Patrick Thompson - Seeing the Wires

‘They’re not worth it,’ said the girl on the stairs who wasn’t crying. The other one gathered herself and looked around. From where she was, halfway up the stairs, it must have seemed like Dandruff Central. I had thought that the long-haired look had died out with the end of grebo, that short-lived Midland sound that sounded exactly like the Midlands – industrial and stupid. I had been wrong. The hall was packed with leather jackets and straggling unwashed manes, ripped jeans and split boots. It was as though Marilyn Manson had been decanted into a kaleidoscope. From the horde came the smells of cider and patchouli. I didn’t see many tattoos. They weren’t well enough off to have tattoos.

Tattoos arrived, in the form of Jack.

‘Stone me,’ he said, ‘what’s this, fucking Donnington? What’s that fucking music ?’

He went in search of it.

‘Are we going to have a drink?’ Judy asked me. I nodded. I had four cans of Supa Brew Ice Special and a bottle of the cheapest red wine. You have to take a bottle of the cheapest red wine to parties. Everyone does. It doesn’t matter whether it’s six hundred bikers in a clapped-out semi or a dinner party with minor royalty, it’s only polite.

I gave Judy a can of Supa and opened one myself. It tasted terrible. If it hadn’t had the alcoholic content of Dean Martin, it would have been undrinkable. It tasted so bad that you could forget what it was doing to your body. Supa comes in packs of four and costs less than either embrocation or lighter fluid, which come in packs of one. It isn’t advertised. It’s gained popularity through word of mouth. Which is strange, because once you’ve had a can or two, you can’t speak.

I’m not very good at drinking. I can drink as much as the next man, but I’ll fall over a long time before he does. I know my limits.

But I can’t stick to them. I recognize them as I see them receding into the distance far behind me. I’ve had one too many, I’ll think. Better have one or two more.

Then I start on the shorts.

We didn’t have any shorts with us, so once the cans were gone I unscrewed the wine bottle and swigged from that. Judy began to move in and out of my field of vision. So did everything else. The red wine stains became more widespread. I had them on my clothes. I had them on everyone else’s clothes. I found myself in the bathroom, with my forehead against the tiles above the bath. Someone had been sick in the bath. It wasn’t me. I had been sick in the sink. Remembering that, I was sick down the wall I was leaning against. I rested on the floor and listened to people knocking on the door. There was some very bad language. I was sick in the bath.

A chunk of the evening vanished.

I was on the stairs. There were more stairs than I remembered. I trod on a stair that wasn’t there and had a rest at the foot of the stairs for a while. A pair of men looking like the bastard offspring of a terrible union between Lemmy and himself helped me to my feet and spoke to me. I couldn’t understand anything they said. They sounded like warthogs. They looked like warthogs. The man who had once been in Pop Will Eat Itself walked past us. He looked like a better-known warthog.

Another chunk of the evening vanished.

I was outside, sitting on the drive. It was uncomfortable. Someone had been sick on it. It wasn’t me, I was sick on the lawn and on a cat that had been up to no good in the shrubbery. Legs were next to me. I looked up them. Standing over me were Eddie Finch, Jack, and Judy.

‘Eddie!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were here tonight.’

They exchanged looks.

‘He’s always like this,’ said Judy. ‘He’s too wussy for this sort of thing.’

‘Always was,’ said Jack. ‘Used to throw up if he had Woodpecker, and that’s pop.’

‘How much has he had?’ Eddie asked.

‘Half a pint,’ said Judy.

‘As much as that?’ said Jack. ‘He’s getting to be one of the big lads.’

‘Wine,’ Judy added. ‘Two cans of Brew and half a pint of wine.’

‘Well most of the wine’s on the garden,’ said Eddie.

‘Two cans of Brew? Call a fucking ambulance,’ said Jack.

‘You’re an ambulance,’ I said. I knew I’d got the joke wrong, but they were all drunk and I thought I’d get away with it

‘There, he says he wants an ambulance. He knows he’s overdone it. Stick to the Vimto, mate.’

I noticed that Eddie had put his arm around Judy, and that Judy didn’t seem to mind. I told them both what I thought about that. I tried to tell them, anyway. The words came out overlapping and stretched.

‘Yeah mate,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve had a bit too much tonight. See Eddie? He’s going to take Judy home. Put her to bed, mate. What you’d be doing if you weren’t on the drive of this charming residence. I’ll take you to mine, you sleep on the floor. Throw up on the floor and I’ll murder you. Fair play? Fair play. Eddie’s got his car here. Haven’t you?’

Eddie nodded.

‘Shame you’re nobody special,’ said Eddie. ‘Good story if you’re famous, drunk in Stourbridge. Good story if you do criminal damage on the way home.’

‘Useless bloody story if it’s just Sam on the pop,’ said Jack. Judy leaned down to kiss me. She came in too quickly and I flinched. Jack and Eddie picked me up.

‘Now the walking thing,’ said Jack. ‘We need to do the walking thing.’

We were in the park, close to the lake. Another chunk of the evening had gone. It was like having your life edited by the British Board of Film Classification. All of the scenes ended in odd places and some things were missing altogether. A duck quacked a series of little quacks. It sounded like it was laughing. I was sick in the duck pond.

‘That’s the vomiting thing,’ said Jack. ‘We’ve done that. We’ve done a lot of that. We don’t need to do it again. It’s not helpful. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, and I’m fucking sure the ducks aren’t happy about it. The walking thing. This is Mary Stevens Park, and I don’t live here. I live at my house and we have to get there in time to go to bed. Now do a straight line. Not into the lake. Leave the cat alone, Sam.’

I was in Jack’s kitchen. There were noises from upstairs.

‘Lisa’s up,’ said Jack. ‘Because of what you did to the cat.’

I was sitting on a chair that seemed to slope in all directions at once. Jack was sitting opposite me. He slumped his elbows on the table then put his face close to mine. His nostrils twitched and he moved a little further away.

‘I never got to tell you, did I?’ he asked. ‘Eddie got in the way. Must have known there was a story coming. I was going to say, do you remember when we were twenty? When we killed those five people?’

I threw away a chunk of the evening.

I was in bed. It was a hard bed, and the room was doing acrobatics. It did flips and cartwheels and somersaults. I could smell vomit. Perhaps it was the cat from four or five memories ago. The smell surrounded me and I fell asleep in it, just like Jimi Hendrix. Except that I woke up the next day.

In the morning anything could have happened. I wouldn’t have known about it. I didn’t wake up until the afternoon. By that time the smell of vomit had become the smell of dried vomit.

Someone had been sick on me in the night.

Jack gave me a cup of coffee and some helpful advice about drinking, and then I went home. I remembered Judy leaving with Eddie. Eddie didn’t strike me as reliable. What was Jack thinking of, letting Judy go off with Eddie Finch? Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys for an exclusive. Come to that, Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys just for a laugh. I didn’t know what he might have done to Judy for a laugh. I’d be sure to count her kidneys the next time I saw her.