“Is there someone I can call for you, or even get in touch with? Somebody I can take you to even?” Jason persisted. The woman glared blankly back up at him. She seemed even more confused.
“I—I don't know. I really don't know,” she confessed.
“You don't know. What about your family? You must have family somewhere? Yes? No?”
The woman's expression turned to one of great frustration. She was becoming more and more upset by the second.
“I—I don't remember, please. My head hurts so much when I try to remember.”
“Can't you remember anything about yourself at all?” Jason continued. A slight hint of doubt and dismay crept into his tone. “What about your name? Surely you must know your own bloody name?” he chuckled.
The woman shook her head in defeat.
“I'm sorry, but I don't. I'm sorry.”
“What about—what’s the last thing you remember? Do you remember how you even ended up at the bottom of that hill out there?”
The woman looked as if she could no longer take this barrage of questioning from Jason any longer. She slapped her hands firmly against her head in protest at his constant line of queries. Jason though seemed completely against the idea that anyone could be suffering from such a traumatic memory loss that they couldn't even remember their own bloody name.
“No, no, no, no, NOO!” the young woman screamed. Jason froze, a little stunned at her over-dramatic outburst. “All I can remember is waking up here, inside this room.” She then hesitated and looked Jason directly in the eye with an almost chilling stare. “…and then I remember you.”
There was a long silence. Jason came to quickly realise that he was nowhere near to further understanding the woman's predicament now than he was at the beginning of their conversation.
“Look,” Jason said firmly but calm, even though he was tired and getting fed up. “Maybe it would be a good idea to get you to a hospital. They could even help you to locate your family.”
The young woman gave him an even steadier, unsettling glower. It made him very uneasy indeed.
“I said no hospitals, okay?” the woman snapped back at him like a spoilt but determined child. Jason broke their eye contact and shook his head in another bout of frustration. He abruptly stood to his feet, annoyed as hell yet a little more comfortable now that he'd broken away from the woman's icy glare.
“Can you even remember what a fucking hospital is, for Christ sake?” yelled Jason, trying to get the last word in. But the woman wasn't listening to him anymore. Instead she had eased back underneath her bed covers like she was getting ready to fall into another deep and heavy sleep.
“Could I please just rest for now? Please?” whispered the woman, seeming faint once again as her voice grew softer. Jason sighed and nodded in defeat.
“All right. But I still reckon we should get you checked out by someone and soon. But if you're not in any great pain or discomfort...then I guess it's okay for you to rest here for a little while.”
“Thank you...Jason,” said the woman softly. She then closed her eyes and peacefully fell back into a deep, blissful sleep. Jason watched her all snuggled under the covers, with only her pretty face and mop of dark hair showing. Strangely, he no longer saw a vulnerable and attractive young woman lying in front of him, but a small, innocent, fragile child instead.
Suddenly, an alien but overwhelmingly warm sense of protectiveness engulfed him and for the time being he embraced that feeling. It dawned on him too that he hadn't thought about his dead wife and his father for quite some time, so all in all, he was silently grateful for the new, welcomed distraction now lying down in front of him.
“Would you like a drink of water or something?” whispered Jason, but the young woman was already taken by sleep and couldn't reply even if she wanted to. Jason turned towards the bedroom doorway and quietly left, closing the door firmly behind him.
Lust for Life
By Sean-Paul Thomas
(Part 1 now FREE on Amazon)
'A Tour de Force of the Male Psyche'
'In the vein of Irvine Welsh. A pulsating novel for the Trainspotting Generation. An insane ride of Love, Romance, Action, Adventure and Revenge. Foaming with crazy ass characters and mouth-watering dialogue. Combined with a rip-roaring finale, just oozing with sex appeal and a Vigilante Justice.'
(This novel contains some Scottish dialect/slang, strong violence and language in parts and a couple of graphic sex scenes.)
Synopsis
If you knew you had only a short time left to live on this planet, to really live, what would you do with that precious time?
A young man with terminal cancer decides to live out his dreams and wild fantasies. But even when he finds love and a new lease on life along the way, it fails to stop his new adventurous ways from spiralling into an unstoppable train wreck of carnage and revenge against his childhood abuser.
A dark, sexy, black-humorous tale of sex, violence, the male psyche and an unstoppable whirlwind adventure of finding love in the least likely place.
Sample
I jumped into the police car. A sexy yet firm and official female voice on the car radio called out for the real owner of the vehicle to answer, but he was currently indisposed and wouldn't be replying any time soon. I switched off the radio. The keys were still in the ignition. I turned on the engine and accelerated away, not even looking back for a second. All I could think about was getting back to her and our new life together. Packing up our shit and getting the hell out of this goddamn country once and for all. Just take off to France, like Celine had suggested, and make a go of life on the continent together. Of course, I felt bad about Mum. I thought about driving back down to the borders to see her, if only for ten minutes, to apologise for what a horrible, inconsiderate bastard of a son I'd been to her all those years. How I'd never kept in touch. How I'd never looked after her and cared for her like any decent son should have watched over his only parent. I'd never even told her how much I loved her. Not once. And I did love her. With all my heart.
I shook those thoughts from my head. Realistically, there was no time. I would phone her, either on the road south or whenever we reached just wherever the hell it was we were gonna end up. If I owed anything to the woman who gave me life and did the best job she possibly could of raising me, I owed her that much.
Everything was going swell driving along the A1 from Dunbar to Edinburgh until I hit the Musselburgh turnoff and a police transit van exploded onto the dual carriageway directly behind me from the Haddington roundabout. The lights on the van were flashing wildly and the horrendous noise from the sirens echoed throughout the countryside.
This didn't look good.
The van was right up my arse as I accelerated. I sped up to well over one hundred miles per hour, continuing to weave in and out of the thin afternoon traffic. If I could just make it to the New Craighall turn-off, I might have a flickering chance to lose the bastard. I spied another two police cars screeching down the opposite motorway lanes ahead. They must be coming for me, yet thankfully they had a fair trek to go to find a turning point along the steel barrier frame that split the two sides of the carriageway in half.
The slip road down to the retail park was fast approaching. The police van hounding me remained hard on my tail. There was no sign of any other police cars blocking my route ahead, so I took the turn off, gently applied the brakes and swerved around another four cars as they slowed for the red light. Not me, though, no danger of that. I bumped up onto a narrow curb and blitzed through the intersection like a bat out of hell, mounting the next pavement to avoid smashing into oncoming traffic from the crossroads. When I peeked into my rear-view mirror, I was shocked to see the large framed police van doing the same thing while clipping cars and taking out all road signs in its path. I returned my concentration to my own driving and rattled through another two roundabouts, passing through another retail park and hitting the approach road to the Niddrie estate. This would be a
s good a place as any to lose these persistent policemen fuckers. Niddrie! Sending a patrol unit into the heart of that schemey, war-torn shithole was every Edinburgh policeman's worst nightmare.
I drove along a boarded-up housing street, then another before taking a sharp turn down a narrow side street. The whole scheme was strewn with garbage, more stray dogs than you could swing a cat at, the occasional random fire burning in a garden or two, and smoke coming from the roof of another random building. Cars with smashed windows, cars without tyres, tyres without cars—all of this decorated the housing estate passing me by.
Then there were the dozens of tracksuit-wearing teens and neds (Non-Educated Delinquents) wearing their clan hoodies and baseball caps. All lounging around, sitting and standing, smoking and drinking, sniffing and staring. The police van remained glued to my rear and sped recklessly with me around the next street corner. I caught another glimpse of the groups of lounging teens in my mirror as they jumped to attention, fully alert and falsely believing for a few anxious seconds that the screeching police van raging behind me was coming for them. Then they relaxed, laughing amongst themselves while playfully pushing one another as the van whizzed on by, still close behind me in the police car out in front.
I made a sharp turn just before a row of shops and sped into a large park and grassland area. I swerved around a frail old man walking his dog as he entered the park. Perhaps he was deaf because he didn't hear me roaring up behind him until it was too late. When I swerved around him, he crouched to the ground in sheer fright, looking like he'd literally shat his pants. I zoomed on by, inches from his bum cheeks.
The police van followed, hot on my heels, into the park after me. It was like something from a car chase movie. The van was racing alongside me. I could see a crazy-looking policeman behind the wheel. Just by the glint in his eyes I could see that he meant business. No doubt about it. He pulled back and away for a second, then barged at my back end before pulling up beside me on the passenger side. I almost lost control during his sneaky manoeuvre, yet somehow managed to keep the vehicle from spinning away from me. I couldn't help but give an innocent little wave to the raging policeman. It must have pissed him off big time because he swerved into me again with even more ferocity, forcing me towards a group of trees in the swiftly approaching distance.
'Shite! Shite! Shite!'
I should've braked. That was the right and obvious thing to do. That was what the police driver had expected me to do. So, I accelerated harder instead. Fuck it. The police van sped with me, both of us dragging and scrapping the other along. As we reached the trees, I saw my split-second opportunity. There was a blind summit approaching. It was a deceiving little dip in the grass which led towards the small forest of trees ahead. I didn't think, I just swerved right, edging the van along with me. Quick as a flash, I swerved left, swinging the full front bonnet of my vehicle hard into the side of the police van. I slammed on the brakes, including the hand-break. The van was rocked off balance with the manoeuvre. The dip in the grass didn't help with its balance. The driver tried to turn his van away from the dip in a desperate bid to regain control...until the most amazing thing happened. The van hit a hidden log and flipped up and over onto its side, skidding and rolling down the grassy slope towards the trees. Watching it happen before my eyes was spectacular. Like a work of art, I had randomly created.
'WOO WHOO!' I couldn't help but roar in a moment of pure exhilaration. I did hope the driver was okay, though. Hopefully he'd been wearing his seat belt like I had. If not, then hard lines, he wasn't very good at his job. I didn't stop to find out and continued towards the far end of the park. Eventually, I found another main road and realised that I wasn't too far from Edinburgh city centre. Maybe a mile or two at the most. It was time to ditch the police car.
I sped through another set of red lights, almost ready to pull over and chance my luck on foot when I spotted a speed camera dead ahead. No better parking place, I supposed, than on top of my second pet hate of all time. Second, that is, to traffic wardens. I headed straight for the steel contraption, ramming into its grey metal exterior, completely uprooting it from the ground while slamming the main body of the camera down hard onto the concrete road in front of me. A couple of passing cars beeped their horns. Some even cheered and waved from their rolled-down car windows with sheer and utter joy as they drove by. Some young neds waiting at a bus stop across the road started applauding and cheering me on too. One even toasted an already half-consumed can of lager into the air like he was accepting me as one of his own. A smashed-up police car on this estate was worth more than any million-pound winning lottery ticket, that's for sure.
I exited the car and waved back at the neds and all the passing drivers still beeping their horns. I smiled and took a bow before getting the hell out of there. I legged it over a nearby stone wall and made my way towards the south-eastern foot of the volcanic hill, Arthur's Seat.
A few weeks earlier.
I couldn't help but wonder if she gave good head as I sat opposite the middle-aged doctor inside her private office at the Royal Infirmary. She'd just told me I had some form of terminal brain cancer, but it hadn't registered properly because I wasn't paying attention to her words any longer. She was overweight, apple-figured, yet with a cute round face that could still turn heads when she walked past a building site… although couldn't anything in a skirt these days? I imagined she'd been one of the popular, pretty girls back in high school. Back in the days when she'd at least had her figure under some control.
I couldn't take my eyes away from a tiny bubble of spit on her lower lip. It aroused me as I watched it linger there all seductively, taunting me. I felt an irresistible urge to lean over and lick it gently from her face. But I controlled it and refocused. My mind snapped back to reality. Fear and sadness once again overwhelmed my thoughts. Something in the air felt wrong. Very, very wrong. I lowered my head and raised my hands at the same time. Halfway into the motion, the two met and I found myself buried face deep inside my cupped hands.
'I just, I just can't take this in.’
Even though I was Scottish and had lived in the country on and off since birth, the Scottish accent I'd acquired over the years never dominated my tongue like it did in most born-and-raised locals. The doc was proper south-of-the-border English, though.
'I'm so, so sorry, Liam.’
I tore my face away from my hands, gently shaking my head before smirking sarcastically.
'So how long, huh? How long have I got?'
The doctor sighed. 'Please, Liam. Don't do this.’
'Come on, eh? What's my sentence? Best guess. Give it to me.’
'Liam, I really couldn't say.’
'How about the last person you diagnosed. How long did they get, huh?'
The doc remained silent, curiously observing me with both sorrow and pity. She really wanted to give me a good, positive answer, I could tell. A wee bit of good news for the long road ahead. But, of course, that wouldn't be very honest of her now, would it? So, all she could do was stare.
Briefly I wondered if she found me attractive. I imagined making my move on her. Would she welcome it? Would she let me stick my tongue deep inside her mouth and move it around, entangling it with her own, before letting me run my hands all over her soft, plump body in the process? Would she enjoy it? Would she make the move for my zipper and then...my wandering mind snapped back to reality and rage consumed me.
'Well, let's hear it then Doc, Jesus!' I exploded, unable to contain my mix of frustration and sexual desire. 'It's like waiting for the bloody X Factor results, for Christ sake.’
She shifted in her seat, shaken abruptly from her staring trance by my aggressive manner.
'With treatment, chemo, I don't know, Liam. Maybe a year, maybe less. That's my best guess.’
I refocused upon that tiny spit bubble. It calmed me. Soothed me immensely. It made me feel good. Fuck the chemo. All that shite just to cling to a few extra months of life. To hope f
or a year at best. My uncle had passed away a few years earlier with leukaemia. It made my stomach churn just thinking about all the crap he had to put up with when he could have been doing something else with his life. Something more memorable and productive with the remainder of his time. Screw that shite. I was out of there.
I nodded kindly at the doc. Thanked her for all the information she'd passed on and left. She stood abruptly, calling out about making an appointment with some other specialist next week. More tests. More horseshit clairvoyance. More wasted time and taxpayers’ money. I wasn't listening anymore.
I walked past the cancer ward's waiting room, which was filled with more sad cases and zombified victims waiting to be told about their afflictions and survival rates. I kept walking. She fell out of earshot. I followed one of the ridiculously coloured lines on the hospital floor leading to some other part of the building. I chose the yellow path and prayed it would lead me to the exit. I felt like the fucking Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. 'Oh, we're off to see the Wizard....’ But there would be no magical wizard with a new brain or magic cure lying in wait for me at the end of this brick road.
I made my way outside. Grey skies towered and rumbled above, urinating upon me with their wet drizzle. A storm was coming. A big fucking storm. When I reached the car park, a cool breeze hit my face like a soft fan on a humid summer's day. It felt good to be outside. To be at one and at peace with nature's earthly fresh air. It felt good to be alive. They say that some people, some lucky few on this earth, really appreciate life and its real meaning only when they're given their own personal expiry date. But oh, how I've pondered the meaning of it all these past few weeks since having the possibility of a near terminal end thrown in my face. The things we do to live a so-called long, healthy, and normal life. The empty, meaningless, monotonous, and mundane tasks, hobbies, activities, careers, love, sex, friends, family, people—and all the other trivial shite—we fill our empty lives with. All of them doing their very best to fill some hollow void in our conscious minds and distract us from the day-to-day process of growing older and nudging another step, another minute, another hour, towards our inevitable doom. Our species, Mother Earth's own terminal cancer, has never been more spiritually or intellectually minded in all our existence than we are today. Yet still, are minds are so narrow and rammed full of such pretentious and superficial self-importance, convinced that our own individual lives have more worth and meaning than those of any of our neighbours while still harbouring some hope and belief that there will be a simple, perfect meaning and explanation to it all in our final conscious hour. Our minds have evolved so far beyond our basic animal caveman way of thinking, yet we still harbour the possibility that there will be some kind of redemption. Some sort of beautiful ray of light or magical white-bearded wizard welcoming us at the end. Oh, what images and illusions of grandeur our minds conjure up in our most desperate times of need. Let me tell you about the meaning of life. We are all acts of a random nature, and none of us should even be here in the first place.
My Sister And I: A dark, violent, gripping and twisted tale of horrifying terror in the Scottish Highlands. Page 22