by Will Wiles
But it can always use a drink.
The Need wasn’t about drink, it was about everything. It existed before the drinking really started, it was already there. It did not elevate drink in my mind, or draw me towards it – what it did was shut down everything else. The drink was just what it left behind, the only respite. The Need blacked out the laptop, the clothes on the floor, the phone, the shower. Even looking at the laptop, and thinking about a day’s work, was impossible without my guts and lungs clenching up. It foreclosed all other options. All it left clear was the path from the bed to the fridge. The Need filled every other corner, it was in me and choking me, like smoke.
The flat was cold, the tiles of the kitchen floor icy under my bare feet, but the Need didn’t care about that. I took a can of Stella from the fridge, cracked it open and sipped. The world opened a little.
No warmth came in with the thin grey light that filtered through the branches of the neighbour’s tree and the filthy glass roof of the kitchen extension. It was too cold, colder than it should be. I put my hand on the radiator – it was almost as chilled as the aluminium can in my other hand. My first thought was to fire an angry email to Dave, the landlord. But then I looked at the clock: half past eleven. The central heating had turned itself off three hours ago.
Next door, the drill started up, battering away at the foundations. The tiles vibrated, my teeth vibrated. Was it just starting now, or had they been going since first thing? I didn’t know. Either way, it hadn’t woken me. Eleven thirty … I went back to the fridge. There was a plastic-banded four-pack of Stella in there, untouched, and a second band with only one can left in it. And the can in my hand. Six cans. Had I bought two four-packs last night, and drunk two cans? Or had I bought three, and drunk six? Whatever had happened, it had been enough to really knock me out.
Figuring the question, standing in the kitchen in my underwear, lager in my hand, I came up against the edge of something. An absence, a ragged hole in my memory where the previous evening should be stored. What time did I get home? How did I get home? It was before the corner shop closed, as I had bought cans … I tracked back, trying to find the end of the Sellotape. I had been with Pierce. We had parted company on the train. I had been on the train alone. It had been a bad journey. Then I went home.
No: I went to the pub.
Pubs make dim memories, by design. Light comes fourth-hand in a good pub, through dusty lampshades, frosted glass, glinting brass and bulging optics. Someone had shoved me at Fenchurch Street and I had been upset. I had a copy of the Evening Standard – the plume was on the front page again, with the headline ‘Met Admits Drone Loss’. That was all quite clear. I had found a suitable pub. I had bought two pints of Stella. Both for me. That little memoroid, as it came bubbling up from the foamy depths, made me squirm. Two pints. I had been on a mission, a speed run to painlessness, and I didn’t care how it looked to the barman or to anyone else. I used to dabble in spirits for that, quick results, but a couple of terrifying blackouts last year meant I now stuck to lager for my own safety.
Around here, my memory failed. The video stalls, the ‘buffering’ symbol spins, the image smears into nightmare blocky garbage. I shivered. It was cold in the kitchen, and all over the flat. I took my almost-finished can back to the bedroom to get dressed, trying to ignore the chaos of empties and unfinished fast food in the living room, and the atrocious state of my stomach and head.
I should do some work, I thought. I really should do some work. After I dressed I opened a second can of Stella and started gathering the empties from the foot of the sofa. Six cans were on the floor, one of which, I discovered, was nearly full. So I had drunk a little more than five. Not an excessive amount for me, far from it, although I had no idea how much I had drunk in the pub before then.
Blackouts were nothing new. Every night is a blackout, really. I rarely have any memory of either falling asleep on the sofa or of making my way to bed later. If I had been out drinking alone, a blackout was not uncommon. I avoided one of the pubs near home because the landlord had taken against me after a couple of incidents. Nothing violent or disgusting, just pathetic. One time I had simply fallen asleep, and it had – I was later told – been difficult to rouse me. Another time I had become rigidly drunk, literally paralytic, mannequin drunk, and had to be guided from the premises by the proprietor with a degree of physical exertion. Spirits had been involved. Then, some time later, one of the regulars clocked that I was still outside, rooted to the same spot on the pavement where I had been deposited, staring up into the sky, or at the tall Victorian houses all around, ‘as if you were waiting for your fucking space ship to come back’, the landlord observed, without amusement.
A man can get a reputation that way. I never liked that particular pub: under-populated, over-lit, sinister. Suspiciously durable furniture. A man can get a beating that way. A proper pub beating must be coming, there’s an inevitability to it. I had done well to avoid it. Shortly after that second incident, a couple of hundred pounds was stolen from my bank account. It’s impossible to be sure how or why this happened, but I believe my card details were taken that night in the pub.
I am more careful in the pub at the end of the street. I keep my patterns there conspicuously normal. A pint, maybe two or three, over the Sunday papers or after work. Never a really heavy session.
Often, an alcoholic will go to considerable effort to avoid being seen drinking. Before I became a drunk, I used to go out and get drunk with work colleagues. It happened often. Now, I might go out after work, but I will never get drunk. I will drink conspicuously little. I can’t take the risk of letting go. Indeed, I don’t like to go out with people from the magazine, because – a few sniffs aside, a bottle or three, barely enough to blunt the edge – I’ll essentially have to abstain. So I refuse, or leave early. A few of them must regard me as a lightweight or a bed-by-Newsnight sort. In fact I am going home to get the evening started.
I really should do some work. I took the full can I had found on the floor and used it to refill my fresh can. I did this over the sink, not risking more damage to the carpet, and felt very thrifty and houseproud. A little foamed over, and I carefully ran a tap over my hand and wiped down the can to avoid stickiness.
Turning, I saw the cockatoo again. It was in the oily branches of the neighbour’s tree, shocking white through the sooted glass, lazily stretching out its wings, letting me know that it had been there a while, watching. Watching this whole time.
You can’t just drop an unbelievable detail into an otherwise straightforward profile. It jolts the reader, jolts them out of the belief that you are a faithful conduit of the truth about the subject. If something unbelievable presents itself – the noted barrister used to be a shark-wrangler and is missing two toes from her right foot as a consequence; the acclaimed author is a fabulist who invented the meat of his bestselling non-fiction book; the promising journalist is a secret drunk who has padded a dozen recent interviews with recycled material and is being stalked by a vengeful cockatoo – you must take the reader’s side in their disbelief. Confirm. Ensure you heard correctly. Ask for corroborating evidence and explanatory background. And account for the reader’s likely reaction in the text itself: ‘Unbelievable as it might sound …’
The cockatoo sounds unbelievable, I know. I have to account for it. For a second, long enough for the wet, heavy can to slip through my wet fingers and fall to the tiled floor, producing a spume of foam, I thought I saw the bird. Then I saw the truth: it was a plastic bag, caught in the branches of the tree over the back garden, exactly the same bag on the same branch as produced the same shock yesterday morning. Yesterday, on the bridge, it had been a pigeon, nothing more exotic than that. On the train – well, I don’t know what that was, a line of reflective stripes in the darkness perhaps, but I do know that it was not a posse of malign avians. There is no cockatoo and there never was. I know. But every now and then, for a moment … I have to describe it as I see it, whatever it is,
a mild hallucination, a recurring perceptual glitch, an outward manifestation of a kink in the psyche.
This particular kink isn’t even discreet enough to be properly repressed. I know exactly what it refers to. It’s so transparent it’s embarrassing.
It relates to a lie I told. Not ‘my first’ lie. Who remembers their first, anyway? Little children have elastic standards of truth: to say something is to make it so, because the past disappears so quickly for them and the future is impossible to imagine. All that matters is the eternal present, in which – literal hand-in-the-biscuit-barrel stuff aside – the lie is the only thing that is real, and is therefore the only thing that can be considered true. Many little children are natural moral philosophers with bright careers ahead in politics, public relations and marketing.
No. This was the first time – I believe – that I invented a story for the entertainment of my classmates, and to make myself appear more interesting. A school friend of mine had been to visit his cousins, who had chinchillas. These animals lived in a big, complicated cage and were let out to be petted and to climb on my friend’s shoulders. As he described visiting the chinchilla-cousins, and the fun he had had there, I saw the attention he was getting from our mutual classmates, and I wanted it for myself.
So I invented my own story. If it was exotic pets they wanted, that was what they would get. I said that an uncle of mine had a cockatoo, a white parrot, and that it had come to visit us. It sat on my uncle’s shoulder, making him look like a pirate, and ate pieces of fruit from my hand. I don’t know where I got the cockatoo image from, why that in particular and not a monkey or a ferret or a snake. But it worked. Some of the attention I coveted came my way. My friends even debated which was better, cockatoo or chinchilla, which annoyed chinchilla-boy no end. Graciously, I sat out this debate, proffering no opinion of my own, and secretly rejoicing that in some eyes my fictitious bird trumped his stupid rodents. It was so easy. It resembled magic – my brain had improved reality and captured the admiration of my peers, at no cost and with very little effort. Of course I would do it again.
A few lies down the road, I realised there were costs and hazards. I had to remember all the details of my edited reality and keep them consistent. If this uncle had come to stay with us, where had the cockatoo slept? Did it have a portable cage, or a perch, or what? No one had the knowledge to gainsay what I said, but I had to ‘know’, to invent, a terrific amount of supplementary knowledge to answer their questions, and I had to remember it. The more invention, the greater the risk. Other times, I stumbled into areas my classmates did know about, which was dangerous. One Monday morning, on a whim, I said that I had been taken to Thorpe Park at the weekend. But a friend of mine had been to Thorpe Park, and recently, and quizzed me about what rides I had been on and which were my favourites. My vague half-answers made him suspicious. He didn’t openly challenge my story, but I could see him doubting it. This close shave should have stopped me – I can remember swearing to myself to stick to the truth – but in the end I was simply more careful, I put more thought into lies and deployed them with more caution. I refined my craft.
In any case, I couldn’t draw a line and swear to the truth, because so many lies were in circulation already. If the cockatoo came up again, I would have to stick to my story. It wasn’t easy to keep track of the lies, but I found myself well suited to the work. More troubling, in the long run, was the solvent effect all this invention and embroidery had on my memory. I had regarded the truth as solid and substantial, and the lies as very different, bright little additions to that edifice. Baubles on the Christmas tree – you know what’s glass and what’s conifer. But it wasn’t like that. Memory proved more liquid than solid. Everything ran together. I found myself thinking that the cockatoo was real, that it had existed and that it had come to our house. The story had become so detailed and vivid, and had been repeated so often, what was the difference? In my mind, it was now being treated as memory. Stranger still, real incidents in my past – events that I knew had happened, that I could confirm – took on the taint of fiction. If the past could be endlessly rewritten and adorned, then none of it mattered, none of it was really real.
Thus, the cockatoo. I had made it, it was mine, it would not leave me. And it was not truly ‘there’, out there. What was out there was a white plastic bag, snared in the branches of a tree.
That, at least, was easy to deal with. Having picked up the dropped can from the floor, I left it on the counter so its remaining contents could settle, and wiped up the spill. I then opened a third can and took a single, contemplative sip as I planned my approach. Then I put on my shoes and coat, unlocked the back door and went outside.
It was still raining – it had rained all night. The tree might be in the neighbour’s garden, but its branches spread out over my garden (Dave’s garden). It was a lime tree, and as the rain dripped through its branches, it picked up a sticky secretion. Everything in my garden (Dave’s garden) – a white plastic picnic table and a couple of chairs, a rusted barbecue, a couple of empty plastic planters – was covered in a thin layer of this vile, tacky substance, which never washed away or dried. Instead, it attracted grime from London’s air. The once-white walls were streaked with black, the glass of the kitchen extension was dimmed by dirt, the plastic chairs adhered to you and left smutty marks on your clothes.
I hated few things like I hated this tree. Blocking my light was bad enough – did it really have to piss filth as well? I had once heard that trees could be killed by hammering a copper spike into their trunk, near the base. Since then, I had harboured fantasies of assassinating the tree. A moonless night, a stake to the heart, an ancient evil slain. When the neighbour’s rebuilding plans emerged, I thought that the one bright side might be the removal of that damned tree, but it was apparently protected. A fully grown tree in Zone One – there are, I am told, many rules. Another indignity: its residence was far more secure than mine.
The bag appeared to be knotted onto the branch, and I didn’t fancy my chances of being able to knock it loose from the ground. It was beyond the reach of the kitchen broom, as it was over the kitchen extension and I couldn’t stand directly underneath it. However it was only a couple of feet above the glass roof of the extension – if I climbed onto the garden wall, and over the roof, it would be in easy reach.
Reluctant to spend long in the rain, I pulled one of the plastic chairs against the wall. To prevent it slipping away when I climbed on it, I dragged a rainwater-filled plastic planter over as well, jamming it against the back legs of the chair, trying to anchor them in place. Then I climbed up onto the chair. Grabbing on to the top of the wall, ignoring its freezing gritty wetness, I pulled myself up, using the back of the chair as a foothold. The plastic yielded in an alarming way, protesting its inability to support my weight, but I only needed its help for a second. With the top of the wall under my belly, I was able to get my foot onto the roof of the kitchen, and from that firmer foundation I could heave myself further up, and ultimately to straddle the garden wall.
From the top of the wall, I had a clear view into my neighbour’s garden. I emitted a low curse – not pain or anger, but surprise. Awe.
I hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in the back garden since the autumn. Why would I? Even in the summer it wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to be. So I had not seen the house from the rear, not for a while. I knew, from the front, that much of the interior of next door was gone. The street-facing windows, their sashes replaced by Xs of wooden bracing, showed sky above. Now, from the rear, I could see exactly how much of the house was gone.
All of it.
The street facade was all that remained, held in place by a wooden framework. Thick black plastic covered what had been the ‘inside’, and the walls of the neighbouring properties, including my house. The whole effect was medical, a body bag. But where was the body? Everything was gone. No interior walls, no floors, no ceiling. The gap in the terrace was spanned by some props at abo
ut the level the floors should have been, stopping the rest of the street from simply falling into the hole.
And what a hole it was. The house hadn’t been demolished down to the foundations – the foundations were gone too. The tree, which stood towards the rear of the back garden, was on top of a steep-sided little hill all its own, skeletal limbs of root sticking out from the slopes, washed clean and ghastly pale. Apart from this hillock, the garden had been excavated to a depth of three or four metres. The digging had gone deeper under the house itself, or where the footprint of the house had been. A rough earth ramp, kept in shape by steel coffers, led down from street level into the pit, which was at least a storey deeper than the floor of my own basement flat. It was hard to tell precisely how deep, as the pit was part-filled with gravy-coloured water. An orange digger and a generator were sinking into the mire, like forlorn relics from a mechanised trench war.
I found myself fearing for the safety of the wall I was sitting on. What was holding it up, a lip of dirt, mere habit? Looking down – a swill of vertigo – I saw heavy steel sheets pressed up against its base, supported by props sunk into the mud. Would that be enough? No workmen were on site – today’s drilling was coming from the other side, where similarly ambitious works were under way, and in half a dozen different places in a two-street radius. The council had tightened the rules and there had been a rush of project approvals ahead of the deadline.
It was madness. My extortionate little cellar had sometimes felt like a dungeon or a mineshaft, a hole in the cold, pressing earth. Now I could see it was a tissue box, exposed on both sides, and fragile. Home.
Not wanting to risk the wall much longer, I inched towards the bag. All the time, I was able to feast my eyes on the works next door, on the totality of my neighbours’ ‘renovation’. And I felt dizzy anger stirring up inside. I had to email for permission before hammering in a nail to hang a picture, and God forbid a pipe should burst. And next door, where they had a whole house, it had not been enough, they had given up trying to squeeze more out of the Victorian structure and had swept it away in order to build something that better matched its vast price tag – and pushing that value even higher in the process. Far beyond my means, of course. Even this hole, this puddle they had made, would be worth far more than I could ever imagine possessing, on the dream of the house that might appear here. Nothing but a number floating in space, a price tag with many zeroes attached to one big zero, an IOU for one house, a transaction, and everyone agreed it was too much for me. What was wrong with me?