“Oh,” I said, meekly.
“Is that all you can say?‘Oh’?” he mocked my voice.
“How much?” I said, still whispering.
Dad laughed. “More than you can bloody afford I’m sure.”
I coughed, hating him. “How bloody much Dad?”
I could hear him considering his answer. I imagined Mum listening in, them both huddled by the phone, steeling themselves.
“Twenty grand,” he said.
“What?”
“Twenty flipping grand! Why do you think he called me eh? He knows you can’t afford that. And he’s right isn’t he.”
“Don’t pay! It wasn’t my fault!”
“Doesn’t matter, we have to. Got our flipping names on your rental agreement haven’t we. Someone has to pay. You or us. Looks like it’s going to be us making the sacrifices again, being responsible again. Just wanted to let you know, you rotten little—”
I put the phone on the table, face down. I was sweating all over, my nails digging into the soft wood. I noticed the barman watching me from a corner of his eye. I took a deep breath, imagining what my parents were doing now. Enjoying being right about me again most likely. As a couple they weren’t bad, but as parents they were almost stereotypically bloody awful.
I had to take control. I grabbed the half-finished pint, downed it, put the glass back down hard onto the table top.
Sod it, I thought. Sod them.
I would have thought some more about it too, only I realised that I needed to pee.
*****
I stumbled out into an afternoon of bright winter sunshine. I looked left and right. I decided on left, since I’d never done anything right in my life. I was in a rotten mood now to boot.
For once I got a stroke of luck. The Marlborough was located in a residential area, but only a few steps down in my chosen direction was a small car park to one side of pub which I guess they kept for staff and punters who could control their levels of drinking. At the back of this was an enclosed section with some wheelie bins and a horrible little rubbish littered green leading to a wall with some trees that obscured the flats beyond. Perfect for fly-tipping and the occasional toxic pee.
Positioning myself behind the last wheelie bin, facing towards the green and the wall, I took a quick look all around to make sure no-one was looking, and unzipped.
Initially, it was far less spectacular than previous escapades. The grass fizzled and the ground underneath welled away as expected. I aimed for the little bits of rubbish, the cans, crisp packets, bottles and all that. They all melted, spewing forth their last gasp of existence in the form of a pungent, grey-green plasticky smoke, before joining the rest of the urine melted mix deep down in the earth’s muck.
“Oy!”
The shout gave me a shock, for it had come from literally right behind me. I turned, and where once there had been nothing but a wheelie bin, there was now the head and shoulders of a dirty, bearded fellow in a ripped-up brown suit jacket and grimy t-shirt, stood half-in half-out of the very same wheelie bin directly behind me.
“What the bloody hell—” he started to say, for I’d turned too quickly, my weeing had not finished, and I was now urinating directly onto his wheelie bin and the stupid thing was reacting as if it had been hit by a full-frontal assault, shuddering and faltering, clanking down onto the ground like an old man who’s had his walking stick kicked away from him.
“Aarrggh!” The poor bloke screamed, falling with his abode as it crashed down towards me. I jumped back so as not to be clattered by it, slipping over in the grass, falling back onto my behind with a thump. The tramp himself came tumbling out of the now collapsed wheelie bin and straight into the ruined, sludgy area of mud that my god-forsaken wee had carved out of the ground.
“Iiiieeeaaarrrggghhh!” He let out an ungodly high pitched scream, as if he was being burned alive.
I knew I was in big trouble.
He had landed face first, raising his arms and putting his hands down onto the ground to lift himself up. He screamed again. As he raised his face I saw that more than half of it was covered in toxic pee infused mud. His beard was frazzled, dirty threads dropping off and disappearing in little tufts of smoke, his face turning a dark purply red where the mud was. He wiped at his cheeks furiously, then looked at his hands, continuing to scream like a man on fire. I could see that those hands were also turning a dark shade of red, scarred by the uriney-acid.
“I’m sorry!” I cried.
He continued to scream, letting his hands go limp as the skin burned off, looking at me with utter terror in his mad eyes. He had just been rudely awakened and I could not think of a worse way to be interrupted from sleep. I watched in horror as he closed one eye, the one on the burnt side of his face, the skin literally cauterizing itself around the eyeball, bubbling itself shut.
“Can’t see!” he cried. “Hurting, hurting, HURTING!”
“Get away from there!”
I scrambled to my feet, pulling him up from under his shoulders and getting an almighty whiff of mould and body odour and strong alcohol in the process.
“What were you doing sleeping in that bin?” I said, dragging his frighteningly limp body across the rubbish littered grass to a corner that was safe from the harm of my awful excretions.
He lay down where I put him. He was moaning, panting and wheezing horribly.
“Look at you,” I said. “What am I supposed to do with you now, eh?”
Half his face was melted, a squidgy mass of pulpy raw red skin matter. His whole body shuddered. I imagined the pain he was going through, and gave up. Not only had he been sleeping in a bin, piss poor and probably kicked and spat at on a regular basis, now this. It was too much.
“Poor sod,” I said. “Why did you have to shock me like that? You should’ve known better! You saw it, didn’t you? Saw what I was doing…”
I sank to my knees next to his shuddering body, extremely fed up to say the least.
I grabbed him by the lapels.
“How do you think I feel?!”
Then he touched my hand with rough-hewn and bloodied fingers, looking straight at me with his one remaining, just-about-functioning blood-shot eye.
“What’re you doing boy?” he rasped. “Get me some flippin’ help would you!”
*****
“I need an ambulance, now!” I shouted into my phone.
There was a note of panic in my voice that I couldn’t recall ever hearing, not since perhaps the first time the ball had hurtled to me out in the field when I was a nipper playing in the local cricket team. “Daddy, daddy!” I had screamed to my watching father, meaning to say ‘What should I do?’, while the ball bounced harmlessly past me to a collective sigh of disappointment from the rest of the team.
“Alright sir,” said the ridiculously calm voice on the other end of the line. “We’re sending a vehicle now to your current location. Can you please give me some details of the emergency?”
I had to answer carefully now. To make matters worse a small crowd of onlookers had gathered, some doubtless from the pub, others from the neighbourhood who had overheard the screams. They looked at the whimpering, mud stained, burned-out mess of a man lying there with disgust. Some glanced at me suspiciously.
“I’m not sure,” I lied down the phone, trying to ignore those around me. “It looks like some kind of acid burn. To the face and hands, as far as I can see. He’s in a bad way, please come, quickly!”
“Alright sir, don’t worry. We’re on our way.”
“Thank you, thank you,” I said, breathlessly
“It’s no problem. And can I take your name sir? And your relation to the injured party?”
“Er, I don’t know him. Just found him out here screaming his head off.”
“I see. And, your name please?”
Quickly thinking things through, I put the phone down.
The crowd was looking at me questioningly. Many seemed to have lowered their suspicions h
aving heard my explanation on the phone. One old lady in particular stepped forward and put a hand on my arm, a sympathetic expression of her face.
“It’s alright dear, you’ve done what you could.”
I sighed and nodded, not wanting to look her in the eye.
“Sometimes these things happen, but don’t worry poppet, whatever will be will be.”
“Yes,” I said, in a low voice.
“What kind of acid is it on the ground there?” some bloke said, sounding not too convinced.
I considered this. Then I politely took the old dear’s hand off my arm, turned, and ran.
Chapter 8
Truth be told, I’m not very good at running. Firstly, I hate it. Getting so out of breath you can barely fill your lungs doesn’t appeal to me. Plus, and I’m just going to be as honest as a plank of wood here, I’m a big fat slob. My body weight and lack of fitness make running probably the least suitable activity for me physically. Even just a brisk walk and my legs ache like the creaking wheels of a rusty bicycle. Also, with my belly getting in the way, making it next to impossible for me to achieve anything resembling proper stretching, there’s very little I can do to remedy such pain. Mentally too, I just don’t feel it. Not a jot. Much rather be slouched on the sofa binging Breaking Bad with a bottle of coke and a big bag of Doritos, or slaying endless foes in whatever the latest first person shoot-em-up on PS4 happens to be.
So I didn’t get very far. Running is very out of character for me, and I only reserve it for special occasions. In actual fact, I can’t recall the last time I ran when not forced to by the whistle of a teacher. But what with the crowd watching, I had felt trapped like an animal. The poor homeless bastard lying there, probably dying (I dreaded to think), the ambulance on its way, and what with it being my fault and everything. And so, without thinking things through, purely on instinct, I legged it.
I managed a block and a half before giving up in haze of sweat, mangled shins and failing lung power. Catching my breath, I leaned over onto my thighs.
I took a quick peek behind me. Thankfully, no one seemed to be following.
I stood up, still breathing heavily, looking up at the grey-white blanket of the cloud covered sky. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, tasting the meal and the Guinness on my breath and generally feeling completely unsuited to life. In fact, I was rapidly getting more and more out of breath, one of those brief, horrible moments when everything seems to spin that little too much, when everything you look at seems to clap and shudder in echoes of itself, and your body threatens you with vomit or collapse, or both. Please don’t faint, I thought. Please no puking.
I stood and just breathed, waiting it out, watching a seagull flap blissfully on the wind up high.
Just as I felt some small smidgen of control over the levels of air reaching my blood stream, the loud wailing of a siren burst from the near distance. I watched as an ambulance with flashing lights turned onto the street at the next intersection and sped past in a dazzle of green and yellow paint and lights and deafening sirens.
Unbearable guilt roared inside me.
I took a deep breath and walked in the opposite direction.
*****
Continuing to walk through the suburbs, I passed countless parked cars and semi-detached houses, all of which I knew to be occupied by uncountably similar people, all of whom bared strong resemblance to my parents.
I reached the intersection at Brighton Road and waited patiently at the crossing for the lights to go green. Cars hummed past. A woman with a baby in a pram arrived at the crossing and waited with me. On the other side were two boys with bicycles, chatting with smiles. Normal people. Happy people. I felt about as dark and shitty as a public loo in the night time. Self-hating, depressed even. This was not the normal me. But how could I stop this rot? My predicament seemed insurmountable.
The light turned green for us to cross. I passed the two bicycle boys and they paid me no mind. As I arrived on the other side of the road, my phone started ringing.
I groaned. Perhaps I should just dump the phone, empty my bank account and take the next train to London? Or better still, up North, to the countryside. The Yorkshire Dales maybe? Somewhere I could pee wherever I wanted. Disappear, become invisible.
I wasn’t quite ready for such a drastic step yet though.
I took out my phone and saw it was Martin calling.
“Hi Martin,” I said, welcoming a chat with someone who knew me, who understood me and knew something of the madness that had been going on. “How’s it going mate?”
“This isn’t Martin,” a stern sounding voice answered. “This is his mother.”
I felt a ripple of shock.
“Would you please come to the hospital now?” she said. “Martin is asking for you, and we need to know what happened.”
I didn’t know how to respond. If Martin wanted to see me, why didn’t he make the call himself? I felt a deep sense of foreboding.
“Hello?” she said, the hostility clear in her voice. “Dave, I know you’re there.”
“I’m sorry,” I said meekly, and put the phone down.
I looked around me, paranoid for some reason. I was sweating again, anxious, my palms wet. At every turn, things appeared to be turning to muck. I was a doomed man. A man of ruin.
Numb, I put the phone back in my pocket. The town centre loomed ahead. Without any clue of where I was going or what I would do, I walked towards it.
Alright Dave, I said to myself, putting my hands in my pockets. You’ve got to man up. This is happening, it’s real and it’s happening to you. So it’s up to you. You’ve got to deal with it. The ball’s in your court.
*****
The phone rang again a minute later. It was Martin again, or rather, his mother. I swiped it away, hoping she would give up.
A few seconds after that, it rang again. Her again. I swiped it away again.
I stopped there, standing on the street, holding the phone in my hand, staring at it, willing her to give up.
Please Mrs. Martin’s mum, I said to myself, I know I am your son’s best friend and that your son is now in hospital and I am partly responsible for him being there, but please, I didn’t mean any harm, I took care of him the best I could, and I had to leave him there for a very good reason. If you talk to him you will understand. Assuming he can talk… But he’s in good hands now and there’s nothing I can do. So please, please, just leave me alone. I’m having an absolute bastard of a day, please don’t add to it.
I waited a full minute, imagining her debating with her husband, optimistically picturing Dave’s father talking her down. “Just leave it now love,” he’d be saying. “There’s no point.”
The phone rang again. My finger was poised to swipe, but the number was different this time. It wasn’t Martin ringing.
I hesitated. I didn’t recognise this number. Could it be the police? I felt a sudden wave of horror at the thought. If it were the police, I had to answer, but what would I say? And perhaps it wasn’t the police? Who else would be calling and why? Just answer it Dave, I told myself. If it is the police, how would it look if I didn’t answer?
I picked up the call and held the phone reluctantly to my ear.
“Hello?” I said hesitantly.
“David?” said a female voice I vaguely recognised but couldn’t quite place.
“Yes?”
“It’s Dr York.”
I felt a wave of relief, not so much because it was her, but just because it wasn’t anyone else.
“Are you OK?”
“Not especially,” I said, wanting to say more, wanting to level with someone, yet still not quite trusting her.
“Well, that’s to be expected,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier. I should never have let you go like that.”
“No,” I said. “That’s alright. It was me that left.”
“Well,” she said, sounding a bit nervous, “I’ve been thinking. Since there is no obvious institution
to care for you at this moment, I wanted to invite you to my house. I can keep an eye on your there, monitor your condition, and there won’t be any problems in terms of you using the…” she searched for the word. “The little boys room. I have a big garden with lots of unkempt space which you can have free reign of. I’ll provide dinner and there’s a spare room you can sleep in, if you want. I know you must be struggling a bit, what with everything. Please don’t think anything of it, it’s the least I can do.”
I was lost for words, almost in tears to be honest. She had seemed like such a hard old crank at first, not sympathetic at all. But I guess the whole thing had been just as much of a shock to her as it had been to me.
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