RAMBLINGS OF A COKED-UP CRITIC
“It’s like how all these social commentary films have the antihero dying at the end. Because the message is that failure and self-destruction are not sustainable. But who d’you think pays taxes on these, like, luxury goods designed to distract us from our lives or make ’em better, who works in the factories that make our economy so amazing, who buys into all that shit? The common man, on a downward spiral from bliss and innocence to degradation and poverty—us, that’s who—me and you, Flick! Because genius is a temporary state; bright sparks burn out; bitter experience deadens hope for improvement. Failure, self-destruction, is the only thing that is truly sustainable, Flick. That’s why Trainspotting was so brilliant. The antihero, the fucking lanky junkie, prevails. Whether he takes drugs again or not is irrelevant. He’s still a fuckup.” Kyle says all this lying on his back with a joint in one hand and a coke-lined Clyde County library card in the other. I sniff over the coffee table and white powder flies up my nose, making it tingle so hard I poke it to see if it’s okay.
“It feels like it’s melting.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, mate, it’s not.” Kyle waves smoke at me dismissively.
I wipe my nostrils self-consciously. “So what references would you cite for that opinion?”
“References?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten everything you learnt in English literature already, Kyle Craig.” I parody our Scottish Eng. lit. teacher, Ms. Clarkson, to perfection and Kyle snorts a laugh, fine white dust escaping his nostrils.
“Oh aye, laddie, well, I would have to cite Irvine Welsh’s essay on the inside cover of the Definitive Edition of Trainspotting, erm . . .”
“Only one reference! You’ll have to do better than that, Mr. Craig, or it’s a D fer you!”
“All right, hang on! Err . . . also Fight Club, for the ‘masturbation is’ speech, George Orwell’s 1984 speech about the need for a continuing state of war . . . and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 for introducing me to said speech.”
“The former or the latter of the two aforementioned speeches?”
“Oh the latter, Mrs. Craig.”
“Why thank you, Kyle.”
WHAT IS LOVE?
I get a text from Rainbow halfway through our little pile of joy and in my excited bleariness, I decide to call her, stumble into the hallway and slump on the doorstep, pressing my mobile to my ear. As the phone begins to ring, I suddenly remember my paranoid invasion of her privacy, the revelation of the circumstances of her adoption and how I acted, the way she looked at me when I ate those space cakes, and the fact that I’m wrist-deep in blow. The animal thing, the screaming, the comparison to her parents didn’t mean a thing. She was just frightened and upset and I was the one who had frightened and upset her. She didn’t want to lose me and was throwing everything she had at it. I see it clearly now, I think, and then it suddenly blurs into a haze again and all I’m left with is the feeling that my heart is sinking to my gut and my knowledge that I was and am totally in the wrong, and Rainbow is the pinnacle of everything that’s right in the world. Shit. I feel hollow, sick and panicked. The coke seems to be acting like a truth serum. I can’t lie to her, I think, feeling my heartbeat in my throat.
“Hello? . . . Hello?”
I swallow and my lips tremble. “Hi, Rainbow.”
“Hello, sweetheart!”
I’m a bastard. I’m a bastard. I’m a big sodding twat . . . I’m a cocked-up coke . . . no . . . coked-up cock bastard. And she’s going to leave me. She’s going to leave me here alone without Rainbow in my life. I love her so much. “I love you so much,” I say. And then suddenly everything blurs again and my mind changes, like switching from Jekyll to Hyde.
“I love you too.”
She doesn’t know it, the voice says—back again but this time it’s a queer tinny twisted voice—but she’s saying that to us with coke everywhere around the room.
Everything is fucking up. Everything is fucking up at the same time, and I feel myself falling down a long black tunnel (Like Alice through the rabbit hole, says the voice) and somehow . . . without the inclination to make myself stop . . . It’s weird but this falling feels good, it feels good to be knowing that it will end, even if it will end badly and everything will fuck up, because at least that knowledge is definite. They say if you never try you’ll never know, but I think as well if you try you’ll never know how things are going to turn out, and I don’t want to never know. The uncertainty kills me. Wasn’t it all just simpler, I hear in a tinny rant, when there was nothing to look forward to, no future with Rainbow to protect? When we knew where we would live and who we would know forever? Don’t you just want to give up on making this huge effort to get out and change things? Change isn’t necessarily for the better. Life’s all right, isn’t it? You’re not an African baby with flies on your face.
Stupid racist voice, I say. It seems my brain is not my brain entirely at the moment. It is running on coke and smoke and JD and the other kind of Coke and, more importantly, the massive release of pain-numbing adrenaline you get when everything is fucking up at the same time.
—I’m ready for this to fuck up, it says. Don’t worry, I can deal, I’m prepped. She’s gonna leave you and we’re gonna move on. No fucking problem.
—Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Rainbow. I love you.
—Huh! my brain exclaims. What is love? A firing of synapses in your head! A chemical surge! Two people gazing stupidly at each other! Whatever. It’s not specific to this one girl. There will always be someone else. Yeah, it could be Rainbow, but it could be anybody. You don’t need Rainbow. What kind of fucking stupid name is “Rainbow”?
—Rainbow . . . Rainbow . . . fuck . . . fuuuuck . . .
The thing about other people leaving you is that it’s cathartic, especially if you part on bad terms. You cut them off, you don’t see them, you don’t need to hurt at all. You can go dead inside, and the simplicity of this feels amazing. Maybe, as well, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: you always think you’ll be dumped and when you are, it’s satisfying to know you were right. You were right about the world—it is a load of shit, she was just a bitch who would eventually stop caring about you! Good for you, brother! The problem is that, right now, I’m so high I want that cathartic simplicity, honesty, to get it all out and have my sins absolved. So my brain is thinking, Fuck it—better to have her dump me over the letter than dump me over the mound of white stuff I’ve just snorted.
Am I thinking clearly? I think to me, to myself, to my own brain. Which is strangely throbbing, though not in a painful way. I can’t lie to her. I never did deserve her. You’re a fucking waster, Flick, my head says. You’re not on her level, she’s out of your league. She always was. I swallow. I leave a pause. My pulse beats loudly in my right cranium.
“Flick?”
“Fuck.”
PUNISHING CONSCIOUSNESS
I tell Rainbow about reading the letter. She doesn’t shout or scream or want to hit me or leave me. She sounds more pissed off at me than I’ve ever known her to be, now that I’ve done this coupled with the fight the other day, but she still doesn’t sound very pissed off. She says she’s angry but she understands. She kept the letter because it was deeply felt by the person who wrote it and she didn’t have the heart to throw it away. She has no feelings for Raphael, or any of her exes. They didn’t speak every night, and Rainbow doesn’t remember any big conversation.
“Sometimes people see things how they want to see them,” Rainbow tells me quietly. No, they didn’t have phone sex, they only spoke on MSN. Rainbow talked to a lot of people on MSN; do I want their names and backgrounds too? The fact that I didn’t trust her or respect her privacy makes her angry, not particularly the fact that I read the letter. She sometimes wants to snoop around my place or read my texts. No, she hasn’t. I’m not a twat, it’s okay. I do deserve her, “stop saying that, Flick.” I tell her that I’m sorry about her adoption, that I’m going t
o stop using, that the deal is over and that everything is over and that I hope she will be able to forgive me and that I’ll do anything to make it up to her, because she is my best friend and she’s beautiful inside and out and because she means more to me than anything in the world. It feels like we’re saying good-bye.
“I wish you were here,” she says sadly. “I wish I could hug you.” We talk for twenty minutes and then she has to go and pick up Tim from his friend’s house. Her mums don’t like him walking back alone. She thinks I’ve been drinking and tells me to stop. And that she loves me. I feel like the most worthless piece of dirty, disgusting shit in the whole fucking world.
I hang up miserably and plod through to rejoin Danny, Dildo and Kyle, who hands me back the straw sympathetically. I look at Kyle. He blows me a kiss. I am so depressed I could kill everyone else. I lean forward, wishing I could be unconscious, wishing I was dead, wishing I could snort my whole fucking existence away. I watch Danny KO Dildo on Tekken.
I want to float into insignificance, I think in a dull, matter-of-fact way. I want to embrace the dark black hole. Be it K hole or coke hole. At this moment I am willing to take anything to make everything go away. Scratch that. To make me go away from everything else, so I can stop tainting it and turning pure things into shitty, hollow, lifeless wrecks. There is no point in being present. Consciousness hurts like a physical wound. I am a bad person. I am hurting the person I love the most, a person who is blameless and vulnerable and honest and who tries to be good, not in a pious way but in a soulful, kind, caring way. A person who has already been hurt enough, who was unloved and let down and discarded by the people who were supposed to care for her the most and I’m doing it to her again. And I’m lying to her about it. Ergo, it would be better if I was not here, and she could move on with her life. Oh take me, self-pity, drag me down into your sweet nothingness. I imagine a high like a Galaxy advert—sweet, smooth . . . chocolaty. Come on, I think impatiently, sucking up another line, and then taking a toke of pot, then necking a pill Kyle proffers. Come on, take me the fuck away. FUCK! Even this fucking shit isn’t working. I do another line. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck Rainbow, fuck me, fuck Montauk, fuck animation, fuck it all, because this is starting to feel good. Weird tingly, orgasmic good, with a sort of side dish of melting, fizzing that feels like the kind of good that’s bad for you, the kind of good that has a lot of calories. I’m on the slide, the slide into being not here. Come on, you beauty, I think. Drown me in this black sea of blow. I laugh suddenly. With glee I realize I’m going to black out. I know, because I always think like a right poet slash twat when I’m on the way under. And then I see the light very brightly and it sends some sort of shooting feeling through my skull. I feel panicked, and at the same time, utterly calm.
Kyle lights up a smoke. “The thing about Almodóvar is that his earlier films were—”
“SHUT THE FUCK UP, KYLE.”
“What?”
I open my mouth wide, with no knowledge of what is to come out, and find myself screaming. “CRITICISM IS NEVER AS VALUABLE AS CREATIVITY.”
And with that, as my legs give way beneath me, I get my wish—unconsciousness.
MY HEAD, MY HEAD.
It’s a little later. I think I’ve been half-asleep, and I’m woken up by a huge pulse in my head. Kyle is still talking, unencumbered by my outburst.
“The problem is that everything we own costs money. And you have to have it just to keep up.”
I stand up slowly. The left side of the room is lower than the right.
“And then you have to buy property in a fucking good location, just to keep all this stuff safe.” Kyle is emphasizing every word and each one beats like a hammer on the inside of my skull.
“We don’t need all this shit, man! We can be free! Free, like that dude in Amores perros!”
Oh god. My head. My head. My head.
I hear the front door open and close. Then, suddenly, Gav appears, blurred and haloed in my vision by an ethereal light—dreamlike—and scampers up to me with his grin, his huge grin, that I’m suddenly terrified by. It looks like he’s going to fucking eat me.
“All right, our Flick?” His voice is sped up, high like he’s sucked down helium. He seems to be moving really fast, jumping up and down, gesturing, shaking. Or perhaps it’s the outline of his body. Perhaps it’s moving so fast the particles are heating up and he’s turning from a solid into a liquid.
“Gav,” I whisper, grabbing him, scared for him, trying to warn him. “You’re melting.” I hear his voice calling me from a distance, echoing, the sound of his words retreating, as if space were being stretched out. “Don’t move,” I say. “You’ll be okay if you don’t move.”
Gav leans down the tunnel between us. His twitchy eyes flick back and forth, looking into mine searchingly. One giant vibrating hand comes closer to me, the edge wiggling like those little lines that float across your pupils in the fluid in your eye. Maybe time is being stretched out too and I’m seeing how things really are before the eye processes them, like seeing the movements between the twenty-five frames of film per second in one of Kyle’s foreign movies.
“Flick?” Gav, so far away, touches my arm. “Flick? Are you okay?”
RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS PART 2
We’re going through the center of town. I’m looking down, but I can tell where we are because the bridge makes my tummy jump up and land in a horrible slow roll and I taste sick at the back of my throat.
“Look at that little piece of pussy.”
“Fez, keep your eyes on the road!”
“What?” I say. It’s like I am present but everyone else is very distant from me, down a long dark corridor. I am aware of Fez’s hostile presence in the car and I am frightened. But it seems that Gav is also here. I can hear him talking in my ear. Gav, the voice of reason.
I grin. It’s a desperate fucking situation when Gav is the voice of reason. Suddenly a pain flashes through my skull, my head falls forward like a dead weight and for a second I black out again.
“Whoa! Whoa, whoa, it’s okay, man, it’s nothing, you just concentrate on me, okay? It’s gonna be okay, it’s me, it’s Gav, you’ll be fine, man, you’ll be fine.” Gav’s eyes are wide and his bottom lip gets caught on his top one. “You’ll be fine.”
I’ve never seen him like this. I look up to the windscreen and watch the car straight-line a corner. Headlights strike us full in the face and the oncoming car’s horn wails in protest. Fez swerves round it without a movement of his stony psycho face. I see those twitchy blue eyes in the mirror fixed hard on the road. I hear the rev count go up as we hit the straight towards the hospital. He’s completely coked up. And he’s enjoying this. The bastard. My brain starts to feel like it’s pressing on the inside of my skull. I let out a small noise from between my teeth, which are bit around my tongue. Something starts to hurt and I can’t tell where, and suddenly all I can think about is: “Rainbow.”
WHITE ROOM
Gav must have walked me through the corridor and put my head gently on the desk while he spoke to the receptionist, because it’s the kind of thing Gav would do in a crisis. Gav was soft in the head from all the pot, yes, but on the plus side it made him a puppy to all those he considered his friends. He must have done this, but I was twitching like a psychiatric case and to me it felt like I had been dragged through the waiting room by some beefy bodyguard whose hands pinched bruises into my arms and who kept taking quick digs into my spine with his knee. When we got to the counter my head smacked into it, my nose definitely broken, and I was sure blood was pouring out of me onto the white countertop, like Edward Norton when his head gets fucked up under the bar in Fight Club. I groan.
Somewhere in the distance, like an echo from down a long corridor, I hear Gav’s voice. “What floor should I . . . ? I don’t know amounts . . .”
“. . . more specific . . .”
“. . . Quite a lot? I dunno, I wasn’t there . . .”
“. . . who w
as with . . .”
“. . . his mates . . . young . . . didn’t know what to do . . .”
“. . . illegal substances . . . toxic?”
“. . . not sure what . . . not exactly ibuprofen . . .”
“. . . age . . . national insurance number card . . .”
“What?”
Some time must have passed, because although I’m not aware of having moved anywhere, I’m now sitting on a doctor’s bed, encircled by blue curtains, flanked by Dildo and Gav, who is now answering different questions.
“He keeps going . . . a bit, a bit blurry, like he can’t see, and shaking, and he was sick a lot and he keeps holding his head and saying ‘Rainbow.’ ”
Rainbow.
“Like that.”
“Rainbow! She’s a girl!”
The doctor looks up from his notepad. “Rainbow’s a girl?”
“Yes, she’s a girl,” I murmur into Dildo’s jacket.
I can’t make out his face but the doctor’s head tilts to look at Gav. Gav shakes his head. A chasm opens in front of me—I’m on top of the steelworks and falling, my tummy, my spleen, my colon, my balls, my dick, my legs, my heart, my lungs drop into my head. My eyes roll up, I feel myself simultaneously retching and leaning backward, everything fades to black, and just before I lose consciousness I hear Gav say: “There ain’t a girl called Rainbow.”
AN ARC OF COLORED LIGHT IN THE SKY CAUSED BY THE RAIN’S REFRACTION OF THE SUN’S RAYS
There are some things that are too painful to say in the first person. I see myself from the outside and the realization of where I’ve ended up is sick, stuck in my throat. I see myself clearly, objectively, as Rainbow might see me.
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