*****
I woke up on the bed fully clothed. It was dark. I turned over and looked at the radio alarm to find that it was just after one thirty in the morning. I wasn't sure how long I had been asleep but it felt like a very long time. The only reason I was awake now was because I was desperate for the toilet.
After visiting the bathroom across the hallway I went back to my room and quietly closed the door. I felt wide awake now and wasn't sure what to do. I had some vague memories of being awake at night and things I would do to relieve the boredom but that was back home, not in a bed and breakfast filled with strangers. I couldn't go downstairs and sit in the kitchen with the radio on now.
Home.
The word conjured only thin, wispy memories, as if it was a place I had not visited for decades. I tried to concentrate and bring to mind the people who were back home, for I knew there to be some, but the memories were gossamer and insubstantial.
I knew that something was wrong with my mind but there was no sense of panic. I felt totally calm, as if I knew that this were merely a temporary blip that would right itself sooner or later. I didn't feel in any danger. I was sure that I hadn't lost my mind, just that a part of it was shut down for the time being, for reasons of self protection. When I had rested enough and got enough sleep then everything would again be normal, whatever that had once been.
A thought popped up from somewhere and I looked through the carrier bag next to the bed for clues to the past that seemed to be slipping away from me hour by hour, thought by thought, piece by piece. Nothing there. Then I noticed the jacket hanging on the back of the door and went through the pockets. My wallet contained only money, a cash card and two credit cards, no photographs or anything with my address on. I recognised the name on the cards as being my own name and discovered that I could remember the pin number to all three cards. I picked up the pen and notepad I had bought the previous day, for a reason that now escaped me, and wrote them all down lest my mind decide to erase that information as well. I knew these were my things and that this person was me but I could no longer feel any connection to him. I didn't feel like I was him.
Then I found my phone, and recognised it as my phone and knew how to switch it on, but something stopped me. I would be missed by now, I would be officially a missing person. I didn't like that idea so I pushed it away. Curiously that was the first moment that the actuality of what I had done occurred to me. I had done something massive and life changing without really being aware of what I was doing. I pushed that thought away as well.
I did briefly consider switching on my phone, that somehow that was the right thing to do, but I didn't. If I switched it on there would be messages, stuff to deal with, and the reason I was here was that I could no longer deal with anything. I sensed that I was at the point of no return, that I could go home now and it wouldn't be a total disaster. But I knew that I wouldn't. All I wanted to do, all I was capable of doing, was staying here in my cave and sleeping. Maybe one day I would be a real person again and be able to go out into the world and do things. But not today. I slid the phone down the back of the wardrobe where it would be difficult to reach.
I figured that I must have had a good reason for doing what I had done and ending up in this place. People don't just do things for no reason, do they? Just because I could not currently remember what the reason was, didn't mean that it wasn't hiding there somewhere and perfectly valid.
I also considered going to a doctor and admitting to everything that was going on in my head, but that would just bring even more stuff to deal with. And in any case, I couldn't think how I would be able to describe my symptoms to a doctor. You can't accurately report on a faulty mind using a faulty mind. No, on balance, I thought it best to sit tight for a few days, remain invisible and let nature take it's course. Surely my mind would return sooner or later.
All that thinking had exhausted me so I undressed and got into bed, hoping for the sweet, calming oblivion of sleep. I did sleep, but of course my mind would not rest. It kept on unravelling my life in all it's horrible detail.
I think that, after leaving school, I had about two years of living in a state which could be described as happy before my mind once again began to work against me. A few months after I started, Kev left and I incorporated his role into my own job, with a commensurate pay rise. Rob and I ran the place pretty efficiently between the two of us. I spent a lot of time on the phone and the rest at the computer, and the office was nearly always frantically busy, but I enjoyed the work. I found that I was suited to that level of responsibility and I matured into a young man fairly quickly. I began to feel like an equal partner in the office rather than just the new kid, and Rob was certainly by then treating me as such.
I still had no long term goals or ambitions because I still couldn't imagine being any older than I was. I knew that I didn't want to turn into my parents or live their kind of life, but I had no idea what sort of life I did want. I expected that at some point I would just become the person I was meant to be, that my brain would eventually mature and I would magically know what I was supposed to be doing and how I was going to live the rest of my life. But mostly I just didn't think about the future because I couldn't make any sort of connection to it, especially an emotional connection.
Another factor was that I grew up during the cold war and my childhood was littered with terrifying documentaries about the imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust. I remember that sometime at the beginning of the 80s when I was in my early teens I decided that there was a fifty fifty chance of getting to the end of the decade without a nuclear conflict. The rhetoric of Regan and Thatcher and the whole mood of the time made this a fairly realistic assessment. Combined with the death of my friend a year or so before, I became utterly convinced that I was going to die at any moment. That feeling has never entirely left me. That's why my life has turned out the way it has – things have just happened to me and I've always submitted to them. I've never really done anything, I've just passively reacted to whatever life has thrown at me.
In those days you could still just about have one job for the entirety of your working life and so I never made any plans to 'move on' or look for any alternative employment. My savings built up rapidly with all the overtime (and very high interest rates at the time) and I soon bought a fairly good second hand car. It made me feel like an adult, a proper member of the human race, to drive to work every morning and park my car outside the office next to Rob's.
I had few friends and no girlfriends because I was working six days a week and was totalling up to seventy hours; I just never had the time nor the inclination to go anywhere where I would meet anybody new. I never felt tired during the first two years, I was just happy to keep going and accumulate savings. I figured that in a few years I would be able to buy a house. I didn't particularly want to buy a house, I didn't need one, but that was what you were supposed to do, wasn't it? Climb the ladder and all that.
I didn't stop for two years. It was when I did that the problems began.
I would work all week and most Saturdays. Saturday night I would go out drinking with the two friends from school I had managed to avoid alienating. They had moved to our school in the sixth form and so only ever knew me as I was at sixteen, they weren't comparing me to my previous self and I hadn't done anything to piss them off. By that point I was virtually invisible at school and would often leave the premises at lunch time or during a free lesson to avoid people. Everyone who had known me in previous years just stopped talking to me and I did nothing to change that situation.
One lunch time I got a bag of chips and went to sit in a park, expecting it to be as deserted as usual. The high hedge around the perimeter prevented me from seeing that two of the swings were occupied. By the time I had entered the park they had spotted me and called me over so it was too late to back out. I considered being rude and just walking away but I found myself carrying on and sitting on the vacant swing next to them. Simon and Jeff were bro
thers whose parents had divorced the previous year and their mother had been forced to move, hence the change of school.
They were in one of my classes but we had never really talked much outside of lessons. They were both drinking cans of Hoffmeister, which was one of the cheapest lagers you could get at the time. I was loathe to share my chips with them because I had so little money that they were a massive treat, but when they offered me a can I suddenly really wanted a drink, so I accepted the can and shared the bag of chips.
I'd never been a big drinker because I couldn't afford it. I asked how they could afford to be drinking at lunchtime.
“Guilt money from our dad,” smiled Simon. “He's got a really good job and he gives us twenty quid a week, each. Mainly just to piss mum off but we're not complaining.”
I almost dropped my can. Twenty quid a week was more than unemployment benefit back then. It would be like a sixteen year old today having eighty or ninety pounds a week.
“And we get them cheap anyway,” added Jeff. “Our older cousin works in an offy. He gets staff discount and the odd crate goes AWOL. It's a nice little scam the manager runs. You always get a certain amount of breakages and stuff that goes out of date so he claims stuff as having been damaged goods and they take it home. These ones are sell by the end of the month so they'd hardly make anything on them in the shop. We got 'em for 20p a can.”
Even I could just about afford to drink at that price. It transpired that Jeff, like me, also had a free period after lunch. When Simon reluctantly went back to school to endure a history lesson I gave Jeff 40p and helped myself to another can. The camaraderie of drinking in the park during school time, along with the unexpected rush of lager itself, worked it's magic and we became firm friends. The three of us would have a liquid lunch in the park most days after that. I'm not sure we ever had anything in common except drinking and making idiotic jokes but it was enough for me, the first connection I had felt to another human being for five years. I started also spending a lot of time at their place instead of suffering through the stifling awkward atmosphere at home.
During my first two years at work I would get slaughtered with Jeff and Simon every Saturday and then spend Sunday lounging around watching all the TV programmes I had video taped during the week. Sometimes I would go for a drive and listen to the radio, just because I could. I never visited my parents and eventually they got the message and stopped pretending to invite me. They divorced soon after that and I don't even know where my father lives now, or even if he is still alive.
This way of life was perfectly acceptable and it may well have continued to make me content for many more years had my routine not been disrupted.
For various reasons we moved to new premises, resulting in business being on hold for almost a month. I think there was something else going on higher up in the company but I was never privy to those details, though I heard rumours about some sort of tax dodge to which I dutifully closed my ears. So long as they continued to pay me I didn't really care how the company chose to run its business affairs.
I had never taken any time off apart from the odd sick day or dentist appointment, or one time when my car broke down, and Rob insisted that I have three weeks off before helping with the final stages of moving into the new building. He saw it as a reward for all my hard work but I had no idea what to do with myself. I was twenty and possessed with a restless energy so just lounging around at home and watching TV didn't appeal to me. On the other hand, there was nothing that I was really interested in doing. The idea of going on an actual holiday on my own seemed odd and untenable. For a few days I went out in the car but the novelty soon wore off.
I quickly realised that I had no life outside of my job. Until that point there had seemed a purpose in working all the hours I could and accumulating lots of money. Because I had been working so much I hadn't had time to sit and think, to be introspective and think about 'life'. After a few days off I began to think about myself and my circumstances and nothing good came of it. I suddenly saw myself and hated what I was looking at. I was a twenty year old virgin with two friends, no girlfriend, effectively no family and no real interest in anything. For the previous two years I had been under the illusion that I was happy because I was so pleased to be away from school and my parents, but now I saw the unpalatable reality. I had several thousand pounds in the bank, a car and a rented flat, but that was it, the sum total of my life. Now that I didn't have work to focus on I realised how empty and pointless my life was and how cosmically, existentially bored I was. For a couple of days I floundered around trying to find something to do, something to engage me and maintain my interest, but I drew a total blank.
This was now a pressing concern because when I returned to work there would be a new person in the office so I wouldn't have to work so many hours. I would be on a regular nine to five, Monday to Friday week with overtime only when we were especially busy. I was fine with that, I had more than enough money for my needs, but what the hell was I going to do with all this free time?
After a week I had reverted to my eleven year old behaviour of staying in bed most of the day and having zero energy. But it didn't soothe me as it once had, and so I did the only other thing I could think of doing at the time: I started drinking. I drove to the supermarket and bought loads of food and everything I needed for the foreseeable future so that I wouldn't have to leave the flat, and six crates of lager – one hundred and forty four cans. After nine days I had run out so I got another six crates.
For two weeks I got up at lunch time, sat in the chair in front of the telly and drank until I passed out. I wouldn't say it made me happy but there was a definite appeal to that level of indulgence and lack of any responsibility. After a while it began to make sense to live in this manner. Because I knew that I was going to be drunk all of my waking hours I stopped worrying about having no life, I stopped worrying about anything. Slowly I began, in some sense, to enjoy myself. I even began to think, callow youth that I was, that there was something heroic about drinking so much. I was saying a big fuck you to my parents, the world, to the notion of adult responsibility, to life itself.
After a while I got sick of the bloating effect of drinking so much lager and so graduated to bitter and then I discovered real ale. A lot of it was much stronger than lager and so I got 'more bang for my buck'. I found that mixing different types of ale would get my drunk a lot more quickly and so began to work my way through the shelves of the supermarket and local off licences.
The first day back at work I took the bus because I had a terrible hangover from being awake for an hour without a drink and couldn't face driving. I was so miserable in the office that everyone who saw me asked me what was wrong. I said I had a stomach bug, which was what it felt like anyway. By lunchtime I had to get out of there. The three of us took different breaks so that there was always enough cover for the phones.
I walked alone to the nearest pub and ordered a meal, for I felt ravenously hungry, and a pint. Ten seconds after starting the pint I felt considerably better. I walked back to work after steak and chips and four pints feeling on top of the world. During the morning I had been wondering how on earth I could cope with the job any longer but now I had found the solution. I could comfortably afford a pub lunch every day so that's what I would do from now on. When I got home I had a takeaway and eight cans and passed out in the chair as I had been doing every day for the previous fortnight.
The following morning I still felt too rough to drive so again I took the bus. It was hard to get through the four hours until my lunch break but once again I went to the pub and had four pints. If anyone at work noticed they never said anything. Providing I could still do my job I don't think Rob would have cared if I'd had a bottle of scotch or some heroin.
On the third day back I had a brainwave. If I walked to work I could have a couple of cans on the way to get me through the morning. This worked very well and I only needed three pints at lunchtime. After a month I sold
my car because I never used it.
And so life continued, for five years.
My drinking never affected my ability to do my job and it never gave me any serious health problems. I sustained a few minor injuries and one twisted ankle from falling over but other than that it was all fine. At that age you can do a lot to your body and it will acquiesce with little in the way of protest. Everything was fine.
Except of course, that it wasn't. My body might have escaped relatively unscathed, but my poor mind was broken. One of the things drinking does is disrupt your sleep but again, at that age I could cope well enough. I became used to getting little sleep and my body adapted to being permanently drunk.
For five years I thought about little else but alcohol and how long I had to wait for my next drink, the next top up that would enable me to remain numb to all worldly concerns. When I wasn't at work I would be either drinking or sleeping. After a couple of years of this exhausting way of life I could no longer summon the energy to go out on a Saturday and eventually I drifted away from my two remaining friends.
Even taking a shower and getting dressed became a Herculean task so I would go shopping on a Friday evening after work for food and drink and then spend the weekend in my flat in a dressing gown. I would listen to music and watch TV and I enjoyed being an audience to things that were external to me, I suppose it was the basic escapism that everyone indulges in to some extent. I think that some of the time I was happy, or at least content, but the drinking blocked out any level of complex thought so life just carried on. I would have occasional flashes of shame at the state I had let myself get into but they were easily dismissed. Now and then I would run out of beer and have to shuffle down to the off licence, attracting pitying or disapproving looks because I was wearing dirty, food stained clothes and hadn't washed or shaved in days but I had long ceased to care what anybody thought of me and this was also easily brushed aside.
It may seem strange but I didn't notice what my life had become. If you start drinking as soon as you wake up then you never properly sober up, never fully regain your senses. Because of my innate inability to see the future I was never really aware of time passing. I never had any thoughts along the lines of “I've been drinking constantly for three years, this sickly, sugary liquid is my entire life, what the fuck am I doing?”. I never, ever thought about what I was doing, I just continued to do it. I honestly never had a single moment of worrying about my health, because that was the future, which didn't exist. I guess walking to and from work and all the miles I accumulated walking around the warehouse kept the weight off and kept me relatively healthy.
It never occurred to me that this could kill me because, as per usual, I couldn't connect to any possible future.
Brian: Mental Book 1 Page 6