Solpadol

by J.W. Carey

I look out the window, vaguely remembering the smashed glass in the bathroom of her student flat, the cheer as I staggered from room to room, coated in vomit, the sobering wind on my face as I walked up the road to my apartment, the police car across the road, the look of revulsion on the security guard’s face when I passed her by. I remember throwing up in my bed and sleeping beside it and waking up early to go to a lecture still reeking of vomit. I remember the first Solpadol taking the pain away.

  ‘Did you ever finish that tattoo off?’

  ‘Not yet; I’m going to though. I just haven’t had chance really, it’s a little more filled in than when you last saw it, but there still the wolf’s fur to colour in.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ We both drank, and I looked out of the window.

  * * *

  I don’t think I have real emotions. Or I’ve been fucked by Shakespeare. Instead, everything feels like the ultimate desire for emotion. Have I ever loved, or has every moment been the result of desiring to love, and know love in my heart? Have I ever been happy, or were all moments of joy dictated by the knowledge that I should have been happy in those moments, beneath the sun? Have I ever been frightened, or is the pounding heart driven by the wish to understand fear and be afraid? Have I ever been anything but hungry; hungry for life and personality and all things?

  And when I looked at her, I could convince myself that I loved her; that she made me happy; that she terrified me. I could almost convince myself that the real ‘she’ was something beyond my daydreams, something greater that my illusions and my memories of her could ever know. I hated every moment that I was with her, not because of her failures to live up to my expectations, but for my expectations.

  There are so many things I should have told her, locked in the midnight deep-throat haze of Solpadol. There are so many truths I should have confessed and lies I should have told and illusions I should have cast and carved on stones that I buried beneath my grave.

  I should admit that love, and the desire for love and the hope of love, drives me insane. I need the kind of love that drives me insane; the kind of love that isn’t a duty, but a pleasure, because I am lazy and I despise duty. I should admit that the love I have known has kept me up at night, and not, and that I love everyone before I know them.

  I should admit that I am an ugly man; hideous and scarred by solitude. I should admit that love and passion are impossibilities for me. I should admit that I am going to die alone, that I will deserve it, that there was never any hope of dying any other way.

  I don’t care. So long as I die with you, Solpadol, I don’t care.

  * * *

  There’s so much I want to say, but we stagger through the conversation for half an hour or more. I buy the drinks; two more, three more. I take another pill when she goes to the toilet, and I catch one old couple glaring at me once I’ve done so. I don’t respond, I just keep looking out of the window. It has started to rain; a dull, sober rain that sends a chill through the room every time the door opens.

  I think of lines I’d rehearsed throughout the day; ideas that would try and explain how I felt, how I’d always felt, how my desperation hadn’t changed but had been pushed aside, stored somewhere in my throat, amongst the hollow feeling. None of them, in the moment, seemed honest.

  We’re halfway through our fourth, and neither of us have spoken in a long time. We’re both just watching the rain, watching the old men smoke outside the Dog across the road, some hiding beneath the stone canopy of the abandoned bookmakers. We watch the young mothers wheel their fat children around in rollers printed with Disney characters. We watch the alternatives swagger down the street with their half-shaved heads and black band t-shirts and hoodies.

  ‘Are you happy?’

  I blink at her, slowly. She’s a little drunk; her lips are held in a grim line to fight it – it’s her entire face, the way it’s set against her own weaknesses, against the results of her own decisions. It isn’t a beautiful face, but there’s something about it – it’s wide, and open, but she can twist it into closed-off expressions on a whim. You don’t even need to speak to her for her to unnerve you; she’s mastered the art of frowning like an actor. Despite that, I used to be able to tell what she was thinking; what reaction she expected of me. I used to be able to look at her and know her, know how her day had gone up until that point; knew what I could say to help her and, more often than not, I chose the other option.

  ‘I don’t know. Are you?’ It takes her a long time to answer, and the concentration, the confusion on her face, is agonising to look at. She turns to look out the window, but I can’t stop looking at her. In profile, her jaw doesn’t look so strong, but beneath the thin red line of her lips it is stunning. The sound of conversation grows and subsides and grows again, before fading away completely until it is just the two of us, S and I, held apart by the years and the question mark.

  ‘What made you choose this place, anyway?’

  She looks around then, seemingly for the first time. Her eyes alight on the images around the walls, on the paintings and prints nailed to the ceiling, at the naked portraits of stunning women with weak jaws and pristine flesh, at the harsh landscapes, at the slanted rooftops over which great eagles flew and opened their mouths and spat out art. There is an old Guinness advertising poster above her head, but my favourite is one of a half-naked woman, her dress slipping off her left shoulder and displaying the curve of her breast, her right leg pushed out from beneath the folds of the silk, and her face obscured by the camera she held in both hands. She is very beautiful. There’s a bottle of wine on the table, half-filled with water, and the long-stemmed flower that emerges from it occasionally shivers as the door opens or the sound of drunkenness grows and swells around the room.

  ‘I’ve been here a couple of times before, with some people from work. Didn’t we come here once? In the last year of college?’

  ‘You might have done. I didn’t come in here until last year. It’s really started to grow on me though; it’s better than the basement anyway.’

  ‘You don’t like it down there?’

  ‘Not really; there’s a lot of, you know, cool people down there. The ones who dress up for each other and pretend to be so alternative to the norm. The ones who were denim vests over cheap jackets, you know? The ones who think that they can pretend to have another name and that gives them a personality. I met this one girl down there, right, and she told me her name was a mix of her actual name and some Shakespearean character – pretty sure I just burst out laughing and left.’

  ‘That’s you.’ She smiles at me, again, and the hollowness at the back of my throat returns. ‘Tactful as always.’

  ‘Well.’ I didn’t have anything else to say; I just finished my drink.

  ‘Right,’ she stood up, ‘I’m going to swing over to the toilet and I’ll bring you a drink back. Same again?’

  ‘Oh; yeah, sure. Thanks.’ She leaves, vanishes into the crowd in moments and leaving me alone.

  The rain can’t decide what it wants to do. It goes from hammering the glass like a drunk at 9:00 A.M to gently caressing the window pane. I like the rain. Like the way it punctuates our conversation, how it underscores our lives. I don’t think anything positive has ever happened in the rain. Victory is the domain of sunlight.

  It always rains in Wigan.

  * * *

  Happiness is an ugly word. Nobody who was happy ever achieved anything. The content are defenders of the status quo; the unhappy work to improve their lot. Nobody with joy in their heart has made a difference, has advanced their species and their friends and their family in any meaningful way. What’s the point of being happy; I always though anybody could be happy.

  I’d like to know what happiness, pure happiness, feels like. I’d like to spend a day, an hour, a minute with the knowledge that I am happy; without the desire for more at the back of my throat; I need joy to be a baseline. I need to define myself by my joy, rather than my hate.
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  What if it’s time to accept that I can’t be saved from myself? What if it’s time to answer the bloody thirst; to listen to my own voice? What if I ignore man, and woman, and noble creatures with years of work across their backs? What if I give in? Give in to who I want to be, to what I want to be and why I want to be someone else?

  What if I choose to chase the ugly dreams of my own happiness?

  Grace Petrie

  ‘You know; I think of you every time I listen to Grace Petrie.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ The stage of her face is failing. She is starting to slur her words, and her eyes drift left or right instead of looking straight at me. I must be out of focus to her; I’m starting to feel out of focus myself.

  ‘She’s a folk singer. I think you’d like her.’

  ‘I don’t listen to folk.’

  ‘You never did. Still, I think you’d like her. When she sings her quiet songs, it’s like she’s breathing in your ear. She sounds kind of naïve, really; singing about love and all that.’ She laughs. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘You were always the naïve one, you know? Always the optimist.’ She shakes her head and looks down into her drink. ‘Always joking.’

  ‘C’mon; you were the naïve one; every naïve thought I have comes from you. Every positive thought in my head sounds a little like you. I think you became my conscience, or something.’ She stares at me for half a second, not blinking, nor breathing; frozen. A strand of her hair has fallen in front of her face, and I would once have dreamed of brushing it away just to feel her skin on mine. She looks at me from under its shadow, beneath the heavy candlelight. I want to carry on; I want to tell her that I was sorry for calling her my conscience; sorry for putting that weight on her; sorry for making her wear those chains. I want to tell her that I’m proud of her; that I know she’d hide those chains beneath her sleeves, with the scars and the tattoos and carry them beneath her skin. I want to tell her that anyone else I know would wear them like a trophy, and hang trophies and medallions and awards from them, and make sure that everyone else knew that they were there. She snorts and looks away.

  ‘You need a better conscience.’

  ‘I’m happy with the one I’ve got, thanks.’

  ‘Are you?’ She leans forward, her neck extended and a few more strands of hair falling in front of her eyes. I can barely see them. They’re hooded, shadowed by her brows and her hair and the gently choking sun through the window. ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Didn’t you just ask me that?’

  ‘Did you answer?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She leans back into her seat again, her features rearranging themselves for another night in front of the silent audience. I watch her, watch the way her entire body sets itself up again; I’ve got the image of bones in my head – all these different-sized bones just clicking together like hinges.

  ‘Do you remember when we went to that book store a couple of years ago; just before Christmas? The snow had stopped the buses from running regularly, and we ended up coming into town about two hours after we planned? I waited at the bus stop for you for about an hour until you turned up. You got mad at me for waiting, I remember that. I said that it was nothing, that it didn’t matter how long I’d wait, that I’d wait for you forever and you looked at me and laughed.’

  She’s looking anywhere else, but at me. I can’t even look at her so I stare at the Guinness poster.

  ‘We went to that book store and you were looking at something for college; art or psychology or something and you were doing this little dance whilst you were looking through them. I asked you what you were doing and you started to properly, properly dance from side to side. You looked over your shoulder at me, and smiled like you’d won something, and I started crying. Not really; I just remember those horrible white lights burning a few tears when they ran down my cheeks. I wasn’t sobbing or anything; I wasn’t even making a sound – I was just standing there, with salt water on my face.’

  I look at her, and she’s still staring away from me; her eyes are focused on something across the street. I can’t even tell if she’s paying attention to me. I don’t even know if I’m speaking out loud anymore, or if we’re a block of awkward silence in a crowded candle-lit bar.

  ‘I think that was the happiest I’ve ever been. I think that was who I wanted to be, even if I laughed at myself. Just a teenager, S, with mismatched hair, watching you dance for the sheer fucking joy of it all. Watching you dance in a corporate bookstore, beneath the ghosts of artists of the body and the mind, artists like the sun falling into the fucking sea, beneath the same words written a thousand, thousand, thousand times over. That was the first time I ever felt like I really belonged anywhere; like I was completely free. For a moment, just a few fucking seconds, I felt like I was something besides this foul-smelling, ugly, half-toothless creature with spike ribs and no jawline and no cheekbones. You, and unrequited love; you made me feel like I was a real person. I don’t think that I ever really thanked you for that.’

  ‘Are you with anyone now?’ She asks, almost as soon as I’ve finished speaking. There’s something in her voice I can’t place; I’ve never heard that tone before. From anyone.

  ‘No; I don’t think so.’ I know that she is, but even so, I feel the old familiar yearning. I feel the ache, for a moment, at the epicentre of the hollow feeling. I could dream of her telling me she was single, dream of her smiling out of her eyes and downing the drink and asking me to get out with her. It would be all too easy to imagine that again – to be an ugly teenager with my duvet clenched in the fingers of one hand, my teeth bared against the primal sensation as my body bucks and writhes. I don’t. I don’t get excited. I don’t do anything.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I know. He’s a nice guy?’ I don’t care; I don’t care for a second. I want Solpadol.

  ‘Yeah, he’s alright. Drinks a bit too much.’

  ‘Everyone that loves you seems to drink a bit too much.’ I smile lazily, tiredly, but I notice her eyes twitch in anger.

  ‘Are you saying that I make people into drunks?’

  ‘Once, I would have told you that just being around you made me drunk.’

  ‘Once?’ She smiles like me, slowly.

  ‘Yeah. I didn’t know what drunk was back then. Not really. I thought it’d make me happy; to be drunk all the time, even if I was drunk on you.’

  * * *

  I could believe in God if His love was described as unrequited. I’d worship anything that I could love and wouldn’t love me back. In unrecognised, unreturned love, there is purity and dedication. There is obsession that keeps me up at night, and always did. There are days when I sit in my office chair and dream about someone I love stepping through the door and telling me they don’t love me. I could kill for anyone and anything that didn’t love me, but had let me love them.

  I don’t want to forge and throw the chains of love. I don’t want to wear the shackles of sensitivity and care and affection – I want my love to hate me and change me and toss me aside a different shape than that which I was before. I want my love to laugh at me and say thank you and forget me as soon as she looks at me.

  I want my love to be available over the counter. I want to take it as I please. I want my love to cost £19.99, and have a strong brand identity. I want to pass by the television sets in second-hand stores and see advertisements for my love flicker in the spaces between the stations. I want to tell my love that every minute, every hour I spend at this keyboard, against this evil, beautiful whiteness, is a maddening minute, a maddening hour. Every keystroke sends tonight bleeding out into the promise of the morning, and every motion that does not hurl me to my bed is a rejection of my body.

  I want to explain that I don’t want to be Shakespeare. I want to make it clear and resound that these hours are the hours I search for in bars, in pubs and nightclubs with cheap whiskey and puerile beer. That these are the hours of light and sound and it i
s these kinds of nights when everything suffers; everything suffers beneath the memories and dreams and fictional loves. I want to make you understand, S, that these fingertips speak affection, only affection; affection to make the stomach churn and bleed and boil.

  I love it, love it though it doesn’t love me back, love it though it hates me – love it like a plague – how could I not? For the unrequited, for the broken lover, these moments are the ideal moments, the freedom cages, the brief instance of paralysing liberty, the frozen seconds of the human soul and all the things that make a soul a soul are made manifest; the purity of it all! The unenviable purity! The solitary emotion! The lies that makes these moments a great, roaring, screaming YES that had seen it all sacked, has seen everything burn, had seen conscience salted that no food could ever grow there again to sustain the meek; the mewling wounds of affection are brought before the senate keyboard in chains, to be laughed at, tortured and fucked by the Caligulan architects of this sinister, scabrous breast!

  Away from this keyboard, the YES is timid, battered, broken – trampled by culture, crushed beneath the heels of trainers that have evolved from twisted fins and the great, lumbering claws of beasts that have swung through the jungle. Away from this keyboard, there is no love like unrequited love. Away from this keyboard, the meek had inherited it all, and the last embers of the YES spark smouldering flames across the world, destined to be extinguished beneath gas bills. Around the world, people I could love stand, with hesitant fingertips and trembling lips and rotten septums as they wait for someone else, anyone else, to… to...

  * * *

  ‘Did you know it’s your fault I drink Guinness?’

  She blinks at me, wearily, blurrily. I can see the exhaustion in her face and remember her laughing at me for being drunk at a friend’s house. She grunts something, grunts with a rising intonation so I assume it’s a question.

  ‘I came to your birthday one year; it could’ve been your eighteenth. When I got there, you’d run out of booze, so I went to the corner shop. It’d already closed, so I went to the pub instead. That was the first pub I went into on my own, you know. Do you remember that?’ She shakes her head. ‘I saw the Golden Harp on tap, so I asked for a Guinness. That was the first time I ever tasted it. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened to me if I hadn’t walked into that pub, at the end of your street. I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad one.’