Solpadol

by J.W. Carey

  ‘Should you be taking those when you’re drinking?’ She slurs a little, and she has to close her eyes with the effort of speech. ‘I heard that’s bad for you, right?’

  ‘No,’ I say, throwing the first tablet down my throat and washing it away with the whiskey, ‘no; it’s fine. I’m different.’

  * * *

  Just… just leave me alone. Leave me alone, life. Leave me alone to Solpadol. Leave me alone to drink; leave me alone to spread rum and whiskey and stout upon pages that demand nothing from me. Leave me alone to find myself and love myself in a sentence. Leave me and my pages alone; these pages – all my demands are upon them – they give me liberty, life, free reign from you.

  If I am capable of love, then I love these things like no other. I love you, page and pen and paper; narcotics of the soul. You ask for nothing from me, and let me demand everything of you, like a child with a weak parent. You give me everything, or the road to everything, and I give you nothing but the eternal gifts of yellow smoke and disappointment. Life; if that’s all I am in the end – when you finally win if all I am accredited for is yellow smoke and disappointment, then I accept! I’ll accept the yellow smoke and disappointment! I’ll wear it like a badge of pride; a dishevelled uniform as testament to my loyalty to me and my love!

  But, one day, I have to believe, I’ll stumble upon gold. In the morning after, I’ll stumble upon a sentence that burns all the smoke away. All this yellow smoke crackling, and burning in the dawn like a bad dream, rolling back like a nuclear explosion; peeling away in the air from this pen, this page, this moment in the Wigan sun, this moment in the John Bull Chophouse, this moment with Rush on the jukebox, this moment with an argument about mobile phone contracts spilling out beneath me and around me, this moment I share with a Guinness and a Kraken and Coke and a pen and a page and paper to fill, and a picture of impossible, rain-sodden Wigan Pier split by light in my mind.

  It scares me, my audience of S and life. It scares me that I might have already written the perfect sentence. I’ve already panned for gold and found it and threw it back into the stream of consciousness. It scares me to think that the perfect sentence, from my fingers, exists – that it’s strung between full stops like laundry, like the ghost of ‘lectricity. What scares me the most is that I might never even look at it again. Even then, I might not recognise it if I did, and I could have used my keyboard like an executioner’s axe and beheaded the snake of a sentence.

  I won’t let the backspace scare me; but I am afraid. What if I have had my moment and deleted it? What if I have left it floating amongst the same Hell where all the forgotten data goes – all those spreadsheets on conversion rates and optimised keywords? What if my three albums of inspiration have bled onto the same page and not even filled the pages and been hidden, deleted, drowned as a nonsense? What if I’ve flayed them alive, until they are nothing but shivering, skinless wrecks of the things they used to be? What if there is a universal truth, somewhere beyond the obvious truths, and I’ve tapped into it and laughed and shaken my head and held that key down until even the memory of yellow smoke has vanished against the white page?

  What if it’s already over, and I’ve missed my chance? What if I never had a chance? What if this is all I have left? Pubs and bars, booze and the endless nights that leave me digging my nails into my skin and drinking with stolen Solpadol until I pass out?

  What if there is never a great unveiling, and no one ever knows that there is emotion or passion in my breast? What if no one knows that there is hope and love and desires that swirls and spits and burns to itself and to each other? What if I die and I’m remembered as a cold, bitter automaton and not a lover at all? What if I’m remembered as pale and ugly; a self-contained, lonely spit ball of hatred that moves amongst the memories and loathes the better times for their nostalgia and loses sleep over the worst moments that leave me burning in the dark?

  What if this is it, S and life; what if this is all I have, and all I’ll ever be?

  Scaring women I could love, in alleyways, and making babies cry just because I exist in the world; what if the sight of me disproves God for them, and I am their first definition of ugliness? What happens if I die being loved by people that I despise? What if, at the end of all thing, all this hate - all this impossible unbearable hate – all this unhappiness – just doesn’t pay off? Would anyone know? Without plain, simple admission, would I ever be mourned, or would it just be me? Can anyone mourn me, or love me, when no one knows who I am beneath the skin, beneath the muscle; who can love a skeleton of a man?

  * * *

  ‘You know; I think all my love is unrequited. Sometimes I think that all the real loves have to be.’

  ‘That’s depressing.’

  ‘Not really. It’s just a thing.

  ‘A depressing thing.’

  She’s reordered herself a little. I think she threw up in the bathroom. When she blinks, she does so a little faster than mere minutes before. Her head has stopped falling apart, and she looks around the room slowly. Like a queen, like a debauched goddess waking up from a thousand-year sleep. I can see the ice cracking away from her veins, the stiffness of alcohol falling apart.

  It’s in me now; the slate, the haze, the feeling of Solpadol making my entire body feel weightless – I don’t trust my limbs to do anything but fly. I’ve got no strength left. Just half-sleep that rises through my body like a mist.

  ‘I wish my tongue could move like my fingers.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I wish I could speak like I can write. I wish I… I wish I was who I was.’

  ‘You seem to be doing a lot of wishing these days. You used to laugh at me every time I wished for something. You said it was a waste of time.’

  ‘Yeah, well; I don’t have much time left. I may as well waste it; what else am I going to do with it?’

  ‘I guess.’ She rattles her fingers on her knee, and a little colour comes back to her face. She always sobered up quickly after throwing up. ‘Do you think tonight was a mistake?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ No; it wasn’t a mistake. I miss you.

  ‘Did you have some, I dunno, sense of nostalgia about meeting up again? I thought it’d be a lot more, you know, dramatic.’ I know what she means. I picture her dressed in a flowing evening gown, draped against the wall and her eyes curling around the room like a predator’s. I picture her in jeans and a dyed t-shirt, swaying beneath the hot sun of a foreign festival. I picture her running her hands through her hair as she tosses a crown to the dirt.

  ‘I don’t do drama all that well. There’s a lot of effort that goes into drama, so I hear. You were always better at it than I am.’

  ‘Was I?’ She purses her lips, and anger is in her face now. I knew it was the wrong thing to say; I know I should apologise and say that it wasn’t what I meant. But it was. She always was the dramatic one; she added the flair, the thunder; it was her presence that set my heart beating irregularly when solitude left me with a stolid, heavy heartbeat – the kind of heartbeat an office clerk had.

  ‘Yeah.’

  She empties her drink in one motion, and if I didn’t know her so well, if I hadn’t remembered every motion of hers and played it through a thousand times, I wouldn’t have noticed her flinch. She’ll regret doing that in a few minutes, when she’s home and shivering with dizziness in front of her toilet seat.

  ‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for the drinks. It’s been good to see you again.’ She stands up, furious. She needs a victory, and in her sensitivity I see it all; I see a lifetime of defeats and bad decisions. I see the wrong men and the worn women, I see self-destruction and affection to hide the self-loathing and the shivering madness of her life. I see her mother, short and vicious and a nightmare reflection of her future. I see her father, living halfway across the country to escape a harridan, giving himself another tattoo to fill the empty space between his days. I see her brother shaving his head and swearing to e
quality and marching under the Union Jack. I see her old friends, not mine, painting their faces like clowns and cutting their dresses to their crotches and doing anything and everything to be seen, with every thought accompanied by a hashtag, with every idle musing punctuated by pursed lips and a self-portrait. I see that I owe her more than I could ever repay. I see myself telling myself that I was in love, and letting the sheer madness and pain and joy of it all overwhelm me and carry me through some of the greyest years with heartache and sorrow.

  ‘You’re never going to read this, are you?’ I ask her as she reached the door. She doesn’t turn around, but she pauses, dramatically – with the drama she wanted – with the light splitting around here and leaving distinct, visible lines in the air. She hesitates, and I realise that’s where we both belong. Right here. Her, standing with her back to me and with the light in front of her; impossible for me to reach with drug weakness and shaking hands; through every late night, twitching fingertip she’s been there. I remember deleting her chapter years ago, and leaving it to rot in the electronic ether and not, for a moment, feeling guilty.

  And when she says no, I feel free.

  ‘No;’ she says, not harshly, not coldly, but honestly; like she’s answering a math’s questions; ‘it doesn’t matter what you have to say.’ She reaches for the door.

  ‘Did I ever tell you I was sorry; for any of it?’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.’ And she was gone; gone like the last word hanging in the night. Gone like I was drunk, and face down on the grass; gone like I’d broken a glass and been left alone and achieved everything I ever wanted – solitude; the freedom to be.

  ‘I don’t need Solpadol anymore.’ I tell the empty seat. I finish my drink after a few seconds and walk out of the bar.

  George Orwell

  Words aren’t meant to last forever. They all become yellow smoke eventually. They all peel away from the page, and leave us with nothing by the acrid stink of their failure. All meaning, all substance, all form fades away in seconds. Nothing lasts. Nothing like the baring of teeth in the moonlight. Nothing like the ugly desire for painkillers that is impossible to explain. It all fades.

  Words aren’t meant to last forever, and they fall behind the pen in moments. Every page of mine is filled with black lines and distinctions and are completely empty. Nothing but the whiteness of potential. All speech and conversation, description and confession are nothing. All emotion and love and hate are nothing.

  Words are words for a moment, a moment alone that stretches and strains beneath hungry eyes. Words are words that should never be remembered and let the moment of creation, the heartbeat of genius, die. No memory and no art, no recording or transcription can do justice to the sheared chemicals that make up the moment. Every second of worship for words, and creation – all wasted in worshipping the past.

  And I hope that all these words mean something for a heartbeat. I hope that I can appeal to someone when they are alone. I hope that the silence of souls is something that I can overcome. I hope that I, now, can speak to someone in solitude because I could never own a room. I could never reveal a flight of merriment, wont to set a table on a roar. I could never make an impact beneath the spotlight of attention.

  * * *

  Joe’s is a quiet bar, most of the time. I think I’m amazed every time I come here that there isn’t a ‘To Let’ sign hanging over the door. The walls, the tables, the air, the bar maids – they’re all beautiful. It doesn’t feel like Wigan; it doesn’t feel like my hometown. This is simple beauty in my hometown, beauty in the back alleys, beauty besides pink trees that seem to flower for a week a year and are drowned beneath the smoke and the beer of these nights. The beautiful days of music and drunken love. The sunlight is alive here, even at night – trapped between the high buildings.

  Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’ve fallen in love, again, with a beautiful face and a moment. I couldn’t say. I’ve never stepped through these doors completely sober. I can’t say what I love and hate about this place. Fleur de Lis windows and romantic art on the walls beside records that will never be played again – this place does something to me; it feels haunted. Haunted by the same accents having the same conversation every night; every week. If you ask the barmaid, she’ll say it’s funny how some conversations just flow; how some people just get on with each other. I tell her I’ll take her word for it.

  It’d kill me, I think; even the heights of enjoyment must crack beneath the stress.

  I can’t differentiate my love from my hate. I can’t love someone for their desires if I can mock them, or the choice to mock them is there. I think it’s the same as joy. I think I’m incapable of pure joy, untainted, as I think I’m incapable of love. Or I’m only capable of love when I’m drinking, and only capable of happiness when I’m drunk.

  I’m tired of trying to be in love with you, Solpadol; I think I’m tired of trying so hard that I’m constantly tired. I’m tired of trying to love and the act of loving leaving me too tired to know what love is. I think I’m afraid, above everything else, that I’m going to die alone, surrounded by people that love me, or love what the glittering appeal of Solpadol made me. I think that’d make me cry on my deathbed, if I were capable of crying anymore.

  And I remember beautiful voices and ugly accents and vague desires destined to go unfulfilled. Specific flashes and moments and questions that just seem to settle amongst the neurons and the subconscious. I remember love – not with who, or with what, just the same implausible feeling that leads me on, leads me to search for it again amongst glasses and abandon the sober nights for dreams and memories of love.

  I’m tired of being sober by the time I fall asleep, and dizzy and nauseous with things to end the pain; I’m tired of drunken mornings, stumbling over the threats of total sobriety and madness and faltering into the evenings. I’m tired of hate, of being painted by myself into twisted, general hate. I’m tired of being constantly disgusted. I’m tired of being tired.

  I think it’s reflective now – for too long, all this has been going on; for too many years have I sat and drank and dreamed of pure love. All my evenings are memories of the crackle of beauty across the sky, the beauty in the dirt – in a white flower uprooted and left as a warning or a promise or as hope or as nothing. A white flower like life uprooted and spilled out onto the streets. All my evenings are looking for something that doesn’t exist anymore.

  I remember my search for endless love dragging me through shadow bars filled with spectres and half-realised people and those who so desperately want to be mad. I remember hearing their madness in ignorance, and fighting a bloody war against them and their empty eyes, their slack jaws desperate to reflect something of meaning; something of freedom; something worth being for. I remember their lies and their made up names and their cologne soaking into formal shirts. I remember hearing all the promise of Polemics and realising that I am broken and following the simplest of arithmetic. I remember looking at myself and being stunned and disgusted and humbled all at once.

  I sit there for an hour or so. Hunched over the top of my stout. Tucked into a six-seater booth alone. I sit there for hours and watch the people come and go. I see them play pool and struggle not to laugh at their weak wrists and efforts. I see them argue over long hair and beards at the bar, and hold their conversation and their comments back when I walk past.

  Nothing ends at Joe’s. Nothing begins at Joe’s. I use the last mouthful of my beer to wash the Solpadol down my throat. It hits me in a matter of seconds, and I stagger down the stairs and out into the night. I think, beneath the rich orange light like the sunrise streaming through the decorative windowpanes, that I’ve spent my life in this space – in these hours; bouncing between the bars. It occurs to me, as I feel the dizziness and the nausea grab me and shake me like a puppet, that I’ll probably die in a moment like these. The voice telling me to stop, to go home, to catch the last bus or climb into a taxi, is stro
ng but I fight it. It flickers just behind my eyes, but I close them and extinguish it with need and loathing.

  A woman in a slim white dress, with blonde hair and one eye, is throwing up in the street; tears slip onto the stone between the vomit, leaving a beat to the solos and lyrics of her misery. I feel sorry for her, for a moment, and then wipe her from my mind. Keep moving. Keep being. Keep drinking. Keep chasing the memories of better nights that have left irremovable scars on my skin. A tattoo in invisible ink for every empty glass. A brand for every empty packet with your name emblazoned on the side.

  * * *

  This bastard town is in my soul. The waters of the Douglas have swollen my stomach. The smoke in the air has permeated my skin. The taste of this accent has stained my tongue. Staring into the eyes of people has given me cancer – they are tumours of hate that grow within me and every drink is a surgical lance that leaves pus flowing over my fingertips and onto the white pages in slow, spluttering events. I can’t shake it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. I have stood beside the waters of Venice, and seen nothing but the same stagnation that lives in Wigan Pier.

  Every step, I know. Every rattling bus wheel on asphalt. Every market stall hounded by old women who sometimes stop and stare at children’s clothes for no reason at all. Every empty store window glittering out of the darkness. The train stations and the bars and everything. And all these things are nothing, not really – just a snapshot of horror. It’s hollowed me out, this place, and made me an empty vessel for everything that hates it.

  I need to leave. I need to leave these streets for streetlights. I need to get away from these people and their dangerous knowledge. I need to get away from animals that act on impulse. I need to escape from signs that tell me not to feed the homeless; that tell me not to kill with kindness. I need to burn the memories of shame, and S, and everything else that this place has made me. I need to resist the open door, with the stairs that descend into the blackness of inevitable drunkenness. I need to not hate, just for a moment; I need to try and love again.