by J.W. Carey
* * *
The old staircase calls to me again; the staircase that stretches downwards and warps beneath the red glow of imported advertising – that red glow that falls down the steps like syrup, that ignores the recessed wood and moves thickly, artificially, sickly. There is one thing to say about the Boulevard; there are always beautiful women here. Amongst the ugliness of old men, the desperation and the pretension and the barked voices like geese, there is something to fall in love with. The manager eyes me warily; she remembers the time I knocked over a glass that she’d just poured. I think she might be the last person to remember me, when I’m dead.
The bar is packed; there’s a bald man destroying everyone at pool – he does it every week and smiles and pretends his entire life was such success. He’s playing against a Welsh guy I haven’t seen before. Young and smiling and wearing a red shirt buttoned to the chest and with his sleeves rolled up around black tattoos. There is a tall woman, with short blonde hair and a tight dress that seems to move around her like sinew whenever she turns, watching the game with sparkling eyes. A small group has formed around her, with flushed men trying to grab her attention and loud women trying to steal them away. I see people I recognise in the corner, drinking at the tables with the low stools beside the DJ’s podium. A part of me wants to join them, but when I look in their direction I see S. I see S everywhere; in the way the manager’s hands pull back on the Guinness tab. In the crack of the pool que against the balls. In the mirrors that line the walls and make us stretch on and on into eternity and reflect us back and reveal that we are nothing – just fleeting visitors. I pay her too much and find a spot to lean against, between the fruit machines and the jukebox. It’s quieter here, with the speakers muted and nothing but the darkness and the reflection.
Though the mirror glitters at me, I try not to look at it. I know what I will see; I know what Solpadol would have me see. I’ll look into my eyes and see the blue and the green turn to brown and gold – spreading out from the pupils like dye in water. They turn the colour of whiskey until it isn’t even me looking back – it’s all the whiskey in my brain.
I take a sip and everything stops. Like the ceiling has caved in, the music cuts out and the conversation dies and the black ball rolls to a stop. I look around, nauseous, dizzy with painkillers and the desire. Everyone stares at me; every fucking one of them. With great open mouths that look like broken jaws, with narrowed suspicious eyes and muscles and fat stomachs filled with meat, with twitching fingers like they’re all conducting a choir in their heads.
I ignore them; I keep drinking. I keep knocking back the Solpadol nausea with stout, keep howling the silent manifesto of inebriation. The music returns in shuddering waves, crashing against me like I am Britain; like I am independence and they are the world. I stand, I raise the glass to my lips and taste the old familiar burn at the back of my tongue. It runs between my wisdom teeth and settles amongst the gums that are stained with whiskey.
There’s a band on in the back room, but they’re never any good. It’s all too much feedback, words that belong in diaries and journals and should be hidden away in the loft. Songs that make up women. Acts that put on the shiver of drunkenness. Men with dead eyes that speak of their failure to make it. Their bodies shake with need and desire and you can see, for half a second, they think they’re headlining their own festivals. They listen to those that made it, screaming into microphones in Los Angeles, and can’t tell the difference between that sound and their own throats. I can’t even be bothered to put my head through the door to listen.
It’s always the same. Week in, week out, this place is always the same. The same faces. The same bodies. The same eyes that move and catch reflections of themselves and aren’t sure whether they’re looking in a mirror or at someone else. I’m becoming one of them; I can feel it. I’ve spent more time in this bar’s toilets than anywhere else; I’ve seen the artwork scratched onto the black walls as ethnic slurs and memes and Hitlerian fashion. All nonsense; all polemic. They keep painting over it with a thick, black substance like the surface of a blackboard, and every week the same jokes and the same phrases are scratched in exactly the same places.
It’s like I’m crawling out of a long, black tunnel – I can’t live like this. I can’t spend my days waiting for my nights, and my nights waiting for the call of drunken sleep. I can’t justify my hatred with love, when all the women I love have never loved me back. I can feel the last Solpadol in my pocket, like a great weight, and it doesn’t make me smile. It doesn’t make me happy. It strikes me with nausea and dizziness and leaves me an inch or two behind my head; like a third person narrative, like a nightmare where I watch myself move and blink and understand rational thought for a heartbeat before impulse takes over completely. I will not die here, I tell myself; I will not drown on my own vomit, or just collapse in the street with my legs still kicking out the steps and my arms still reaching for fresh horror.
I want to go home. Home to the drawer beside my bed that holds empty bottles of Kraken and Aberlour and cheap Bells. Home to the rattling of glass on glass. Home to silent drinking sessions in the dawn and painkillers sitting in the sunlight. Home to the call of the birds in my neighbours’ trees as they attack the silence of distant cars and a rotating earth. I want to purge all of this from my system; to vomit out the drugs and the alcohol, to bleed out the love and the hate.
A cheer comes from behind me and, turning, I see the bald man standing with his mouth hanging open. The Welsh guy has his arms raised by the crowd, but he looks sheepish and embarrassed rather than proud. It’s a horrifying scene. The joy at his defeat tells the man everything he needs to know – all his world comes crashing down around him in their cheers and their open mouths and their lips that form a thousand cavernous holes that lead down to Hell. One of the men that stood closest to the winner, wearing a deep purple shirt, was shivering the midst of some cocaine fuelled heartbeat. His voice wailed like a banshee’s over the rest of them, and the mirrors around us should have shattered to hear the pure, ungovernable joy in his throat. They jeer the bald man who, suddenly, looks so old and so small. It’s like he’s shrivelling in front of me, curling up into a ball deep within his chest and, without another word, he hurls the que to the table and pushes his way through to the back room and the smoker’s exit. With no prey, the crowd broke up again, leaving the Welsh guy alone. Even he looked lost, regretful, and made his way to the bar as soon as he could.
I think about the scene playing out in front of these mirrors a thousand times; champions made and broken before the uncaring glass. I don’t know why, but the idea makes me irrepressibly angry. I turn my face upon the glass nearest to me, ready to spit and snarl at its clear expression. I could have smashed my glass against it, and kept on smashing until the glass and my hand and the mirror was all gone – just a memory of ignoble defeat.
And there she is. I see her moving in the glass, nervously creeping through the crowd with eyes that flicker left and right and left again before settling uncomfortably in the middle. I can see her face clearly, and she has metal running through her lip and her eyebrow, and it catches the hazy light until it glows with a dull sheen. She is smaller than me, by about a foot, and there is something in the way she moves that sets me on fire; my heart races and pumps the drugs through my system faster than ever before. It all hits me at once, the nausea and the contentment. There’s something in the way she moves that sets me on fire – it has a strange kind of passion to it, this fiery nervousness that speaks of innocence. She stands still and her fingers play over the glass in her hand hesitantly; like she isn’t sure where she should be holding it. I see her look towards the pool table, where the blonde woman has started a game – her hair is cropped above bare shoulders and her black dress does more than move with her; it seems to tell her where to move ad when. It clings to her like a nightmare, and when she folds her legs to sit down and sticks her tongue out at her competitor she is sex. The black dress
is sitting, walking, breathing, pounding, pulsating sex and that is all.
But she comes and stands next to me; not through choice, but because it is the only clear space around; she looks away from me, out into the light of the room and away from the mirrors beside me. I catch her glancing in the mirrors across the room occasionally, but her eyes don’t move when I see her. She’s not looking at me, but at something else; something only she can see.
She looks a little like S, from the back. Eventually, she can’t ignore me anymore. She turns on me with a smile and a nervous laugh, and it turns out that she’s drinking cider mixed with beer and a stranger’s vodka. She dares me to drink some of it with her, and I would have told her to fuck off if she hadn’t been beautiful. If she hadn’t been comparing herself to the blonde goddess being worshipped at the pool table. She doesn’t want me, in any way; I can see that through Solpadol clarity. She is just tired – tired of being alone, tired of seeing men and women fawn over the Valkyrie and the way she bends over the table to stumble on the balls; she’s tired of being a shadow beneath the earth, working away at her disgusting pint that already tasted of vomit with this sheer determination that blows Nordic sex out of the way.
‘I’m an artist,’ she says, having to shout it over the thunder of Saturday night; ‘well, I’ve got an art degree anyway.’
‘What kind of art do you do?’ I ask, leaning in a little. I feel like she wants to recoil in horror, that my movement is her epiphany. That she should look up at me, then at herself and the nightmare scenes of desperation in the mirror and run and run and not stop running until she was happy.
‘Observational humour.’
‘And that’s art then is it?’ She looks at me blankly; she hasn’t heard, or she’s chosen not to hear. ‘Is it more of a romantic thing, or are you spending your nights spray-painting vaguely political images on a wall?’
‘No; I do a lot of digital stuff. I’m tryna get my own website built so I can start selling it maybe, but I’ve got seven months’ worth of work already finished.’
With a half fever in her eyes, she tells me all about her art; about the passion in it, the heat, the vibrancy of creativity. I’m struggling not to howl at her, and break her art upon the back of the stink of smoke, and spilled beer and the shivering cocaine comedown of the guy in the purple shirt. I want to tell her that creativity’s a noxious perfume, just a falsity, just a poison in the blood and the veins, clinging to the skin of the veins and the muscle and making its home amongst the weaker things of the body. Nobody, I want to tell her, no one had creativity in their bones.
She looks towards the pool table again, just as the Valkyrie positions herself for another shot – she is bent too far over and the sinew of her dress is pulled tight against her back, curving down over her arse. It isn’t hard to ignore; it’s just muscle.
‘I can tell you’re an artist.’ I tell her, having to shout over the rising crescendo of an American metal song.
‘How?’
Just as I open my mouth to shout, the song cuts off into a moment of silence. All conversation carries on, but my words are louder than everyone else’s. I don’t know whether I’m just louder, when I want to be, or my thoughts are funnelled between and magnified by the jukebox and the fruit machine and the mirrors and the glass in my hand.
‘You’re fucking alive, aren’t you?’
St. George
I want to tell you that her silhouette moves above me and occasionally blocks the light, and I can only see her in those moments and movements of blackness.
I need you to know that her outline is ephemeral and unreal, but that the feeling of her on top of me is solid and physical and something primal; that I can feel the sweat and the heat of her thighs on mine, that I can feel the ends of her hair about my neck, that I can feel her strength as she moves above me. I want to tell you that her sounds were the only ones to fill my ears, and her moans and gasps emptied me of everything else but the desire.
I want to tell you that, behind her, the shadows passed along the street and breathed out white fumes into the stained night air, with taxis creeping past their waiting customers with some holding onto each other to stop themselves from collapsing, that the smoking man who turned away to give us the illusion of privacy and everything else in a world and a town and a night of horrors all vanished.
I need you to know that I paw beneath her dress like a dying man seeks absolution, and felt the mounds of her breasts against the sudden harshness of her bra.
I want to tell you that she gasped at the cold of my touch, even through the ragged filter of her breath, and that she moved a little faster.
I need you to know that I felt her wetness in my pubic hair.
I want to tell you that she contracted around me, with her breathless gasps shuddering between desperate moans.
I need you to know that her nails dug into my back, and that I could feel them through my coat and my shirt.
I want to tell you that she bent her head to mine and kissed me hard, hungrily, as though all time was hers to control by sheer will, and her hair was a curtain around us like a tangled defence against the night air.
I need you to know that I was matching her, thrusting upwards and into her, and I wrapped my arms around her to bring her in tighter, to pull her down onto me, to bring her hungry lips closer to mine.
I want to tell you that I felt her tongue on mine, curling downwards as mine curled up to meet it.
I need you to know that I felt her tear her head away, ‘I’m close’ and bury it in my neck, ‘come on, come on,’ and she bit me again, harder, and I thought I felt her break the skin, was certain that she’d torn my larynx out and I was dying and my head would loll back against the brick wall as the blood fell from her mouth and she would rise and pull her dress down straight and wipe the sweat from her hair and my moans from her tongue.
You deserve to know that she gasped and the sound stretched out and turned into silence.
You should hear that I could see her mouth open, and that I was waiting for the scream that never came, but which grew and swelled and shuddered into one low moan which drove me to the brink.
You deserve to know nothing but that I let myself go, and felt myself go and empty into her; that I felt her contract against me as I throbbed and that we both shuddered again, synchronised for moments and nothing more.
You should hear that we spent a few seconds in death; the envious death, the death men and women fight for and hate themselves for seeking and that you, too, will have blinked back memories of shame in favour of this suicide.
And I deserve to tell you that I was gone; floating in the ether of evolution – that I was lost in bio-chemistry and brushed against the outstretched palms of disproved gods, and my exhausted muscles recited an alien litany of understanding. I deserve to say that I stood, proudly, beneath a newborn star and that I was naked, with grass growing around my ankles and no shame and distant flowers snaking upwards ever higher until their petals spread out and created a barrier against the universe and plunged into the half-light, tinted with the golden light of the colours of flowers. I deserve to tell you that the air, there, in orgasm was warm and safe and that I knew something; that I stood at the centre of the universe – that I wasn’t the Alpha or the Omega, but something in between; something about which the beginning and the end could revolve and define themselves against. I deserve to tell you that I heard someone, lost a hundred, thousand, million miles away, lost in the immeasurable distance of space, shout something that sounded like ‘Hallelujah’. I deserve to be able to tell you that I smiled.
And, inevitably, I would tell you that ‘Hallelujah’ sounded more like ‘Solpadol’.
I would tell you that all the flowers died, and the grass shrivelled around me, and the alien star expanded to fill all of existence until the ground beneath me vanished. I would tell you that I fell into the dirt and the stone and the ashes of forgotten civilisations like Broken Brita
in.
I would tell you that I was sitting in an alleyway, with my jeans unbuttoned and my back pressed hard against a wall and my buttocks digging painfully into the uneven surface of cobblestones.
And you would hear that my cock shrivelled in the cold, and in the face of existence, and it falls out of her and slaps wetly against my testicles.
I want to tell you that she was holding on to me, with her arms around my shoulders, and that she had her eyes closed.
I need you to know that I felt the weight of our actions, that the simple motions of our bodies made us beasts and creatures of the field lost in a maze of badly-laid and buckles stone.
I want to tell you that we were searching amongst our half-freedoms for anything to make us feel alive; to give us the semblance of a heartbeat.
I need you to know that I didn’t want to be there; breathing in her breath; feeling the heat and the smell of her, which turned from a pleasure into the monstrosity of moments.
I want to tell you that my stomach churned as I wondered how many thousands of microscopic organisms I has just released into her, fighting gravity to crawl ever deeper within her; parasites, every one of them.
I need you to know that I am no better; that I had a few pound coins left in one pocket, but that I didn’t know which one; that I didn’t know if I’d spent my last tenner before the cool night air enwrapped our bodies and we enwrapped each other.
You should hear that I mastered my breathing, with my chest’s motions switching the desperate drawing of breath to the regular rise and fall.
You deserve to know that my legs ached, my back hurt, my head throbbed and the muscles of my arms were burning.