Solpadol

by J.W. Carey

  You should hear that she stood slowly, with her legs straightening out beneath her and her dress falling back into place and covering her crotch and the wisps of hair.

  You deserve to know that she looked down at me, and I pulled my underwear up around my hips and tried to pull at the zip of my jeans only to find out that they were broken and I had to pull my belt tight around myself instead.

  I want to tell you that she sat back down, curling on top of me like a child seeking a comfortably position in which to sleep; that her knees were drawn up tight to her breasts and that she sat side on with her shoulder against my chest.

  You deserve to know that she tilted her head to me and rested it against my shoulder with her hair covering her face like an executioner’s hood.

  I need to tell you that the smoking man was gone, though he had left the quashed remains of his cigarette still smouldering between the cobblestones and I felt the urge to crawl towards it and drag her with me and share the last of a stolen shot of tobacco with her and to give her the last things that I had and die in the gutter; just die, and pray with my last breath that I wasn’t a delusional Osiris and that she wasn’t Isis reborn – I could pray that she wouldn’t mistake biology for love and pull me together to live a half-life with an ankh and a sickle.

  You should hear about the way she shivered on top of me; from a chill or the horror at what we had one or because the tears that fell from her eyes and caught the man’s cigarettes and the distant yellow streetlight was a glittering refraction, and that I had no idea as to what was going on behind her eyes.

  You deserve to know that I wondered if I could love her.

  I deserved to know if either of us knew what love was, of if we had evolved beyond the need for such fairy tales.

  * * *

  There are still balloons and bunting in place from St. George’s day. The laptop hooked up to the sound system kicks out some nauseatingly bad music; all electronics and throbbing bass that I can practically taste in the back of my throat. The light is alternatively blue and green and spirals over the walls, which are covered with pictures of trains – photographs and paintings all stand side by side and conjure up images of smoke and sweat and steel.

  There is a man passed out in the corner behind a half-finished beer and beneath a cheap, vinyl hat bearing the image of St. George’s flag. He shifts to himself occasionally, like he is disturbed in his sleep, and his arm moves like a tired piston every few moments, lifting an empty hand to his lips, which try to suck on the empty air.

  It’s my last whiskey. I’ll be going home soon. I’ve taken my last Solpadol, and one of the men behind the bar is eyeing me warily. He’s waiting for me to snap; I can see it in the way his neck tightens beneath his head. I’m not going to snap. There doesn’t seem to be much point. He thinks I’ve taken some illicit drug that will have me bouncing of the walls and hurling glasses through windows. He doesn’t understand; I don’t even want him to.

  There are a couple of girls who keep looking at me as well. They’re both quite attractive, but you couldn’t tell through the makeup and the bad lighting. One is short and slightly stocky, with beautiful brunette hair that falls down to the small of her back. The other is a little taller, with short red hair above a silver and grey dress that clings tightly to her knees.

  I think about buying them a drink, but I don’t really want to. It’d just be going through the motions, the old familiar motions, that normally end with a thank you and a kiss and walking home alone with my music so loud that people wake up in their houses and the lights flicker on behind me.

  There’s something going on in the women’s bathroom, and the guy watching me goes to investigate. That’s fine; I can finish my drink in peace. Everyone else in here is old. Their skin has started to sag and wrinkle, and half of them look purple with broken veins spreading out like spiders’ webs across their faces.

  Everything hurts; every muscle tells me that it is living agony. Every brain cell sobs to itself, individually, and misery washes over my brain like a wave. The wind is hard, outside, and it seems like the Earth is screaming. I take my time, savour the cheap whiskey, wait for the Solpadol to take hold again and leave me dizzy and nauseous and open to being drunk or in love. But it doesn’t come. I sit, and I wait, beneath bad music and racist holidays and memories and wait for the pain to stop but it doesn’t. If anything, it spreads. Through my body, down to my legs and swells at the base of my neck.

  I’ve never realised just how tired I am. My biceps hurt from the constant lifting of glass, after glass, after glass. My legs hurt from walking in the spaces between the bars. My stomach hurts from hate and my chest hurts from love and my head burns from substance abuse.

  And there is nothing. No horror can equate to the moment that your painkillers fail to kill the pain. There are no tears, like the tears for the failure of Solpadol. And the other painkillers that I might dare to give your name won’t even touch the sides of this agony. And this sober practice; this sober practice like the clattering of keys leaves me screaming by necessity.

  Screaming. Screaming for Solpadol. Screaming for you and all that you are. Screaming for nothing. Screaming in silence. Screaming into a white page like an unplugged microphone. Screaming into the drawer, beside my bed, filled with empty glass bottles and painkiller packets. And every bottle has been filled with my screaming, with my desperate screaming, for the kind of love that would make me whole, and human, and take away the hollow need that sends these devils through my veins.

  Thank you.

  Honesty

  Confession is not difficult. It becomes even less so when you are not seeking absolution for your deeds, thoughts or emotions. It becomes a recital; something you practice in the mirror and stand tall and proud before your peers and stutter on the first word. I confess that I am addicted to a lot of things, and I call it life. I confess that every substance in my body poisons me; my meat gives me cancer; my drink rots my liver; my painkillers deaden my cells one by one; the fluid in my eyes make me blind; the fat in my veins makes me shiver.

  I still doubt that this is the best way to expunge my horrors; to legitimise myself and make myself healthy. Sometimes, it feels like all this writing is just me wallowing in my own misery, in my own regrets and mistakes. Reliving them over and over again. I sometimes wonder if they are flowing out of my beaten, drunken soul with these words or are locked and chained to my veins by repetition. Once, it was exhilarating to confess on the page, to tell someone that, yes, I have been drunk and fallen asleep on a bus and thrown up into its heating system. It’s become part of the formula now. I drink and treat my drunkenness with Solpadol. I sleep and treat my hangovers with words.

  I doubt that I don’t want to do this and spend my life doing this. I have tasted the chains of office work and more. I have made tea and looked over the rooftops of Great George Street and seen Wigan Pier in the distance like a threat, or a promise. More and more, it looks like something that needs to be burned to the water. It needs to collapse, and fall into the Douglas and all the drunken boats and admirers would be caught in the crash and the river would dry up around the rubble.

  I confess that I fall in love too easily, even when I can’t stand up. I confess that I have broken promises and drink too much. I confess that I am tired of listening and want to speak. I confess that I want to perform in the back rooms of bars, between the famous folk singers if the future. I confess that I want to be left alone, between the moments of catastrophic joy and constructive misery.

  Where, once, such confessions were liberating, today they feel like a thousand wires all coiling together to create a noose around my chest. Pulling my lungs and my heart, tightening my stomach and pulling them closer together until I can’t distinguish them; until my hunger and my love and my desire for fresh, clean, cool air are the same thing and I am one great organ of consumption. A great organ that sucks and wheezes and spits and vomits and eats and takes so much in and gives no
thing back of worth but time; but a body.

  All I have to give, all anyone really has to give with laboratories and mandates and the baking of half a million people, is love. It isn’t a pure love; society has left me rotten and putrescent for purity. It isn’t biological love, for I was born too ugly and too awkward for the heights of Romeo and Lothario. It isn’t calculated love, because whenever I think I, invariably, end up hating. It isn’t all-consuming and passionate love, for in that fervency lays delusion and fanaticism. But it is love that has gone unrequited and unrecognised for too long. It is love that has drowned beneath English rain and choked on impure air and panted in the claustrophobic confines of buses and trains and desks. I confess that I have loved so many people. I confess that no one that I love, loves me back. I confess that I don’t know what real, solitary, directed love is and it would drive me mad if I did.

  I had a habit of changing what sat on my windowsill to reflect what I was writing. It went from an aspidistra to a rosary, and has had seen a dozen other items – loose change for the Caitiff, a broken piano key for Mychandra; sheet upon sheet of old folk songs and even a scrap of a prayer sheet for short stories and a CD printed on a plastic sleeve for Zappala. It stands empty now, for how can I represent this non-existent love? Nothing but confessions sit on the surfaces of my room; nothing but games consoles and computers, keyboards and laptops and record players and books and speakers and confessions.

  I’m struggling. I feel like there isn’t as much in my soul as I thought there was. I feel like it’s all been pulled apart, cut open with a clumsy surgeon’s scalpel, and each piece examined for the source of the cancerous hate that drives me on and overwhelms the love I know hides somewhere. I’ve opened myself to seek the hole, the black hole that sucks in everything and can never be filled, and found nothing but blood and bone and muscle. Nothing even that speaks of personality, or a soul, or the great all-consuming need that drives me. The only evidence that my body belongs to me is the rotten pancreas, the missing teeth and faded scars on my arms. I’ve never given my body anything, but only taken from it. Only stolen and patched over and left in hideous places to sleep on hardwood floors, to toss and turn on couches belonging to friends of friends; to lie awake and furious in the beds of women that love me.

  I’m furious. Angry that my life has been pre-ordained by my birth, and the only thing I have any control over is the manner of my death. I’m angry that no matter what I do, or say, I’ll still come across as creepy. I’m angry that I win all the small battles, but I’m not the kind of person who wins a war, who succeeds in anything that matters. I am shuddering with rage at the thought of all the people who laughed at me when I was a child being right, and I’ll never amount to anything. I’m furious to think that this might be it for me, and I’ll waste my life on minimum wage for years and die at the age of twenty-eight or, worse, I’ll live longer.

  I’m ashamed. Ashamed all the things I’ve done and mistakes I’ve made and things I should have done. They keep me up at night; witty retorts that burn my throat, memories of accidents that I couldn’t control. I shake with shame. None of these confessions make a dint in the stone of shame that crumbles and lodges in the ventricles and the aorta. They’re all just hot air, blown from lungs desperate for something cool and sustaining. Just a glimmer of freedom from my own actions and decisions and everything else. I’m ashamed that I’m older than I’ve ever been, and I haven’t accomplished a thing. I’m ashamed that I might be my generation – lazy, entitled, arrogant, false, ignorant, guilty of cultural appropriation and a thousand other things. I’m ashamed that my face makes me look disgusted all the time.

  And I don’t think I’m capable of happiness, or satisfaction. I don’t think I’ll ever achieve a natural smile; the kind I’ve seen radiate throughout the entire body and beam out of every pore. And that’s all I want. I could sacrifice everything, I think – love, freedom, desire, internet access and electricity, heating and comfort and life; I could sacrifice it all for one moment of pure, unstained happiness.

  I’d stop taking Solpadol, if I thought I could be content without it. I could stop taking Solpadol, if drug abuse didn’t hold the promise of dizzying joy and nauseating freedom; impossible to achieve by other means.

  Contact

  If, for whatever reason, you’d like to get in contact with me then you can reach me at johncarey@gmx.co.uk, or, alternatively, you can visit my site over at jcdefixio.com to check out some other things I’ve written.