Others (4 page)

Not entirely convinced by either solution, I mentally began to explore my limbs and body, wondering if anything had become broken or detached in the fall. I breathed more easily when everything appeared to be intact; well, as intact as it ever could be. I pushed myself back against the wall and rested there awhile.

I let a minute pass by, then another, knowing what I had to do if only for peace of mind. I had to go back up there and take a second look. No rush though. I had all the time in the world.

I hesitated at the top of the stairs. I really didn’t want to go inside that room again. There was no percentage, no incentive. No gain. Not really part of the job description. Except I had to; for my own satisfaction.

I’d suffered flashbacks before, a result of too much Eighties acid, but they’d never been as nightmarish as this. And the last one had been well over a year ago and had involved hundreds of thousands of dancing legs, a black and white Busby Berkeley extravaganza of torso-less limbs and sparkling sequins, a Grand Guignol musical of severed parts danced to a full Latin-rhythm orchestra. Where that peculiarly horrid fantasy was dredged from, I’d no idea - probably from watching too many Thirties musicals on TV while tripped out on A - but it had been patently unreal, easy to cope with, unlike this latest vision -
hallucination?
No, there had been something all too real about those mutants in the mirror.

I inspected the broken landing rail before moving on, a delaying tactic, I guess. I must have hit it with some force to smash right through, even though the mounting had been weakened by the last tenant. That was going to be added to my damage report, just another item the absent builder would have to pay for when the building society finally caught up with him. Time-wasting over, my gaze drifted towards the open doorway.

It was so dark in there because, as the middle room, it was windowless, only light from the landing window seeping into the open doorway. I edged closer, unwillingly, treading carefully while not exactly creeping. This time I peered round the door very slowly.

The mirror on the dingy wall opposite had broken into myriad pieces, yet still held together like a great big jigsaw of silvered glass. And it was my own image I saw reflected there, my own fearsome self mirrored a thousand times or more, my imperfections multiplied; and even though I could not understand why the glass had shattered at my approach, I now realized that it had been my own hideousness, viewed in a new and awesome way, which had shocked me so.

I stood transfixed, watching myself in this jagged confederation of plagiarized horrors, this horrendous coalition of likenesses, and after a while I began to weep.

5

I got back to my flat late, having lingered in a bar on the way. Not one of my regular haunts - too many friends and acquaintances would have wanted to gab, even buy me a drink or two, and I had a need to be alone with my own thoughts, my own personal misery. After five Bushmills Malt and three Buds, I’d left, stepping out into the warm night and turning towards the seafront, the salt-breeze almost clearing the fug from my head, which was something I hadn’t wanted. I needed that alcohol haze between myself and my demons, needed it to restrain them, lest their grip clung too tight, held me in terror till dawn. They had come knocking before, more than once, possessing me through the night, mesmerizing, haunting me; and with daylight, I had never understood why.

Hobbling along the coast road, I listened to the voices of people, youngsters in the main, rising from the open areas outside clubs and cafes along the lower promenade. For years the arches between the town’s two piers had lain neglected and derelict until a bright local councillor had worked his butt off attracting investors to a scheme by which the area would be revamped. Now it had metamorphosed into a lively boulevard of clubs, bars, cafes and craft shops, where locals and tourists mingled on mild evenings and the younger ones, too many of them high on Special K or GHB, raved to their particular caste of Jungle or Techno, Nu Energy or Drum ‘n’ Bass, Trance or Speed, Hip Hop or Big Beat, Waltz or Foxtrot (just kidding). Ironically, it was both what I needed and didn’t need at that moment: the noise, the shrieks, and the babble of life was good, and, together with the bright lights, told me that life was incessant and encompassing; and that, in itself, let me know how alone I was. An outsider. Always had been, always would be.

In that lachrymose mood, I moved on, eventually reaching the steps to my basement flat. My home was situated in one of the seaside town’s broad, sweeping crescents, a hilly green park at its centre, the main thoroughfare and the sea itself bounding the open end. It was a terrific location, most of the tall, white Regency properties - some in better condition than others - nowadays split up into flats or grand apartments, the residents a mixture of rent-paying youngsters and high-earning owners. Vehicles lined both sides of the horseshoe road, many of them double-parked, but still the vista from the apex of the curve was breathtaking, day or night. Descending the stone stairway to my front door, I drunkenly scratched the wood around the keyhole with the key’s tip before inserting it. I pushed my way in, flicking the light-switch quickly as I hurried down the short hallway to the bathroom where I kept part of my stash. My hands shook like a regular druggy’s - which, take my word for it, I wasn’t, not really - as I reached inside the bathroom cabinet and scrabbled with the lid of the Elastoplast tin. Somehow I managed not to spill the contents as the lid came off.

Inside, instead of plasters, were my ready-mades (Sunday afternoons was generally reserved for rolling enough joints to get me through the week), comprising of two varieties, some rolled in brown cigarette skins (papers), the others in white. The Skunk - in this case Kali Mist, named after the Hindu goddess of destruction - was for when I was really strung out, and the other, white-skinned, was more gentle, a good Jamaican sinsemilla. Tonight I chose the brown.

Lighting up, I went through to the small furniture-crowded sitting-room and poured myself another Highland Malt, this one a Dalmore, before drawing the curtains of the barred windows a little and flopping on to a cushion-strewn sofa. Anticipation as the smoke burned its way down my throat was almost as pleasant as the mellowness that I knew would quickly follow. No rush involved, just an easy sinking into a better place, and while waiting for the mood change the drug and alcohol hopefully would bring about, I surveyed my surrounds, something I often did when my emotions were low, my perspective hopeless. Two small versions of magnificent sculptures stood at each end of the sideboard, Rodin’s
Eternal Spring,
a dark bronze whose male and female figures were wonderfully natural on one side, and Epstein’s
Genesis,
an anti-naturalistic carving of a pregnant woman, an elongated hand stretched across her swollen belly, a piece that was the very antithesis of its opposite neighbour but no less beautiful. Adorning the wall over the room’s mean little fireplace was a wood-framed print of Agnolo Bronzino’s
Eleonora da Toledo and Her Son,
the mother serene in her beauty, the young boy placid in his innocence, and on the mantelshelf below was a miniature copy of Hepworth’s
Mother and Child,
an abstract carving in marble, all fluid lines and pierced stone (make what you will of my choice, its romanticism, the obvious underlying yearning - I only knew that they took my mind on journeys). I sipped whisky between the drags.

Sleep, helped along by a couple of Motivals before I turned in, was uneventful that night. Rather than fall into another dimension where everything was troubled and plausible only in the dream state (which was my usual sleep pattern), I drifted off into oblivion instead, cares and worries excluded, fantasies barred. Even my hangover next day was tolerable, and although I suffered a few hurts and bruises from the tumble I’d taken, there seemed to be no real harm done (thank you squidgy stair-carpet).

I wet-shaved in front of the bathroom mirror, used to the ugliness that stared back at me; used to it, yes, but never willingly accepting that countenance, still disturbed and saddened by it, even after all these years. An everyday ritual like shaving was still a routine torture. Once, when I was on heavy stuff like Ice - crystal meth - another face would sometimes regard me from beyond the glass, one that watched me with two good eyes and whose features were regular, though too blurred for recognition. That ill-defined but handsome countenance had hinted at something too evasive to remember properly, too vague to focus upon, yet still filled me with a strange, elusive regret. Regret
and
guilt. At one time those emotions had become so overwhelming I’d turned away from hallucinatory substances completely -what good was a high whose sidekick was profound but unaccountable remorse? Maybe a shrink would have some answers, albeit predictable ones: cut out the bad stuff, think positive, drugs altered and eventually deteriorated your mind state. You take the drugs to escape your own reality, but in the comedowns the reality only becomes more depressing, and the stronger the substance, the harsher the aftermath. Well, I’d already cut out the heavy stuff, because it scared me too much, and I didn’t need a shrink to tell me so. In fact, Acid, Charlie and Amphets had been easy to dump, and I’d never used H anyway - heroin was too addictive for someone like me who constantly sought escape. My main gig nowadays was Skunk and booze. Hell, I’d spit in your eye if you even offered me E. Sure, I knew it was considered smart to be part of that scene, but I also knew that those poor suckers were the losers in the long run (and that was their problem - it took time to find out). No diatribe here, no preaching; just the hard facts.

Naturally, more than one psychologist - not psychiatrist; nobody’s ever thought me crazy - had tried to get me on their metaphorical couch, assuming I had to have some kind -
any
kind - of inner turmoil because of my ‘impaired’ physique; and maybe I had -
of course I bloody had
- but I’d never felt the need, or even the urge, to discuss it with the medical profession - or anyone else, for that matter. My mind was my own territory. Let doctors prescribe medicines and pain-killers for the afflictions my physique brought me, but my thoughts were private, they belonged to me alone. Tormented I might be, but it was my own personal torment, invisible to outsiders, unlike my deformities, which were on show for all the world to see. Besides, I had the constant and irrevocable feeling that no shrink would ever understand, let alone resolve, the reason for my lifelong disquiet, this unease that was always with me and which grew more ponderous as the years went by. They’d assumed my troubled mind was due to my dysfunctional form, and I knew - don’t ask me how I knew, I just
did
- the issue was far more complex than that.

Self-discovery had never been an indulgence of mine. That earlier time of fierce drug-taking had always had two clear purposes: pleasure and escape. With both there came a ‘lifting’, a supposed ascent on to a higher plane where creative thought is enhanced and where you feel at one with all around you, at one with the essence of life itself. Huh! Try it enough and you’ll discover it’s a false concept; that, rather than being a great mind-expanding experience, it’s ultimately a closing down of avenues of reason, an occlusion of actuality, and so a limiting of the thought process. At the time you may think you’re on the road to perception, to Nirvana even, but in truth you’re travelling blind alleys (although instead of heading towards a dead end, you’re on the way to cerebral dissipation). Am I sure? Sure I’m sure. Just look around at all the deadheads left over from the sixties, the mental cadavers of the drugs revolution, those once creative musicians and artists and writers, and even businessmen and financiers, their powers of creativity long since withered, their drive stultified, not through passing years but through damaged brain cells and enfeebled resolve. You know who I mean, those dried-up facsimiles of their former selves, their talent mere echoes. Many - of those who survived, that is -are rarely heard from, they seem to exist in some intellective timewarp, while the bleatings from those still in the public eye tend to be an embarrassment.

Anyway, for me the comedowns that followed the highs were too disenchanting to bear and the pursuit itself too ineffectual, meaningless and self-deceiving, to desire. Besides all this, the cost was too great, both to pocket and body (let alone the mind).

These days, I stuck mainly to cannabis and booze for no other reason than to dull my own wretchedness.

I retraced last night’s route to the office, on the way passing by the bar I’d swilled in last night, not even giving its locked door a second glance, and stopping to breakfast at one of those archway cafe’s along the boulevard. The sun was already working up to a steady blast, the slight sea breeze cooling the few holiday-makers who were about so early. The sea itself was a fresh blue, dark on the horizon, white caps breaking easily along the shoreline; one or two sunbathers were already stretched out on towels on the pebbled beach, but these were probably office workers or hotel staff, catching the early morning heat before commencing duties for the day. Watching sky-weaving seagulls as I sipped lip-burning coffee at an outside table, I felt a calmness come upon me. I wasn’t at peace with myself - I’d never known what that was like - but at least the trauma of the previous night had settled, and the illusion in the broken mirror had become precisely that to my rational mind: an
illusion
caused by fragmented glass and embellished by the darkness of that windowless room. Why had it shattered completely at my approach? Easy. The former occupier had already smashed it and my footfalls had caused the final meltdown. I refused to consider the fact that I’d witnessed an
explosion
of glass - that just wasn’t part of my rationale on that warm civilized morning.

A craft-shop owner gave me a wave as she opened her shutters, the young waiter who’d served me breakfast loitered for a friendly chat. As I climbed the steep ramp to the upper road, another acquaintance hailed me from the doorway of the Old Ship hotel. I returned a brisk salute and went on my way.

Looking as I did, I was more noticeable than most around town, and hence had become part of its scenery, a familiar figure to the locals; and that was no bad thing in my line of work, because it made me well enough known to gain people’s confidence and so much easier for me to pursue enquiries. A lot of these people were eager to talk to me, either out of some guilt-ridden pity (there for the grace of God, and all that…), or because they were ashamed of the repugnance I aroused in them and felt noble when they were able to hide it. Maybe I’m being a little over-cynical here, but I can only explain the vibes I got from them. Some - a certain few - were unabashed at how I looked, and I received genuine warmth from them, while others - there’s always the opposite extreme to anything - never even tried to conceal their loathing of me. All in all, though, I was generally accepted and only the tourists and out-of-towners tended to give me the hard, or at best, discreet, stare. Kids were always a problem, but then I’d learned to accept that.

Cutting through the Lanes, a pedestrian area of narrow turnings and alleyways filled with antique, jewellery and gift shops, I crossed a broad thoroughfare and turned off into the road that led past the old Regency theatre and the Royal Pavilion’s park opposite. The theatre’s display boards advertised an ‘all-new
Rocky Horror Show!’,
not quite my taste in live performance, but the kind of thing that brought in the holiday-makers and locals (especially the kids and weirdos) in droves; next week might be a Gilbert and Sullivan, or a murder mystery, or even a ballet. Variety, in the broad sense, is what kept the place going. My mood considerably brightened by the sunshine and ‘hail goodfellows’ along the way, I climbed the creaky stairs to the agency.

‘Okay,’ greeted Henry, who always seemed to beat me into the office, no matter how early I arrived, from his desk. ‘In which movie did Cary Grant say his male co-star resembled Ralph Bellamy and who was that co-star?’

I groaned at the regular ritual, not quite ready for it so soon in the day. Nevertheless the answer came to me before I’d even reached my office door.

‘Easy,’ I told him with a smug grin.
‘His Girl Friday,
and the co-star
was
Ralph Bellamy.’

Henry wasn’t pleased. He went back to his paperwork, grumbling darkly under his breath.

I went around my own desk and studied the day’s agenda, which I usually scheduled in a large diary before leaving the office the previous night. Ida would have gone straight to store duty and Philo, when he arrived in about half-an-hour’s time, breathless and over-heated from his dash from the bus stop and ascent of the stairs, would be busy for most of the day with an assignment that meant catching the train to London. I wanted him to pay a call on the General Registrar Office, where there should be a record of baby Ripstone/ Teasdale’s birth, as temporary as that condition might have been.