A Stranger Leaves by Adam Parry from Chapter ten to the End

 

Chapter Ten

The day before Ash’s birthday Helen sent him an obscure Facebook message. He darted one back to her asking if she was up for a home visit, he half hopelessly batted a couple more messages back at her. Then nothing.  Before he began checking Facebook every five minutes he switched off his computer and listened to Poetry Please until medication time and fell into the futility of his broken bed.

Even so the lack of Helen did not spoil the advent of his 47^th year. Lara and her mum came for the usual Saturday visit. That day they went to Afford. Ash vaguely recalled going to Afford at least once before. Thirty years ago, perhaps to the day. That day there were a lot of stinking steam engines in a field of mud. He remembered he had thought at the time:

‘Why are we here? I think I’m going to throw up! Oh another photograph!’

He clunk-clicked beside Rachael the customary steering wheel before her.

They drove along a new road through the ‘shire past a loch and a bird sanctuary through the ever steepening vista of hills, sun clad and tanned tattooed with sheep and highland bulls. The car hefted down through a valley, before they knew it, they were in the small village of Alford’s ambitious main drag.

What a day it was like no other uninvited into the summer of rain. Before their adventure in Haughton Park they went to a subdued bar with the bare window beside their table they shared a meal.

Rachael and Lara had sandwiches but didn’t eat their greens or the potato chips on the plate. He had steak pie and steamed vegetables.

Lara’s Mum said she loved Afford, said she would live there if she could. He didn’t say that, though he thought she probably could, but she loved her job or so she said and now Lara was in Big School it diluted her option of leaving Aberdeen and living here.

Then they went to Haughton Park and played on the swings and slides and climbing frame, and watched the miniature train flitting in and out of the foliage blurring so slowly by. Ash took a lot of photos as he and Lara ran and jumped over tree stumps taking a whirlwind tour of the park and back to Rachael for a spot of tennis.

Afterwards they went to the steam engine museum. The stinking jumped up tractors had their own museum now instead of a muddy field. There was an old British army tank out in the courtyard.  He stood in front of one of those old police boxes as Rachael took a few pictures of Ash posing in blue like a bemused Timelord who remembers to smile just in time.

Back in the centre of Afford coffee and cakes were on the cards. Firstly they went into the nearest. It was a bit of an upmarket minimalist charity shop with overpriced tat, cookbooks from the thirties and clothes on a rack that Rachael flicked through absently. But, as soon as they went in Lara had saw the paltry offerings on the cake tray, she dragged her parents out and chased them across the road as if she were herding a couple of lost sheep to a cafe. At once inside the door Ash espied meringues. He loved Meringues. He thought that perhaps he could change his name by deed poll to Mr Meringue. These meringues seemed the King of Kings of meringues, sizeable as Sylvester Malone’s right fist. He grudgingly permitted Lara a dab or two of cream. Rachael looked away from the temptation of the meringue and to his relief said she didn’t want any.

He asked Arlene to drive slowly back to Culter as he knew the two of them wouldn’t stay long once he got home. He put on the CD they’d given him for his birthday and discussed their favourite tracks on the compilation while about the car the ‘Shire ran at its own pace, the woods and the waters as horses stock-still galloped by them.

The cat stench and stink from his wheelie bin of the many mice that Emily and Eva had eviscerated greeted them at the back door.

‘I’ve had such a good day,’ he told them and thanked them for his presents. ‘I’ll buy a carpet for the bedroom with the money I got.’ Ash said as he walked them back to the car.

‘We’ll be back on Monday, mind.’ Rachael assured him. He kissed the top of Lara’s ginger head of hair. As he usually did he raced back to house and waited at the front window to wave at them and throws a couple of kisses. Then they were gone driving away for another hundred years or so until the following Monday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 11

The Friday after Ash took an overdose of sleeping tablets he found himself in his sister’s yellow car on their way to Stonehaven.  Somehow calmly and clearly he explained what had happened. But, he could not find the words to explain the loss he had felt in that moment, the moment between not even considering taking an overdose of sleeping tablets and then stuffing them down his maw. That moment before the world was not over and he felt he had chapters of lives ahead, albums worth of love songs to sing, then it had vanished like snow in a brisk thaw and as he sat in her bright yellow car racing like a comet to the sea he could literally feel banality bricking up all the doors and windows in his life.

She sat beside him listening, waiting for him to tell his tale. Patiently. Willingly, because he wasn’t screaming and shouting and blaming it all on her. Of course there wasn’t much that she could do but drive and take it in and drive.

Ash loved the road to Stonehaven, over the River Dee where plodding anglers stock-still in the spring sunshine played. Sweeping back up the valley past the ostrich farm, almost on the way to Storybook Glen, but not taking that particular turning  heading along the other way and racing  past a few odd couple of houses at the sides of the road and taking in the obscure names that signposted single track roads to farmhouses, then sweeping on further and further to the sea, he always anticipated the incongruous site of an old RAF jump jet outside a business park, and soon, so soon as somehow laughter found itself back into the car the sight of the sea swept into the ache of his eye, as if seeing the still blue water was a memory of a surprise of childhood.

They negotiated their way through the placid streets of Stonehaven and parked in the square then walked down one of the side alleys that opened out onto the expanse of the stony beach, like a thousand mile journey beneath the unobscured sun and the ghost of a waiting moon between the arms of the cliffs that touched the folds of deep water North and South.

Rachael had said if she could she’d bide in Alford while he might’ve replied that had he the choice he would live in Stonehaven, if only for the beach. He and his sister wandered toward the outgoing tide and watched ragged dogs running along the shore. There was so much space as if sea itself was standing off to one side bemused at the arena of the day. And then it fell over him, as if there were no sun, or his sister there beside him, the gulls overhead struck dumb by the clamour of the slamming gates in his mind, then it fell over him and the day about was burnt and blackened like some books in a Nazi bonfire and it fell over him there was no escape from his head and he would have to go back to the house where he had forgotten how to love.

They must have done some shopping and had a meal. But, before they got back in the car from some strength of hidden old memories he asked her if they could go to Dunnater Castle.  As if she had been waiting for years for Ash to ask her to take him there they slammed themselves into the car and she drove swiftly through a thickening of woods beyond Stonehaven and over the sound of falling water like pleasant tinnitus.  Finally along a single track road they manoeuvred themselves into a tight space in a gravelly car park beside the Exhibition Centre for the castle at the head of a track that led to the cliffs that overlooked the castle upon its ancient island.

‘I haven’t been here since Mum was still about and even then I stayed in the car park,’ he told his sister. Then with a twinge like the breaking of a wishbone, he remembered why he had not wandered with her and Mum in her blue raincoat that day and suddenly he wanted to turn back and hide in the back seat of the sun coloured car, yet he seemed to have no choice but to walk on and the nearer they got to Dunnater as the upturned steeple of a waterfall drenched down between the vibrant cracks of green hillsides.  Often he had gone to the watercolour room in the art gallery just to look at the picture of Dunnater, there standing there looking closer with such timeless intent as if in the mass of sky next week’s winning lotto numbers were mixed into the paint. Other paler renditions dotted cafes and bookshops, in out of the way galleries and his collection of postcards, but suddenly as they neared he finally saw the Dunnater in its earthly moss and stone.

I could just jump, just run now until I run out of grass and fall into the air, but I can’t, and I don’t know why I can’t. His sister sat upon the edge of the cliff looking down at the communities of seagulls perched upon the cliffside or reeling drunkenly in the happy blue of the sky. She looked down at a line of kayakers serene, like a family of swans guiding each other along. I could push her off. Now. Now. Or did it seem she was waiting for him to push her off, her back hunched with patient resignation?

He sunk to his knees; the grass was damp but bearable, more bearable than the mass murder in his head as he watched groups of tourists talking snapshots, thinking perhaps what a great day to have come here.

How many can I keel over before they get me? He remained rooted to the grass. Oh don’t move. Don’t move!

Then he saw her absentmindedly casting him a half smile of recognition. The Arthur lassie he had sat beside at the Rilke night at Books and Beans. Although they had not spoken that night, somehow he had found her again at the edge of the land, beside his holy castle, this Guinevere that could love him and never ask why.

But, Ash hadn’t a half bottle of voddie in him to have the balls to go over and say hello. Though it didn’t matter in the end, he somehow knew he would see her again when he wouldn’t need vodka to speak to her.

His sister got up from the edge, walked over to him and asked him if had stopped praying yet. He laughed and got up.  Before they left, a Dad and his weekend son asked them to take a couple of photo, and reciprocated by taking a few of Ash and his sister with Dunnater in the background. They turned their backs on the castle and too soon they were on the road home to Culter, Ash put her pair of sunglasses on and finally there was a smile in his eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 12

One night he couldn’t sleep he lay awake recalling the night in The Moorings when he lost his wallet.   About the pints of amnesia brew he necked that night and found himself with a few other men outside the bar after closing hour.  The bouncer popped out for a moment and told them it was time to go home.  Ash found himself walking up Market Street with one of the other stragglers and they kissed and the human world of Saturday strangers closed their eyes to them.  They kissed three times all the long, beery, cold wind passage up to Rosemount. Ash fell to the red duvet-covered bed and the man lay beside him. Searching through his pockets to make a rolly he discovered he’d lost his wallet.  Sobriety in a moment cleared his head.  Thank God, he thought.  I have to get out of here and the lost wallet panic welled up and he was out, back in the cold windy street.

The nonchalant man lay upon the bed as Ash struggled out of the warm, sleep-filled flat to the cold voice of the wind and to a conveniently parked taxi that took him home. He had stashed £20 for such an emergency as this. When he got home he noticed the glass in his watch was broken and the hands clutching onto history.  Good watch, he thought, best watch I’ve had. He wondered with a surge of paranoia if the man had tried to stop him leaving and he’d broken his watch on the man in Rosemount’s face, but if so surely he would recall that he hadn’t been that drunk. There was no news of a mannie from Rosemount’s head staved in, but Ash did regret breaking the watch. Then there was also the wallet, he’d got all the cards replaced of course but there had been a great picture of Lara and his sister’s dog. Lost. Only a picture.  This night he lay awake thinking. What if I’d not lost my wallet. Ash played the conversation they’d had in the flat.

“I’m just going to roll up...’

“Then you can suck my cock.”

No. There’s no way of that happening. Thankfuck I lost my wallet. Ash imagined a scenario where the guy had tried to stop him from going and somehow his good watch was smashed. He tried a few on but as far as he recalled the guy didn’t seem that bothered.  Thankfuck I lost my wallet.  What if he had tried to stop Ash?  It wouldn’t have gone well.  At the time all he could think of was that he had lost his wallet. He was like a scud missile aimed for home to cancel his cards and ransack the roaches in his ashtray. Thankfuck there was a taxi and he’d got home to a long hangover. A longer week, but as if from a gift of time that next weekend he saw Helen for the second time. He’d felt as if he were taking care of a child, he laughed at himself she was so like me when I was young. He remembered that he had told her that dreaming was pointless. He regretted it, what he’d said. Maybe it was just his dreams that were pointless. Had he given up on everything? Had he stopped dreaming?

Ash got out of bed and he smoked and had a cup of coffee.  He checked his phone to see if anyone he knew had called.  He usually let the phone ring these days, no-one he knew left messages so he didn’t know if anyone he knew called. He hated phones. He checked his e-mail. There was a heart-stopper.  As he was only in his bare feet he did not kick the desk in anger. He had not completed his 2^nd Level Creative writing course. He had expected that. If he failed it this time he would do it another year he had planned. But, no The OU had banned him from taking courses as he had failed to complete so many. Things were not going the way they were supposed to. Earlier in the year he’d auditioned for a local production of Calendar Girls, but he didn’t get the part. Lately he’d been getting more depressed than he realised. He stopped buying newspapers as he couldn’t concentrate as none of it seemed important or relevant to his life now. Yet, he continued. Even if there wasn’t a reason.

For months he did not Hoover. Clean, clean himself occasionally. Shop for the cats and interminably putting money on his gas or electric card.  He’d call his Dad, and listen to his sister when she called. The last year or so he’d started seeing a new consultant psychiatrist. She had tried to encourage him with his writing, she told Ash not to be too hard upon himself.  He just didn’t know what to do with himself now that he’d finished his first novel. That was the point.  He felt he’d been sitting in the same place, drinking coffee and smoking for the last twelve years, and, he told himself forlornly, next year it’ll be thirteen.

He stubbed out his last cigarette. As he often did, he told himself that he couldn’t put off doing things because today of all days he might write, and he might write something good.  How many times had he had the same thoughts, yet still not moved? How many times had he closed the curtains and slept through the day, merely jotting a few things in his journal. The mini shrink had tried to get him to go to groups.  He had nearly cried the last time he saw her. She was pregnant and going on Maternity Leave. Why did he feel as if he had lost something? Outside the Health Centre he had to drag himself away from the vicinity of the pub.

Before going back to bed he looked at the calendar a charity had sent him. In the afternoon he had an appointment with his relatively new Psychiatrist.  He was quite looking forward to it. He felt she was quite good luck for him. Her name was Helen, like his Mum, like the girl from Characters. They had been discussing cutting his meds. He was worrying about the antidepressants.  He often ran out of them and his head started to judder, and his tinnitus got really bad. How would he feel if he came off them for good? Would the juddering stop eventually? As he lay there he tried to remember how he felt before he started those particular pills, but it seemed so long ago.  He knew they took an edge off, but he felt he had become less compassionate. And he never had any energy, back before he took them he was out walking all the time.  Nowadays he felt like a cripple just walking up the hill to his house. Always panting and red-faced when he got back tearing off his clothes as he was so hot.

He lay upon the single bed with an electric lamp on in the far corner. He stared at the books, dusty on a long shelf. Read, read, and not read. He should really give most of them to a charity. Yet some of them were special, even though he wondered if he had been in his right mind when he’d bought some of them. It would be easier to just throw them in the wheelie bin, he thought as his sister had told him that charity shops in Town weren’t accepting books.  He looked about the room, cigarette stained, coffee coloured, smelling of cat. A looming filing cabinet full of things he’d forgotten about.  That can go too; it was ugly and brown like the rest of the room.

 

In the afternoon he told his psychiatrist about not being allowed to do any more OU courses, she had looked so disappointed at him. He wanted to shout at her, I planned to fail so I could do it another year but they changed the fucking rules on me. The look she gave him said exactly  what a failure he’d become, no matter how many people told him not to put himself down, he could not stop the negativity of his thoughts, thoughts that whipped him to his bed and sleep.  So he could stop thinking, stop being who he was. They talked about cutting down his medication, but that was all it was. Talking. Giving her a snapshot of my life, as the Eagles used to call it. At least, he thought as he walked home afterwards, I didn’t weep at her. I’m sick of crying.  I imagine she is too. Back in the house he made coffee and lit up. I need some help, his thoughts called. I need help to paint the house, Hoover the carpets. He put on a microwave sausage and mash dinner. It tasted like death in his smoke and coffee stained mouth. I need help with everything, he thought as he smoked staring at the television.

That night, as he always did, he forgot to pray.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 13

On Thursday, his week’s meds gone since last Friday, so he was waiting for the long night. But, it was only five in the afternoon.  No friends were in when he called. Ash had some food – fish fingers and beans with lots of salt. He could hardly bear it with no medication he felt there was nuclear bomb testing going on in his brain.  He called up his sister again, she could tell he was upset and told him the depression would pass.  The next day she surprised him with a visit, she’d brought breakfast. Ash wolfed down the croissant and some fresh pineapple. Ash asked her if she would help him sort his cupboards, before he knew it the hall cupboard seemed so spacious there was enough room for a Bulgarian or two, and his wheelie bin was full to bursting with stuff they threw out and he agreed as there was ample paint to paint the sitting room to tackle it with her. She was on a mission, phone went, she was in Lidl and they had good mattresses on offer. Earlier they had inspected his bed the mattress almost pancake flat and the frame almost bent double. Did Ash want it?

They started the painting early the next day. There was a good calm feeling between them and he did as he was instructed and helped,  he moved all the furniture away from the walls. It didn’t seem to take that long , he lifted up the red carpet in the hall and white washed it all and the doors. Even so it wasn’t gone midday.  She said she had time if Ash could be bothered doing the bedroom today as well. They got purple paint and got some food. Came back and sat in the garden. Ash had a tuna sandwich.  Once again they moved the furniture from the walls and repainted the bedroom purple. She had a grand idea of staining the wooden floor boards. Yet as if each moment had been spent well he was surprised to see it was not even five. He suddenly realised he was tired and as she drove away he closed the curtains and slept on the new mattress on the bed in the middle of the sitting room.

A week or so later the day was fine and he took his camera for a walk over the Moor. He was happily snapping away,  all worldly concerns vanished as if he were a sphere of light sure upon the path then his precious camera created. He fiddled about with it, then with a howl of despair fell to the path and started crying like an insomniacal infant. Yet reason snapped him out of it when he saw a woman and dog. Pull yourself together, he saw a sparrow hawk on the pylon, he asked the sparrow hawk to take away the pain. Ash stood up, sniffed, wiped his tears away on his sleeve and walked along the path toward the woman with her dog, to home, to reason.

Two hours later he had come to the resigned consolation that this was karma at work. The last time his friend Martha had visited him, he had inadvertently sat on her camera, he could hear it crunch beneath him and not confessed to it until she was safely back in Edinburgh and on the end of the phone. Now his was fucking, fuck, fucked. Then, he accidentally deleted some pages of a story set in Edinburgh and Glasgow when he went on a site where some of Martha’s pictures featured.

Three hours later some witchcraft was involved. He had told his octogenarian neighbours about the night he had sat on her camera and he had them in stitches, yet from then on he felt a cold whisper reverberating with a harsh future, did he remember the moment when their curse fell?

After four hours it didn’t seem to matter how many times he pressed the same buttons on it the camera was deceased. Why did it seem like the end of the world? He gave up. When he checked in with his sister she reminded Ash it was just a possession. Yeah right! As periodically as her periods she would give half her clothes and most of the home furnishings to charity. Ash still had underpants from the last century. What was it with women that they clear out and give away stuff? If it wasn’t for her charitable Christian ethic he would have an extensive library of weird and wonderful books and his well-honed record collection. He said goodbye grumpily. But, he wouldn’t know what to do without her, she had helped him paint the house and he looked about at how clean and fresh everything was and smiled, later he bought a camera from Amazon. When it arrived it needed a memory card so he went to Jessop’s where a tall beautiful woman served him put in the memory card and the batteries. For the next hour or so he was snapping away about Aberdeen. Some of them were pretty good. The camera kept him occupied for a week or so when he got into a regime of eating properly and taking the medication as prescribed. Stuck in front of films on the I-player. He went down to the shop and met Mark halfway down, he told him there was some billy going about. Ash loved speed. He’d not had any for a couple of years. So he wasn’t too long behind at Mark’s and he got himself some. Sometimes it was so damned convenient with a drug dealer on the other side of the road. But it was good he’d had a break from it – he would enjoy it more now.

He sat in the silent house, the cats sleeping in another room, just listening to his tinnitus. He wrote six chapters of his novel.  When the speed ran out he went back to the boy who was pleased to see him and gave him a couple of lines of cocaine.  That was the way of thing before after and during Christmas. His brother in law demanded Ash blow his nose at Christmas dinner table. He didn’t as he was well aware of the pounds of cocaine compact deep inside his nose.  His brother in law punished Ash by putting on opera as they ate the Turkey and all the trimmings.

The Wicker Man wasn’t on that New Year, or Being There, he spent the day sleeping as he had done through the royal wedding and the Olympics. Lara sent him a message to wish him a happy New Year, he couldn’t reply too hung-over by sleep and boredom. Happy! He thought ruefully. 2013 and all that. Lara had told him that kids in her school were crying as they were afraid it was the end of the world when the Mayan calendar ran out. Happy! As he lay back on the sofa,  all the machines off. Well we’d made it through, the Age of Aquarius. At last. Happy. Happy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14.

He had the new Consultant Psychiatrist twice a month, and a fresh CPN or mental hygienist as the mini-shrink was pregnant and was away on maternity leave.

As the Eagles would say, “just a snapshot of your life”

 When Ash went to see him. The Consultant was a woman with the same name as Ash’s mother. Earlier last year she said she would cut down his meds as he had been going on about it for months. That was a complete mistake, almost straight away he felt he had lost a leg that he didn’t know was there until it was gone. He suffered it for about a month, but had to phone her office to get her to increase his dose of anti-psychotics. It was easier than he thought. He worried too much.

 He’d seen the Consultant the day his camera broke. There was a kind of hysterical power in the office. Ash told her about all his times in London and how he had found so much more freedom in Glasgow. With each word he could see waxy like power weeping from him like his tears. He saw her seeing his power sent off to seal the pact through the open window slamming into the day. But, he was feeling better he supposed, or so he told her.

 Still he was taking all his medication on a Saturday and had to wait a mainly sleepless week until he got more medication. He’d been seeing the consultant about a year and a half when he got his hand on ten jellies. He typed a series of poems in the cold dark of January onto the computer that night. Earlier he asked his Dad if he could come out and visit and he said he could.

 But by then he‘d already taken the ten jellies; he had no meds left to help him sleep. He lay in his bed smoking the tinnitus and bombs going off in his head making him angrier and angrier.

 Angry at whom? The usual cavalcade of names and memories attacked Ash with their stock phrases like 2D ghosts.

 But, mainly him. His father. He had stayed up all night making himself sicker going over the same old arguments so he could not sleep in. And now that it was nearly time to go the rage within him became so unbearable.

He called him.

‘Right you! Up!

‘You know. I never said this before but the only reason my mum died when she was 59 was because she didn’t want to spend any more time with you.’ Ash slammed down the phone. He called the octogenarians a couple of doors down the street. ‘Look I’m really sorry for bothering you, but I’ve been hearing that you go about telling everyone I’m a poor soul. A poor soul...’

‘No we’ve not been saying that.’

 ‘All you have to do is apologize and that’ll be fine.’

‘But that wasn’t us.’

‘You liar,’ Ash screamed down the phone. ‘Apologize. Poor soul. Apologize.’ He could not stop screaming and slammed the phone down. He snapped in his sister’s number and started in on his third phone rage offence of the day, but she was getting slippery and she somehow cut him off.

‘What’s wrong?’

He howled down the phone, no pain, no words, and a howl that could seem to shatter the world. He hung up and called for an ambulance, he told them that he’d taken 50 jellies. It seemed like moments before the ambulance men came.

Ash asked the ambulance guy in the back if everyone felt as so much pain as this. The guy began to look pale and did not answer. They had to start a conversation as it took at least twenty minutes to get to the hospital and the snow was very thick. His name was Ross. Came from Elgin. Got married and came down here. Ash and Ross were both born in the same hospital. So much for twenty minutes. It took them an hour to get to the hospital, but Ash had someone to talk to. T

hey wheeled him to the A+E. Inside it was all new and snazzy, not at all busy. He got to lie down straight away and not very much happened and he looked about the Department. It was circular in shape with all the beds along the circumference and a nurse’s station in the centre. He drank some water. After a while he went to a bed, fell asleep and woke a couple of hours later with drool all down his cheek. He took his jacket with him to the toilet. He lit and took two inhalation of a cigarette.

 The next thing he knew he was being discharged and outside by the ashtray for the smokers. He smoked the unfinished cigarette at the entrance, others were also smoking. Then he had a coffee and bacon roll.

He was a bit wobbly, but he was OK. He hardly had to wait for a bus to Town, it was busy. He supposed this bus route, that he barely used these days, had a dynamic of its own. He was used to the half empty double decker through Deeside that seemed to wait at each bus stop like some reluctant donkey; yeah the donkey says I’ll help just let’s have a break, please. While this bus seemed on rails as it sailed on past held up vehicles outside the bus lane. He tried to telephone his sister from a phone box on Union Street, no answer she was probably at work in the school. The bus for home he saw in the distance turned off Broad Street he didn’t want to hang about town. He easily made it to the bus stop before the bus.

Ash watched the snow fall as slowly the surefooted bus took him safely home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 15

 

Ash counted them. Eight. He recognized one of the cops.  He could almost feel himself lurch up out of his nest of the long, black leather sofa and go for one of their utility belts. They were waiting for Veronica to drive here from the far side of town.

As soon as he had got home he had started all over again making abusive phone calls. Someone had called the police. They wanted Vers to stay and look after him. All the while they waited he ranted about the boy across the road, but he ranted himself into a corner and had to give up his piece of pot.

When she arrived Ash was hyper, screeching at her as soon as he got in the door, happily like a cat that’d got the cream, giggling, ‘I’ve been busted!’

She insisted on sleeping on the fold down bed under the sofa, but once she’d got it sheeted and cosy with her cuddly toys and the double feather duvet and got in to sleep it collapsed beneath her. They both laughed. Afterwards Ash thought if he had just sat and talked with her, in the half light and quiet sitting instead of chain-smoking, going over everything once again and again lying in his dirty bedroom all the rest would’ve been different.

As usual just after six he heard Sarah take her car out the garage opposite his bedroom window. But, this day, he raced out the back door at her closing the garage door.

‘All you have to do is apologize you fucking witch!’ Vers was suddenly at his side pulling him back. He struggled from her and raced back into the house grabbed his gnarled, hooked walking stick whacking it against the locked front door.  Vers was still in the kitchen as Ash broke out into the still dark morn to the front of the houses. Evan, Sarah’s eighty year old husband was still in their house. Ash banged and banged his door, screaming ‘apologize, that is all I want’. Vers was there again at his shoulder turning him away from the door. Swiftly he ran back into his house, threw down the stick. By the time Vers got back in he’d already picked up the knife. He turned to her and cut twice down his right arm.

‘Now have you got what you wanted?’ Blood, yes, but it wasn’t spraying all over the place. I’ve gone too far; he had no choice. Veronica thought for a moment she was watching Ash in a play, but when she saw take a pair of scissors and saw him cut all the wires of his computer all she could weep at him was. ‘No’.

Ash felt the electricity like a touch of a snake’s tongue, then it was gone and he was still standing.

Then all there were more cops. Vers vanished.  He was put in an Ambulance. Later in A+E the nurse chided him for being there a second time as if she were giving him a subtle gift of rational thought. Within minutes they had let him go, he got lost on the way out.  Someone called his name, looking over he saw two cops. For a second he was terrified, but he went over to them. They’d been at the house earlier, they told him, but he didn’t recognize them. However, they were kind and drove him home, via the chemist to get his weeks’ worth of pills, and helped him to get the electricity back on. And they called his Mental Hygienist to make an appointment that day with his psychiatrist. When he left he slept for the first time that week.

Helen, his Doctor, sat in the consulting room lit sepia brown like an embrace.  She liked him. His writing.  She was like a bottle of his Father’s jellies, except he didn’t have to steal from her and he didn’t have to neck stupid, suicidal amounts of her just to write. Just four or five doses of her a year was ample. He had liked her from the start, even before their first appointment. She had the same name as his Mum; Vers had scowled at him when he played at being a sick orphan: ‘Where is Dr Helen?’ Lara’s middle name was Helen. He’d thought the shrink’s last name sounded Scandinavian. When the CPN told him he’d start seeing her, Ash imagined her long, lithe and beautiful, with silver blonde hair, or he had surmised that she might be married to a Norwegian then he imagined her on the arm of some wealthy oil worker looking small a weasily, or maybe he was tall and lanky and Helen tiny in comparison with dark hair that fell over face, small-breasted and so lithe she could float off if she wasn’t anchored arm in arm with her warrior of sea and rig, both old and beautiful in a kind of Adam Faith way. Both of them dressed in clothes that seemed like a creative skin from the souls of people living in a land of winter. When Ash imagined them apart he was diminished without her and he had the look of a lost child in big city while she would dance on the frosty air. Her eyes would be as dark as her hair and if she smiled at you they glinted star light black like the long nights of the North.  And then when she spoke it was like a surprise, strangers would expect that she spoke French for she seemed like an aristocrat exiled, strangers might expect her to speak Mandarin for she was graced with a deceptive fragility. Ash would voice the words that her tongue-tied husband had neither the wit nor imagination to say; Ash would tell no earthly language should touch that heart red tongue and lips, but only the words of an angel or an alien. Yes if Ash could put these words in to the clumsy roustabout spouse’s mouth and she would smile and laugh lovingly at his praise, laughter like a miracle giving sight to those lifelong blind, and a smile like a blessing from a prophet.

But at their first meeting she turned out to be a middle-aged, non-blonde, small English woman he was really disappointed her name was Helen and that was the point. There was something magical about her any way, she seemed to dust all the long neglected bookshelves in him by the time he’d left the consulting room and only a few days later he met that other Helen in Characters, his Dr Helen seemed to grant his secret wish, unspoken, but long, long desired.

Now, a year later in the twilit, almost sleeping consulting room she let him tell the tale of the worse day of his life and she did not allow him to see how tired she was.  She offered him a bed at the Hospital if he wanted to be admitted as a voluntary patient, she seemed to be offering to even drive him there. Stubbornness and the last few roaches in his roach bags stopped him from going with her and he dragged himself back home, yet she had left the place open if he changed his mind.

Yet once he got home he felt like terrified ghost haunted by the living.  For a moment or two as he sat on the red carpeted floor he was glad he had once again avoided The Bin that came from with the memories of months in Kingseat, month long sections, and fortnightly injections, freedoms curtailed, he’d avoided that primal fear of that Hospital that came from a similar place as ancestral fears of slavery. Yes, glad for a moment until he realized how cold with loneliness his house was, and silent, a sad sitting-room with its many empty chairs, his own self enforced lifetime section filled with angry conversations with the ghostly patients in his mind.

Once he rolled up a roach filled number full, of dry tobacco and old ash Dr Helen’s kind words, as if from somewhere long, long ago, returned to him with each harsh drag of the number. The joint lasted a long time, the smoke like a faded dream wreathed and swam about him.  He felt he had been dumped suddenly into the future where all the rules of his life had been ripped up and he did not know what to do.

He called William, Maxi barking in the background, who begged him almost in tears to take the place at the hospital and within an hour he entered the TV room of a ground floor ward at the Hospital.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 2

 

Chapter 1

 

Charlotte asked him how to use the remote control.

‘I’ve no idea. I just got admitted.’

‘Oh.’ Charlotte looked almost in tears. Ash thought her whole body seemed to be weeping, her hair drenched in tears from a lifetime of blubbering.

‘Let me have a go, then.’

She smiled like a dream of sunrise like a surprise of sunshine evaporating the lingering dew in him.

‘So why are you in?’

He revealed the knife slashes down his arm.

‘Have you been sectioned?’

‘No. I’m voluntary. My Dad was almost crying on the phone he begged me to come in. He shamed me in the front door.’

‘Is the door locked?’ Ash nodded. ‘Oh. I’d have to speak to one of the nurses now.’

Charlotte walked away towards the nurses’ station leaving Ash in frustration with the battery less remote. Then he saw the manual controls on the side of the TV and gently manipulated them and finally got a picture as Charlotte knocked loudly on the door of the nurses’ station. Ash channel surfed and sat tiredly, his fingers numb, and laughed for the first time in days when he found an episode of The Big bang Theory on E4. Charlotte returned and sat beside him.

‘Do you like this?’ He asked.

‘Can you get Al Jazeera?’

‘Ok.’ He got up again a stabbed at the controls at the side of the TV.

‘No, you’ve got to go back up. Those music channels have been on since I got sectioned.’

Ash sighed wearily, then the video of Annie Lennox’s ‘No more I love yous’ distracted him from his utter exhaustion and he asked her:

‘Can I watch this first?’

‘Are you sectioned?’ She repeated. ‘Do you want to go for a fag?’ She proffered him a Regal.

‘Thanks.  I suppose we have to go outside.’

‘Yeah. There’s a garden.’ She pointed to a doorway wedged open with books.  He followed after her, his Regal stuck unlit between his lips like a rude, sickly tongue and once through the door he sparked up  his old lighter Helen had given him and lit hers first.

Snow covered the garden ahead of them and more was falling, a wind blasted at them and the others crowded  outside the doorway all blowing their smoke as if their silver blue breaths could battle the waves of wind.

 

 

Chapter 2

 

‘I just thought,’ Ash said to Charlotte as the automatic doors of the bank slid open. ‘Perhaps back on George Street there was some time-travelling anthropologist come from the far future to study us as we are the forebears of a genetic pool that has great significance in their time.’ She said:

‘Even I know that’s a bit far-fetched.’

‘Anything’s possible.’

Charlotte had joined the end of the queue.  Two customers were being served and ahead of Charlotte in the line were a diminutive, soft bodied, thin and blonde woman Ash thought he recognized from somewhere, and she was telling the nervous man ahead of her that the cash machine wasn’t working and it was her son’s birthday.  Charlotte anxiously watched the well-dressed, looming tall black- skinned teller with teeth whiter than his well-ironed shirt as he served a large sweaty man in dirty grey tracksuit bottoms with a matching dirty grey sweat shirt. The slob was telling the teller how he had tried to use the cash machine. He seemed drunk and was listing all the things he had planned to buy with his money, and, even though there was a rising urgency in his voice, there seemed a precise confidence in it that held a bank robber’s gun to the black man’s head and each knowing, well placed word was like a wish or a prayer or a magic spell that would without doubt give him power to unlock the cash he wanted. Along from him at the counter a couple stood. They looked like tourists or immigrants, young, holding each other; they seemed to Ash as vulnerable as young kids playing Mary and Joseph in a Nativity Play in front of the whole school. Their teller stared at the bank details on her computer screen as if she was telepathically trying to fit together whatever was awry with the couple’s account.  She excused herself and went through a door behind at the back of the counter where a greater mind than hers could be found; perhaps The Wizard of Oz. Mary asked her Joseph in their own language what was happening, but Ash saw how his slumped shoulders emphasised his hopelessness as if he were too tired to explain. The teller returned, a no, we can’t help you on her face. Broken,  almost in tears she turned from the counter and Ash watched them sorrowfully leave the fully booked Bethlehem Inn through the bank’s automatic doors and disappear down Hadden Street still holding each other as if that were the only currency they had left. Meanwhile the slob had become silent as if he’d so befuddled the black teller that he was counting out cash just to shut up the grey garbed guy.  The small woman ahead of Charlotte was speaking into a mobile phone.  Charlotte was looking worried with waiting. Ash attempted a smile for her.  He liked the open- plan, almost friendly environs of the bank.  In the centre of it were two soft cushioned settees facing each other. He told Charlotte he was going to sit down. She sshed him as her eyes bored into the black teller like she were telepathically urging  him to get his finger out and serve her first instead of the woman speaking on her phone first.  Ash went and thankfully dropped onto one of the sofas facing the automatic doors wishing desperately that he could run out, away from Charlotte, as fast as he could.

The doors slid open and his friend Alison entered the bank. He thought she looked thinner, all dressed up and looking the best he’d seen her. A younger woman came in at the same time and Ash assumed this was Alison’s daughter. He called Alison over and she sat beside him.

‘Is that Lea?’

‘No, nothing to do with me.  What are you doing here?’

‘Have you known her for a while, or did you just pick her up.’

‘We met in the hospital.’ And he showed her the cuts on his arm.

‘Oh.’ She was quiet for a moment or two. ‘I have a new number if you want it.’  He scribbled it down on the back of a bank withdrawal slip.  Alison got up and told him to take care and went to use the cash machine for deposits at the back of the bank.

Looking back over at Charlotte he saw her eyes looking at Alison and switching to him with a look full of poison and hopeless failure.  She beckoned for him to come over to the queue which somehow hadn’t moved forward, both tellers had vanished from the counter and the woman with the phone was almost shouting at the black plastic in her hand as if it were a very naughty boy. As he returned to Charlotte’s side he could see she was in tears.

Oh fuck, he thought. ‘What’s up sweetie?’

‘I need my money now.’ She snapped as if he were responsible for the wait and that he had stolen the purse she had lost in hospital.

He gave her shoulders a squeeze. She tried to smile through a hiccup of tears, but there was a terrible strength in her voice as she said ‘I want it now.’ Ash cringed and felt all the eyes in the bank fall on him. Then desperately he attempted to calm her and stop the crying he spoke the magic words that had stilled her weeping in the past.

‘I’ll scream and scream until I’m sick.’ He smiled and put his hand beneath her chin and lifted her head so their eyes met; saw she was suddenly smiling at his fake mockery. ‘Because I can.’ He tickled her under the chin and she laughed, and it seemed the bank full of folk sighed with relief. Charlotte put her arm through his.  Finally the white teethed, beautiful bank teller beckoned her over and Ash, relieved, almost fell back into the sofa.  He heard her blubbering out her story about the stolen purse while the teller nodded benignly as if he had heard her telling the same story in a dream he’d had the night before.  And about all the cards on a day trip one horrible day away from the ward, Ash drifted off thinking about Alison, he memorised her new number and put it into the back of his wallet like valuable keepsake of his holiday in the bank on Hadden Street. As if the black guy was either stupid or deaf Charlotte repeated the same story Ash had heard many times, thinking what he would do once the torture of the day in the uncomfortable energy of Charlotte was over and he could go home to skin up the last of his legal highs.  That is if the day would ever end, he still had to get Charlotte back to the hospital. Please give her some fucking money.  He looked over at the counter and the black teller had moved away to speak with someone who might be, please Jove let it be, the Bank Manager.

Charlotte walked serenely over to him, so calm now after all the scenes and almost hysteria, as if she were a completely new person he had never met before, a stranger who was incapable of weeping her face covered in a make-up of joyfulness that forbade tears.

‘Who were you talking to before?’

‘Just a pal I haven’t seen for a while.’

‘I don’t like her.’

‘So are they giving you anything?’

‘Maybe a hundred.  I have to speak to an advisor.’

‘Great.  That should last you.’

She sat close beside him and kissed him with salty lips.  Soon a couple of the bank staff came over to them on the sofa and asked Charlotte to join them in a partitioned off part of the bank. Ash said he would wait where he was but the two advisors implored him with their eyes to come with him should the necessity of his magic over Charlotte be required.  Inwardly he groaned.  This has nothing to do with him. Did they think he was her CPN, or social worker?  He wanted to run away as fast as he could, but Charlotte took his hand and almost dragged him after the two advisors and he found himself sitting beside her facing the two bank staff is if it were him facing the guillotine and not Charlotte.

‘Well’, she said rudely. ‘Are you going to give me some cash?’

Yeah that’s the way to go, sweetie, that’s going to get them to give you the key to the safe. He squeezed her hand so hard his nails almost cut into palm of her sweaty hand. He looked in disbelief as one of them got her to sign a withdrawal slip and the other counted out five £20 notes.

‘There are you OK now.’ He asked. But, no...

She let go his hand and snatched up the money and put it in her purse that looked suspiciously like the one she had supposedly lost and asked if she’d be able to get more until she got her new card. Ash almost cried out. Isn’t that enough, don’t push it.  One of the advisors looked at Ash and shook her head as if it were all his fault Charlotte couldn’t get any more money, that it was him that had spent it all, stolen the purse and was using Charlotte for booze money.

Help, this has nothing to do with me, it’s her that gives fivers away to every homeless gypsy she crosses, her that spends twenty quid on fags that lasts her half an hour. Her.  He wanted to bang his head on the table between them.  They looked at the computer as if it showed an aid worker being beheaded by terrorists.

‘Well, your account is quite overdrawn. So, I’m sorry this is the last money we can give you until new funds go into your account.’ Charlotte straightened up and looked at them icily and said. ‘Well I suppose I’ll just have to wait until my Dad dies, eh?’

Ash took her shoulders and gently turned her to him. ‘Hey,’ he smiled somehow. ‘Why don’t we just go back up the road so you can get your supper?

‘OK then.’ She smiled at him and a little of the embarrassing dread he felt dissipated, the two advisors smiled at him appreciating his messianic power over her. He took her hand and urged her from the seat and she stood and looked about the bank as if in shock, she clutched the purse in her other hand, precious as the  touch of an only son.  He led her from the bank. As soon as the automatic doors of the bank shut behind them Charlotte went into shop-shop-shopping mode and to Ash’s surprise had spent the whole hundred quid by the time they got to the rain drenched wind whipped hospital. By then Ash thought he would fall over and considered admitting himself back into the hospital, but any ward where Charlotte wasn’t, but at the door of the ward she grabbed the bags of charity shop clothes and the £50 of groceries she’d bought for all the Chancers within. Ash was relieved she left him there; he escaped to a smoking shelter and vainly hoped he would never see her again, coughing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3

After Ash had made Charlotte come and she tried to snuggle into bed beside him he pushed her away without screaming at her to leave him alone, without screaming why are you here all the time, without screaming at her vile face, her ugliness , her obscene body: get out. Get away from me! Instead, he said, calmly as if he knew it was the best way to cut her to the bone, as if he knew such a calm voice would convey the bitterness and vile poison in him.

‘Would you write me a reference? I’m looking for a younger model.

‘Could you leave me to sleep?’ She straightened her clothes and went through to the sitting room, calling back. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘God’s sake Charlotte put on the radio, read a bloody book, paint something.’

For half an hour Ash tried to sleep almost forgetting she was still in the house.  Then he heard the front door opening. ‘At last,’ but she did not slam the door behind herself and a few seconds later came back in and he was overwhelmed by the sickening thought that she would never go. The cops would come again to take her back to the hospital and he’d have to ignore her innumerable phone calls that would spoil another day filled with the dread that she would turn up once more in a taxi. And it would start all over again and she would let him make her come, and have to repress the spew of all the filth and black thoughts she provoked in him. Would he ever sleep now she was a constant presence in his life?  How many pillows with her face imagined on it would he have to batter? Go away. Go away, Please God if I see her fucking face I’ll puke.

Then he heard the distinctive knock of the guy from over the road, the dealer Mark, on the door and swiftly Charlotte opening the door.  He heard the junkie’s voice.

‘Did you put this in my letterbox?’ She said yes and closed the door as Mark went away.

Ash’s anger coursed through his livid body. Him. Him. She’d brought that cunting pusher to his door. What is wrong with her? He threw back the bedclothes and half dressed, raced through to the sitting room. As calmly as he could he told Charlotte:

‘Please will you just leave please?’

‘OK’ she said.  He sat in his shirt and underpants on the long, black couch as she slowly wandered about picking up and bagging up her stuff.  She piled her bags by the door.  Surely it couldn’t be that easy, he smiled inwardly, works every time saying please.  Charlotte came into the sitting room, but just stood by the end of the sofa.

‘Could you lend me a tenner?’

Ash thought of the line from Dr Zhivago:

‘I have paid my whore; I give her to you as a wedding gift.’

And the line raged and repeated behind his false, cruel empty eyed face as he ripped open his wallet and gave her cash. Charlotte smiled her thin-lipped smile, almost triumphant.  And she thanked him as if he were not throwing her out, but abandoning him, never to please him again, never to make her come again. A smile that showed Ash she had beaten him and his greedy, mean-minded genes. With the smile left on the air in front of him she went from the end of the couch to the kitchen.  He groaned and lit up, thinking I’ll have to go out to get another pack of twenty.  He heard her in the kitchen running water in the washing-up bowl.

What is she doing now?

‘Please’, he repeated, ‘Charlotte will you go.’

She stamped through the hallway; picked up her bags and the door shut quietly like the whispering voice of his Grandfather’s last words.  She was gone, and Ash was glad.  Suddenly the house was silent and he felt emancipated to sleep for as long as he liked or to talk to himself and do whatever he fucking felt like doing for the next three years. But, instead, for the next three years she was always there, in his head, the pictures and the scissors she had left behind, following him when he went out, at every rage filled corner on the periphery of the day until all the hate for her he did not express, all the cruel jibes he had stifled ate at him, broke him, ate him, he felt all her otherworldly orgasm and as he struck each new pillow wondered if she would ever leave him alone, in the peace of sleep,  in the freedom of dreams where she did venture, on his murdered misshaped pillows. And like the wedded couple she desired them to be each day free of Charlotte was filled with marital blisslessness and the crying of their aborted, unmade babies, imprisoned in masturbatory separate bedrooms crusty with the orgasms of waste. He felt like a widower and released from the responsibilities he had run away from when he asked her that sunny day in spring three years ago today to please go away. Please. Charlotte haunted Ash and the younger model he never found.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4

The mental hygienist, Linda, was late, or Ash was far too early.  The waiting room was packed and too hot so he went back out again and leant against the wall of the Health Centre with a view of the car park.  He didn’t know what Linda’s car looked like so he scrutinised each car passing or coming into the car park, dismissing them all. He lit up using Helen’s lighter and his eyes were drawn to the gay guy across the road hitting on a couple of plumbers by their van. So he missed Linda parking her car and she came upon him unawares. He dropped the butt and stuttered:

‘It’s too hot in there, had to get some fresh air.’ He followed her in through the sliding doors, she went into the reception area to get his notes and for a minute or two he perched on the only available seat, anxious and self-conscious as if the whole of the village had turned up just to see him suffering in the damnable heat. Thankfully Linda wasn’t long and they went, like a swiftly cruising bus down the bus lane ahead of a traffic jam at the Haudigan Roundabout, into the Community Consulting Room. In the same way he had disliked his minishrink, he liked the mental hygienist. The fact that Linda was small and blonde while the minishrink was dark and big was a major factor, yet Linda was part of Dr Straven’s team, while the minishrink was part of The Eagle’s team, his last psychiatrist whom he’d sacked for putting him on the evil Valium and demonic anti-depressants and also while he had missed countless appointments with the minishrink Ash had religiously turned up each time to see Linda. However he couldn’t look Linda in the eye, or sometimes even look at her at all,  she saw him looking intently at electric sockets, or seemingly redesigning the carpet with his mental powers, or fiddling about with stuff on the desk, but not ever Ash’s eyes.

He had been out of the ward about a month so he showed her the photos he’d taken on the camera Veronica had given him as he’d wandered about the village and down by the River Don. He admitted that apart from doing that he’d done no writing and had been having a vast number of vivid dreams.

‘Once or twice I’ve been in town.  First time I went to that drugs action place,’ He scowled. ‘You know that place on Market Street. Dr Straven said I’d get help there.  But, I must have gone on the wrong day or the wrong time or I didn’t look wasted enough to get help so there was no room in the Inn so to speak. So that was the day...’ he paused.

‘Do you want to know a secret?’ She nodded. ‘I came out the DA place and crossed Market Street as if the hand of fate was on my shoulder into the market straight to the legal high shop.’

Linda sighed as if she’d heard it all before.

‘Well don’t you think that’s a bit unwise?’

‘Probably, but it’s better than the hassle of getting illegal high and having to associate with my junkie friends.’

She said nothing for a while, so he asked her if he could stand and walk about a bit. Linda told him she didn’t mind.

He lumbered up to his feet, but felt stupid in the cramped little room as if he was doing a crazy and felt as if Charlotte had taken over his body, so he sat straight back down again.

‘So how are you managing with the daily dispense.’

‘That’s about the only good thing. I get out every day, do photos and that because I have to go the chemist.  I love walking down by the river and my legs are thick with muscles. So yes it’s ok.’

Thankfully the hour long appointment sped by and unlike the mini- shrink, the mental hygienist never asked the final, dreaded question:

‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’

If Linda had he would’ve asked her for a lift into town, but anyway he was free to frogmarch out of the place and almost ran to the bus stop. Just as well, as the bus arrived just in less than a minute to take him into town. He flashed his concession card and stamped up the stairs to the top deck. For once the bus was fleet-footed and hardly missed a green light or stopped to pick up any other travellers. He threw the crappy free newspaper off the seat. Might as well read The Sun, if he realized he could have used it to line the cat litter tray, but that rag wasn’t even worthy of that.  He stared out the window watching the horses in the fields just outside Culter and the start of major road works preparing the way for the new fabled Aberdeen Bypass, swiftly they reached Milltimber Church, the empty cross draped with a white sheet as it would soon be Easter, then they were in Cults where a new old folks home had just opened. Then just a mile or two from the city centre the bus came to a rude halt at the crossroads just after Milltimber and the bus took three or four attempts to get by the traffic lights, yet after that they were home free and he considered where to get off the bus, playing with the pack of 18 and Helen’s lighter in his coat pocket.

He got off by The Graveyard and quickly crossed the vehicle less void of Union Street and in the side entrance to The Market.  He got himself a 3gram bag of Clockwork Orange and a gram of Croackcaine, plus his usual £1 worth of cheap ciggie papers the older woman behind counter threw in when she served him.  Then just as quick he retraced his steps out of the Market to the bus shelter just outside the entrance. A bus came just as he was thinking of buying a book to read on the way back so he spent another illiterate journey back to Culter.

If Ash had known then that he would be repeating the same journey to the legal high shop, apart from varying the time spent in the city centre in Waterstones or cafes and charity shops, picking up food and falling in love with a girl in the Co-op and another in Poundland, for the next two and a half years no doubt he would’ve regretted the cunning plan he had made. The plan being that he would wean himself off proper drugs and avoid the associated trouble with drug dealers, especially the boy, Mark, the junkie over the road, and all in all cut down smoking in all forms, but Ash being Ash he should’ve known none of his cunning plans would come to fruition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

Ash was in Town, moving swiftly through daily routine and perfect round. He stood at the steps of the Market, had come to a stop.  He didn’t know his next move, whether to go up to a coffee shop or Down to the wharf.  He turned down the cobbled street to avoid the hard-faced, desperate prostitute. Ash found himself at the back of The Moorings and decided to go in, it had been over two years since he’d last had a drink and who knows he might see Helen in there.

He ordered a pint and checked out the small group of Goths, the woman by the window reading a newspaper, on the juke box Siousxie and The Banshees was playing, but halfway through some kind of German rock bands started up.

He ordered another beer and told the barman that he thought German voices and singers a special sort; he told the barman of a beautiful song in Cabaret, Tomorrow Belongs To Me, was beautiful. Then he thought:

‘He probably thinks I’m a lover of musical theatre.’

 

Halfway through the second pint he realized that the lone woman with paper was a prostitute and ordered a packet of cigarette papers. He went swiftly to the toilet  to skin up some legal highs, but  it stank of barman’s shit and there was nowhere to lean his makings on, even the floor was all pissy so he decided not to bother, went out and after the last half-pint he got himself out of the pub.

Ash went to look for somewhere quiet to skin up.  Despite the wind and the occasional person passing by he managed in twice longer than usual to build a half-decent, smokeable spliff. He sat and looked out at the boats anchored at the wharf side, vast supply boats and over in the distance the ferry to Shetland where Charlotte lived. But suddenly a tough wind smacked into him as he stared and grit brought tears to his eyes. Ash decided to go home now, so he turned his back on the Harbour, walked up Market Street and along Union Street to the Coop He saw Bob the Artist at the self-service check out buying a couple of beers.

‘Bob,’ Ash shouted excitedly. He waved over and they met at the entrance and walked down to Union Terrace Gardens so Bob could drink his beers. Ash took out the gram of Charlie Sheen, wet his finger and had a few dabs. Bob offered him a beer not noticing what Ash had done. He asked for a cigarette as he’d forgotten to get any in the Coop. Bob said he was out and proffered the open can. But, Ash was lost without a fag to skin up, looking about for dog ends in the grass. He saw a lassie over on one of the green benches and started to approach her, she was eating a sandwich.

‘Hello,’ but he was met with silence, ‘I don’t suppose...’ 

‘No!’

He retreated back to Bob in the grass, sat asking if he’d been doing any painting.

‘No, but I’ve been doing a lot of drinking,’ and offered the beer once more.

‘Do you want to look at some photos? I got a new digital camera.’ And Ash tried to show him his latest batch of pictures of the reconstruction of Marschall College into the new Council Headquarters, but the evening light came stuttering through the trees that encircle the gardens and made it difficult to see the pictures.

Ash was a bit disappointed and Bob looked cross when he grabbed the camera away from him and put it in his pocket. He took another dab of Charlie Sheen.

‘I wish you could read my novel.’

Bob asked. ‘Is it all typed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well give me a look, if you still want to.’

‘Let’s go up to Union Street. I fancy a drink.’

‘I know a place where there’s a beer garden.’

Ash felt the pints from The Moorings kicking in as they sat in the rather tiny beer garden sandwiched between the TSB and the dentists. They were talking about a mutual friend Ash hadn’t seen for years, he lived in an estate up by the hospital.

‘I’ll give you his new number as long as you don’t tell him I gave it to you.’

Ash wrote it down in the blue spiral notebook he’d bought in the Post Office when he applied for his passport, between an unfinished poem and pages of hangman game he’d played one night with Charlotte.

Once they’d drunk up Bob said he was going to the Holburn Bar so Ash traipsed along and got some cash from the hole in the wall on the corner of Union Street. He gave Bob £20, saying:

‘You need it more than me and anyway if I’m in dire straits one day maybe someone’ll do the same for me.’

Bob nodded sagely.

At the Holburn, downstairs wasn’t open yet so they went into the bar. Between sips of a vodka and coke Ash dabbed at the Charlie Sheen in his pocket. Somehow the desolate bar had become a party and he found himself dancing with an obese woman he’d spoken to when they came in.

 A guy on Facebook looked pissed off at them and slammed down the lid of his massive laptop and left.  Ash went out for a cigarette and the postie who had been sitting at the end of the bar was at the door smoking out of the wind. Ash couldn’t stop himself from thanking the postal service and all who sailed in her for the great service they had done to his writing career. He would’ve hugged the postie but he could tell the guy was gay so didn’t bother.

Soon the club downstairs was open and Ash and Bob went down, he gave Bob a tenner to get a round then went to the toilet to skin up, but he was a bit jittery and dropped the joint into the toilet bowl. Waste not want not he told himself and fished it out and carried the slimy wet worm of legal highs through to the club that was filling up with folk and a band was playing. The joint felt and looked unsmokable in the buzz and half-light so he cast it aside onto the floor.

Meanwhile Bob still hadn’t got the beers . A barman called him over, as Bob had pointed at him.

‘Yes, I gave him the money,’ Ash replied.

When the bar tender had asked how much he’d given Bob, Bob had told a porky and said Ash had given  him twenty. He answered:

‘Oh, just a tenner,’ not in the least aware of Bob’s duplicity. His look growled at Ash. Dejectedly Bob took the change. Ash went to find a place to watch the band; the noise was far too loud so he retreated back to where Bob was sitting with their drinks. They sat in silence for a while, Ash gawped about the place as more and more folk came in.

‘I think I’ll stay in here for now.’ Ash said

 Bob had drunk his pint and was looking uncomfortable. Nearby two lassies had set up a couple of tables to flog CDs of the night’s band, so when Bob pissed off Ash went over to them feeling daft with cash and bought one. He suddenly wanted to go after Bob and give him some more money so he could feed himself. He found him in a doorway across the road. Ash sat beside him.

‘God, I’m away with it!’ his dabbing finger searching for the powder at the bottom of the gram bag. Is it OK to skin up here? , but he went ahead anyway but the skins wouldn’t stick together and the wind kept pushing them away and spread the contents everywhere. He gave up.

‘Here’s some money to buy food.’ Bob took it.

‘You know you’re the only friend I have left. Do you remember when you came to live at my bit, and then left the next morning, because I told you to paint a picture of the stars?

Bob grinned.

‘I’m going to Edinburgh for the Festival. Do you want to come with me? You can make a mint begging down there..

Yeah I can imagine.  I like the buskers, music on every corner.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I’m going back into the Holburn, and then maybe go down the Lane’.

‘It’s not safe down there’.

Ash went back over the road as he ordered he told the barman he’d given Bob £20 to get some scran ‘£20’, the barman laughed. ‘It’s you that...’

But Ash turned his back on him and went and watched the second band of the night. He saw some free seats on the front so went down the aisle of merrymakers. He was happy on the front with a great view of the band. In very little time he found himself lying down alone along the empty seats. HE e saw one of the lassies who’d been flogging the CD’s giving him a look. He lurched over to her.

‘Don’t you think you’ve had too much to drink?’

She was probably right. ‘OK, I’ll have one more and go.’

 

She came over to the bar with Ash and watched drink him down the lager. By the end of the first half pint everything that followed was taken from his mind, blanked out until he found himself getting out of a taxi in front of his house. And for no reason he could recall he was at the back of Mark and Juliet’s house screaming and shouting abuse after bashing his face on the tall fence at the side of their garden. He felt a cut and there was blood on his fingers and his glasses were left askew halfway down his nose. Then until the policeman came he repeatedly shouted ‘Die,’ at Mark’s window, and ‘Fucking Junkies’, and ‘Juliet, yeah you, die you Junkie bitch ,’ over and over mixing all three until his lungs were heaving with the effort.

The policeman found him lying by the steps to his back door still screaming at Mark and Juliet, who hadn’t come out of their house, even though Ash could hear them stopping each other from doing him in. With just a few looks and words the policeman had snapped him out of his psychotic glee. The tall, good-looking copper took Ash’s keys and helped him inside. In the kitchen in the blaze of light Ash started up again screaming more tasteless abuse, especially directed at Juliet. The policeman spoke on his radio and within a few minutes a young lassie cop arrived in the kitchen, but still he couldn’t stop shouting, shouldn’t stop screaming. The tall, good-looking policeman with surprising strength Ash couldn’t resist even if he tried had him handcuffed and lying face down in the cat’s food bowl.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘You’re arrested.’

‘Aberdonian fuck...’ And then the bile and hatred, the sheer evil he had had to contend with from his first days in Aberdeen, in school and all the other days of his time in this place was rammed out of him like tainted blood and pleuritic snot.  The door was still open and a stream of new cops coming into the kitchen he creamed out louder, his voice directed now at all the neighbours’ houses, the mean-minded street full thoughtless, uncaring servants of his ire, those most of all responsible for the hatred he felt, the sheer rage of 50 years directed solely at them. He needed most of all to let them know how much he despised them, ‘Ya, Aberdonian assholes.’ His arresting officer pushed his face deeper into the cat’s food and as he twisted about his head tried to gag him with a tea towel to shut him up.

Ash told him that he needed to go the toilet. ‘Well you should have thought of that earlier. You’re not going anywhere now.’

Ash was taken out of the kitchen by the three cops who’d been the last to witness his anti-social behaviour; they threw him into the back of the police van. Ash realised it was something they did every day, and felt as he was driven away there was no malice in them towards him, it was almost an act of kindness. A small dribble of urine escaped, but he tensed up to stop the inevitable flow from being released.

In no time Ash was at the police station just behind the Arts Centre where he’d been in a one man show, still in the excruciatingly tight handcuffs.  He was taken to the front desk by the first two cops.

The tall one wanted to hit him, Ash could tell, the tall one wanted to kill him. ‘Just like a fucking Aberdonian,’ he thought.

Luckily, before he let the bladder full of lager tasting urine escape all over himself and the police station floor, the lassie copper searched him and found his legal highs.

‘I don’t drink very much’, Ash said apologetically

She was going to look for any illegal highs but he shook his head to save her the bother and then proceeded to piss himself.

In the cell he took off his clothes and they put it them in a bin bag and they gave him a pair of plastic pyjamas. After they closed his cell he realised it was the cell they had always put him in.

‘I was better,’ he cried out at the empty walls and unopenable door, ‘I was better.’ He could hear others in their adjoining cells shouting and screaming and he could hear his own voice in theirs so he shut up howling at the wind and suddenly stopped being so angry. Later the grille on the cell door opened and one of the women at the front desk told him that Veronica was coming to pick him up. In ten minutes or so the tall cop came to the grille and showed him his arrest docket. Ash raised himself up from the lotus position and agilely went to look at it, the copper pointed out the website he would have to use to pay his fine and Ash had to push his face further into the open grille to scrutinize it, squinting as they had taken his glasses. Then suddenly the lassie cop was at the other’s shoulder. Ash felt the anger emanating from the guy and pushed his head back out of the grille sure that his much abused, helplessly angered arresting officer was going to smash his head into the top of the grille.

Ash thought. ‘I wouldn’t blame him; he could have had that one for free and I wouldn’t complain.’

They gave him his clothes and his legal highs, but he had no wallet and he recalled that his glasses got smashed when he bumped into the fence beside Mark and Juliet’s bit. A portly cop, he remembered from another night in the cells took him to the reception where Veronica was waiting, he said.

‘Don’t give her a hard time.’  He said Ash playfully punched the master of the keys in the stomach.

‘Yeah, I’ll be good. See Ya.’

And then he rushed over to his beautiful sister and told her.

‘Oh it’s so good to see you.’

 

Chapter 6

Ash had been on daily dispense since he’d been discharged from hospital.  Basically daily dispense meant that he had to go down to the village chemist every day except Sundays to collect his medication.  He’d been doing so nearly a year now. Once he’d tried to go on weekly dispense but he’d taken all his pills in a couple of days and within the week he was back on daily dispense.  He told Sandra the chief chemist that he felt Dr Straven had been bullying him to get his meds weekly.

‘Don’t let her bully you.’ Sandra had said. He’d nearly been in tears at his failure, but there were more pros than cons getting daily dispense.  He went out more, going into Town for his legal highs, food, buying books, but mainly getting out of Culter where the prices of most things were ridiculously high, he was getting fitter going up and down the hill every day, walking along the riverbank or over the road to the Moor, or marching from one charity shop, or coffee shop to the next along Union Street , he took more showers and shaved every day, even got into a house cleaning routine and he ate far better than he had for years.

Yet every time he saw his psychiatrist he felt she wasn’t listening to him when he told her how much better his life had become. Once while he was waiting for his next appointment Ash thought:

I dare her, just one fucking word about my pills and I’ll walk out.

But, of course, this time she never said a word and until she quit a few months later, going off daily dispense wasn’t mentioned again. However then she started on at him about seeing a Psychotherapist, but he dug in his heels, he was fine with her and his mental hygienist and didn’t want a change. One month she might say he wasn’t getting much from his visits with her, or the following month he might say he had been killing time until the appointment cleaning his house and she said he might as well have just kept on cleaning instead of wasting time with her.

Didn’t she realize that he felt so at ease with her, felt she was the only shrink he had properly spoke with in all his years of shrinking, and she was driving him away into the arms of some Analyst that he was beginning to fear each time she mentioned him, so when one month she asked him straight out if he wanted to be put on the waiting list for a Psychotherapist he politely refused.  Ash didn’t want anything else; she was his lucky charm and there every month for him to blether at. But with every word, sigh, incline of her head she deflated him, trying to drive him away.

Then one day, almost two years since being discharged from the hospital, Dr Straven almost broke him, seemed to want to send to him to pub at the bottom of the hill as soon as he left the Health Centre, or leave him weeping out in the street.

‘Well Ash, I have to give up my position at the Hospital as my Mother is very sick and I have to spend time taking care of her.’

Ash was surprised and the thought ‘another one bites the dust’ sprang into his mind, but it wasn’t funny, his stomach wanted to empty on the swivel chair at the side of the desk and such an awful pain stabbed into his smoky soul.  From outside he could hear the mocking laugh, laugh, laughing of children. He stood; there would be no ritual of filling out the appointment card, Dr Straven going through her diary to give him a look at all the things she had to do.  He made it to the door of the office struggling to put his coat on.  She seemed to be saying something but he couldn’t hear her over the shrill of whistling tinnitus.   He stared at the grain of the office door. Ash said:

‘Well, bye, I’ll see you, no I won’t but you know what I mean.’  He finally managed to get into his coat and opened the heavy door leaving her behind, a piece of his dead past and walked out without looking back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 7

Ash’s mental hygienist gave him more of a forewarning of his banishment.  She painstakingly explained to him his illness-which wasn’t at all what he thought it was- the causes and its symptoms. As he walked home from the Health Centre just before Christmas he had a kind of revelation, a presentiment of the future as the understanding lay before like the footprints ahead of him he would leave in the snow, or like a healing hug that she had explained why his life had been the way it was and there was actually hope in the knowledge she had imparted to him. Yet later after the New Year she told him she was being forced to change her CPN work toward a different part of Aberdeen and had no choice but to drop all her patients in Culter.  That day he was sad and there was no healing hug, no future and he was angry at the Government for all the cuts which was probably the sole reason the next appointment with her would be the last. He considered buying her some chocolate muffins from the new bakers in Culter, but he didn’t and turned up that final day empty handed determined not to get upset.

Once the hour had passed he shook her hand, though he would have liked to give her a healing hug of his own, and she told him it had been a pleasure being his mental hygienist.

Over the last few appointments she’d persuaded him to start at the Psychotherapy Department. He’d agreed to go, she told him about the Hub Group, involving other people with the same illness and where he would learn about a way of thinking called Mentalization.  He would have to go to the Hospital and despite the free lunch, or the fact that more women suffered from the illness than men the real reason he said yes to it all was he would be left adrift with no shrink, mini shrink or mental hygienist.  She told him he’d get an appointment once he’d reached the top of the waiting list and that he’d have a few one to one sessions with a Therapist who would asses him. Ash had read over the pamphlet she’d given him over a few times and gone on a website that basically gave the same information.

On their last day she had shook his hand. He had hardly ever looked at her because she was too beautiful, sometimes he’d take off his glasses and short-sightedly stare, but mainly it hurt to look at her because he was afraid he might greet. On their last day she had shook his hand and told him it had been a pleasure being his CPN and it had been like she had given him a chocolate muffin instead.

‘Well,’ Ash said. ‘You’re the first CPN I’ve got through that I haven’t given a story to read.’ And she laughed, and as beautiful women do, she was more beautiful when she smiled. Ash took one last look back that last day, and Ash decided to smile.

Chapter 8

It was a beautiful day; a Sunday and he woke up about one in the afternoon. So what if he’d run out of legal highs, he couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of going into Town to get more.  He put on Northsound 1 and as the latest hits played he remembered that he’d taken the two days of his weekend meds on Saturday. A chill came over him, but he warmed up with a bit of dancing on his red carpet to the songs on the radio. Somehow he felt so happy and he didn’t have anything, legal highs or pills only the ability to dance, the freedom to dance all day if he wanted to. So he head banged to the nearest shop, making up moves as he rushed out into the sunshine. Of course he needed cigarettes and he had two as he ballet danced and stood high on his toes.  It was thirsty work and once again the sun disdainfully dragged him out into the sun stretched slope of the road, back into the shop to buy a can or two cokes, but to Ash’s dismay the cans of beer brown fizz had sold out.  He felt a sudden shudder as the gates of happiness clanged down and like a sleepy robot, ignore it’s function he bought instead a couple of cans of Tenants lager.

When he got back there was a text from Veronica, he would look at it later and he had his first can and third cigarette of the day, he picked up the house phone and the, he’d look at the text later, raced through to the bedroom and slowly lay back on his well pummelled pillows with his lager  kissing small sips like it was a lover laying on top of him, but with each tender sip angry thoughts overtook him, curses and rants aimed at the theatrical characters in a lifelong play he was never going to finish. Leslie had asked him to write these thoughts down and he went back into the sitting room, but instead of picking up his journal and pen.

First he looked at the text:

Hi Ash just to tell you dad has gone into Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

Fuck, he went to the phone. Veronica’s message told him.

Hi Dad had a fall this afternoon and he’s in the hospital, I’m here too, please call.

Ash stabbed in her number.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked.

‘Are you alright?’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh Roland was changing a light bulb in Dad’s kitchen and got his foot caught in a rung lost his balance on landed on dad.’

Pathetically he said he had had a drink.

Vers angrily said his name like a curse.

‘Why’ve you had a drink?’

‘I got them before the messages.’

He started to cry. He heard her husband’s voice calling from further away from the phone.

‘Pull yourself together.’

‘What did that fucking man say?’ He crushed d back tears from his eyes.

‘Ash, I can’t talk to you when you’re like this’

‘Ok then, just tell me what ward he’s in.’

Soon Ash found himself back down the shop buying eight cans of Tennants and as soon as he got back he quickly went through the m, glugging and gulping them down not like they were his lover but his rapist. He stayed up all night sending off countless text and voice messages to Ver’s ansaphone. They ranged from:

‘Please call me back,’ to:

‘I’m big and fat enough to squish his fucking Mother how’d he like that.

Later, he went to the chemist, red faced getting his daily med with tears in his red night swollen eyes. ‘My Dad’s in hospital.’ he staggered out onto the street stopping himself from sobbing anymore.  He went and got his rations in the Spar as he did every day.

When he got home the full depth of his nights drinking drenched him, he hadn’t felt it before as he’d been so angry.  Yet he wanted to start calling again, but he didn’t have strength, the desire left to do so.  He had to pull himself together and go and see his Dad in the hospital. As an afterthought he told himself I can get some legal highs when I’m in Town.

Still red-eyed and in the same clothes he’d been wearing all night he grabbed his bag threw in the book he’d been reading by Kazuo Ishiguro When We Were Orphans and rushed down to the bus stop. He jumped into the book as soon as he took his seat, reading frantically until he got to the junction onto Union Street.  He closed the book and asked the older man beside him if he knew which bus would take him up to ARI. ‘I think it’s the 13, but I’m not sure’ Ash breathed lager fumes at him. ‘That’s Ok, I’m pretty sure it’s the 59.’ He proceeded to tell the old guy about his dad being in hospital. ‘I don’t know what he’s going to do, he loves walking his dog down the river Don. As he was moving to get off the bus, the man said.’ You don’t have to get off here, you can getting the 59 on Union Terrace.’ Ash asked him if he was from Edinburgh. ‘No,’ he replied. Ash smiled ‘you sound like you’re from Edinburgh, but then everybody sounds like there from Edinburgh these days.  Excuse me; I’m getting off here so I can get some cash from the bank.’ The guy laughed. Ash thought. He probably thinks I’m going to get drunk again.

Once he’d got some cash from the hole in the wall he dashed down to the market got his Clockwork Orange then somehow got on the right bus to the hospital. Eventually he found the ward after nearly breaking down again, angry and exhausted by the confusing long corridor to the lifts. A nurse gave him a concerned like as if he were a patient escaping from his own ward. He found the lift to the ward and got a supply elevator up and up.

‘Can I see William’, he asked the nurse he saw as soon as he came in the door.

‘Yes sure you can.’

He was over there on his own, the bed a corpse beneath him. Each ringing step on the linoleum floor of the ward sounded like an Angel dying. Ash pulled up a seat near the sleeping head of his old man.

‘Hello there,’ Dad’s head turned his way and it almost seemed to be smiling.

‘Oh, I’ve brought you some cakes’ and put them on the bedside cabinet.

‘Help me sit up will you,’ Ash’s Dad said.  Ash went behind the top of the bed and tried to gently lift him, he was afraid he would hurt him as he pushed up on to the pristine pillows. Ash’s Dad felt as heavy as Kryptonite. Dad had almost fallen asleep again. ‘I’ll get you a cake from the box.’ Ash chattered away as he ate. ‘Did you like it?’

 ‘It’s too sweet, they give me heartburn.’

‘Sorry.’

‘That’s alright.’ he began to fall asleep and Ash stayed a little longer. He startled awake and he smiled at Ash as if he had forgotten he was there.

Ash told him he was off now.

‘Yeah, that’s OK, I’ll just go back to sleep.’

Ash wanted to get on the bed beside his frail Father and go nowhere else, hold him, give him all his own strength and life grabbing him back from the gates of Paradise, but instead he got up from the chair and kissed him the forehead.

The he trotted out of the ward, afraid to look back, to his journey back home and his Clockwork Orange

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9

Ash slept fitfully that night, but those moments of sleep were dream doused.  When he at last got up with the alarm he remembered that today was to be an eventful day.  He was to meet his psychotherapist for the first time. He’d got plenty of time so ironed a shirt, showered and cleaned the mud off his boots.  He still had plenty of time, but the late August sunshine manhandled him out the door.  Still, a she got on the bus into town, he knew he would be at least two hours early for the appointment and apart from picking up legal highs Ash couldn’t think of anything much else to do. Yet he was relieved when he had made it into Town and got off at Holburn Street to take out some cash from the TSB. If he walked slowly down Union Street it’d take maybe 15 minutes to get to the Market, then another ten minutes for a coffee and a slow walk up to the Hospital would kill enough time to maybe get something to eat up there.

But, despite himself he raced with his normal long strided swift plod to the Market. Instead of 15 it only took him 5 minutes to get to the counter in the Market and was back on the teeming Union Street outside MacDonald’s, but he wasn’t feeling hungry. Ash knew he would later and he didn’t particularly want to eat in the Hospital canteen so he retraced his steps back up Union Street past Waterstones up to the Coop, got a jar of coffee, cigarettes and a couple of ready meals. Now. Only just two hours until he had to be at the Psychotherapy Department.

He crossed over Union Street into the newest cafe in town, which used to be the old Waterstones and sat by the window with a flat white. He noticed a gay guy watching him and tried not to catch his eye. Halfway through the coffee he went to the toilet and on his way out the gay guy was there and Ash gave him a dirty look even though he was annoyed with himself that the guy had presumed he was a faggot and probably wanted Ash to suck him off in the toilet.

Ash had thought:

I wish they would leave me the fuck alone.

Back before his flat white he felt old and dishevelled, he’d shaved rather badly.   He stared out the window looking across at the dentist where he’d recently missed an appointment. As Ash stared he saw a fat Ned. The Ned stared  back at him, gave the look and a hateful smirk at his curls of hair and the flowery shirt Rachael had given him for Christmas. He hated queer bashers worse than queers.  Draining his cup he got out of the place, there was nothing else for it he would go up to the Hospital and be early, why was he always so fucking early.

He lit up with Helen’s lighter and tossed the butt down on Union Terrace.  The Hospital had a new anti-smoking policy and no-one was allowed to smoke in the grounds. So he sparked up another and puffed away up the road past Rosemount Square throwing it down at a junction across from a Hairdresser he used to frequent and a bookshop he used to haunt on Giro days.

As he walked the last wee while to the side entrance to the Hospital, The Green Door, he was suddenly surprised to see The Green Door was gone. To Ash it remained the symbol of his countless visits to the Hospital and someone had taken it away and he felt a sense of loss and anger.  For a bloody door, he thought, come on pull yourself together. He had an hour or more to wait now he was here and he sauntered around the grounds looking for the Psychotherapy Department, he’d never to been to that part of the Hospital before, but he found it relatively quickly.  He fiddled with Helen’s lighter and found a garden round the back of the building with a bench and hot flowers in the August sun. Despite the prohibition on smoking in Hospital grounds, he felt he had no choice but to light up again, there was no-one about and even if there were he doubted he’d get a section for breaking the rules, at most a few dirty looks from people in offices about the garden.  He looked again at his watch. Ages yet.  His eyes scanned the light green lawn ahead of him.  He saw a Magic Mushroom.  He was tempted to pick it, chew and swallow it down with the can of coke in his bag. He knelt down to get a closer look. His hand almost unconsciously searching out the tiny wee, pointy pleasure to take it up, but he left it and the used cigarette smouldering in the grass telling himself it wouldn’t be a good idea seeing the Psychotherapist for the first time dinging out of his face.

Ash went out of the garden to find somewhere to sit in the sun, the Legal Highs burning a hole in his pocket, but a joint was probably out of the question too. When there was only a half hour until his appointment he ventured into the Psychotherapy Department, found the receptionist and said he was in for an appointment with Martin Templeton. Ash wondered to himself whether he was a doctor, is that what you call a Psychotherapist, it was confusing after seeing a Psychiatrist for such a long time.  In the waiting area he took out the Alan Warner book he was half way through, Morvern Callar, and read until the time of his appointment. There were a few others waiting, all with their heads down looking at the floor, lost inside themselves. Ash had said hello, but most of them had barely responded.  He got stuck into the book, finally at two the portly Psychotherapist came through from his office, seeing Ash straight away and came over to him.

‘Are you Ash?’ Ash responded with a smile and shook the proffered hand. ‘Come through.’

Most of the appointment went by in a blur.  Martin told him he was here for an assessment and for him to see how Borderline Personality Disorder had affected his life. Martin Templeton told him he had lived in Chester; the same place Ash had lived in his childhood.  Deep inside Ash there were still constant storm blasts of anger sure that he was only here because of NHS cuts, that he was fine with the Psychiatrists and CPNs, that here with Martin he was just going over old ground as he answered the Therapist’s questions, so basically he felt he was being fobbed off and getting second best.  Martin asked about his relationship with his daughter, his sister Ver’s, their Father, implying some kind of red necked incest when he asked about his cousin in Australia, yet cut him off when Ash tried to speak about his dead Mother. Ash wanted to cry.

Martin talked about Mentalization which was an aid for people with Borderline Personality Disorder to get their emotions under control to help them in situations with others and to take responsibility with their own thoughts.

The Psychotherapist, Doctor whatever the fuck he was, asked him if he wanted to join a Mentalization Course, called The Hub Group, every Tuesday for six months. Ash felt this was the last chance for him and the anger dissipated, Ash would be able to spend time with others like him, maybe learn what exactly this so-called BDP was and not felt so lost and alone knowing other people were going through the same thing.

Then the tears came and he started blurting out, thinking It has been a long time since my last confession, yet as the words spewed from his dry lips Ash felt he was explaining what had caused his illness, not child abuse, or drugs, not being moved around from pillar to post with Dad in the Navy, but this, these words of those days broken and lost when he had run away to London.

‘I’d got a job in a gay bar, hated it and I put on a bit of a gay act, but I met an Aussie guy there who offered me a job in his start-up business and a place to stay after I’d got the sack for stealing from a charity box. I stayed with him a long time,’ Ash laughed. ‘But I managed to save my arse. We ended up staying in a posh place just off Regent’s Street and I worked quite hard helping with his business that was taking off. But then he started drinking a lot and I had to get away from him stealing £200 on the way out the door and I went to Soho to get a prostitute.  Her name was Teen.  I had a bit of adventure with her, hitch-hiking up to Fife where she abandoned me and all £200 gone.  Instead of coming home to Aberdeen Teen had told me there was a club in Soho that’d love to have me so I borrowed money from my Grandmother and got on the next bus back to London.  And I became a stripper in a place called Colts. The first night there I was dancing downstairs and some gang who wanted to close Colts down invaded the place and all the punters scrambled for it. I was left alone and one of the gang came up to me and grabbed my dick. I was terrified and he told me to get the fuck back to Glasgow or wherever I was from. He squeezed my cock really hard and I thought he was going to cut it off.  Suddenly about a hundred cops came out of nowhere and the guy scarpered.

‘Anyway once it all calmed down one of the other strippers gave me a line of speed that was first time I took speed. I chewed on my teeth all night, see that’s why my teeth are all pushed in and squinty like that. So in the end I stayed at Colts, stripping along to Kate Bush songs, sleeping in an armchair, by the poppers where the punters paid the cash to get in. Oh it seemed that way forever and all I did with the money was buy drink. I hardly ate, I even tried to get help from the Aussie guy, but he had a new flatmate and had told him I had AIDS. In the end after being in an endless David Lean epic I ran away from London back home.’

Ash came to a breathless stop, yet the words though kept rattling through his head, there had been so much more, he’d made a few friends, stayed in a homeless hostel, gone to Cornwall, ate a Wimpey quarter pounder each night he stayed in a B&B in Victoria. But, now he could only cry, he joked though through his tears.

‘Somehow I managed to save my arse throughout it all’

Mark Templeton listened through it all; maybe he had expected something different. What? That his Father beat him, or his Mum stuck Kirby grips in his penis at bath times, Ash presumed he’d heard it all from other people, all their cries for help, all their confessions, it was his job after all, he probably thinks I’m some kind of tinky smackhead.  Isn’t that enough, Ash screamed in his head, wouldn’t all of that have fucked up anyone.

Then before Ash knew it the hour and the appointment was over. The tears had stopped by then. Psychotherapist Templeton filled out an appointment card for the next time and as he left Ash said to himself:

All I wanted was to speak about my Mum, how she’s gone and I’m still here and it’s wrong

But he said:

‘See ya next week.’

 

 

 

 

Chapter 10

Ash was going to see his new girlfriend. They’d had long walks together down by the River Don– a long stretch of moss green-white, and sky reflected  blue- black water.  Ash would take pictures of her there in her white and black coat.

Her name was Maxi, and she was William’s dog, Ash had once called her Mad Max2, back in the day when she’d run away from him barking hysterically, or cowering away from him in the safety of William’s bedroom every time Ash visited Dyce. Now, since Dad’s last fall, and stint in hospital a great sea change had occurred.  She’d bark happily and cadge pieces of chicken from the tins of Big Soup Chicken and Veg William made for lunch.  One day Maxi had even climbed on his lap, and pawed his face as if she was his best pal in the world and he was keen to take the dog around the large field outside the house.

Since William’s last fall he hadn’t been able to take her out much. How the old man had loved to take her along the river or along the railway line, but now all he could manage was the quick drive to ASDA, a little bag of shopping. So instead Ash or his sister would take her, Maxi was a good dog and liked getting her picture taken.

Maxi was waiting at the gate for Ash as he went up the steps and into William’s bit.  He was in the kitchen putting on his jacket.

‘Just caught me on the way out.’

 Maxi followed Ash through to the downstairs toilet, two buses worth of repressed urine, spilled from him. ‘Are you going up to ASDA?’

‘Where else.’

He took Maxi to the car and put her in the dog hair covered pink sheet at the backseat, gave her a sausage. She took the treat and gulped it down; while William was slowly making his way from the house he gave her another. When they were both in the car William asked him if he’d walk to the Health Centre later and pick up a prescription and put it in the chemist.

In no time William raced to the parking lot getting a slot straight away in the disabled parking space nearest the front of the shopping centre.

‘Tie up the dog.’ Ash got out smashing the door into a 4x4 parked illegally.

Inside, William went straight for the cigarette counter.

‘Is it still muddy by the river,’ Ash asked as he hadn’t been to the river all winter with Maxi.

‘It was yesterday when Alexa took her.’

‘Oh.’ Ash had suddenly run out of things to talk about now they were sitting in the cafe.  He was hungry, but the hordes of the entirety of Dyce School all seemed to be in the queue getting their second breakfast. Ash surveyed them hoping there’d be some food left once they’d had their fill.

He poured sugar sachets into his coffee and stirred it roughly with the complimentary brown stick. ‘I think I’ll get a roll and sausage.

‘Go on then, they aren’t as bad as they look.’

‘I’ll wait,’

‘Coward.’

‘Lara was giving me a hard time about all the sugar I take.’

‘Just ignore her.’

‘But, I do need to cut down.’

‘Don’t worry about it. I imagine Rachael‘ll have to look after you when you can’t shit properly and clean you up.’

Ash stared at him.

‘I doubt it she barely speaks to me anymore.’

His Father wasn’t listening; he’d seen Alexa his neighbour and de facto dog walker when Ash or his sister wasn’t about.

‘Hi.’ Ash said as she came over and sat beside them. She was a widower and had been actively wooing William before William broke his hip, since then he hadn’t gotten as angry at her for ‘popping in’ or giving him ‘indigestible food’. In, fact recently he’d called her a’ god send’ and ‘irreplaceable’. Ash recalled his teenage years trying to read books in his bedroom or trying to study and her two sons were endlessly revving their motorbikes just outside the house in the car park. Now, the last time he’d seen the eldest of the two brothers he’d looked a well-heeled, respectable business man whereas Ash looked like a dishevelled dosser in comparison.

Ash never knew what to say to them so he usually stuck to safe subjects such as Donald Trump, Decimalization and the different drugs Dad was on, all of which would get William talking. Yet Ash had been trying to make a special effort not to wind up his Father, intentionally or unintentionally since the tumult of his recent drug and drinking incidents and more especially since his last fall.  On the main he succeeded and his visits, usually unannounced and sometimes following the same routine, both well-oiled and mutually sustainable. Ash veered off Obama, the EU referendum and the Plight of the Palestinians and tried his best to keep to a censored version of his life. He would tell him of the ups and downs of The Hub, or Mentalization Group and avoided talking too much of the fall in oil prices as this would lead to pangs of guilt i.e. Lara’s Mum perhaps losing her job at Shell and almost daily guilt trip of not having a job and being an inadequate Father.

Thankfully by the time Alexa got her coffee from the contrary coffee machine the queue at the till had quickly diminished and Ash rushed to get his roll and sausage.  The woman at the till was another Alexa.  She didn’t smile much, but she was friendly enough. William had told him she’d gone out for a fag during her break and thrown down the filter and a keen –eyed Refuse Inspector fined her £40 on the spot. Ash had looked about the car park of the shopping centre from the car at the time and quipped:

 

‘If they fined everyone £40 every time they threw down a butt the fucking deficit would have gone by now.’

He got two sachets of tomato sauce as he smiled and paid Alexa with his debit card and went back to the table with his roll and sausage where William and Alexa were talking.  He lathered the sausages with the sauce, licking away the last few spots on the side of the sachets.

‘You sure you’ve got enough sauce on there?’ He always asked that and Ash felt like a wee boy with his Sunday morning fry up dumping artistically half a bottle of HP sauce on the rashers of bacon, sausages, tomatoes, fried bread and mushrooms.

‘You won’t be able to taste the bloody sausage.’ William’s voice broke him from gastronomic reverie.

‘That’s the point,’ he tried to laugh but his mouth was full of roll and sausage. When he had finished and Alexa had gone Ash asked. ’What do you need from the store I can go round and pick it up for you.’

‘No. No, it’s the only exercise I get and if I don’t people will wonder what has happened to me.’

‘I’d probably get it wrong anyway.’ Ash recalled the dog food incident and the soup incident first when he’d got a six pack of jelly, not gravy and mulligatawny soup instead of lentil.

‘Yes, but you can carry some of the big stuff.’

Once William had divested himself of the cafe chair and table Ash surged ahead to glance at the DVDs in the window of the Media Centre then got a basket. Ash got the plastic bag at the self-service tills which William used to carry about the shop. He met him at the plants display.

‘What big stuff do you need?’

‘Oh, don’t rush me.’

‘OK, sorry.’

Ash hovered about his dad for a while, then popped round the aisle to look at the meagre display of books near there stationery and then got a red diary and a packet of twenty pens then went searching for Dad.  He was still at the flowers

‘You remember the tulip bulbs you bought me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I went out into the garden to plant them, and Vers in one of her epic clear out of my house had thrown away my, trowels.’

‘She does that all the time with to me. I couldn’t find any of my bookmarks the other day.  Which reminds me will you get some from the Library?’

 For a moment Ash thought he had made a joke, but he was convinced knowing her who had a penchant for throwing out good stuff with the bad. Ash didn’t want to remember the extensive lighter collection removal incident, as it just made him angry. Of course later in the year he had to clear out his loft and discovered the three trowels and felt sense of guilt for always blaming his good sister Vers for everything that went wrong. At least at the start of the week he had improvised by digging holes for the bulbs with his bare hands. And he was looking forward to spring when they came to flower.’

‘ Could you get me a big box of Corn Flakes – not the biggest but the one down?  And some dog biscuits?’

‘Sure.’ Ash sped off from the sell-by date collection of the very chilly aisle .William usually spent a long time there but never bought a thing, however by the time Ash had found the cereal and Maxi’s biscuits he was nowhere to be seen. Ash walked hurriedly up and down the aisles and along the central one peering up and down. He was beginning to get anxious. He eventually found him looking at the kitchen bins near the clothes section.

‘Oh there you are. I thought you had your invisibility ring on.’

‘I don’t have one of them,’ William said tiredly as if instead of his son had been rushing about the aisles  his son.

‘I was only joking.’

‘I know.  Can you carry this bin for me?’

‘OK.’

Then a voice behind him said:

‘Is that you Ash?’

And he turned and there was Abby, he was pretty sure it was Abby. His head asked:

‘Is that you Abby?’  He  thought he had sat beside her one day on the bus going in for legal high, but he had mistaken her for someone who must’ve been Charlotte flashing her wedding ring at him and on the bus he’d been thinking:

‘Who is this?’ For months he had been convinced it’d been Abby and the more he told the story to the more certain he was it had been Abby that day, on the bus, but it hadn’t been Abby at all. The woman with the trolley with a child in the seat was definitely the greatest love of his life, whom he’d dumped when Lara’s Mum got pregnant and for the first drunken years after Lara had been born the woman he had searched for whenever he was in Town whom he’d call when he’d drunk too much and cried like a bairn. Her. Here. In front of him like a heart attack.

‘Hi,’ he smiled. At least he hoped he was smiling. He’d only dreamt about her once and he had found out she was married when he looked her up on Face book. ‘Who is this?’

‘This is Willow.’ she said

‘Are you helping your Mum get shopping?’ Come on Ash, he told himself, you haven’t seen her for sixteen years you could think of something better to say than that. Abby was a blonde now, not a bottle redhead, and not much like the photos he kept of her in a blue covered album Mum had given him. I suppose she’s older now but she still looked young, but then she had been younger than him when they’d gone out. ‘So are you going to help your Mum to get sweeties?’ Willow looked at him, but didn’t smile.

‘No. No sweeties for you,’ her Mum said.

They must’ve spoken more; Ash wondered later, oh yes, he remembered she asked him why he was in Dyce and he said he’d come to see his Dad.

Abby smiled as Ash looked at his Father quietly looking at clocks nearby.

‘Is he still with us?’

And yes, he recalled, he had gone on about his cats, one of which was almost 21 and had been around all those empty years ago when Abby would tell him to give the cat more attention. But, the conversation didn’t last long, not long enough. It could never have been long enough. Here, in ASDA where he never saw anyone he knew. He turned back to his Dad once he’d said goodbye. He could have talked, prattle on but he didn’t want to prattled on, so he turned away and for the rest of the shopping experience he felt he was drunk and stoned and he’d been hit on the head.

Then again, just before they made it to the Satan inspired self-service check outs, he saw Abby again when he got some cheap tuna for the cats and she was getting a tin of shrimps. Abby asked:

‘So how old is your daughter now?’

’15, 16 this year.’

‘Has it been that long? Do you still see her?’

‘Oh yes.’ He thought I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He said:

‘It was good to see you.’

‘Yes. You too.’ In the field outside the shopping centre as he walked Maxi back from Boots and the Library, all his recent dreams and nightmare sped unremembered through his head, sixteen years of dejavu flooding through him almost like Magic Mushrooms dancing. He gripped hard on the leash and the bag with his Father’s Temazepam thinking:

‘You can’t do anything about it. She’s married now. She’s not mine anymore.’

 

Chapter 11

Just before Christmas the era of Ash’s use of legal highs came to an abrupt and unexpected end.

 He was seeing Lara later in the afternoon, but he had no smoke, so he went into Town six hours early. He’d started going to the head shop on King Street which was cheaper than the one in the Market. It had only been open a month or two yet already someone, probably the local council, had stayed in the window. This lot were usually out of it on their wares and a few times he had blagged a gram or two as the guy serving him seemed to have had lost his ability to count. However on this particularly frosty Christmas shopping horde filled day the woman a blonde, sensibly dressed, clear of eye who was obviously one of the owners who was on the counter.

‘Can I have 3 grams of Clockwork Orange?’

‘We haven’t any.’  She said bluntly.

‘Where’s the list with the other brands on?’

‘There’s no list.’

‘Oh,’ the penny dropped. ‘So is that the end of it. Are they banned again?’

‘For now.’ Crestfallen and confused he walked, shoulders straight out of the door onto King Street, a street with more hairdressers and barbers on it than the For Sale s or For Lease signs in the rest of Aberdeen.  Now he had what felt half a century until he saw his daughter so with a wallet full of cash fresh from the hole in the wall on Union Terrace he crossed over the dual carriageway past the Arts Centre to the nearest barbers. A sexy barber, blonde in the prerequisite tight jeans quickly demopped his grey mass of hair. He made a stuttering, nervous conversation about the shootings in Paris

‘I was thinking it could’ve been the Cafe Central on Belmont Street and kids at a bloody concert like the Music Hall. It is all going too far.’

‘I know,’ she said sadness in her reflected eyes as she brushed up the grey curls of his hair.

 As he sat there Ash tried to think what to do and soon as the tip left his pocket he sped to the Market, but even though he knew it would be the case, both the fancy head shop which he never used or the stall further in that he used doggedly, had no Clockwork Orange or legal smokes, snorts or pills.  He went up the side stairs past the shoplifter’s door of British Home Stores onto Union Street and by the time he was at McDonalds he had an irritating itch at the back his head. He envisioned that his only options were that a year from now he’d either be a smack head a crack addict or worse he had given up drugs completely. He went into McDonalds and ordered two hamburgers and a carton of milk. Or, he thought as he sat down his stomach churning with hunger and fear, I’ll be drinking again. Ash had been so proud of himself that he’d not had a drink for over a year and was keen on reminding the folk every at the Hub Group every Tuesday.

His head was going:

Damn. Damn. Damn I’ll lose it or get beaten up or arrested. Again. Even a half bitter will probably get me stabbed down a dark alley down the Wharf as the Harbour was now being touted as.

Of course! He had no other choice he had to call Alison. He’d seen her once since he’d taken the legal stuff and that was because he stupidly bought a particular brand of legal high that was so strong he quickly began to go loopy after the second drag of the first joint.

Her phone, may all the angels of Paradise be praised, was answered and he heard Alison’s timid voice speaking like triumphant hope.

‘I’m seeing Lara later,’ he told her after she said she’d get him something. ‘But we might be going to see Star Wars, so I might not be able to get there till later.’ Alison said that was fine. Ash was almost crying with relief. As he left McDonalds a security guard began walking towards him with a suspicious look in her eyes as if she knew he was making a deal on the phone, but he made it to the cold, dirty street feeling now as light of spirit as he was of hair.

His goal now was to see Lara buy her some shoes and get out of Town to Alison’s ASAP. Fuck Star Wars. The DVD will probably be out in January.  Even so, it was going to be a long day, but the light at the end of the tunnel was suddenly so bright.  As quick as he could he got out of Christmas Shopping Central and snuck down Belmont Street, a colder yet much quieter region, thinking he could sit in the Library for a while.  At the hole in the wall at the top of Belmont Street opposite the Art Gallery a beggar sat forlorn in the wind, so hoping the guy would bring him luck Ash gave him a quid and told the boy to take care of himself, and was wished a Happy Christmas.

Ash wandered down to Union Terrace Gardens, which after all the fuss a few years ago, had not been revamped and would undoubtedly be never be revamped. The place was deserted, not even an alcoholic urinating in one of the alcoves just below street level. Up on the Terrace there was a Street Market and a spinny, sickening looking funfair ride and an ice skating rink was put up for the holy festivities. He went back up the steps again and crossed over to the Library.  The wind was sharp and gritty on Rosemount Viaduct. Walking against the wind was his old drinking buddy with a scarf about his face, grey haired and balder and looking older than he usually did.

‘Hi, Steve.’

Ash thought that he was going to walk right past him, blank him, but now that he had become a Jehovah’s Witness such rudeness was probably a sin.

Steve was with his mother.

‘We’re going to the  theatre cafe,’ Steve told him.

‘I’m just popping into the Library. I might join you later,’ Ash lied.

The cold and the wind at his back moved him on up the steps of the Library and he was in the thankful warmth of the Fiction Department. He went straight to  ‘I’ and picked out a copy of A Pale View of the Hills by his recent friend and inspiration Kazuo Ishiguro. Typically there was a copy of the man’s latest novel The Buried Giant. He told the young, male librarian at the desk ‘I ordered The Buried Giant from my Brother in Law for Christmas and I lost the copy I got for my 50^th birthday.  And there it was all the time.’

‘Typical,’ the boy at the desk agreed with.

Just over four hours until I see Lara, Ash though as he loitered at a Free Trade stall near the entrance where coffees, teas and some charity goods were on display like a fine chessboard that immediately caught his eye.

‘I’ll get this coffee; I’m exhausted after all the wandering around the Library. You know I completely forgot where the I’s were in the alphabet,’ this garnered a laugh from the old woman serving. ‘Well Happy Christmas. I’d get the chess board but I’ve no one to play chess with.  I tried to teach my daughter, but kids nowadays. Not interested. Happy Christmas,’ Ash repeated putting the overpriced, morally sound instant coffee into his bag beside the precious, beautiful library book.

Then back out into the cold. He wasn’t quite sure what to do next so he watched the ice skaters on the rink in the Christmas Market and tried not to throw up the hamburger while he watched the spinny funfair machine that he dearly hoped Lara didn’t want to go on. Nearby he went into a couple of charity shops and the comic shop buying a blue t-shirt with Hope written on it, he had another at home but the word had faded away. Finally he went in The Shack and got a flat white from the waitress whom he’d heard was writing a book. He lingered in the coffee shop for a while. He wanted to go up to Alison’s, it wasn’t far away, but he didn’t want to be wasted when he saw Lara.

I suppose I should buy some Christmas presents for other people; Ash concluded. He forged his way to Waterstones.  As he sped down to Union Street he saw a painted wooden cat in one of the Market Stalls. Alison’d like that, he thought, but he kept on going and didn’t get it. By the time he got to the bookshop and traipsed around a few times feeling like a shoplifter he felt tired and called his sister on his mobile. No answer, so he sent a text upstairs having another coffee which she quickly replied writing that she was in the hallowed Union Square.

Despite the fact that he was trying to waste time until he saw Lara he almost ran through the overpriced, hot arena of consumerism and breathless and sweating he plonked himself down across from where Vers was sitting. She smiled at him as she was eating one of the Starbucks chocolate mallow on a stick speciality. As Ash tried to get his breath back, she asked:

‘Have you bought any presents yet?

Earlier in the week he’d arranged to meet Vers for their annual present buying ritual, but that day he had enough Clockwork Orange and a persistent sniffle so he cancelled it.

‘No. Not really. I’m going to buy Lara some shoes today so she can pick them out herself. I’m sure I’ve got wrapping paper at home, but if you want to wrap it up yourself feel free as you ‘threw out’ my Sellotape you can have this jar of coffee.’

Vers laughed scornfully.

‘I told you what I wanted. Do you want me to write it down for you?’

‘Yes.’

He looked down the list. ‘A massage voucher.’

‘Yes for a place on Crown Street across from the old Post Office.’

‘Oh. OK. My back is killing me. If I lie on the table would you give my back a good kneading.  You said you wanted a diary.  I got myself a page a day one. I’m going to write a novel called The Sun Doesn’t Shine Like That Anymore.’

‘What’s it about.’

‘The last few years or so.’

‘Well, when it’s finished I’ll get all my friends at church to read it.’

‘I don’t think they’d like it very much,’

‘They have good ones in John Menzies.’

‘Good what?’

‘Diaries. I need one with a week on two pages.’

‘OK. I’m going to try and get a coffee.’

‘Get me one of those Mango Fruit Salad bowls while you’re there.’

Ash looked at the tremendously long queue. ‘I might be a week or two. If Armageddon kicks off while I’m away I’ll see you in the next life.’

‘Ash,’ Vers exclaimed in mock anger.

A few Earth hours later, Lara and he, were in the back row of the cinema waiting for the film to begin.

What seemed like several days of pure bliss later when Ash’s faith in the scam that was Hollywood was renewed, Ash and his daughter were waiting in the freezing street by the bus stop for her bus home.

Ash said excitedly:

‘Do you want to see it again?’

‘No,’ she said laughing.

Ash puffed away on a Superking, ignoring the dirty looks from others waiting for a bus.

‘Do you have enough change?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know being with you is better than any anti-depressant. You’re my cure, you know that.’

Lara gave him a look that was both one of mirth and pride and surprise and Ash knew she loved him.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 12

 

When Lara went away on the bus Ash walked quick up Market Street, thinking again ‘end of an era.’ He saw the bus to Alison’s at the Graveyard, it could pull away at any time now, so he raced ahead to the next bus stop on Broad Street, people dodging artlessly, panting, his legs over-dosing on lactic acid, panic filled eyes peering back to see where the bus was.  It was slowly gaining on him he mustered up a sprint of speed as the bus caught up with him at the corner onto Broad Street. Ash sprinted now ignoring the pain in his chest and legs as he saw the bus had made it to the stop and people had started to get on. He kept going doggedly as if he had to make the last train to Stockholm to pick up his Nobel Prize for Literature. Just as an old guy on crutches was about to get on, Ash darted past him into the light of the bus and showed his concession card first.

The bus was choc-a-block, but he managed to get a double seat to himself where he proceeded to cough and wheeze, his chest heaving and gasping as he tried to get his breathing under control.  By the time he got  off the bus, despite getting a few pointed sniggers from a couple of kids, he was feeling cool and controlled, a superhuman in his long black coat.

He knocked on Alison’s door and then after waiting what seemed like ages,  knocked again. Eventually, his stomach had started to churn like the spinny sickening funfair thing on Union Terrace, she opened the door. She smiled.

‘I was in the bath.’

The long, the short and the tall of it, Ash scored. Though it took a while, he never stopped blabbering out his verbal vomit; there were some heart-stopping moments, changes of plan and waiting. But, he scored and the boy even gave him a lift home.

Of course it was all quiet when he got home. Christmas Eve was a couple of days off, but as he smoked and drank coffee into the dark morning he remembered that the chemist in the village was closed for four days over the holiday and instead of his daily dispense of pills, he’d get four days’ worth of pills. Ash was suddenly dreading it, because despite his new Hope t-shirt he knew there was no way in Hell he’d get through the birthday of God without taking an overdose.  And of course Ash did.

When he’d smoked all the pot he called Alison.

‘You’ve phoned during EastEnders.’

‘Oh shit,’ Ash thought, ‘what have I done.’

‘And you never left me enough.  I had nothing over Christmas.’

‘Shit,’ he said apologizing several time.

‘And the boy wouldn’t leave me in peace after he came back from yours.’

‘Crap,’ and again:

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah.  Me too.  Look I’m watching EastEnders I’ll call you back later.’

‘No it’s OK I’ll manage. I’ll call in a day or so.’

But when he did she didn’t pick-up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 13

The day after David Bowie died was a Tuesday so Ash was at the Hospital for the Hub Group.

Somehow he had not bought any drugs, or Legal Highs, or drank. Mainly because he could not get any, but such is life and like he’d said to the group I’m still breathing, I’m still functioning, still on the daily dispense and still going to the Hub group every week. He’d been walking about Culter, down to the River, or over Ardbeck Moor taking a memory card full of photos, he’d got back into the new novel he’d started a couple of years earlier and had even applied for a job at the Oxfam Bookshop in Town.  In fact, to his own surprise he’d actually painted some of his house and had finished some drawings and paintings that he’d started four years earlier.

For the last two weeks Martin the Psychotherapist had joined the group and they’d been doing some Psychodrama.  The first day of this Ash had quickly exited the Group the first time this was done with the redhead, tall and freckly pale with long legs like silk on the touch of his eyes and an older woman from Seaton.  He was pretty sure he was madly in love/lust with the redhead and the woman from Seaton was like his Mother. But, over the next couple of weeks love/lust turned to hate/lust and despite the long redness of her hair, freckles that he would play dot to dot with and those legs, she he concluded, was no longer hotter than his daughter.

This Tuesday, the day after David Bowie died Martin asked them to think of a photograph that they were to use in the Psychodrama. Even when Martin asked if Ash had picked a photo and he’d replied he was still flicking through them, he knew at once which one he was going to use. Lara and him with their hobbit feet on Cataline Beach, with Jasper, Vers old dog.  When Martin asked for volunteers to re-enact the picture using other members of the group Ash said he’d go for it and took centre Stage.

‘Now,’ Martin said, ‘tell us about what the picture looks like and choose the group members to be the other people in the picture.’

‘Ok, well it’s me and Lara and Jasper the dog and we’re on Cataline beach as it’s my 40^th Birthday, we’re standing in triangular tableaux and there’s lots of food out of shot that Veronica had made.’

‘Pick someone to be Lara.’

Ash wasn’t going to pick the redhead as that would smack too much of favouritism.

‘And Jasper.’

One of the other women in the group said she wanted to be Jasper and he picked the other love/lust member of the group, a quiet, almost mute blonde who all in all was probably a bit hotter than his daughter, but only slightly.

‘Where do you want them to stand?’

‘Like I said we’re in a triangle shape. Lara’s in a rock pool with bare feet and Jaspers in front looking at the food, chicken and salad cream sandwiches and pies my sister made.

‘She took the photo?’

‘Yes.’

‘So for a moment,’ Martin said, ‘tell us how you feel in the photograph.’

‘Well I’m happy as it’s my 40^th Birthday, and I made the choice to go to Cataline.’

‘Why did you want to go to Cataline?’

‘Well I went out with lassie in Glasgow called Cat before I ended up in Kingseat Hospital. My Dad and Mum took me there around the same time.  I asked him just to piss him...’

‘So, how are you feeling now?’

‘Well’ I’m happy and I’ve got no shoes on in it, when I look at the photo I always call it the hobbit feet pic.  Her little ones. My big ones.’

‘Why are you happy?’

‘It’s such a sunny day in July and I feel so free, my hair’s longer and darker and she’s happy too, even the dog seems to be smiling,’

‘Ok, that’s good. Now I want you to move Lara from her position and you stand there and be Lara.’

‘Hello,’ Ash said trying to sound six and rubbed Jasper’s head.  The woman playing the dog was neither a love/lust or hate/lust object, he wasn’t sure what she was. Jasper barked at the undesignated plate of sandwiches.

‘So, Lara do you know why you’re called Lara?’                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

‘Yes, after the Julie Christie character in Dr Zhivago.’

‘Does your Dad tell you about it?’

‘’Yes he goes on about it all the time to everyone.’ Martin stopped Ash/Lara from launching into his Dr Zhivago routine.

‘So are you having a good day?’

‘Yes, it’s great!’

‘Why?’

‘It’s so hot and there so much food I know there will be some cake and I want to dance in the water.’

‘Why?’

‘Well I’m having an extra day seeing Daddy as it’s his birthday.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m six. There was a deer on the road on the way here.’

‘A deer?’

‘Yes it jumped right in front of the car, we almost hit it, and that would’ve spoilt Daddy’s Birthday if Auntie Veronica had hit it.’

‘Did she hit it?’

‘No.’

‘That’s fine then.’

‘So, do you like Auntie Veronica?’

‘Yes, I think so she has lots of great cuddly toys and a cool bedroom with a massive wall mirror, but daddy only shouts when she’s with us.’

‘Did he shout today?’

‘No.’

‘Is he enjoying himself?’

‘’I think he wants to dance about in the water too.’

Ash must’ve done something, made some facial expression, something changed that Martin noticed because he suddenly asked in a different voice as if wasn’t talking to Lara but the gnawed soul inside Ash:

‘Has something happened?’

And Ash remembered.  He didn’t want to talk about it, and thankfully Martin quickly moved on.

‘Now Ash I want someone to be you. Move out of the picture and put someone in your place.’

‘OK.’ He picked the beardy guy.

‘Now you’re out of the picture and I want you to speak to the Ash there.’

‘What?’

‘Just speak to him.’

‘OK.’

‘Yes,’ Martin urged.

Ash said, easily forgetting that moment of awful remembrance:

‘Well, I don’t know, I’m sorry. Well you managed to make it to fifty, you might have fucked up so many things, quit things and sometimes given up, but you’re still alive and you don’t always fuck, sometimes stick at things and keep going and you don’t run away back to London, you keep going and you still keep trying. Er, I’m sorry...’

‘That’s OK, don’t apologise. Now swap places, go back into the picture and the beardy guy can come out again. Talk to him from the picture as if you were talking to you now,’

‘This is confusing.’ Ash said. (There was something he’d forgotten.)

He went back into the triangle on the hot, hot day in July and spoke to the beardy guy being his Fifty year old self.

‘Hey man what have you done to your hair? You should just chill, you look like you really could do with a drink. Hey don’t be so sad, you should be here.’

The beardy guy smiled.

Jasper barked.

‘Everything is so beautiful in the heat; man the sun doesn’t shine like that anymore.’

Ash heard a voice in his head.  He didn’t’ know whose voice it was, it could’ve been Martin, or the redhead, or Lara, or Vers, or William, even Dr Straven or all of them:

‘But it does. The sun does shine like that still.’

And Ash knew, for once he knew that it did. And does still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14

Just a day or so after the Brexit Referendum Ash got drunk with a Bank Holiday weekend’s worth of pills in his system. On the whole he managed to not remember much of the nights drinking, and absentmindedly upon awakening  he wondered who had been in his house with him; his wallet was gone as well as a large quantity of small change that had filled the old coffee jars scattered just as absent-mindedly about the house.

 

Quickly he cancelled his card with the bank, and he delightedly discovered that he hadn’t lost all his change.  Hah! Probably couldn’t carry it all.  He started to count. Typically the bank was closed until Tuesday so he’d have to make do. He bagged up and set the bags brazenly on the coffee table. They can come back and try to take this, he thought angrily, and then the hangover and the paranoia shocked Ash like a rollercoaster ride.

Why did he have to have gone out? Why?

Apart from Brexit things had been going well, well sort of. Ash had got a part in a play in the local theatre group and yet despite his best efforts could not remember the meagre lines, unerringly getting them hopelessly mangled at the rehearsals, compounded by the so called clusterfuck he made of moving around parts of the set during an important scene.

Apart from that he got on well with one of the actresses who played the character of his wife. They were the only smokers in the cast, both being sniffed at by Public Enemy No 1. Of course Ash fell in love with the girl who played a ghost; she had such a beautiful voice when she spoke in character.  Ash surprised himself by going with them all to a pub down the road, being sociable and not having a pint, or six. Afterwards, at home, he was hyper and worked on a big picture he had started, that was pinned up on the bedroom wall, on a large sheet of paper that took up most of the wall. Later as the sun was rising he worked on his book. It was almost finished.

Then one Saturday morning, at an impromptu rehearsal, the play was cancelled.  It was the village’s Gala Day and, unshaven and unshowered, he kept ahead of the parade of vintage cars and local groups’ floats. Once they overtook him Ash saw in the lead car the retired doctor that he had seen a couple of times at the Health Centre when he first moved here. Ash waved a smile at the group in the car and sped on ahead of the ambling cars and floats, yet only a step or two ahead as if he raced happiness and play. He skipped the corner and went diagonally across The Ploughman’s car park.  He got a smirk/hate look from a couple of drunken guys, so he sped on, a little wound up and caught up with the parade that slowly slithered up  turning towards the Playing Field where the Gala was being held and Ash was soon once again at the head of the Parade. As the  cars turned again onto the Gala Field Ash carried on up the hill to home, to daily dispense, and a trickster of an idea hidden somewhere about, that he could spend more time searching now he didn’t have to read those lines ever again.

By Christmas Donald was President Elect.

The Man was inaugurated in front of an unsettling bemused global wide audience, some of whom may well have hoped, like Ash, The Final Trump might giggle nervously at the last moment and say ‘really, Ladies and Gentlemen, it was only a joke. Let Hilary have it.’ Please, we wished.

Ash saw his Father over Christmas and New Year and kept his head though all around people were losing theirs.  Lately he’d been going to see him every week and talk him around the ASDA in his wheelchair, and of course walk Maxi across the field in front of the house, throwing her discarded plastic bottles to chase and mangle boisterously.

Lara was sixteen. What the hell had he done for the first sixteen years of the new Millennium? But mostly the massacred brain cells had no answer for him. Despite the new cigarette packaging, photos of death and dying, babies’ dummies with cigarettes attached, other stark metaphorical images staring up from the ash dusted coffee table, with more warnings than the border between North and South Korea, Ash still chain-smoked.

In the end he finished the big picture, before he finished his book. By Easter he had taken down the picture and pinned up another large sheet of paper.  But before he began to draw he cast down his pencils, his mind in the unwinnable conflict of writing and pictures and tried, for night after night, to write a poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 15

I t was the final Thursday of the month and Ash found himself, as if  a friendly hand took him, to the Poetry group on Belmont Street over the wet cobbles slick with light from the bars and streetlights. Slain’s Castle looked like a soot black derelict. Ahead he saw the Art Gallery closed now after two years of renovation.  Ash hoped that the galley would reopen soon. He missed going there, It had been always been a thing he did when he was skint. Ash would wander around the various galleries of different forms of Art, then go to the Library and check out too many books. Afterwards he would sit on the green benches in Union Terrace garden have a slow burning cigarette if he hadn’t spent all his ciggie rations on booze.

Anyway Ash turned up the short steps through the yellow doorway of Books and Beans, the walls papered with posters up the flight of stars into the main part of the book shop which had resigned itself to being a coffee shop complete with Wi-Fi, dusty with the books some never sold since the first day Ash went there to sell some books, and sadly probably never would. Like permanent collage coloured walls.

Recently when he had come here for a coffee he’d sit and read Wuthering Heights, crossly grabbing it from the shelf bemoaning the almost total inaccessibility to the bookshelves. The place was more a canteen, he’d storm to himself. Ash would find a place by one of the windows and look at the hungry pigeons on the ledge flying down to the cobbles and across the road to the closed door of the pub club place that he was too old to enter.

Just like the last time he had been to the evening Poetry Group the assembled poets had come in a large number and he found a seat nearest the door.  Before he could put down his bag and take off his black coat the MC started talking about Tibetan Poetry, then introduced a translator guy who spoke of the forms of writing Tibetan Poets used.  Ash had started to stop listening.  He had seen her, the Guinevere girl in her thick jacket and boots that she had on the last time he’d seen her on the cliffs overlooking Dunnater Castle.

Of course it had been inevitable that they would meet again, here. Ash had heard of the Guinevere girl the times he’d actually gone to writing groups in the city, but what in the beginning had been a golden certainty that were parts of some story, but regret that he hadn’t stuck in the groups and had stopped  going altogether n ever meeting her and that particular story was never written. Almost as if he’d always shunned happiness. Now as he sat there looking at her dark hair and her shoulders, he saw that he had left it too late. I’ve changed, she’s probably changed. Jesus I can’t even talk to her.

Ash, however, had come prepared and took a surreptitious quick sip of the half bottle of vodka in the pocket of his jacket and waited for the translator to finish talking.  As on the last Thursday of the month he met Helen. Ash and the Guinevere girl each got a chance to read a poem, and at the end she followed Ash down the stair.

 

That that’s past and passing

that that’s still to pass us by were the

 greatest gift they ever  gave.

To you, my tenderest tendril

a thousand thoughts away

or in the corner of these eyes.

She waves to me from her teenage time,

saying both hello and good bye.

My tenderest tendril always young

the loveliest song I’ve ever sung,

that smile forgives reveals me real again.

Both in, at last, the same time zone

across the table from each other

where seconds are lost, or found, my dear, my love:

that that’s past and passing

that that’s still to pass us by

are the only gifts I ever gave

and never threw away.

 

 Ash was standing at the edge of the cliff looking over Dunnater Castle iced in snow like a Birthday Cake on a rumpled dark table cloth of sea.

She stood beside him.  Funnily her name was also Helen.  Helen had been helping him with writing he’d started about King Arthur.  He’d even started talking horse riding lessons as research. He’d explained the original idea, the initial tributaries in flood of the exiting of ideas and Helen had helped him focus more, getting the whole book down while ideas are still fresh.

He smiled at Helen; every time he looked at her was like a surprise.  However could she be here?  He was as happy as he had been on Lara’s tenth birthday. He took his hand from Helen’s and looked down at the wintry sea clashing against the cliffs where obstinate seagulls swayed in the air. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and before Ash lit up he tossed the packet into the air, they seemed to hover ahead of him held up by the wind, cartoon-like, then fell swiftly and soon vanished into the dark sea and were swept away beyond the Castle high on its island.

She kissed Ash, his Helen, and they turned their back on the castle and the sea, with no regret, because they would see it again some Summer’s day when an old magic rises, here where joy is always unexpected and love the only cure, his hand in Helen’s beneath the roof of the world, in her hand precious to Helen as handful of jewels, in her he felt that touch leading him, leaving the snow and sea cliffs behind for new strangers to stare at. Then leave.