Left foot, right foot, seventeen steps. The sun makes metal shine, I squint to avoid it, take a left. Twenty steps down the stairs; grey stone, slight dust. Someone screams, there is the wheeze of an bike wheel that needs oiling, a fire alarm, screeching brakes and the sun hangs & lurks. A mass of footsteps behind me, ascending—I hear them flee. My eyesight works in flashes, my hand shakes, cigarette smoke.
Descent.
Hospital rooms full of wilting flowers, tasteless food. I watched the snow from my window, the seasons change, my beard trimmed. Gloved orderlies and doctors. Held back. Morphine, fentanyl, Demerol, diladaud. My mother talked and left.
I had a nurse bathe me, she washed under my balls and stared into my eyes. She was night-shift, mostly, and I would talk to her about what happened. That is, she would ask and I would repeat myself. Days blur. I used to be a smackhead, I told her. She said she didn’t believe me, despite the cracked shivers down my arms, hangdog expression, IV drip.
Trains are are a novelty. Down from the street, money jangles in my pocket. We watch the city drift past in broken pentameter, thoughts jumble. I read my father’s books—war, cowboys, communists, cliche. All it is is all it is, here’s my stop. Tickets, cigarettes.
We go to meetings and chainsmoke at the steps at the rear. Coffee, biscuits. We all look fucked. Sarah, her name is, she is relentless, never stops talking. The youngest. I am second. Broken syntax.
Sarah skips meetings halfway through and I follow her, four zone travelcards, we skip through the alleys and eyes squint shut. Her hand is cold to the touch, skin sickly. Anaemic white.
Drink with me, she says, and her hand shakes and I watch her eyes dart. She’s afraid we were followed; her words overlap. Blonde hair, black eyes, smudged make-up. Breathe. I drink orange juice, vodka. She paid.
There was an intervention, I told the group. Metal folding chairs, grey tile, ammonia scent. My teeth stain yellow, prolonged use. My uncles and a cousin had swept me from my haunts and sandwiched me in the rear of the car. Talk radio. The loneliness of the late night caller. Detox, psych ward, parental supervision.
I am 22.
So Sarah drinks and she has her flat, trust fund bank account. We fuck on the floor, all rugs and floorboards, I pin down her arms above her head. Impersonal nouns. She has no books or music. I hear the taps run and she fixes me a drink. It’s dusk as I leave.
My mother works night and I enter an empty house; the pipes rattle and talk. My childhood bedroom, the branches of the garden tree shadowed like claws and hawks. Nicotine breath expels greyish blue. I still remember how it felt.
First time, I was fifteen. Hadn’t even had sex yet, barely even touched a tit. It was Michelle’s house, year younger, a complete slut. I’d gone there with a friend. I just snorted the dust from a mirror, left in a bubble. Let’s not glorify or romanticise, that’s all it was.
My dreams are fitful, I wake jumpy, 4am.
I was a strange child. The enchanted boy, my grandmother called me.
Sadness and boredom stayed in the quiet rooms where I lived alone with shadows. Sometimes it felt like they had taken me for my father, that the right corner of shadow would find him somewhere, rolling his dice between fingers. But the winter was framed in frozen windows and the light marched along barren hilltops. Sometimes his nearness was like a hand on my shoulder but I was always spinning on my heels too slowly, always missing.
Sarah is topless with my cock in her mouth in the sterile bathrooms on the second floor. I don’t know what else this building is used for, with it’s succession of closed doors and polished floor tiles but we scamper up the stairs like idiotic children, out of breath and pressed for time. It rains outside and I hear it against the windows.
We take meetings and trains, left foot right foot. Stairwells and alleys.
Paul Lynch lives and writes in England.