Evening is an orange smudge of fog and sunsets. My eyelids can’t stay open. Man, I’m tired. I have been walking around in circles all day, scared of bumping into myself. I keep on opening beers and then leaving them undrunk on the kitchen table. It’s a crying shame. It’s very easy to sneer at self-help books and therapy or counsellors. So I’ve decide to carry on doing just that. It certainly beats changing my life.

I can’t sleep so I lie in bed and read the TV guide - mainly films on satellite that I won’t get to see. Satellite television makes me unduly sad, I don’t know why. You can't get cable in my flat. No unsightly satellite dishes allowed. I hate not having it - and it’s getting worse now, what with cable and digital TV, there is so much top-quality programming just passing me by. Live sports, premier league football. I dream of the stuff. And the channels are multiplying, they’re breeding in the night. I wake up and there’s ten more channels to choose from: cartoons, twenty four hour news, MTV, MTV2, MTV Bass, MTV ME, the whole shebang. And I’m missing it all, stuck here on planet earth with five channels and the remote control. Even the Italian fucking football has disappeared. It's just me and indoor bowls in the afternoon. It’s not fair.
My head is full of popping and fizzing, like a soft drink advert. It feels as though my existence is entirely sponsored by Coca-Cola, such is the effervescing in my head. I can’t sleep - you try sleeping when all you can hear is the distant rattling of paper-clips and tube trains. I’m 29-years-old. I can retire in 35 years and buy a nest in the country and take pot-shots at passing tourists. I already feel like an old man. I’m sick of wanking and sex seems out of the question at the moment. No, sex is not a friend of mine. Indeed, sex will not even look me straight in the eye anymore. It is all just rumour and office gossip: sex is something that happens to other people, like car-crashes or winning the lottery.
I pop a sleeping pill, one of the cheap, over-the-counter, non prescription types that has the advantage of not upsetting my stomach or my ulcer or my dear sensitive head. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t send me to sleep. No, the sleeping pill does work, it doesn’t help at all, except for giving me some moral high ground from which I can sneer at the pharmaceutical industry. One day I shall compose a list of all the global industries that have betrayed me throughout my life and believe me: the pharmaceutical industry will be top. Potions, lotions, creams, pills, injections, tonics, enemas, suppositories... I’ve taken the lot and none of them have helped: I’m still me. Even worse, a night like tonight you can really notice that my hair is growing thin. I don’t look good...I mean I always expected to look like my father, but I seem to have skipped a generation and gone straight for my granddad. At the moment, lying in bed, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between me and my grandfather, and he’s dead, so I’ve got to be doing something wrong.
Six months ago I gave up smoking and I’ve felt terrible ever since. I tell you, never give up smoking. Your body won’t forgive you. Sure, at first your chest might feel looser and your bowels will no longer clog up. You might get rid of that ten-year lingering cough and that tired hang-dog expression, but don’t let that fool you: your body wants smoke. And so, pretty soon your knees will go and you’ll trap your fingers in the door of a taxi. You’ll shit yourself in the street. You’ll cum too soon in bed or not come at all. You’ll get nosebleeds when you speak in public. All these symptoms can be indirectly attributed to abandoning tobacco. Your body will get revenge. It always does.
Anyway, I gave up smoking for the same reason I started smoking, to annoy the people around me. Fifteen years ago when the mid Eighties health fad kicked in (and everyone was smearing yoghurt on their arse, knitting their own Ryvita and jogging to work with their new-born kids) I decided to start smoking out of pettiness or hatred or whatever. You have to understand that I was never a social smoker. I was always very much an anti-social smoker, and so now that all my contemporaries have become dizzy London media whore with a fag in one hand, a cocktail in the other and a kilo of gak holding their nostrils apart, I have decided to jack it in and start breathing pure air again. It doesn’t feel good to give up it, it is very much a sacrifice. Don’t let anyone tell you that there is no longer such a thing as human sacrifice. Sheer nonsense: I’m human and I make a sacrifice every time I get out of bed. I sacrifice my sleep, my sobriety, my sex-life, my money. I am a walking paragon of resentful virtue. Or I would be if I did any walking. I don’t seem to be getting anywhere at the moment.
In between the buzzing of my faulty conscience, the crackling of my headache and the insidious whisperings of my self-esteem you would think there was no space for external noise. But you would be wrong.
For I am blessed not only with a sleepless body but also sleepless neighbours. They moved in four years ago and set about on publicly constructing the perfect model family. This involves loud sex and loud hammering. The sex I can forgive, but the DIY really gets me down. For a year now, every moment of silence has been punctuated by the rat-at-at of a nail-gun, the sub-sonic buzzing of a chainsaw, the clanging clatter of hammer against nail. It only ever starts when I stop. If I should pause for a moment when I emerge from the shower, they are waiting with pliers and a monkey-wrench. When I switch off the radio, I am assaulted by the wailing of their dogs pining for supper or the hapless mother barking at the ungodly brats. And now I cannot park my car outside the house because there is another builder's van and two hatchbacks - with matching roof-racks and “Give My Child A Chance” stickers. I can't sit in the garden and now I cannot lie on the roof because their delightful mock-Tudor extension overlooks my terrace and houses the dregs of the family not allowed to roam freely on the lower floors. Not content with breeding at a rate which embarrasses passing Catholics, they seem to have imported elderly grandparents and long-lost uncles to fill out the house and save on the cost of babysitters. I feel like I am living in a waking nightmare in which the volume control of my existence has gone haywire and every act occurs as loudly as possible.
In the heatwave of summer I would leave my bedroom window open. That was a mistake. Every morning I would be awoken at sunrise not by the gentle chirrup of birdsong but by the screaming of sugar-crazed toddlers, shooed outside to cause chaos on the terrace which now faces my window. The noise haunts me. On bad nights it reduces me to tears and muffled, whining screams. It feels like sonic rape, the screech of tricycle and scateboard follows me around even at work.
It's affecting my head. Silence sounds oddly unnatural to me, as though it is only the nasty prelude to a crying child or a barking dog; When I'm alone I find myself making my own special noise, an awkward clunking and squawking, just to fill in the blanks. The neighbours feel like a constant battering ram against my skull: the noise a reminder of their ever-spreading territory. They may as well just come over and piss on my carpets and get it over and done with. They want to hurt me, I know it. I can feel it in my gut. They must be trying to get to me - at night they leave their dogs chained in the front room - they bark incessantly and drive me underneath my covers. (Underneath the pillows, underneath the sheets, underneath the bed). I tell you... the neighbours, they’re affecting me badly. I bite my hands and I can’t focus on the garden without feeling sick. The husband - I still don’t know his name, it seems to change whenever I ask - has built a shed in the bottom of the garden and commutes to and from the house every 10 minutes to check in case the children have collapsed under the weight of their own vocal chords. I hate them. At night I listen very intently and I can hear them walking round the kitchen. The husband is the worst. I think I can hear his beard growing, an ultrasonic scratching like nails on a blackboard. I can’t move away from the bedroom for fear that they are watching and waiting, ready to bang pots and pans and scare me off. When I walk out in the street the kids point and jeer. I feel ill. My head is a football. Go on, kick it.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that here I am, all on my own, lonely and sliding towards premature middle-age. And of course I'm just jealous of this happy little clan with their friends and their dinner-parties and their daily adventures. Well, close... but you’re still full of shit. I am not like that. I am not like that at all. I am not jealous; I am quite content to fall apart in my own squalid boredom, because I do it quietly. I do everything quietly - it's my new commandment. I’m going to sneak into hotels and scrawl it into the bibles: Whatever you do in life, thou shalt do it quietly. Too fucking right.
(Don’t listen to me. I don’t make any sense to myself, so I don’t know why you have invited yourself in here to eavesdrop. If you’re snooping around looking for some wisdom then look elsewhere. There’s no room in the inn, you’ll have to sleep in the barn. My head hurts, it feels like a watermelon. Like I said, I’m full of shit, but you’re the one listening. Let me make one thing clear, these words, these spaces, this incessant jabbering of nouns and verbs - it isn’t art, it’s attrition. The second I shut up I start thinking and when I start thinking the serious problems start to set in.)
It is 3am and time has started going backwards. The pillows, these damp sheets, the old wallpaper. They all seem like little reminders of the my debt to the twentieth century. My little pact with progress that keeps me alive and keeps me awake. I have spent enough money in my time... you would imagine that I would have invested a little in the security of my future. But no, everything I own is a short-term investment, a shot at getting through the day. Sometimes I see CDs in shops reduced to half-price, and even though I already own them, I feel compelled to buy them again, just so that I can feel like a man who bought a bargain.
I inspect the bric-a-brac of my existence: compact discs I never play, food that I never eat, clothes I never wear, all bought to soothe my consumer conscience and to burn a hole in my ever-shrinking pocket. I am pissing it all away on little one-night-stands at Ikea and HMV. What would my wife (my ex-wife) say about me? She would say that I was an overweight sack of excuses and one-liners that in a certain light might look like a bit like a man. And I wouldn’t disagree, except to piss her off.
I should have a drink, a small glass of Scotch or something, but I don’t like to mix it with the sleeping pills. What a coward, eh?

I always dreamt of a television in my bedroom. It seemed like a good ambition as a child. Never aim too high. A bedroom telly will do - no squabbles about the remote control, no need to worry whether the family might not want to watch the golf, no need to be discreet with the soft-core French films that passed for pornography in my early teens. A TV in my bedroom seemed like a very great thing indeed. When I stayed over with friends - Larry or Harry or Gary or whatever else they weren’t called - they always had TVs in their bedroom. I would be awed into silence by the little box in the corner that beamed out happiness 24 hours a day. The littlest miracle.
Now, here I am 20 years later and I have got myself my own TV with remote control, teletext and DVD player. But I can’t watch it in bed, it doesn’t feel right. At 5am I often crawl out of bed and make a pot of tea, sit in my dressing gown in the kitchen and watch the TV that sits on top of the fridge; that feels more natural than lying in bed and watching the telly. Either I can’t sleep in the same room as a television, or I can’t watch television in the same room as a bed, I can’t work out which. Either way, my childhood dreams have been thwarted. I listen to the radio at night, and am happy to doze off with it playing in the background, but there seems to be something criminal about going to sleep with the telly on, as though the newsreaders and talk-show hosts and American cops will be watching me as I sleep. I get paranoid about that, that they’ll steal things from the bedroom when I’m sleeping. Or that they’ll kill me whilst I’m dreaming, I would if I had the chance. And this is coming from me, who works in TV, the mystery should have washed away by now. My television dream has boiled down to a single, simple practicality. If I want to watch TV, I have to wear my glasses. If I want to go to sleep, I have to take them off. I get angry when I think about that too much.
The sniffle of an invisible cat, the rumble of distant trains, the shouts and whispers of the high-street. All the noises of the night, the soundtrack to my sleeplessness. You ever think about the patterns that appear before your eyes before you go to sleep? I do. They’re not just random blobs and flashes, they must mean something. I don’t know what they signify yet, I haven’t so far cracked the code - the intermittent visions of a thousand tiny pin-pricks on the wrong sides of my eyes, or the cascading set of multicoloured ball-bearings which sometimes roll at me as I think of sleep. I guess they must be there for a reason, other than a brain tumour or dandruff on the eyes. They must have some cosmic significance; they remind me of those ink-blot tests you get in Hollywood psycho-dramas: Those Rorschach tests which the bespectacled police shrink will show to the serial killer in order to defrost his brain. As the patterns flash before my eyelids like so many errant blood-vessels , I think I can figure out all the shapes and formats, the strings and squares which make up my little existence. Sometimes they appear as animals, sometimes as friendly faces, often if I concentrate they seem to absorb the shape of vintage cars, all polished headlights and gleaming running boards. I don’t know why. All too often it works the wrong way for me: I see the real things in life as shapeless blobs, ink blots on my spectacles. Everything blurs into a painful mess. That’s the curse of a short-sighted childhood.

Most nights when I can’t sleep I rehearse magazine interviews and prepare mental quotes that I can imagine on the dustjackets of hardback books. Black and white photos to appear in Sunday supplements and film magazines. Telephone interviewers asking for my opinion on today’s events in the Gulf, or my weekly column in which I muse upon my top-ten films. The media spotlight shines upon my toothy grin. If I still haven’t dropped off I rewind the events of the day and replay them in the third person, framing them with the appropriate comments and dialogue, writing my own happy endings. All the fat and fact that clogs up my head gets the fictional treatment, played widescreen and Technicolor for my imagination and my flagging self-esteem. Everyone does it, dreaming of stardom and success and an escape from the dreary responsibility of waking and cooking and breathing. Tonight I skip the theatricals and take another pill. Like I said, they’re pretty weak.
I regret everything. I regret getting up in morning and going to sleep at night. I regret marrying my wife and I regret divorcing her. I regret coffee, tea and daytime TV. I regret smiling when I should have frowned. I regret the London Underground. If I could go back and change it all I would do it in an instant. Sometimes I even regret things I haven’t done yet, in anticipation of my future failures. People tell me - often pub-philosophers or football pundits on the telly - that you only regret things you didn’t do rather than things you did do. Well I regret both. I regret things that I know I couldn’t have avoided, and that aren’t even my fault. I regret the fact that I was a gutless child, clinging to my mother and the safety of home. I should have been out in adventure playgrounds, grazing my knees and wrestling with the older boys. But that was never my style. All those idiots in the papers, giving their interviews and their smiling photos, they always roll out the same lines: Regrets? No. Without my mistakes, I wouldn’t be the man I am now. Well, I don’t want to be the man I am now, so you can take my mistakes and you can stick them. I would happily swap my life for a fresh one, all unblemished potential and free from the constant weight of becoming a middle-aged nobody. There is definitely something to be said for self-pity. It isn’t self-respect, but it’s cheaper and from a distance you can’t tell the difference.
It is quarter past four in the morning and I am still not asleep. To be more accurate, I am awake. So I am thinking about myself, like there was ever anything else to think about. And don’t tell me to grow up, I have been growing up all my life and look where it has gotten me. I’ll tell you something, you are never to old to be totally wrong about everything. You want to win something in life, you put your money on the young guy. The older I get the more opinions I hear in my head and the less I recognise the one that’s telling me the truth. So, yeah, in with all the noise and verbal diarrhoea and the broken half-arsed soundbites you may suspect I’m still living the life of some spoiled teenager with too much time on my hands and too many hormones. Well, that’s a cheap shot. I got the same life as you, the same responsibilities, the same loves, the same mortgages and anxieties. I’m just a little less enthusiastic about the whole maturing business. Be honest, who are you doing it for? Your friends? Your family? The little invisible camera that follows you around at night? You’re doing it for someone, but it isn’t yourself. When you’re alone and you’ve stripped away the kids and the pine furnishing and the art-prints on the wall and the practical car, you tell me that you believe in all that shit any more than me. You tell me that you don’t think life is an empty lie full of empty people, empty thoughts and ugly endings. You tell me that if you could get away with the rape and the murder and the money that you wouldn’t go for it. Well you can tell me but I don’t believe it.. No, I don’t think so. You want maturity and a beautiful wife and the fulfilling job and a healthy dose of red wine and pasta then you’ve got to buy into all that whole society-media supplement shit, that we’re all moving in the right direction, that everything is going to be alright. Well, forgive me for my immaturity, but I don’t think so. Everything is not going to be alright. Everything is going to be wrong. Everything is going to gnaw away at my ankles like an angry little beaver. Life is going to catch up with me and life is going to kill me and I have to confess that I’m not at all happy with the deal. My life is empty. Jesus, I keep buying furniture but this room still doesn’t look lived in. Where is my chariot of fucking fire? It’s so hot in here. Some nights when I can’t sleep I switch ends of the bed, just to get a different perspective on life, but tonight I’ve crawled around the bed so much I’ve exhausted the novelty. I can’t tell one end from the other.
So I never did get to mature. Mature. What a word. Like a fine wine, like good cheese, like fruit falling off the trees in autumn. No, I skipped all that and just started rotting. I have mildew and dry-rot and the house is only ten years old. What hope is there for the future if your house won’t stand up straight and look you in the face. It sees me and starts crying.
I reluctantly get up and pace around the bedroom, like a paunchy boxer looking for a shadow to hit. All the porn is well-read by now and stored away in a box beneath the bed for posterity and my children. My heirloom. I hit the bathroom. Inside the cabinet are the bottles and boxes that make up my proudest collection. The tablets are lined up in pairs by the mirror, like they’re waiting for Moses to come down and read them: tablets for migraines, for stress, for stomach complaints, for constipation, for diarrhoea, for depression, for anxiety, for happiness, for richer, for poorer, for better or for worse in sickness and in health. I am married to medicine. My happiest moments are at the doctors, when my throat is being probed or my temperature is being taken or when I am being asked to slowly exhale. When I am asked to remove my shirt or slowly bend over, its all so very sensual. I love it, I really do. All they ask of me is that I be ill, and I so rarely disappoint. I feel quite proud of my contribution to the upkeep of the health service.
I splash my face with cold water and wash behind my ears. I can hear a slow regular tapping coming from the water boiler in the airing-cupboard. I guess that I am still awake. I talk about myself a lot, don’t I? You find me a woman and maybe I’ll shut up.
Women, where do I begin? At the beginning? Is that too easy for you?
Women. You try to grow up for them. Try to prove that you’re not just some kid trying to talk your way into their pants. You care. You think about important issues. You’re on the side of the angels. You have hidden depths. You have the ability to relate to a fellow human being on an emotional level without flinching. You can cook. You can change your underwear without parental prompting. You can smile at adversity. Touching, no? I’m painting a beautiful picture of the guy I tried to be. It didn’t work out. I always thought there would be a moment when women ceased to be pornography and became human, when statistics and possessions and power gave way to love and tenderness and compassion. Well, needless to say, the statistics won. There was never a day of revelation, never a magic moment when love wove its spell upon my loins and they stirred to the melody of contentment and mutual appreciation. No, maybe my heart wanted love, and maybe my mind wanted approval, but my cock still wanted the amphetamine buzz of pornography: the slags and whores and prick-teases of my under-fed imagination were still running the show. No matter how I rearranged my early girlfriends, how I posed them and framed them with my pornographic eye, something was missing, something cheap and nasty and compelling. The vulgar glossiness of the intrusive photograph, the silent hatred that dripped from the hard-core flick, that was what I wanted. The sad truth of the matter was that love did not turn me on. It soothed me and touched me, but it left me soft as butter. Only hate ever made me hard. The brutal truth. I suppose that is the real beauty of porn; it leaves you hard and it leaves you alone.
Pornography has never abandoned me and I have never had the hard to abandon it. Even when - in a fit of teenage conscience - I burnt the magazines, the pornography was still there: in my mind, in my bed, in my drunken leer, in the parts of my mind I didn’t let show at dinner-parties, in the lists and the money and the dirt beneath my nails. No, love had offered itself to me and I had turned around and walked nervously away. No love. No woman, no beautiful wife. No children playing in the beautiful garden. I know I made the wrong decision, but it was the only thing I could do. I had no choice. You hear these new fathers being interviewed about their babies and they give you all that shit about childbirth putting their life into perspective and their spiritual awakening and how they really didn’t know the meaning of love before it, and everything crumbles into this easy soft -focus portrait of conjugal thirtysomething bliss, a million miles away from the static and the mobile phones and the incessant bleating of the neighbours and the panic-attacks on the tube. I don’t buy it, they’re still looking after number one. Don’t get me wrong, I try my best to fake the lifestyle, the easy tan and the linen suits, the Tuscan holidays and the air of benevolent success. The good grace to forgive my enemies, the tear in my eyes as I watch the foreign famines and the landmines. The Motown, the Beatles, the Gershwin, the soundtrack to the advert for a better life. The designer shirts, the sensible haircut. The look of a man who has the measure of life. But I always end up with the junk food and the bottle of generic cola, the pizza crusts and the tracksuit trousers. The second cheapest wine on the menu. The suspect smells of desperation and porn. I can’t fake the smell of success. So don’t call me immature, I’ve just not got the appetite to swallow the whole lie at once. Well, that’s life - as they say on TV. I don’t blame life. I blame myself. Oh, don’t quote me on any of this, I may well change my mind in the morning. It’s back to bed for me, I’ve had my time off for good-behaviour.
The curtains are dead in the air. There is no breeze tonight, just the hot dust of the early hours and the insects on the window-sill. London is gnawing it’s teeth in it’s sleep. My head is in my hands, my knees are up against my chin. The sweat is slick against the sheets like I’ve pissed myself. I can’t have children. Yes, you heard me. I’m not saying it again. No, I’m not asking you to cry for me or consider me in a warmer, more sympathetic light. Low-sperm count. I am firing blanks. You’ve seen it all before on the daytime-soaps and the afternoon talk-shows. In all honesty, it was at least a partial relief, I have never wanted kids. My sex-life was always ruined by the fear that I’d knock my girlfriends up. It killed off my marriage, but that was already on the cards before we found out. So please don’t get your hankies out, this is a comedy, not a tragedy. I am very definitely playing this role for laughs, hamming it up for the audience. I can hear the constant clapping, it sounds like hammers in my head.
I am not even a very good misogynist. I quite like women deep down. Oh, don’t worry, as a gender I hate them, but as individuals they tend too be rather nice. At least as clever as men, and better manners, which is a big deal in my book. I am a better misanthropist than I am a misogynist. I hate them all. Well, not always. Underneath my mattress there is a photo of my ex-wife. Stupid dumb bitch. I keep it there because I am sentimental. There are photos of her naked too, hidden behind the closet, but that’s another matter. No, this is just a little portrait of her smiling, my favourite. I think maybe that’s why I can’t sleep. You know the story of the princess and the pea, how she can sense the pea is there, fucking her up. Well, maybe that’s the deal with the photo. Only I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of it. It’s not like I dig it out every evening and shake my fist at God or anything. I have my dignity.
I kill another sleeping pill. I am drying up, my throat is full of phlegm and dried up tears. All the words I have eaten are sticking in my gullet and choking me up. Damn you. Oprah Winfrey and Ricki Lake, where are you now? I should be crying on your shoulders like a sick little puppy. Oprah and Ricki and me in bed with the remote control and a bucket of chicken wings and fries. That’s therapy. That’s it ladies, take your clothes off, don’t be scared. You shouldn’t hate each other, there’s only me to be scared of. That’s it, snuggle up close. Tell me about your problems, let me inside your heads. It’s alright baby. No, it’s not alright. Nothing will ever be alright again. My head is ringing like it’s New Years Day.

I have now stopped counting up from midnight, and started counting down towards seven, when the alarm will go off. I want it to be summer again, so the nights are shorter. I don’t like getting up. Every morning when I look in the mirror it feels like a fresh insult: God has not improved me in the night. I could stop complaining, but where there hell would that get me? I’ve run out of jokes. I’ve got a million punchlines and a glass jaw. There is something warm and sickly trying to get out of my stomach. My ex-wife is called Sarah, you don’t want to know how much I pay her each month. Love never comes cheap. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all.
Morning is breaking and so am I. The sky is pale and streaked with grey clouds and fading streetlights. I can hear the world yawning. Things aren’t really so bad. Nice house, nice job, nice car, nice nails bitten down to the bone. I have a nice life, I just fill it with bad things. I have a really expensive Anglepoise lamp that makes me happy. Things ain’t all bad. Just me. I could tell you a few stories that would make you like me. They wouldn’t have to be true, but they’d make you smile. Who the hell are you anyway? Get the fuck out off my head, I’m trying to sleep. Money is so lovely, but I know I’m losing it.
Do you ever wonder why life is like this? Why it is all so unhappy? We have so many answers to so many questions and yet when I wake up in the morning I can hardly remember my name. And the worst is yet to come. However bad I feel now, it is cushioned by money and youth and health and all those other great things, so it can only go downhill from now.

Don’t you ever get lonely for the human race? We are so alone out here on planet earth, leaving the lights, the TV and the radio on, in case someone blows up our home in the night. These are all stupid thoughts for my teenage years, they have no place in my new adult life. Everything is under control. I’ve got the brand-new stereo, I’ve got a library full of unread books. I’ve bought myself a little bit of history, a little pile of irreplaceable junk. This is the here and now. This is my life.
I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and trudge downstairs in my underwear. The new day is here, a little light that shines on my pillow. I put the kettle on and fill my mug with coffee. I fish through the laundry-bin for some socks and go upstairs to find my glasses. There is a loose bolt in my stomach, a scraping noise in my ears. I can feel the blood in my face, uneven and sweaty. Little things remind me of her, not some sentimental catalogue of kisses, just the fact that she is still alive somewhere. It doesn’t make me happy, it doesn’t even make me that sad. It just makes me wonder. There’s only me to please and even that seems a little ambitious at the moment.
In theory, you’re supposed to live inside your head. Supposed to stay there and play out all of life’s little roles from behind those flickering eyes. But I live outside my head, I float four or five feet above my head and observe and take notes. I am a one-man spectator sport, waiting for the cue cards and the enthusiastic applause. I am so far away from everything, in constant orbit of my life; I spin above myself, never quite able to get my feet on the ground. I am the first man on the moon and it’s pretty damn lonely up here with no-one for company but Neil and Buzz. Where does all the noise come from? From my head? From my arse? I switch on the stereo and those chords come out slow like honey, swelling as the strings build and those sad notes hit my neck, hit my stomach, hit my lonely little eyes. Nothing feels good anymore, I have sold it all so cheap. Don’t give me any self-help crap about redemption or hope, I am far too clever for that. It’s too late in the day for that: it’s morning.
Things aren’t ever so bad, most people cope.
The table in the lounge is wooden and one leg swings an inch above the carpet. I stuck some card underneath to balance it, but that now seems to have disappeared. I drink my coffee, some expensive new brand that tastes like the cheap stuff, only dearer. What’s a guy to do? All that money, all those years, I thought I could buy my way out of jail.
A walk in the park, the rain against my face. A day spent in the the sunshine, lazing with the insects and the buttercups. A day to smile at the simple pleasure of everyday existence. A day spent indoors waiting for my head to boil over, waiting for the chance to shoot myself down. It makes no difference to me. I expect you’re bored of middle-class angst. I certainly am. I’d start crying, only I wouldn’t know what to do with the moment once it’s ended. That’s the story of my life; a series of disjointed paragraphs that don’t lead me anywhere except the end. I can hear a buzzing in my brain, like the low hum of electricity. Goodbye. Good fucking riddance. Goodbye. Good morning.

I was a different monster every day of the week, except for Sunday. Every morning I would wake to the sound of Mother calling me and I would sit up in bed and wonder what day of the week it was, so that I would know which monster I would be. Then I would perch on the edge of my bed, wrapped in my covers, and start becoming that monster.
On Mondays I was a vampire. My teeth would feel all pointy and I would bite into the end of my pencil during Art, leaving the same marks that a vampire would leave on the necks of his victims. When it was home time and Mother came to fetch me, I would sweep my coat around me like a cloak and shield my eyes from the terrible sun. Mother would make blood-juice from the blender and watch TV with me in the dark tomb of my bedroom. Sometimes we would play shadow puppets with our hands, making the shapes of bats swoop across the walls. Eventually it would be bedtime and Mother would kiss my forehead and she would let me kiss her on the neck, like a vampire would.
When I woke up the next morning it would be Tuesday and I would be a werewolf. I would stop to talk with all the dogs I saw on my way to school and I would growl and snarl at the other children in the playground if they came near me.
If there was a full moon that night then I would sit at my window with Mother. We would wait for gaps in the clouds so that we could see it clearly and then we would howl at it. We would howl at the moon and keep on howling even when the neighbours were shouting or banging on the walls. I would only stop howling when Mother stopped howling and Mother would only stop howling when she rolled around on the floor laughing. Though one time she stopped howling and started crying. That was after I had asked what kind of monster Daddy was.
Wednesday was the day we went out to the sports field at school, even if it was raining. In fact, most times it was raining. We would play games like football or hockey or rugby and I would get home covered in mud and bits of grass. Mother would say that I looked like a swamp monster. She would pour me a deep hot bath with lots of bubbles and I would lie in the dirty water for ages, watching over my swamp.
I had taken a packet of matches from Daddy’s coat. It was a thin card packet with a picture of a naked lady on the front and there were only eight matches inside. I decided to save my matches for Thursdays. That’s when I knew Thursday was when I was a dragon. I believed, with my matches in my pocket, I could set fire to anyone who tried to hurt me, just like a fire breathing dragon might. There was one big boy at school who I especially didn’t like. I imagined finding out where he lived and dropping a burning match through his letterbox. His whole house would go on fire. The next day he would come to school all cracked and black like burnt wood and shrunken by the flames. But I never found out where he lived.
.
Daddy only came home at weekends. He would get home very late on Friday; it was always past my bedtime so I didn’t see him. On Saturdays he was mostly at the pub all day until late at night or I was in my room keeping my distance, so again I didn’t see him. Sometimes at night I would hear him shouting when he was home. Mother was very different at the weekends. She was very quiet like people are when they are thinking lots, but she didn’t seem to be thinking anything. That’s how she was on Fridays when all she did was drift around the house, sit on her kitchen stool and wait for Daddy to come home. She was like a zombie, so becoming like a zombie was what I did on Fridays, too. I would look like I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking and I would walk very slowly around the playground, ready to eat the other children if they crossed my path.
Mother always told me it was best to keep my distance on Saturdays. I would stay in my room, or if I moved around the house I would do it very quietly, like a ghost. I wasn’t sure if ghosts were monsters or not but Saturday was definitely the day to be a ghost.
One Saturday, Mother had packed a suitcase of clothes, like people do when they go on holiday. She called up the stairs for me to come down. She said that we were going to run away together and there wouldn’t be any monsters anymore. She looked in my room for me but I wasn’t there. I was being a ghost and hiding with the towels in the cupboard in the bathroom. Mother unpacked the suitcase and went back to sit on her kitchen stool.
On Sunday I wasn’t a monster at all. I didn’t need to be because Daddy was home. Daddy was the monster. He would sit in his armchair, smelling of all the beer and smoke from the night before. He would beckon me to him and groan at me with words I didn’t understand. Then he would start to get angry with me. He would rise up from his chair like a huge beast and lift his fist to hit me. He would make me call him Daddy even though that wasn’t his real name. Then Mother would come into the room and take me to sit at the dinner table. There would be Sunday roast, which would make Mother cry and there would be shouting. We would eat our Sunday roast in silence and I would wonder why Daddy would come to see us at all if he didn’t like us. I would have to go to my room then and I would be pleased that it was nearly Monday and Daddy would be leaving again and i could be the monster.

The Absence of Alekan

The faces of devils, mouths stretched and slits cut into the eyes, were hung in plastic packets before me. I tugged one free and checked the price on the back. Then I fell into a trance, drifting into another memory of Alekan

She would stand, holding the stem of a wine glass between her legs as she struck a match and lit a cigar. The glass was full but steady between clenched knees. She would stoop and bend gracefully, her shoulders would hunch, her heels would separate, turning her toes inwards; and her eyelashes would flicker with the flame. It was a manoeuvre unique to her and she performed it at parties, weddings and in beer gardens. Wherever safe surface space for a placed glass was limited. It was a show of poise and practiced elegance, letting not a drop of wine be spilt. She would straighten again, rising with rings of triumphant black smoke and lift the wine from her knees to her lips. When she died the performance, her balancing act, died with her. I did not expect to see it again.

Still, I was confronted with many things that did remind me of her. It became a battle to step forward into the future without collapsing through the frail path and plunging into the past. There were the obvious signs of her absence; her pillow untouched, her reading glasses lightly covered in dust and the toilet seat raised up to greet me. But there were other more cryptic reminders too; an empty shoebox in the street, a creak on the stairs, the word ‘hello’, the word ‘goodbye’ and perhaps every word in-between.

I would spend my nights sleepless and hopeless on the sofa. Watching incoherent shapes flash across the television screen, finding myself suddenly in the kitchen having stirred my mug of tea until cold. When I finally crashed into sleep I would have strange lucid dreams in which Alekan was revealed to be alive. I would be convinced that her death had been a mistake or a hoax. And my subconscious-self invented ways to fake my own death to be with her.

“Are you ok?”

I had snapped out of my daydream to find myself in a fancy dress shop. The girl behind the counter had called out to me in casual concern. I had been staring at the back of a devil mask for long enough. The stumpy pointed horns and animal snout reminded me too much of a bull. I put the mask back and turned to the girl at the counter. She was still holding the same thin smile of inquiry. It occurred to me that I had been browsing the contents of the shelves for some time without interruption from the ringing door.

“Is it usually this dead in here?” I asked. My tongue tingled at the sound of the d’s, sending a shiver through my throat. I fastened the buttons on my coat.

“Usually deader.” She looked about sixteen. Curls of brown hair framed a swollen face.

“I thought it would be busy, with Halloween.”

“People aren’t spending on it. Make do with what they’ve got. They don’t want to dress up in this bollocks anyway. Not very inventive is it?” She curled her hair in her finger as she spoke. “We’re having a victims of serial killers theme,” she said “I’m going as a victim of Jack the ripper. Corset all ripped out and bleeding at the front. I thought about having a bit of womb sticking out and maybe a baby’s leg or something but I’m not sure how that would work. Now that’s inventive.”

Inventive, I thought, is worse than expensive. It would require some creative spark that my exhausted imagination could not muster. I braced myself for the grisly weather behind the ringing door.

I found that my eyes would search as I walked the streets. As if her face would suddenly reveal itself from a crowd of pedestrians or in a passing car and I would have to be ready to spot it. I even hoped to see someone who looked like her. To trick myself for that moment that she could still be alive.

I picked up the invitation from the pile of post on the table. There was no set theme other than Halloween and fancy dress. I sat down for a moment, sipping at cold tea, thinking if there was anything in the flat I could use to fabricate an inventive costume. But I wasn’t ready to rummage beneath the surface yet. I had generated a layer of mess like a thick covering of dust. It was a safety gap I had created for myself between everyday survival and absolute horror. I could not bear to uncover too much Alekan. Time would decide which memories would rise from the dust to flourish and which would remain buried. Some might escape for a moment like unfurling serpents of black smoke, only to slither into the light and die.

I figured I felt like a zombie so I must look like one. The outfit of a man grieving the tragic death of his lover would be the costume I would have to settle on. I tipped the cold tea away, filled the mug with vodka, dialled for a taxi, waited, drank and filled the mug again.

By the time I arrived I had acquired a careless stagger appropriate to my zombie persona. My vocals needed perfecting but the night to come would surely train a slurred rambling, incoherent growl and perhaps some drooling. I don’t remember knocking or ringing but I remember the door held open before me and George welcoming me into the room of swirling light, twisted bodies and hurtling noise.

It was the first time I had seen George since the funeral. George was my tutor at college, my mentor in my first steps into the world after education and a friend on those occasions when a friend had been most needed. George, dressed in fur and fangs, took me in, sat me down and placed a cold drink in my hand.

I was nestled in a corner, my frame sunk into the cushioned embrace of an armchair. I watched as George did the rounds amongst the party guests. The music was difficult to separate from the beat of laughter and rhythmic conversation. Furniture in costume and upholstered party guests became hard to distinguish. I smiled and nodded contentedly to all. In return I was well watered and directed safely to a place to piss.

When I returned from my toilet trip I found my armchair had been taken. An apparition was sat before me. Dark hair draped from veiled head to lace nightdress and pale slender legs led to shiny black heels.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m in your seat.” She began to stand.

“It’s fine,” I said, holding out my hand as if my gesture could lower her back into the seat. I sat on the floor in front of her. “I’m fine like this. Are you a ghost?”

“Yeah I guess so.” She brushed her veil to one side to sip from a bottle of beer. “I didn’t really give it much thought. Some of them have been really creative. Have you seen the sewer monster?” The veil fell back across her face. Her nightdress lay sleekly against her pale body. She crossed her legs with a swing of shiny black heels.

I glanced around at the other guests without being able to focus on anything. There was a man wrapped in toilet paper, was he the sewer monster? I turned back to the ghost. The conversation stuttered on. Her face remained concealed. Every now and then there would be a flash of her lips as she took another sip from her beer. I spoke about my own struggle to settle on a costume. I explained the girl in the fancy dress shop, giving my own enthusiastic description of her ‘inventive’ victim costume. The ghost giggled. I found myself trying to charm her. I wondered what she looked like behind the veil. The more I invested in her however, the more I was scared that her face would not resemble Alekan's at all.

It must have been late. I’d noticed most of the other guests had gone. I found myself on another toilet trip. I flushed the chain and tugged open the door. The ghost was stood there in the hall. She stepped forward pushing me back into the bathroom and locking the door behind her. I stumbled slightly on the awkward surface of the bobbled bathroom rug. As she started to lift her veil I closed my eyes. Her lips crashed against mine and I pushed her back against the door as my tongue pushed hers back into her mouth. She pulled my top free from my arms and splayed her fingers on my chest. The passionate kissing continued for a moment then stopped.

“Open your eyes,” she giggled, dropping one hand to my crotch. My eyes were clenched as tensely. She kissed again, this time tentatively, questioningly. Her hands lifted away from my body. “Open your eyes,” she said with empty voice. But I refused to break the spell.

“Why won’t you see me?” she whispered. I heard the click of the lock. When I opened my eyes she was gone, her veil deserted on the bathroom floor. I picked it up, lifted down the toilet seat and sat for a while.

Alekan and I were snuggled together in the same sleeping bag. My face was lost in her hair and my arm felt dead beneath her body. It was the last time we woke up together. We crept out into the morning, treading with bare feet on damp grass. We stood together, looking up at the sky in search of a glimmer of sun behind the cloud. The village we’d visited the previous day, sat upon the crest of the hill before us. I was about to reflect on how alone we were, when I saw the dark shape emerge from the foot of the hill. Top-heavy, it stumbled uneasily to one side, as if, much like a shark, its existence relied upon forward-motion.

Immediately, I felt uneasy and began to scan the field for the safest exit. Alekan turned to the tent and began to gather her things but I pulled her away. I told her we could come back. Behind us, at the top of the field, the bordering hedgerow was thinner and the wire fence behind it was exposed. We moved quickly towards the gap.

I sensed it was coming for us. We moved quicker. Jogging up the incline towards the hedgerow. I felt the ground tremble. I could see the barbs of the wire fence ahead. I could see that one fencepost had fallen away, allowing enough room for someone to jump though without tangling with the wire. The air was thumping in my ears. I could hear hooves pounding the ground. The animal was upon us. Alekan’s hand was yanked away from mine. She had turned to face her aggressor and it had bowed its head before thrusting upwards into her body. There was a crack as one horn hooked up through her ribs, breaking the first and wedging between the next two. It bowed down again, charging forward, horns adorned with my Alekan She was fixed to the beast’s head. It crashed into the hedgerow ahead of me and jack-knifed into the fence. It scrambled there for a moment. Then it swung its great body around again, dragging Alekan’s body from the fence and through the brambles of the hedgerow, her legs trailed between his. I noticed then that the wire from the fence was caught partly by the animal’s head and wrapped around AlekanThe barbs bit into her neck. The hoofed legs steadied themselves. I stood, simply waiting for the next horrifying action. The beast heaved forward, aiming its free horn towards me, but the line of wire tensed. There was a crunch and the animal was halted, like a dog on a wire leash, and Alekan was ripped in two.

My elbow slipped from my knee and I awoke. I had slept on the toilet with my head in my hands. George was perched on the edge of the bath in front of me, glass of red wine in hand, her fur coat and fangs relinquished.

“Sleep well?” she asked.

“No. Not for a long time.” I yawned and attempted to stretch my spine.

“I always suffer a sense of loss when a party comes to an end.” She lifted the red wine to her lips, wrapping a thick cardigan around her body with her other hand. Her toes sunk into the bobbled bathroom rug.

“I always suffer a sense of loss when my girlfriend dies.” I yawned again. The veil was on my lap. I examined it with my fingers.

“She is beautiful don’t you think?” I wasn’t sure if George meant the ghost or Alekan simply smiled in response. She took a packet from her cardigan pocket and leaned forward to place a cigar in my mouth.

“Always at the end of a party.” She took one between her own lips, stood, placed the stem of the wine glass between her legs and struck a match. Her eyelashes flickered with the flame. As she lifted the wine from her knees to her lips a serpent of black smoke slithered to the ceiling to die.