Chapter Text
The engine whirs as my fuzzy vision grows ever less reliable. I know better than this, but following hour after hour beside someone with a shot glass glued to his lips whenever I looked up, the thought that I had to drive us back somehow vanished completely. I’ve always been a responsible person who knows, since he can’t control himself with his liquor, he’s better off sticking to the walls of a nightclub, sticking to his cigarettes.
On top of the chills of early December I can already feel my head whizzing and clamping down with the worst headache I’ve had in years, and I know by the morning I’ll wake up alone in my bed a shaky wreck, deprived of sleep, fluids, and wishing I’d never met the idiot who dragged me out this evening.
My passenger, however, is fine. From the back seat where he’s passed out I can hear him groan in his sleep every now and then. When he wakes up he’ll feel like I do—the clamping pain and the flood of regret—but, unlike me, he can justify the feeling in the same way he persuaded me to put too many inch-tall glasses to my lips.
“C’mon. It’s a stag-do. It’s worth it!”
I hate him. I don’t care if he’s my closest friend, for the next twenty-four hours everything he does for me will go unappreciated. He’s getting married? Okay, I’m not. Best man’s duty or not there is no reason for me to be out acting my age when I could be home watching bullshit TV with whiskey in hand, before swiftly falling into my duvet. Given that chance I’d be a happy man, but now I’ve missed the Wednesday night double bill of Border Security and replaced a sound sleep with driving down a lifeless road back home from some ghastly casino.
“I hate you,” I mutter through the silence, throwing a cautious glance at the seat behind me. A wispy grey cloud leaves my mouth into the air, reminding me how long it’s been since my last cigarette, though by this point I’ve lost my concept of time. I guess it must have been hours.
Another great sigh exaggerates the need growing at the back of my throat, seeping through the fabric of my gloves and warming the backs of my hands.
The box protruding from my jacket suddenly becomes all the more noticeable, a lump in my side I’m desperate to remove and use for a better, more unhealthy purpose. Problem? I don’t trust myself to keep driving in a straight line with both hands, let alone while using one to extract a box of cigarettes from my pocket.
If he were awake, my mate would light one for me—maybe even himself after the night we’ve had—and everything would be grand. I’m itching.
I need one.
I need to pull over.
The road is as bare, boring and empty as you’d expect any go-between town to be. There are more street-lamps than cars, and a silence sweeps through the air across the tarmac like tumbleweed is to follow. The sight isn’t anything special. In fact it’s pretty depressing to look ahead of my steering wheel, but the town’s lifelessness is a blessing in at least one sense: if my drunk parking is really as terrible as I’ve been told before, that it leaves me perpendicular to the pavement, at least I won’t be blocking anyone.
With as much focus as I can drag away from the cigarettes and the bashing in of my head I roll the car onto the kerb; slightly further than I would’ve liked, but I’m too far past wrecked to care about the fresh scratches on the bumper or the awkward angle at which I’ve put the chassis. Even if I were to topple face first into the cement upon leaving I’m not sure I’d mind. A broken nose would take the edge off my head, I should hope.
I cast another glance at the backseat before swinging open the door and throwing my feet out. They barely plant down before the dizziness hits me and I turn to look again. He hasn’t choked on his own vomit yet so I decide to ignore him, and once my vision has straightened I slowly move my head again to face the red-brick wall beside the car. The fuzziness blurs it into a mass of muted browns and oranges and I realise my perception is perhaps worse than it’s been in a long time. It feels like the only thing I can truly concentrate on is the cardboard in my pocket, digging into my hipbone like a stubborn shard, pleading to be noticed.
It eases slightly as I haul myself up, steadying myself. The cold of the metal bleeds through my gloves onto my skin, prickling my fingertips like tiny needles. I flinch, almost tripping over my own feet and instead lean against the wall. My fingers fumble their way into my pocket, fishing out first the sacred packet and carelessly letting it fall to my feet before I start rooting around for my lighter. Prying desperately deep into the crevasse I wrap my fingers around the first things I come into contact with.
Things—it’s in pieces—it must have broken in half! But if it has why can’t I feel the fluid leaking out?
I rip my hand from my pocket and in my palm sit dice; two of them.
“What the…” I whisper, glaring at the cubes in confusion with the odd glance towards my comatose friend. “Dice?”
Dice. Only a few hours ago we were smack bang in the middle of a casino, yes, but I by no means remember palming them at any point in the evening. I’m not some sort of petty criminal, and even if I was why the hell would I steal a set of dice?
“Alright there, mate?”
My head snaps up and as my eyes focus I see a man in front of me. He’s…tall—the sort of bloke who looks at you like you really don’t want to pick a fight with him. He smirks at me, furrowing his brow as he hangs out a doorway. As I look at him my senses seem to heighten, and suddenly I can hear the hum of music from nearby.
“You’ve just been stood there a while, hunched over,” he adds slowly. “I’ve gotta say you look pretty shifty there.”
Since I’m not entirely sober I want to tell him he looks kind of like an angry walrus and so has no real excuse for referring to me as ‘shifty’, but instead I go with: “Oh, yeah. Fine, man. Just a bit out of it.”
“Oh?”
I nod.
“Long night?”
I keep nodding.
“Been driving a while?”
I don’t stop—can’t stop—lulling myself into a pattern I just can’t seem to break until I brush a stray hair from my eyes.
“I could kill for a smoke.”
The walrus man spits a laugh that sets me more on edge than I thought I was to begin with. “Then have one. They’re only at your feet.”
“I can’t find my lighter. It’s not in my pocket.”
“Have you tried the other pocket?”
I haven’t.
“Here,” he says with his gnarly grin, stretching his arm towards me as he hops down. While his height is less frightening now, the outstretched hand leaves me frozen.
There’s no chance of me taking hold of his hand, as I think he realises as he lets it drop and hang lifelessly at his side. “Come round ’ere. Use mine.”
Its calming at first, as it always is; the heat at the back of my throat and the glow of a streetlamp like a spotlight on me. I’ve been led into some dead-end alleyway, a few meters long and wide. Bricks seem crammed so tightly into the narrow walls that, if it weren’t plagued with smoke, it’d be warm enough to not see each breath I take for the first time all night.
The only chill comes when I catch his eye.
That same unnerving expression he’s worn this whole time doesn’t falter as he mutters, “You’re a good kid, aren’t you?”
For the first time since I was fifteen I start to choke on my polluted breath, spitting out smoke and compressing the already claustrophobic area.
“W-What?” I manage through coughs, dropping the cigarette to the floor and shoving my hand into my coat.
“I saw your badge in the car. What’s your name?”
“Mate, I—”
He steps forward. He raises his arm to push my shoulder, snarling as he does so.
I fall back, pressing myself against the wall helplessly, and suddenly I start to think about ‘Watership Down’. With this man towering above me, pinning me like a weak little boy, with something shiny poking from his pocket that I’m certain is not his lighter, all I can think of is rabbits.
He’s getting closer and closer, and as he presses his chest against mine I can feel him reach into his pocket.
It’s been years since I read that book, but suddenly my dad’s voice is fresh in my mind, perfectly articulating each syllable, reading it to me:
‘The whole world will be your enemy…’
“What are you doing?” I don’t know why but the words stutter out on their own accord. We both know what he’s doing.
‘and whenever they catch you, they will kill you…’
“Don’t struggle.”
“Oi—”
He covers my mouth with his hand and I start to shake. My mind darts about bounding from thought to thought in a desperate attempt to remember that final line of that speech like it’ll free me from the grip of this gruff bloke. But it isn’t coming. Not now, or now or—
Suddenly my hands are out, pushing him back with as much force as they can muster, but my shoulders can’t slip away. I can’t slip away. Any desperate attempt I may try to get out of this feels less than futile. Or is the phrase ‘more than futile’?
Who knows? Who gives a shit? The knife is on the floor now and he’s bending down; back turned, eyes away…blind.
The wall is close. Too close. The impact when my foot collides into his head drives it forward toward the brick. Hard. I lean over his torso and theres an explained rattling sound as I jab him with my toe. But there’s blood seeping and no response and my eyes are going fuzzier than they have all night.
So I run: back to the car, to my lifeless friend away from this lifeless enemy. Only as I heave open the door with the remainder of my strength does that last sentence force it’s way through the pounding.
‘But first they must catch you…’
A groaning voice sounds in the back. I tell him to go back to sleep and he obeys. Now, even with the radio buzzing in the background, the silence starts to strangle me. That man—a few miles back and metres into a lifeless alley—haunts my peripheral vision as if he’s clawing at the windows.
I turn up the radio and change station, helplessly hoping for a distraction from what I’ve left behind.
Change station.
Police station.
I have work in the morning.