Travelled there in my old, falling apart car. Wind pushing me across lanes on the motorway. No rain. Yet. For some reason I notice my fingernails. They are dirty and the paint has dried. The metallic taste in my mouth comes back and my stomach leaps. I would eat, but…
I never knew him but he was a friend of my family and, apparently, he was there when I wasn’t and had helped out.
So, out of respect, I un-cap the beer.
Pour it over the grave.
He would have liked that.
They said.

The mobile buzzes inside my trouser pocket. I check the message.

‘Where R U Bro?’

The light from the pub window throws my shadow onto the pavement. Best place for it.

I can hear the waves and imagine them bashing the quiet, black rocks. The pub will be only half full. She will stand there half smiling in the yellow, rude light of the public bar.

* * *

When I walk in she blushes like I’ve told a blue joke.

“I’m not staying,” I say. There are a few tired men in football shirts with their arms around each other; faces blurred, live’s in tatters; like mine, like hers.

I pinch one of her nipples, secretly, as she leans on the bar in front of me. She says she likes it when I pinch her nipples like that.

She gets me a rum and ginger wine. I watch her body as she prepares the drink.

I drink it quickly, touch the ends of her fingers with mine and leave.

It’s dark outside.

I stare into the lit windows of the estate agents. Cheap properties for sale and no one to buy them.

* * *

The train station is deserted.

I sit on the edge of the platform then heave myself onto the tracks. It starts to rain. I move along the line. Unlikely anything will be coming in either direction. I unscrew a fresh bottle of rum and keep walking; cobbles, wood, cobbles, wood. The rain carves up my face but the rum protects me from disintegrating.

And deep in the Firth, the herring jabber into the darkness while the fisherman’s faces stare, still as death, into the bitter brine.

Sunday afternoon. Really feels like the morning though. Woke up and had pains in the back of the head, chest, arm, elbow and ankle. Where they come from is anyone’s guess.
My girlfriends mother was talking on the answerphone. There I am in bed wondering where this voice is coming from.

* * *

Drank a strong paracetamol mixed with some pain killers.
Dandy.
Things better now.
Although I’m missing Columbo. Sunday without Columbo is like rolly without a Rizla.
The wind is getting up.
Imagine all the cats are indoors. Those that aren’t probably stuck to cars, the sides of houses and walls miles away from home.
Save the owner a few pence on whiskas.
Well, we are in a recession; every little helps.

* * *

Sunday limbo.
Nothing like it. A rare quiet.
And no, I don’t mean church.

* * *

Paintings slowly rotting in a damp basement.

“Daytime moves like I don’t know what. Sounds erupt from nowhere and end in the same place. The egg in the bowl is a perfect thing. I wonder what that makes me? A twist in a cloud on its way to disappearing? A puddle; its component parts transforming into lighter matter and not, as it appears, a puddle. There is too much to consider when I appear. So I remove ‘I’. Not me, but ‘I’. What happens?

Illustration. A light source is detected, possibly. This is more accurate.”

His words continued and his mouth seemed to try to carve them into the air between us. If he’d been mute, it’s possible than I’d still have understood. I wondered if it would have been the same message though? He pushed a peanut around. The peanut appeared as an old, shiny and distorted skull. As the finger touched the peanut, it rubbed away some of the oily residue and salt crystals. These crystals gathered on the end of the finger before falling to the wooden table top. Then the finger began to push the crystals. Tenderly. His eyes revealed a process of decoding happening somewhere behind them.

I take his hand and close my fingers around it. He looks up at me, startled. His eyes are lost in space and just barely read my face. Then, a smile.

Out on the bay, a few boats return from the channel with empty nets.

He covers his eyes with his free hand, and cries quietly and steady.

The sun doesn’t know. The sea is indifferent. My friend is dead.

Three times in a week?
That’s the truth of it though, I can’t lie. He’d been in the area for a while, that I knew. Never thought he’d contact me again, especially not in the way he did.
Where was I?
Think it had something to do with an underground room, I can’t be sure. Recently, my memory hasn’t been all that.
I’d set up a glass of water and a nasal spray, just in case. Decided I’d ring them, let them know what was happening. Then I decided not to. Then I thought, well; better just to get it over with. Had to happen at some point. Now was that point.
Looked around the room for a telephone book. Didn’t have their number; in all likelihood, it had been changed many times over the years.
Looked about the room for the telephone book. Then there he was. An old finger pointed towards a bookshelf with the directory on it.
I blinked.
It started to rain.
I wasn’t sure if it was even him.

It’s wonderful to see. It’s wonderful. What he carries around with him is almost unintelligable. A kind of glow. A glow that shoots a man into oblivion. Across the world, in the world, somewhere, poverty is cancelled by the actions of one man.
What it means I’ve no idea. Nonetheless, it happened.

Woke up this morning, found my friends had gone.
I sang along with the morning chorus. Argued with my feet for not keeping a straight line. Challenged them to walk straight.
Walk straight fuckers!
Then I realise that the birds know more than me, or at least they seem to. Their song is the air, is the trees, is every cell in me.
What are friends anyway? An attachment. A self selected shrine to your own ill-percieved sense of worth.
Shit.
There is nothing. There is nothing.
We clamber around in a soup of murder, insanity and illusion.
We are not important.
And the need for importance is more telling than the belief. Strike it.
Like a match.
Until the black death comes.

End up in bed or on the sofa and it’s later, maybe a day or week later and I haven’t moved an inch and I can’t crap either.

I black out. Just, ‘phoom’ and I’m out.

My head becomes a room. Grey walls. Dusty floorboards. Some rubbish. No breeze.

An apparition of an old woman swims into the room. Seems distorted by heat shimmer. It sits in a wicker chair. Black wicca chair. It’s phlegmatic hands begin to shake. They appear blurred with movement. Small stars grow in space.

A voice says, “You’re a miserable bastard. What’s the matter, constipated? Miserable bastard. Nothing changes with you does it? Nothing changes.”

As a boy, I talked myself out of football and fights and girls.
There were only a few girls that took chewing gums for snogs and they all smelled like barbeque flavour monster munch.

I Come Here to Destroy! by Maxwell Jay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License