Part 8

With that acrid thought, I left the Ministry of Sound. A bitterly cold wind was slashing at my face as I checked my phone. 4AM. I was still buzzing, as they say, not off my head buzzing, but palpable enough buzzing, hence why I was desirous of the night continuing. Maybe I haven’t got what it takes to keep raving, I told myself, but I am not ready to call it quits on the night out. I hailed a cab and got it to take me to Leicester Square, really I wanted the cab to take me to Soho but I was too embarrassed to ask to be dropped off in Soho, hence why I got the cab to drop me off in Leicester Square. I walked briskly from there to Soho and within a few minutes I found myself walking down an alleyway looking for some action. A lady of the night called out to me as I approached her, I looked at her and realised that I didn’t in fact want some action after all, I thought I had wanted it but it turned out, when afforded the opportunity of availing myself of some action that I didn’t, I had for many years thought of myself as a ‘getting some action’ kind of a guy, notwithstanding my innate prudishness, but now I saw very clearly that I did not want it at all, that I had been deluded about wanting some action all along. The lady of the night called out to me again and I scarpered; I ran full tilt back to Leicester Square and then I slowed into a jog as I considered what to do, I was still high and therefore I didn’t want the night to end, even if I had wanted the night to end, I had nowhere to end it, so to speak, having not booked a room at a hotel. It was a mistake, I realised, to have not booked a room at a hotel, now I had nowhere to go and end the night, meaning somewhere to go and lie down and keep warm and perhaps even get some sleep, although that seemed unlikely in view of my being high on whatever drugs I’d ingested and my insomniac tendencies, which had become more pronounced as I’d gotten older and which I fully expected to get even more pronounced as I trudged my way to old age, if I made it to old age, of course, which couldn’t be taken for granted, given my incessant vaping and chronic loneliness, chronic loneliness being known to cause those it afflicts to drop dead without warning, chronic loneliness being an endemic societal problem and the likely, though always undiagnosed, cause of many premature deaths, chronic loneliness being a mass murderer if you looked at it clear-headedly, which is what I felt I was doing just then as I jogged around Leicester Square considering what to do next, not that I did much considering of what to do next because I was too high to think about that, instead I just jogged for the sake of jogging, it felt good to be jogging in other words, especially around Leicester Square in the early hours, I didn’t need to jog for any ulterior motive, I thought, for example to buy me some time to think about what to do next, I could simply jog for its own sake, just as I could do anything for its own sake and not to serve another purpose, I realised. I jogged until dawn started to break out like a rash all over Leicester Square and then I stopped, as abruptly as I’d started I stopped. I was hungry after all that jogging and so I repaired to Burger King, where I ordered a Whopper. Inevitably I was asked by the girl serving me if I wanted the Whopper meal. I declined, politely but authoritatively. The girl serving me looked surprised, as if it was ridiculous to order a Whopper without an accompaniment of fries and a soft drink, but I stuck to my guns, stood my ground etc, I had my principled reasons, after all, for not ordering a Whopper meal and it would take a lot of persuasive power or brute force to get me to abjure those principles. I ate my Whopper at a table by a window on the first floor overlooking Leicester Square. Why, I thought, are there so many people milling about at the crack of dawn? It was a mystery, one that Ludwig might have opined over in his notes if it had ever occurred to him to opine over it, but he hadn’t, as I knew, having read his notes, even though I denied to myself that I had done so, nonetheless I had, and even if I had barely understood a quarter of what those notes purported to opine over, I understood enough to know that the mysterious nature of people milling about Leicester Square at the crack of dawn had never occurred to him, probably because he’d never been to Leicester Square at this time of day, if he had, I am sure, I thought, the mysteriousness of this phenomenon would have been instantly apparent to him, Ludwig being extremely sensitive to mysterious phenomena. Where others saw merely the quotidian he saw mystery, I thought, although perversely where others saw mystery, he invariably saw the quotidian, Ludwig being nothing if not contrary, and since most people most of the time saw the quotidian, Ludwig most of the time saw the mysterious, meaning he was less an apprehender of mysteries congenitally speaking and more of a contrarian congenitally speaking, his being sensitive to mystery in other words was directly causally related (invertedly) to the aversion that people generally have to mystery and their predilection for the quotidian, this being a secular age, I reflected, people tend to eschew the mysterious in favour of scientific analysis, which, as is well known, is the intellectual manifestation of the quotidian. The Whopper was delectable, although I ate it too quickly and it got stuck in my oesophagus for a while. Once the blockage had cleared, I got up and left the Burger King. The drugs had worn off, meaning I was in the grip of a downer, meaning I needed a drink. Only a drink, I thought, can ameliorate this downer. Of course, more drugs would have been better than a drink, in terms of ameliorative efficacy, but I had no way of obtaining more drugs, not knowing anyone to score from, so I walked back to Waterloo and purchased a 200ml bottle of whisky, which I surreptitiously swigged from on the train to Haslemere, even though I was on a train packed with commuters and it was in fact impossible to be surreptitious about swigging from the bottle of whisky, all the same I tried to do precisely that. Thankfully the commuters in my vicinity pretended not to notice me swigging, which made it a little less humiliating, but all the same it was still demeaning, just because they feigned not to notice, I thought, didn’t mean they weren’t mercilessly inwardly reproaching me for my aberrant behaviour, which was patently beyond the pale and entirely worthy of their disapprobation, I was only too painfully aware. By the time I got to Haslemere, I’d drunk the whole bottle, yet I didn’t feel particularly inebriated, in fact the whisky had done hardly anything to displace the downer, which I could feel unspooling inside of me like the mycelial strands of a virulent fungus. I have to do something about it, I said. Sorry, what? said the commuter who happened to be exiting Haslemere train station from the turnstile adjacent to mine. I shook my head, pretended not to have heard the commuter, walked briskly ahead. I had to do something about the downer, that much was clear, I thought as I opened my car door. I got into the car and after a few false dawns managed to get the motor running. I didn’t like drink driving, but what choice did I have really? I thought. Then I realised I did in fact have a choice, that I could simply turn the engine off, get out of the car and walk to Hindhead. I didn’t need to drive to Hindhead. Yes, it would certainly be nicer, easier, more comfortable etc to drive rather than walk to Hindhead, but it would also be illegal to do so, not that I was averse to committing the odd crime here or there, but there were crimes and there were crimes, I thought, taking illicit substances was one type of crime, an innocuous one, a so-called victimless crime, whereas drink driving was another type of crime, potentially innocuous, true, although it also had the potential to be ruinous in terms of maiming or even killing someone as a result of my not being in control of my vehicle on account of my no doubt vitiated motor coordination skills, not to mention the ruination of my own life in terms of the swingeing legal consequences, which selfish as it was, I had a duty to consider. No, drink driving was one step over the red line too far. I turned the engine off and got out of the car. I had sunk low in life, but not low enough to drive whilst over the so-called legal limit. I set off for Hindhead at a brisk clip, as they say, but on the way, seeing that it was open for business, I ventured into a pub. I thought it was strange that a pub was open at half eight in the morning, but, strange or not, it was open and so, opportunistically, I went inside and ordered a pint of lager. I took my pint outside and went and sat at a table adjacent to a patio heater. I had a big gulp of lager and then I immediately, not to mention compulsively, started vaping, but after five or six puffs I saw that the red light on the side of the vape device was flashing intermittently. Fuck, I thought. As expected, the vape device ran out shortly thereafter, so I downed my lager and walked to the nearest newsagents, bought a bundle of vape devices and hotfooted it back to the pub where I experienced a profound sense of déjà vu as I purchased a pint of lager and went and sat with it at an outside table adjacent to a patio heater, whereupon I took a large gulp of lager and started vaping. After however many puffs I felt my chest tighten characteristically, so I put the vape device to one side for a while and took my phone out of my inside jacket pocket. I was about to scroll desultorily through my newsfeed when I was seized by an uncontrollable urge to reactivate my Facebook account. I had deactivated my Facebook account many years ago to preserve my dignity and sanity, even though it was debatable I still had my dignity and in reality had already lost my sanity, nonetheless I deactivated my Facebook account in a vain attempt at salvaging both my dignity and my sanity. It was all too easy to reactivate my Facebook account and in a jiffy I was back in the la-la land of Facebook. I lost no time in looking up family members and certain so-called friends, scrolling through their posts, assessing their likes (most of my family members had hardly any I was pleased to note and the likes they did have were pyramid scheme likes, i.e., reciprocal likes from within the familial network, and which therefore didn’t count as likes) and so on. As I did so, I found myself tensing up. I hadn’t been on Facebook for a very long time and I felt like a cross between an interloper, a Luddite and a voyeur. The more I looked the more disgusted I became, the more vindicated I felt for having made the decision to deactivate my account. After half an hour, I could take no more of the rampant narcissism, unbridled banality, prodigious piffle and I promptly deactivated my Facebook account again, well, not promptly as such, since Facebook made it as hard as possible to deactivate my account, which was an inversion, I reflected, of how easy it had been to reactivate my account. I will never reactivate my Facebook account again, I thought. Even though the chances were I probably would, I told myself I wouldn’t. I always tell myself I won’t do something and end up doing it again, I thought. Nothing is ever final when it comes to me deciding something. I may say that it is and believe so, with the utmost sincerity and total conviction, and yet at some point down the track I will very likely renege on that decision; on the other hand, I may stop doing something without consciously deciding not to and never do it again; if I had simply stopped using Facebook without consciously deciding to stop using it, I reflected, rather than deactivating my account, I might have stood a chance of never looking at Facebook again, whereas having decided to deactivate my account I was doomed, almost certainly, to look at Facebook again, something I was absolutely sure I didn’t want to do, even though I was aware that virtually every other human being on the planet was on Facebook, and that my family and so-called friends probably judged me all too harshly for not being on Facebook or at the very least questioned my motives, which to be sure were far from pure, but then my motives were my business, just as the motives of my family and so-called friends were theirs. I downed my lager in one draught and then belched, not loudly but lingeringly. I could smell the decomposing Whopper in the belch, which made me want to retch, but I didn’t retch, even though I could easily have spewed out all of the lager I had only recently imbibed, together with the partially digested remnants of my Whopper, I did not do so for fear of the humiliation of puking in public, a fear that was deep-seated and therefore a very effective anti-emetic. I went back to the bar and got myself another drink, this time a glass of red wine, which I drank leaning against the bar listening to the conversation, if you can call it that, transpiring between two tradesmen who were at the other end of the bar, and who were evidently quite drunk, even though it was half nine in the morning and one imagined they must have had a day’s work in front of them, a day’s plumbing or roofing or bricklaying or whatever, they were clearly intoxicated, certainly their conversation bore all the lineaments of a drunken conversation, which was very voluble and loud and seemed to walk a distinctly inebriated curvilinear line between politics, salacious gossip and football. Since I was not in the least interested in any of these things, I soon zoned out of their conversation and retreated into my own world, a world that was as familiar to me as it was abhorrent, a bleak, hellish landscape in which ghouls, demons and witches caterwauled and clutched at me, a world in which I saw with absolute clarity the total pointlessness of existence and the psychopathic indifference of the cosmos to my life. With an effort of will, or the seeming effort of will, I flipped myself out of that place and found myself back in the pub, propping up the bar, staring into an empty wine glass. I ordered a double brandy, necked it and left immediately, no, come to think of it, first I went to the toilet and took a shit, and then I left. I speed-walked back to Hindhead and let myself into Ludwig’s wing. I went straight upstairs and lay down on the bed. I closed my eyes and even though I felt I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I did in fact fall into a deep slumber, or as deep a slumber as it was possible for me to fall into. I dreamt about my mother. She was a young girl in my dream but still unmistakably my mother. Even though she was a young girl, she was evidently pregnant. It didn’t feel right to me in my dream that my mother in the form of a young girl should be pregnant, but it was nonetheless a fact and I had no choice but to accept it as such. The next thing I knew my mother was giving birth in my dream, wailing and swearing, shouting at me to fucking help her and so on. At some point, a baby with a cone-shaped head emerged from her dilated cervix. I knew right away that the baby was me. It’s me, I thought in my dream, I am that baby and that baby is undeniably me. I helped the baby me out of my mother’s cervix and gave it to my mother to hold. My mother stared down at the baby me with a mournful expression. I could tell she was staring at the future of the baby me, envisioning how it would grow up into me me and that she was sad about that, disappointed. I was sad and disappointed too. I wanted it to be different, but it just wasn’t going to be, as much as I hoped and wished it would, it wouldn’t, the baby me was destined to become me, just as my mother had been destined to become who she became and all people are destined to become whoever they become, and all the people they beget are destined to become who they become and so on. Presently, I heard a ripping sound, as of scissors cutting cloth, and through a tear in the fabric of my dream came the head of my wife, then the shoulders, then the rest of her. I’ll fucking kill you! she screamed, brandishing a sharp implement. Oi, oi, said the baby me in a cockney brogue, what’s this all about? My wife stared down at the baby me for a moment, a thoughtful expression interweaved into the contours of her face, then, quick as a flash, she stabbed the baby me with the sharp implement, in the abdomen (naturally), at which point I awoke, gasping for air, utterly flummoxed by my dream, which even by my standards stood out as particularly demented. I am insane, I thought, a madman, though I seem to the casual observer to be quite sane, I am nonetheless completely bonkers, in need of help etc, the sort of person a newspaper might describe as ‘troubled’ in reporting a crime committed by that person, yes, I thought, troubled was an apposite epithet to apply in describing me.