I drew up the plan of attack. I led the charge. She was the Light Brigade and I was Lord fucking Cardigan.
So yeah. I took it hard. And yeah, I suppose I took the coward’s road.
I stayed with Imelda’s daughter, Lisa, until the ambulance arrived. She hadn’t said a word the whole time; just sat with her mother’s head in her lap, rocking her back and forth as though she was asleep. The only time she showed any animation at all was when the paramedics tried to separate her from the blood-boltered corpse. Even then, she didn’t fight them or cry or swear at them; she just held on tightly to Imelda’s chest, forcing them to pry her fingers loose one by one. And after that she stopped moving altogether.
I watched the ambulance go.
Then I found an off-licence, bought a bottle of whatever whisky came readiest to hand, took it to one of the wooden benches at Elephant and Castle and drank it dry.
My memories of the days and weeks that followed are a little patchy, but I know that that bottle was only the first of many. I would have taken other drugs, probably, if any had been kicking around, but booze has always been my sledgehammer of choice when I want to throw a tarp over the day and pass out fast.
Only now it wasn’t just a day I wanted to blot out. I wanted to forget I’d ever been born. I wanted to erase Felix Castor and rewind. Someone else might do a better job of taking up the space he used to occupy.
So I did my best to turn my brain into half-congealed soup, but in spite of my best efforts, a few scraps of sense input from that time manage to stand out fairly distinctly.
I remember being carried home one night by my good friend Juliet – who, being a succubus, didn’t even break a sweat – and propped up against the door like a sack of coal. She would have taken me all the way to my bed, I’m sure, except that my landlady, Pen, doesn’t allow her in the house: Pen has a ‘no succubi’ rule that’s fairly strict.
I remember Pen standing in the doorway of my room, cursing me out. ‘You selfish, self-pitying bastard!’ she was saying. ‘He’s out there. He’s out there on the streets right now, and all you’re doing about it is lying here in your own vomit! Well fuck you, Fix! I’ll find him myself, if you won’t help.’
I remember crawling on my hands and knees on the floor of my room, groping under my bed for a bottle that had fallen and rolled. When I found it, most of the contents had spilled out. Heartbroken from the loss, I cried. Then drank what was left in a single gulp, and coughed and hacked and wheezed for five minutes because the neck of the bottle had attracted enough dust and fluff to choke a horse.
I remember being called to the hospital to talk about Lisa’s condition. I’d given myself as next of kin because I didn’t know any other name to put down. So I had to go, wishing all the while that I’d given the paramedics a false name and address. She was still completely unresponsive, and the doctors wanted to know if she had any history of catatonia or neural disorders. They also wanted me to sign a shit-load of papers. I started in blithely enough, until my eyes came briefly into focus and I realised what some of the consent forms were for. Anti-psychotics. Electroshock. Surgical interventions. I fled, pursued by shouted assurances that most of the permissions were ‘just in case’.
I remember sitting in a car park late at night, my back up against the rear tyre of a truck, playing my whistle. I was trying to reproduce a note I’d never heard before. Something totally new: an
I remember lying with my cheek pressed against cold stone, thinking with something like relief that it might all be over at last. This might be a mortuary slab that I was sprawled out on. But it wasn’t. It was just another stinking, sticky pavement strewn with broken glass, just another station of the booze-hound’s cross.
Alcohol is a curious thing: an arcane and complex thing that opens up its mysteries to you in successive layers. At the very heart of its cruelty, there’s a dark and terrible compassion, which is this: after it’s poisoned you, you can take it as medicine. You can get into a cycle where you’re drinking to carry your body through the pains and wrenches of withdrawal, and in the short term it actually works.
I rode that horse for a while. Then I fell off it and it trampled me. Then it pissed on me as I lay in the gutter.
Coming back was slow, and at first almost accidental. I woke up in my lightless room, stewed in my own sweat and feeling like someone had magically transformed my tongue into a size-10 army boot. I was on fire with the ague of chemical need, alternately too hot and too cold inside my skin, on which salamanders were crawling with hooked claws, and snakes with rasping scales.
I couldn’t find the light switch, couldn’t even remember the layout of my own room. I staggered to the bathroom in the dark, filled the bath with cold water and fell into it, fully clothed. Well, the clothes smelled like they needed a wash in any case, so it counted as economy of effort.
By the time the sun came up, I’d ridden out the worst of the shakes. I stood up on wobbly legs, stripped the sodden clothes from my body and washed properly. Shaving was harder, because my hands were still about as steady as the plastic mule in the game of Buckaroo, but I persevered.
I staggered downstairs about an hour later, wearing a pair of clean underpants that I’d providentially found down the back of a radiator and one of Pen’s 200 or so T-shirts with Celtic knot designs on them. On the table in the hall there was a stack of mail for me, including a brown envelope in legal quarto size which had come recorded delivery and had bad news written all over it. I ignored it for now. First things first.
I rehydrated myself with a couple of litres of water, and zapped my nervous system with about the same amount of strong black coffee. I still felt like the walking dead, but I’m not prejudiced: some of my best friends belong to that fraternity. And at least my brain was starting to work again.
The first thing it did was play me back those few snippets of memory, like answerphone messages. The worrying one was Pen saying, ‘I’ll find him myself.’ I needed to have a word with her about that, but she wasn’t in her basement sitting room when I went down there to check.
The rats were, though, prowling restlessly round their rat-habitat. So were the ravens, Edgar and Arthur, one of them sitting on an actual perch, the other on Pen’s computer monitor. They clacked their beaks when I entered, and Arthur cawed intimidatingly.
I make a point of feeding the ravens whenever I see them, because it doesn’t make sense to piss off birds whose beaks are strong enough to open tin cans, but it’s occurred to me recently that I’m only making a Pavlovian connection in their minds between Castor and food which may one day come back to bite me in the arse, either figuratively or literally. I took some frozen liver from Pen’s fridge, thawed it out in the microwave and split it between the two of them. They fell on it like a pair of blood-crazed maniacs. It looked like they hadn’t been fed in a while. To be on the safe side, I fed the rats too. Then I went upstairs and fed myself, saved from the agonies of indecision by the fact that the kitchen was empty except for a tin of baked beans and a packet of Ryvita crackers. Well, okay, there was a half-finished bottle of Janneau Armagnac too, but I made myself look away. I didn’t want to go on another bender until I was sure Pen was okay.
So I fixed myself some weight-conscious beans on toast and ate them slowly with Radio 4 playing in the background. That told me what day of the week it was and who was prime minister; the fine detail I could fill in for myself later.
In the meantime, that bottle of brandy was still making indecent suggestions to me from the kitchen. I decided to get some distance from it before I found myself in a compromising situation.
I went back upstairs to my room with the vague but virtuous intention of clearing up some of the shit that had accumulated during my spectacular drunk. But the scale of the task daunted me. There was broken glass trodden into the carpet, a sour stink of stale, spilled booze in the air, and the lurking likelihood that picking up any one item of dirty laundry or overturned furniture would reveal greater horrors underneath. I gave up on the idea before I’d even started. I was able to assemble myself a less ridiculous outfit, though: a black shirt, dark grey cargo pants and a pair of low-heel boots that have proved over the years to be as durable as Permian granite.
After that I just waited for a while: in the back garden until the sun got too high, then in the basement with the ravens. Morning shaded into afternoon, with no sign of Pen. She couldn’t know that I’d wake up and feed the birds, so her absence was doubly hard to explain.
I was on the rack again by this time: sweating like a warthog, with a sick, hollow feeling in my stomach that only alcohol could fill. My head throbbed as though it was a blood-filled pimple that would burst at a touch. And the
