house of 1000 stories

Right, my latest effort, which isn't great, to be fair. Needs a lot of work.

A Lack of Colour
Extract from a novel
CHAPTER ONE:
In The Beginning

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not alive anymore? I don’t mean that you’re dead – but simply that you’re not living – you’re just existing? I know that sounds like a load of philosophical bullshit, I know that it’s opening the can of proverbial worms. Maybe it’s a bit pretentious. But I suppose when you’ve trawled yourself through the wasteland of university life that is sparse and poor, dotted only with foreign films, fancy complicated theories and chats about books in coffee houses, then this is where you end up. A little bit fancy, a little bit complicated, a little bit pretentious.
My entire existence rests in this room, everything in it washed over in a kind of grey sense of defeat. There is no faith, no hope, no light to be gleaned from this bedsit. The light filters through the grime on the window, passes through the green of the empty bottles and hits me, dim and dull, hangover like a club to the head.
As I tilt my head to one side on the pillow, I feel the accumulation of three years of university life style slide, like acid rain from one side of my brain to the other. Last night’s red wine bottles sit devoid of content, like Catholics after confession. Two on the table, one empty and spent on the floor of my bedroom. I should get up and make coffee. I should sit at my computer and type reams and reams of genius fiction, but for now, all the hangover will let me do is roll my head from one side to the other, trying to find a cool spot on the pillow, in the close heat of the bedroom. Outside, it could be January, it could be June. But inside, the warmth of the night’s wine and the girl sharing the pillow make it impossible to find a cool spot prevents my morning-after state of mind from even knowing what day it is. The light on the answering machine in the corner flashes red. Messages. From who, I don’t know. In my mind, as the girl sleeps on, I wonder who it could be. People don’t call me. I’m not the kind of person who gets calls. Whoever it is, I decide then and there that I will not call them back. If I can haul myself into the kitchen without waking her, I can make a cup of coffee and maybe even have a shower, and then she’ll leave and I’ll be able to write. It seems selfish. She’s a nice girl. No angel, but nice none the less. But nice girls do not muses make. Nightly, I will sit, crying into my keyboard, tears trying in vain to ruin the few vague etchings I’ve managed to make in pencil. Then comes the wine, always the wine. Living in a slum bed sit above an off license in Leeds isn’t exactly the romantic picture of a struggling novelist that you would normally opt for; where’s the candles, the Parisian night, the rooftops of Notre Dame Cathedrale? Where is the absinthe and the beautiful girls ready to inspire such creative genius as I’d like to think I was? It lies to me to spend my evenings drinking cheap red wine, normally costing about two quid and labelled ‘Dionysus’ from the off license downstairs. The wine is almost inevitably followed by ending up in bed with some random girl that I’ll phone, maybe a friend from a while back. The girls are all too willing to come over to the flat, ring the bell whose chime is almost a death knell by now, ascend the stairs that shake with every step, put fist to cracked paint on my door, turn the tarnished brass handle and join me in red wine, self pity and sex. Join me in worshipping at the alter of self-destruction and then leave in the morning, never to be spoken to again. Or at least until the next time.
The hangover is still managing to make my brain too big for my skull, luckily this time no nausea ensues. I swing my legs out from underneath the bedcovers – they part from the bed like tarnished rain clouds making way for rays of sunshine – the air is still warm, and when I look over to the window – the curtains remain unclosed, they are never closed, I don’t like to shut out life, however much I seem to despise it sometimes. The filth on the window glitters with early sunshine. The clock perched next to the computer, like a little bird; eager to sing it’s song on the mornings that I allow it, that is when I set my alarm, which rarely happens – reads a quarter to nine in the morning. I almost smile, but the ache in my cranium will not allow it. The knowledge that the girl has to be at work at nine gives me excuse for freedom.
I turn back to the bed where she sits, her eyes wide and shot with veins from the excess of the previous night. The scared look of uncertainty. The glance at the bird clock hopping by the computer. The utter of expletives. She is out of bed and into her jeans in a movement that seems almost fluid. Dancing out of the room with something that is just a little bit less than grace, she flings her farewell out behind her, the words are tin cans tied to a ‘just married’ sign on a car. She knows I won’t be calling her. She’s not that kind of girl. This is about inspiration, this is not about romance.
I am still uninspired.
I let my feet carry me across the tiles, down the hallway. Some tiles are cracked; some are just so dirty you wouldn’t be able to tell if they were cracked or not. In the kitchen, the kettle is hiding, nestled between piles of cups and plates that have been in need of cleaning for what could be weeks. Time seems irrelevant at present. There is nothing more important than starting to write, than sitting down and letting the words be as cathartic as confession. I see the kettle, almost shying away from my hand, curled up tight and wary between the dirty dishes. I catch it eventually, and manage to fill it with water and make a cup of coffee. Luckily, I have milk. Back up the hallway, my bare feet almost sticking to the floor with every step, I leave the coffee by the bird clock and the computer and the unused pencils and detour towards the bathroom.
The one redeeming feature of the flat - if you can imagine redemption is able to be found in such a place - is the shower. It’s kind of the only place in the building where everything seems okay. It’s not a mess like the kitchen is. My bathroom always seems sparkling. White and almost divine, the shower being my makeshift church, the water is my religion. Somewhere I can go to wash away the sins of the night before, and emerge from clean and refreshed, and filled with hope that by the time I return to the bird and the computer and the pencils, I will be inspired, I will be able to write. The redemption room deems it so. This optimism, this hope that is born with every new day will no doubt be the downfall of me.
I am not the kind of person to get ground down by things. Of course, in the dark, in the night, enveloped by the sheer scale of this ten hour secret of nightfall – I will despair, I will try, I will lose hope, I will drink, I will fuck, I will forget to let hope prevail. But then morning comes, and I see it as my new chance. As my new day. And my hopes will rise as high as I got the night before, when the red wine of my sins has been washed away in the church of the bathroom, I will sit at my computer, ready to pour out my soul into some great literary work, but it never comes. The bird clock sits and laughs, at first I think with me, then at me, and then the hours towards nightfall are slipping by so fast that he is just downright mocking me.
The phone rings.
My first feeling towards this is sheer, absolute terror. The message on the answering machine is still there, I have not listened to it. I never give my number to anyone. Ever. Not the girls, no one. The only person who ever calls me, and very rarely at that, is the Landlady. On the realisation that this is who it must be, my second feeling is panic. I have to answer it. I’ve been avoiding the issue of my overdue rent for weeks. There’s only so much that sex with your landlady will do, only so far it can get you before hard cash becomes the only option. The only option that is not available to me at present. What will I say when I do finally pick up the receiver?
A day stretches past as my hand - longer and whiter than usual - reaches, ghostlike for the phone. Almost as if I’ve become a ghost myself, I half expect my hand to simply slide through the instrument which vibrates gently against itself, an electronic baby shaking and crying in it’s digital cradle. My ghost picks up the baby, and like an estranged father, or indeed the ghost of a father, it does not know what to do. Or what to say. Shakily, pressing the grey plastic offspring to his mouth, the ghost-dad tries to speak. My voice, gravely with sleep and lack of coffee, grates against the smooth that greets me.
“Tom? Good morning,” The voice on the end of the line is smooth. Steady and consistent like the surface of a lake, it trickles out from the telephone baby, it soaks through the receiver into my skin, filling in the ghost parts and making me very aware of myself, of my movements and my expressions, although no one is here to see them other than the mirror which hangs by the door.
“Yes? Go-good morning,” Splash. My gravel breaks the calmness of her lake, a thousand tiny holes appear in the smooth surface.
“We need to talk,” The Landlady. The only woman to frequent my flat and to leave unscathed and un-violated. By me, at least. She’s the one violating me. She’s the one doing the scathing.
I acknowledge the need to talk, and she proceeds to smooth over the surface of the lake, now I’ve dived into it. I’m under the water, under her, and I don’t want to come back up, don’t want to break that perfect surface. I try not to, for so long, making noises with my breath just enough to keep her talking, keep her flowing, keep me drowning and sinking under this lake of a woman.
I can’t hold it any longer.
I break the surface of that lake like a missile fired underwater. I shoot out straight away, breaking her, destroying the calmness and the sereneness of the lake.
“I’m leaving. Can’t do this anymore. Can’t stay in this shit hole a day longer. I’ll drop the keys at yours, I’ll be out by tomorrow,” I swear violently as I throw the baby back into it’s cradle. I’m the ghost again. The lake can dry the fuck up for all I care. I’m having vodka in my coffee and it’s not even nine-thirty. Jesus.
Reaching into the recesses of my cupboard, the large walk-in one in my bedroom, I try in vain to search for the battered brown suitcase that I came here with a year ago. Or was it two? So little has happened, it’s hard to tell. The non-event that was my life here is stocked in this cupboard. We start with good intentions, the checklist of my soul ready for this stock-take heartbreak.
The cupboard could be a well, or a mineshaft. I’d throw myself down it in a second if I thought it’d get me anywhere. Bring on the seventh level of Hell, I’ll pack my suitcase and start the journey there myself. The suitcase, however, has gone AWOL, and so I drag out a battered old hold-all, the paint crumbled off it so it says ‘didas’ due to the flaking of an ‘A’; I throw whatever I can find into it. A couple of shirts, some CDs, a tape that I made in sixth form. Whatever I’ve left, I don’t care. All I can think about is getting out of there. Forget the now. Forget the blonde haired girls and the sex in place of rent and the empty whiskey bottles. Just start new, start again.
Shake it off. Fuck it.
Straining to hold back tears for the fiftieth time this week, I walk down the crumbling stairs to the street, throwing the flimsy door back into it’s frame as I leave. It rattles; the glass might have cracked there and then if it wasn’t already shattered in a pile on the floor.
Hating my writing, myself, everything, I head down the road, avoiding piles of dog shit and cracks in the pavement, stepping over broken glass and what might have once been a kid’s pushchair, but is now a burnt out frame. Grand theft pram. God, I love this neighbourhood. I swing around the corner, and then there it is.
My salvation.
Shining gold from it’s huge dirt-stained glass windows, the doors thrown open, welcoming one, welcoming all to come in, forget their troubles and worship. Benches thoughtfully placed in the greenery surrounding the majestic building, it’s old stone walls offering comfort, salvation, redemption to everyone who enters it’s doors. I push through the heavy oak doorway, smoke hangs in the air inside like incense. A low hum, a chant of some kind rises from the back, strangely comforting and filled with passion, a group of voices rising and falling in elation and disappointment at the sermon being testified to them by the big-screen TV. The commentator on the football match is their preacher. I walk up to the altar, lined with pumps and glasses to cleanse myself of my sins. I’m here for communion, for the weekly forgiveness. Give me the communion wine, in a pint glass. Pour it out for many, for the forgiveness of sins. Give me the bread that is your body; make it salt and vinegar flavoured in a packet. I’m here to confess all, to be forgiven my sins and make it all go away.
I’m praying fucking hard today.
I’m here to meet my maker, so to speak. I’ve never met him before, in fact I’m not entirely sure he exists, or whether he knows if I do. I’ve got a good idea though, that the man in the corner, almost invisible, is my maker. Not my God, but the man I would have probably called Dad if he’d been around when I was a kid. Looking at him, it’s hard to deny that we’re connected in some way. It’s not unlike those endless nights spent sat drinking at the bar, my only company being whatever of my reflection I can see nestled in between the bottles of Pernod and Blue Bols, the overly-ambitious cocktail ingredients sat as redundant and lonely as I am on the shelf.
Only this time, it’s not my reflection, at least not in the way a mirror might reflect. I’m looking at myself in twenty years time. My age, doubled. I wonder if my Mother would care that I was trying to find Him. I think about her last correspondence, a drunken garbled ‘Happy Birthday’ answer phone message two years ago and I decide that she wouldn’t mind. From my spot at the bar, I see my senior self lift his pint glass in the way that I do, his left hand gracefully encircling the drink, his little finger raised slightly, an out of place gesture, a faux sense of posh. Diamond in the rough, I’d call him, if I was one for clichés. Papa was a rolling stone. I’m not a diamond, but if geological metaphors are called for, I’m my own headstone, my fate yet to be read by others but etched deep into myself already.
I wonder if I’m clinging to things a little bit too much. I pick the label on the beer mat which houses my pint of piss-weak lager, the cardboard coming away underneath my fingernails, too long from neglect – or unbitten from lack of worry or care. I don’t see how we both ended up in the Royal Park pub in Leeds. We’re not from here. There’s nothing to make us gravitate towards this city. Our home is in Sheffield. The Steel City. The lack of steel, or rather the lack of jobs for people making steel was probably what had caused him to leave. My failed attempts at trying to get a degree were what dragged me kicking and screaming into West Yorkshire. That fizzled out quickly. Two years later I’m still sitting in the same pub, threatening to walk out of the same flat, still shagging the same old leather faced landlady to keep my head under some kind of roof, even if that roof has more holes than the stories we used to get told at Sunday School.
Two years and one phone call from my mother. Two years and two hundred sightings of what has to be my father. I can see how he could fail to recognise me, his vision skewed by ten pints a day. I mean, my own sight is focused by lager most of the time, but he just takes the piss. He must be in the pub from opening till closing. This is the same merry-go-round I ride every day I visit the pub. The horses painted with curiosity, regret, dread. I don’t think I’m going insane. I will talk to him one day, even if it’s only to prove that he exists, that he’s not just some company I dreamed up in my drunken haze to make me feel less alone. I drain my pint and nod to the barman.
“Same again, mate?”
My head sort of tips downward, more looking at the scratched counter than agreeing with him. I wonder if five pints is too much to have drank by two o’clock in the afternoon, and I decide that I don’t care.
Scratched into the bar, immortalised in chipped varnish and cheap wood are the words
‘LUFC’
‘BECKI LUVZ GAZ’
Profound. The pub suddenly strikes me not so much as a church, but as a schoolroom. The schoolmaster is looming over me now. It’s Maths. I hate Maths.
“One eighty please,”
Is he asking me a question? I don’t know the answer. I fish in my pocket to pull out some coins, my dinner money, but all that’s in there are what could be a conker and a couple of marbles.
“Slate?” I ask hopefully.
“Nah, mate. Sorry,” The teacher takes my pint away and reckons to pour it down the drain. I’ve got a feeling I’ll be in detention if I don’t make tracks soon, and besides, I have a hangover settling in from the night before. I wonder if Matron’s office is on my way home. Scraping my chair back across the stone floor, I hit something solid. Well, I say solid, I hit something that kind of gives way when I slam my chair back a little bit too hard. The action isn’t even from embarrassment at having no money to pay for a second pint. I’m way beyond embarrassment. The blockade to my chair-swinging antics turns out to be, in fact, extremely solid. The thing that was giving way was a huge beer gut. The solid part kind of hits home when this six-foot-something slab of man shoves what I first take to be an entire ham, but what on second glance appears to be his hand, into my chest.
“Got a problem, Faggot?” He asks me, polite and to the point.
I never know any better. I know I’m in the shit now; I’ll end up in detention or the Headmaster’s office for sure now. Fuck it.
“I think it’s you with the problem, darling,” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. I’m literally half his size. I’ve been living on cuppa soup for the last month due to actually having to pay rent this time, as I’ve been consistently too drunk to get it up for the landlady.
There’s one crack to my ribs that I remember, and then probably more. The man who probably gave me his y chromosome sits, wizened to bar room brawls. His eyes barely register it anymore. I kind of feel something clonk me around the back of the head, and then my insomnia seems to be a bit cured. I remember being asleep for a while.

* * *



CHAPTER TWO:
His eyes red with wine, and his teeth white with milk

I never, ever wake up feeling nice. I know ‘nice’ is a really crap word to use, but it’s sometimes the only feeling that you want. Whenever I wake up in the flat, I’m either freezing, or wet from the leaking roof, or I’ve got some little slag next to me, taking up the space in the bed and quite possibly rendering me infertile with some hideous disease, not that I care about preventing catching one enough to use a condom. Usually, there’s some creditor banging on the door, demanding I give them money that I simply don’t have. Or it’s the landlady, wanting her piece of me in exchange for this piece of shit room.
Every morning, my bones creak like a seventy year old, not someone in their twenties. My body aches like I’m a heroin addict who needs his next fix to get out of bed, only I don’t know which drug would fix the way I feel every day, if any. But today is different.
I open my eyes with caution, all too familiar with the searing pain that often accompanies my head after a trip to the pub and a disco dance with some bastard hooligan waiting to take out their football frustrations on the nearest ‘faggot’ which, to be fair, is usually me. I let the light slip between my eyelashes and get ready to groan at the aching. But it doesn’t come. I feel rested. I feel really, really nice. This feeling worries me somewhat, and I close my eyes again. I’m warm, dry and tucked up like a nativity play doll in a manger. My bed feels different. I feel different. I decide to give the light a second chance at sneaking past my eyelash gates. It does, and the light is sunny and golden. The light in Leeds is never sunny or golden. I feel the start of a wave of panic. Am I in jail? It wouldn’t be the first time I’d ended up in the cells. The worst part about being arrested is that I have no one to ring when it comes to my one phone call. It’s embarrassing. I think that’s why they just let me out, half the time. They pity me. It’s a horrible feeling, people pitying you. I don’t feel pitied at the moment though. And this bed’s too much like something you’d expect to sleep in at the Hilton to be a jail one. I finally open my eyes and look around. Oh God. It’s different to anything I expected.
I’ve woken up dead.
It’s the only conclusion that seems to make any sense. It’s not a thought I’ve ever had before, but I just seem to know that’s what’s happened. I’d think I was in a hospital, but – as I’m sure you can guess, yes, I’ve been there before and NHS emergency wards do not look like this. For a start, mine is the only bed in the room. It’s crazy. I look around, wondering if I’d stumbled across some LSD on the way home (wouldn’t be the first time for that, either). I appear to be still living in my flat, well, my bedsit, but it’s no longer a shit hole. The grey that washed over my bed the day before is gone. For a start, everything appears to be white. I just take it in and accept it, I don’t question it. I’m scared of what the answer might be if I do.
I’m in my flat, in my bed, but it’s all perfect. I swing out of bed, I’m naked. So I make my way over to my wardrobe, and all my clothes are there, just like before, but they’re all white too. It’s crazy. It’s as if someone has been down to Netto and bought them out of economy bleach, and then used to cover Leeds. All of the colour is gone, all the dirt and shadows are washed away and all that’s left is a clean white space, a newness and a simplicity that always seemed to evade me before today.
I have a bit of a wash, and get dressed. Even the crack in my mirror is fixed, and I look the healthiest I have since, well, since I discovered drink, drugs and sex. I’d love to say this is a dream, but I can’t. There’s something about it that just tells me it’s real. I pick my wallet up off the dresser, to find that it’s stashed full of twenty pound notes. My stomach sinks when I think what I might have done to get the money, but something about the crisp newness of the notes reassures me.
So, I’m dead, apparently. First day in heaven, what do I do?
Go down the pub, of course.
Walking down the street is unnerving. Never before have I not been in direct danger of skewering my foot on a broken bottle, or slipping in a pile of dog shit, or had to avoid someone begging for change. There are people around, but I don’t recognise any of them. Some kid throws a stone at me, that’s arched in the air perfectly to hand smack on the top of my head. It hits, but I don’t feel it. The kid laughs at me, but it’s not malicious, or even mischievous. I’m confused. I don’t feel uneasy as such, but I know that if I don’t just accept what is happening, if I don’t just carry on as normal, I’ll most likely lose it all. I make my way around the corner, ready to pay my respects in the pub.
Salvation, the pub usually offers. Today, there’s something different about it. It’s not going to save me. The white exterior of the pub is crowded with people. Everything is shining, clean and white, but there is a buzz about the place that is hard to define; it’s the kind of uneasy feeling you get when your mum drops you off on your first day of school. An ambulance is parked outside, and the whole area is cordoned off with white tape. I feel a kind of sick panic begin to make it’s way past my stomach and rest in my throat. In my head, I the events begin to slot together like bricks in a game of tetris. I begin to see what’s happened. I want to turn around and run away so much, but it seems that although I may have died, my human nature has not. Like a rubber-necker at a car crash scene, I can’t turn away. Something is propelling me towards the pub, and for a change, it’s not just the lure of beer.
I make to push my way through the throngs of people straining themselves in voyeuristic pleasure, but I didn’t need to. A woman turns around, and looks me straight in the face. If I look like I’ve seen a ghost, that wouldn’t even begin to hit the tip of the iceberg. The crowd seems to part for me and before I’ve even realised I’m walking, I’ve reached the tape across the door of the pub. I look in, I can see the bar, complete with it’s redundant cocktail shelf. It seems that no one in Heaven takes too kindly to exotic drinks either. From what I can see, everything is the same, only whiter, cleaner, brighter.
The big screen is up; a football match plays to a room full of officials who don’t notice the score. They’re too busy dusting for fingerprints and taking crime scene photographs. I see myself, stark and bright in Technicolor against the bright white of the floor. My body, laid dirty and broken in a heap, a pool of red around my head, spreading out to cover the chair leg which hit me around the back of the skull. My vision is blurred, not for the first time in this pub. I can hear sounds. A gasp. Vomit splattering spectacularly on the floor. A dull thudding sound. The whiteness of the place only makes it worse. I close my eyes and the same image of myself swims in the red behind my eyelids. I steady myself against the doorframe, my hand gripping the oak so tight that splinters start to come away an force themselves through my skin. I don’t feel them.
I can see the big chunk of meat hooligan, on the floor, I’m confused as to why he’s there, I was sure that he hit me and…won? Craning my neck around the door, I see I’m wrong. There’s a pool of red around him too. My empty pint glass is smashed and stuck into the side of his neck.
If there was any blood running through my veins, it would have run cold by now. The thudding in my ears races faster and faster, the red behind my eyes no longer blocking anything out. I turn, and look around at the gathering crowd. They’ve backed off, leaving about a metre circle around me. I see a police car behind them, in the back, head down and handcuffs on, is Meat Man; all white and most certainly as dead as I am. I panic; there is nowhere to run to. I try to blend back into the crowd, but to no avail. A tall, black police woman, her uniform so clinical and white, only asserting her official status further, comes over to me.
“Thomas Harrison?” She enquires, curt and brisk.
My mouth is too dry to form an answer. I don’t need to. Her colleague, a short man who despite being in heaven still has halitosis, snaps his handcuffs onto me and I’m lead to a second waiting police car. The police woman turns to me.
“We expected you sooner. You do not have to say anything unless you wish to do so but anything you do say may be taken down and used as evidence against you in the court of Heaven”
I don’t even know what to say. I let my head rest against the car seat as we pull away from the pub. Trust me to be in even more shit in Heaven than I am in real life.
To say I don’t know how to take it is an understatement. Everything here is identical to how it was yesterday, only everything is white. I don’t see that there is anything different about Heaven at all compared to…home? Earth? I don’t even know what to call it. You’d think they’d give you some kind of induction into Heaven. Assuming that’s where I am, of course. I can’t see as it would be anywhere else. I want to second-guess myself, to kind of stop and think about the absolute insanity of everything that’s going on. It’s not every day that you wake up dead, find out you’ve gone to Heaven, find out that not only is Heaven not a paradise, but you’re in trouble for quite possibly killing a man in a bar fight. I think if I just go with it, and don’t question it, my head might just stay intact.
“You new round here then?” The bad-breath bobby addresses me in a thick Yorkshire accent as he drives the Police car. I nod.
“Yes…well, no, well yes. I mean, I’ve lived here a few years, but not when it was all…white. Not when I was…” I trail off mid-sentence, not quite wanting to admit my posthumous state. The officer finishes my words off for me.
“Dead?” He gives a little dry chuckle. “You’ll get used to it. You’ll have to; you’re here forever now. Didn’t you read the Handbook when you got here?”
I hadn’t really been listening but at the mention of a handbook, my ears prick up.
“Handbook? I knew it! No, I didn’t get one,” I am somewhat triumphant in the knowledge that things are looking up, and there is something that’s going to help me get my head around whatever mess I was in.
“We’ll sort you out with one at the station,” The tall woman officer is frosty in disposition. She doesn’t even try to make conversation. This cuts the conversation somewhat dead, for want of a better word. The car pulls into the forecourt of a somewhat old and crumbling Police station, which is a veritable ant’s nest of people. As my door is opened and I swing my feet out of it’s door, I notice that the gravel itself is white, and somewhat sparkling. There doesn’t seem to be an ounce of darkness in this place, yet the feeling is one of unease, of a kind of sick expectancy, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.
This is meant to be Heaven, isn’t it?
My feet crunch on the gravel, I can’t help but feel my heart sink, as I’m lead towards the doors of what has to be the police station. Above it, words are suspended in what I can only describe as the trail that a kid might make with a sparkler on bonfire night, spelling out Fiat justitia et ruat caelum. I have no idea what that might mean. Something about justice?
I’m too busy worrying about my current situation. Not only am I apparently dead, but I’ve been arrested, I have no idea what’s going to happen to me, and just in case I was letting myself get comfortable in my confusion, Heaven (if that is where I am) is definitely not any kind of paradise. Officer bad-breath pushes me forward, he is not gentle, but not cruel either.
The ant’s nest of people in foyer of the station is beyond confusing. Women lounge against doorframes, their fishnet and leather uniforms bleached white by the celestial atmosphere. A man sobs over a picture of his family, the colours of the picture stark against the white of the room. The colour, or rather the lack of it, implies purity, but this room is anything but pure. There’s a sense of desperation, of destitution. The feeling that hangs in the air is one that is kind of tinged with a sad hope, a longing for something that will never arrive. A veritable air of Miss Havisham enshrouds the station and it’s patrons.
The people here all seem to know something I don’t.
Bad-breath returns and thrusts a thick booklet into my hands. I look at the cover. Inscribed on the front in gold lettering that wouldn’t have looked out of place on some kind of invitation to a royal function, are the words Fiat justitia (et ruat caelum) again. I still have no idea what they mean. I turn to ask Bad-Breath if they have an English edition, but by the time I do, he’s already disappearing into a door at the back of the room.
I give up.
Really, I do. I take a white cracked formica seat next to short, cockney fella white jet black hair. Again, something unpleasant surrounds the contrast between his hair and the world around it. He pulls long and hard on a cigarette as he sits next to me. Breathing the smoke in through his teeth, he exhales into my face.
“Latin, mate,” He informs me, tapping the book like an old pro.
“Oh, right” I’d already worked that out. I just didn’t know what it meant. I’m not catholic, I didn’t study the classics, the only Latin I’ve ever needed to know in my life was Carpe Diem – the name of a pub in town that I’d frequented at one point.
“Means ‘Let justice be done,’ innit,” It makes sense. This short cocky Londoner sitting next to me, pulling hard on a roll-up and speaking out of the side of his mouth without eye contact – a habit born of years on the tube in London’s cold and miserable streets – seems to be able to offer me at least some answers. He finishes the scrag-end of a cigarette and stamps it out on the floor. The ash is white, the floor is white. Within seconds, the mess has merged to become white glitter once again.
“Makes sense,” I say, the notebook in my hands still unopened. I turn the first page gingerly, hoping that it’ll be written in some way that I can understand. It isn’t. I suppose the sigh that escapes my lips is a lot heavier than I’d intended it to be because the cigarette guy turns to me and raises a thick black eyebrow. I feel like I should apologise for some reason. Instead, I just shrug.
“It’s all in…Latin,” I’m surprised how close to tears I am. Cigarette guy’s eyes light up in amusement.
“You can’t read Latin? How long you been here?”
“About eight hours, I think,”
A low whistle accompanies the smoke from a fresh cigarette on it’s dance out of cigarette guy’s mouth. The bushy eyebrows are raised at me.
“Faaaackin’ ‘ell mate. They got you in quick, didn’t they? I’ve been hanging around here for months! What you done? Why you dead?”
The absurdity of it all kind of wraps around me. Not in such a way that I feel suffocated, more in the way that I feel warmed and calmed by it. Everything’s so crazy and messed up. Everything’s changed. I know I just have to sink into this absurdity or I’m just going to end up cracking. Sink or swim.
“To be honest, mate, I’m not sure,” I tell Cigarette guy. “I was alright, in the pub, then some bloke smacked me round the head with a bit of a chair. That’s the last thing I remember,” The only thing that helps me steer clear of how surreal this all is, is how I keep focussing on the smoke coming from in-between Cigarette guy’s fingers. It curls up, and doesn’t just hang in the air like it does…down there. It doesn’t just blow away or disappear. It kind of pops, when it reaches a certain height. The smoke itself just pops into nothingness. It’s quite beautiful.
The low whistle comes again.
“You bin murdered, aintcha. That’ll be why they got you in so quick. I just got the cancer, didn’t I. They’ll take another year before they look at me, I’m gonna be here a while,” He flicks ash down to the glitter floor. “Mind you, it’s still normally a good week or so before they get you in for murders. What’s so special about yours? Who was this guy you hit? The pope?” His chuckle at his own bad taste descends into a hacking cough.
“Just…a hooligan. Some guy from the pub, Carl Parish or something, I think. I don’t know him, I just know of him. He’s up here too you know, went in just before I did,” Cigarette guy’s face whitens, even more than the room around it. I see his body kind of stiffen and he drops the cigarette end to the floor almost unconsciously.
“You…killed someone? You killed Carl Parish?” His voice is low, throaty, and not because of the smoke.
“No!” I go to defend myself, but with words, not a pint glass. This time at least. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t think so,” I pause, more sad than scared. “I don’t remember,” I add, my voice is a marshmallow dipped in a fondue made of guilt and shame.
“Mate, Carl Parish is the son of one of the head guys up here. Constable Michael Parish,” I notice how he puts particular emphasis on the first syllable of Constable. He continues; “Mike Parish basically runs the deciding up here. Carl’s been fucking things up down there for years. He’s already killed three men before, but got off on it, on account of his friends in high places,” Cigarette guy leans in, punch line at the ready. “Thing is, the reason he stayed free down there was on condition that when he gets here he doesn’t go to Heaven. He goes…down there. You don’t want to fuck with someone in charge of deciding,” Cigarette guy leans back, satisfied at his performance.
My head goes into overdrive. This does not make sense. I’m dead, but I’m not in Heaven. I’ve killed one of the top bosses’ sons around here. I’m basically for the high jump. I have a million questions for Cigarette guy, but when I open my mouth, all that comes out is:
“Runs the deciding? Deciding what?” A loudspeaker crackling to life drowns my last couple of words out.
“Number ten-sixty-three-forty-two-zero, door C,” Cigarette guy coughs nervously and gets up.
“That’s me,” He taps my book on the cover and makes his way through the throngs towards the door marked with a large gold C. I don’t know what to do, or where to look. I glance down at my lap, at the book. I see where Cigarette guy tapped it. There’s a number. That must be me. I’m 10-63-42-5. Only four more people to go. I wait. Listen to their numbers being counted down.
Waiting for God, I amuse myself by thinking up little explanations for my situation. It’s a good job I don’t have anything to worry about back down there. No one waiting for me. No one I’ve left behind. I imagine that’d be worse. You die, and they all cry for the loss of one person. You mourn the loss of everyone you’ve ever loved. All I have to worry about is the fact that there’ll be no more red wine slurs, no more brawls in bars, no more bottle blonde landladies, for my whole eternal life. Make things seem a little bleak, if not easier to deal with.
Only it’s not easy to deal with. There’s nothing easy about dealing with the fact that you’re dead, and you seem to have arrived with a front-row ticket for your own Judgement Day. I can’t even bring myself to call it that. I don’t know what to call it. The loudspeaker has once again called someone else into their own day of reckoning. I think there’s only one person left to go before it’s my turn. I swallow, hard. For some reason, the fact that I don’t know what’s on the other side of door C is more comforting than if I had known.
I could try to look in the book, try to figure something out. But I’m not sure. It’s strange, normally I’ll read anything. It’s the writer in me. If I’m in the bath, I’ll read the back of the shampoo bottle. If I’m in Spain, I’ll read Spanish graffiti, even though I’ll have very little idea of the meaning. But for some reason, I’m not even looking at the book on my lap, let alone reading it. I think maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe ignorance really is bliss.
I know that my number’s up before the voice even comes over the room. I see people who’ve been waiting there for an age look around and ‘tut’ at me as I make my way to the door, a reflex action born from years of having to queue up. A kid, about six years old, is asleep across a chair, his mother stroking his hair. This place reminds me distinctly of an airport, in more ways than one. For a start, everyone’s waiting to get somewhere. And the faces that surround me, some are joyous and excited at the prospect that they will most certainly be going to heaven, some faces are anxious and tinged with a slight fear at the fact that they are uncertain of the nature of the journey that awaits them, whereas others look downright miserable, as if their holiday as come to an end and they’re off to somewhere that is definitely less pleasant than this waiting room. I don’t even want to think about the place that those people might be ending up in. I don’t know which category that I’d fit into. I don’t think that the dread sloshing around in my stomach is a good sign, though.
I finally reach the door, I stop, ready to take a deep breath and gather my thoughts, preparing myself for whatever lay behind it, but just as I’m about to breath deep, the door swings open and I’m pushed? Sucked? Pulled? Through it. Free will appears to be suspended. Great.
As soon as I hear the door bang shut behind me, it strikes me that something big is happening. The room itself is indication enough for that.
I’m in court.
There’s no mistaking that. I’ve seen enough celebrity trials on television for me to know a courtroom when I see one. OJ, Michael Jackson, I’ve been through the lot. Only this is slightly different. The one thing that was reassuring about being in this place was the sense of familiarity. Everything was the same, even the people, aside from their lack of colour. Now, I can see I’m in a whole different ball game. For a start, the guy on the podium to my right has wings. Wings, for fuck’s sake. There’s a jury to my left, they have halos. A couple of them seem to have the starting signs of wings too. The whiteness of the police station was nothing compared to the courtroom. It literally hurts my eyes, my head and seems to flush it’s brightness right through me, making me weak and feel faint. The rest of the courtroom is full. With who, I’m not sure.
“Order!” The winged judge next to me bangs a gold gavel against the podium, which makes a solid and sweet note, the room falls silent. I have no idea what to expect. The judge picks up a piece of paper.
“Tom Harrison, you are charged with the murder of Carl Parish,” Smack. My head feels twice as bad as when the chair leg wrapped itself around the back of my skull. Only this time, the only thing that’s hit me are the judge’s words.
“How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

* * *