Half-numb, as if after waking, my body rises to pace the alien room. The thermostat is set to twenty-three but no heat emanates from the radiators. The frames hung with fishing twine from picture rails are all slightly out of place, as though dusted in a hurry. I have no idea how long I’ve been reading for; I might well have been here the entire length of the period the diary covers.
I’m unable to avoid holding the diary under my nose and breathing in.
The release of acetylcholine brings back snapshots of an old world: a smattering of brown, picked woodchip pocks on the wallpaper next to the bed; the nutrient-rich musk of football boots, topsoil still clinging to the studs; a background whirl from the plastic vent cut into the single pane of my window, through which bleeds an evening scent of thunderstorms and the mint growing in the garden beneath my window. The olfactory senses are more powerful than my old self’s writing skills, but I deliberately painted my days with broad strokes.
I try to slide the diary into my pocket but it won’t quite fit. Out of respect for my old self, I don’t force it in and instead hunt through my father’s kitchen for a bag. I find a collection of plastic carriers in a small larder containing a washing machine with an open, mouldy detergent tray. After wrapping the diary in one, I slide it through the budgie cage and head to the front door.
I’ve read roughly a third of the diary’s length, but feel no need to continue just yet. I know worse is to come.
So, yes, I was right. Adults are scared of time. Of course we are. Unlike children, who appear the very luminous embodiment of immortality, we’re its victims, its ultimate joke. And I don’t think you even need to be particularly old to appreciate that. Reading something like this, I realise just how far down the road I’ve walked.
Poker and I have never had a mutually beneficial relationship, ill fortune having dogged me since our first date, when I lost seven pounds to tight-faced rivals at Aaron’s kitchen table. Since then, the stakes raised, my losses increasing accordingly, the prudish chaperone known to players as ‘running cold’ has recurrently come between me and any genuine love of Texas Hold ‘Em.
This evening is no different.
The tipsy novice opposite, smirking behind what seems to be a perennial cigarillo habit, raises me to the limit then demolishes my pair of nines with four jacks. The following hand, a hard-faced pro wades all-in and forces me to fold when I harbour a higher straight. The kick of my body’s natural fight-or-flight stress hormone, noradrenaline, has been slowly boosting the heart rate and triggering the release of glucose from energy stores in an attempt to sharpen my mind against nervous tension, but all it’s really done is cause me to haemorrhage nine hundred pounds in ten minutes.
I stopped gambling at roughly the same time I gave up the drink and… Well, it seems all my poisons are returning.
Stop here, I tell myself. For everyone’s sake, stop here.
I mutter my apologies and escort my father’s budgie to the bar.
I’m holding on. I can do this.
‘What’ll it be, sir?’ the barman asks, with a perceptible caution. The sweat must be visible. My shaking hands.
‘Just a lemonade please.’
The tiny Royal Flush Casino is decorated in the colours of faux-luxury chocolate wrappers. The ceilings are golden, the carpets royal purple. Fear and sweat have commingled with a library’s hush to produce a simmering electrical storm of greedy, fanatical meditation, a high-stakes beehive of anxiety.
Orgiastic cries of disbelief shriek from the other table. A white-haired woman wrapped inside absurdly large cataract glasses sweeps a mountain of chips towards her as a well-dressed young man hurls his cards to the baize after a tense showdown. There’s a smattering of envious applause and then a cathedral murmur washes back over the room, the clacking of the roulette tables. Not long after, their croupier, a long-legged brunette in a low-cut gold dress, slides over to the bar and asks ‘Michael’ for her ‘usual’.
‘Rough night, babe?’ She nods at my lemonade.
Is it tonight? I consult my watch. Seven o‘clock. Sunday. I need to catch that train.
‘This place is too noisy. I found it distracting.’
She smiles without humour. Addicts are experts at making excuses. ‘What’s with the bird?’ she asks.
‘Lucky charm.’
When asked, I divulge my losses. ‘Some charm,’ she says in a voice betraying no surprise.
She casts languorous eyes over the tables, the rigid faces of the players, and tells me her name’s Laura. She’s as composed and indifferent as a femme fatale and the scent of rosewater snakes around her exposed neck like the wisping curlicues from a Loony Tunes cartoon. The thin but clear nasolabial folds either side of her mouth mark her out as older than she first appeared.
‘I’m not really allowed to fraternise with the customers, you know. You’ll get kicked out if my bosses think we’re socialising. Look up there. Eye in the sky.’ She nods towards a ceiling-mounted camera blatantly ignoring us.
‘So why are you talking to me?’
‘You’re kind of handsome.’ Employing a man’s cheap flirting tactics, she slowly looks me up and down.
Her paranoia isn’t completely unjustified; a security guard by the blackjack tables is squinting our way. Not wanting to get the woman sacked, I finish my drink.
Just before Laura sashays off to set up the next game, I feel a gentle tugging near my groin. When security’s looking in the opposite direction I investigate my pocket and pull out a queen of hearts with a phone number scribbled across it.
For a brief moment, I’m taken aback, but the depositing of the card was far too practised, far too cool, to feel sincere. We exchanged but a handful of sentences; this is, surely, nothing more than a tart card, a souvenir for the loss of nearly a grand. Perhaps it’s even company policy, to ensure a bankrupt loser’s return. Crude tactics notwithstanding, Laura’s gorgeous and most men would give her a call, but I know she only considers me a catch because I can afford to run cold once in a while.
Stepping from the casino, it takes me a moment to remember where I am. Becksmouth wears the approach of her evening in the fizzing, stuttering neon of fish and chip shop signage, the sparkle of emerging stars. I’m heading to the station when my phone rings.
‘Hello? Lucas?’
Most people sound different through a microphone, the bandwidth of telephones being much narrower than the human ear, but this voice is clearly identifiable; warm, unhurried, and ambivalent about which side of the Atlantic it heralds from. I do my best to keep the delight and surprise from my reply.
I fail. ‘Mariana… Hi.’ The last person I was expecting to hear from.
‘Hey, honey. So, did you go see your mom in the end? I know we talked about meeting this weekend but… I got kind of busy myself. You know what it’s like.’ Her vagueness is refreshing. She’s keen but not desperate, and excuses are beyond her.
‘How did you track me down?’ I ask. ‘I never gave you my number.’
‘I got it off Aaron while you were at the bar the other night. At least I thought I did. I called it just now and got…’
‘Aaron?’
‘Yep. He’s cunning. He gave me this number eventually, but only on the condition I meet him for a drink “sometime”. He kept going on about his film script and how it needed, like, a second pair of eyes, and how I may be able to “help” because there’s Venezuelan blood in me and The Honorary Consul was set in South America… Pretty tenuous… Look, I’m sorry I gave you a hard time Friday. I don’t know the first thing about your family and I really shouldn’t be judging you. It was none of my business. Sorry.’ This tiny soliloquy comes out almost in one breath.
‘You’ve nothing to apologise for, Mariana. I shouldn’t have tried dragging you to that awful club. Anyway…’ I change the subject, not wishing to prolong her obvious embarrassment. ‘Looking forward to your trip to New York and escaping us “dull” Brits?’
She sighs, tells me Syngestia have reneged on her week off and require her to come in to help sort out ‘the problem’ at the labs. Her voice tightens again.
‘So Mumbling Frank was right. The EasyBreathe patent’s in jeopardy.’
‘Looks like it,’ she laments. ‘But why pull my vacation? How shitty is that? I mean, what use am I going to be?’
Mariana, on top of ensuring Syngestia’s PCs run properly and our network remains secure, is also charged with checking and fixing the robots that screen hundreds of thousands of compounds every day. Those little machines are going to be put through their paces in the next few weeks but, even so, they haven’t broken down in the two years I’ve been working for the company. Paranoia must be flying around the place.
‘I’ve had the flight booked for months. My mom’s expecting me at JFK Tuesday morning.’ She either shifts the receiver to her other ear or exhales at length; all I discern is a brief spike of static followed by a sniff. ‘Shall I just tell work where to go?’
‘Please don’t. They’ll never find another computer expert as beautiful as you.’
‘Hmm. Slightly smoother than the lines your friend tried on me.’ Her voice has temporarily returned to its regular, unstressed pitch. She subtly presses the subject of my grief once more: ‘How’s your weekend been?’
I consider telling Mariana the gory details. Irregularities behind my father’s death meant, thankfully, that the offer to visit him ‘in state’ (that is, pumped full of formaldehyde and ethanol to sustain a corporeal shell in the absence of his soul), wasn’t made. His flat contained no clues as to the whereabouts of ‘Sophia’, no phone number or address, not even a surname. She’s nothing but a ghost who informed my mother of her ex-husband’s death, a young woman my father proudly mentioned, but never introduced, to his youngest son.
‘I did come down to Becksmouth, in the end. My weekend wasn’t too bad. I lost a bit of money but won a budgie.’
‘Sounds… good. Well I guess I’ll be seeing you.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘You coming back to London so soon?’
‘Yeah. There’s no point me being down here at the moment.’ I helped my mother out this morning with notifications about the death but it’s all up in the air while we wait for the outcomes of the coroner’s knife work.
‘Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow then.’ She sounds unsure, or unconcerned. I wish I knew which.
‘Bye, Mariana.’
After I switch off my phone, there’s a sharp jangling of coins. A tramp appears to half-heartedly toast me with a Styrofoam cup. I don’t recognise the area, having managed to turn the wrong way after leaving the casino, so I stick a fiver in his cup, as though to make amends for throwing nine hundred pounds away, and ask him the way to the station.
A short walk later, it’s obvious he had no idea where the station is. I’ve missed my train and my arm aches from lugging this damn birdcage through town.
I find myself in a residential square, its lawn scarred by the purplish shadows cast by surrounding horse chestnuts. A jogger fizzes past me before fading into the darkness ahead, reappearing every time she passes under one of the ancient street lamps which showcase the five-storeyed, dark-bricked terraces to my right. Brass door knockers gleam behind black iron railings and, through the windows, disapproving and long-dead relatives glower at Neoexpressionist works of art above heirloom grand pianos half-covered in bowls of potpourri. The posh part of town. Now I’m really lost.
At the far end of the square, a belly dancer dances in a pub window, her naked stomach gyrating in a sequined bedlah as bass-heavy hip-hop reverberates through shisha-pipe smoke. The clientele – mainly women, expensively dressed – are transfixed. I consider entering, but remain outside, indecisive.
I’ve been experiencing similar hesitation lately. Tiredness, discontent, I don’t know what it is. Maybe I just crave an alternative to the pubs, clubs and after-club clubs which have filled my third decade on Earth. After all, the pleasures within could so easily be found elsewhere, and the draught chemicals their customers guzzle aren’t hard to come by either; I can attest to this only too well.
Behind the square, looms a four-storey Victorian building in blood-coloured brick. Atop the roof sits a squat dome with a nippled cupola, and the near side of the building swells out in a high porch. In it I glimpse the rich, polished woods of a reception and the coronae of soft lighting through clean glass. Strangely, all the side windows have thick security bars across them.
I step closer. The sign reads ‘Sinton Hospital’. I’ve walked farther than I realised.
The budgie trills as an incomplete memory struggles to assert itself. Why is this place significant? I peer over my shoulder, hunting through the jagged trees twisting from the square, as though looking back the way I’ve come will solidify the asked-for recollection, and my eyes are drawn to a poster behind Perspex, just outside the hospital grounds.
The advert shows a young family on a stony, British beach, daughter on her father’s shoulders, son wrestling an ice cream from the hands of a smiling mother, all improbably unaware of the cameraman who’s snapped them in their moment of windswept bliss. Underneath runs a caption: Syngestia, working towards a safer tomorrow. It’s a new ad, to get our company name out there, to bolster public trust. For some reason the decision was made to compare our work ethic to that of a contented family unit.
It seems pretty far off the mark to me. Archaic in choice of the locals’ holiday location, it almost predates an age in which forty percent of marriages end in divorce. The children are cherubic and smartly dressed, the mother impossibly attractive, but it’s the father’s face I’m drawn to: skin lined but healthy, hair greying, he waits on the threshold of old age. Since I can’t remember his exact appearance after ten years, this man easily takes on my own father’s attributes. This is who I see when I recall the head which turned towards me in The Old Mint House, his lover’s fingernails black against his bare skin. Overlong hair only a man in the early stages of male-pattern baldness knows the preciousness of. Ocean-green eyes which don’t, or can’t, look directly into his son’s.
My father was easily distracted. Always looking out windows at the stars when he should’ve been listening. Even in photos, he’s failing to eyeball the camera. His parents were both shopkeepers and could speak to anyone; being brought up amid chatter he took to saying little at a young age. This wouldn’t have got him far socially so I expect he developed his rather abstract sense of humour as a bridge between his own world and everyone else’s, but he remained perfectly at ease with silence. He just couldn’t bear fidelity, felicity or the truth.
The poster has been defaced. An animal rights activist – persistent but trivial thorns in the side of science – has appended to the top of the boy’s head two blood-red devil horns and a speech bubble from his beatific lips announcing, simply, ‘Butcher’.
The budgie flaps in his cage, little wings a sudden and terrible ricochet in the darkness, and my heart stops for a moment. The bird hops onto his perch, fixes his black eyes upon me, and chirps a sound I can only describe as mocking laughter.