The Blurry Lights of London

The dead-air feeling in the air that morning was obvious. The electric static filled my car with mourning. I could see smears of where the blood had dried from the night before on the passenger side seat. After last night, I couldn’t talk to Steph for a while. I really blew it and as I worked my Renault through the morning snarl of traffic, I stared down at the carpet and gripped my steering wheel tight.

I was married to a lovely lady named Gloria, the mother of our two children who shared our three-bedroom Clapham bungalow. I returned last night after my row with Steph, tucking my self into our bed stealthfully, watching the rise and fall of Gloria’s chest looking through the empty vodka bottle at her bedside table, to the warped LED display of the alarm clock, which snickered at me in the way it held up its cards and displayed 4:00. My fist was sore despite stopping at the off license at half two, and the purchase of the whiskey for medicinal purposes –to stop the swelling and make it easier to live with myself for the few minutes it would take for me to fall asleep without the shards of memory from that night revisiting me.

I sat in my car, listening to the morning show on BBC Two, gripping the wheel and imagining what Steph was thinking as she sat in the settee in the front room, her nose stuffed with tissue paper, swallowing slowly and watching the morning news: football scores, adverts for cleaning products, dispatches from far away countries, with the sound turned down, while she choked back the tears and swallowed another Vicodin.

I had ascended the ranks at Gareth and Cornwall, a smallish tax firm on the west side of Richmond, a wealthy suburb of London. As top CPA, my C.V. was filled with panoply of corporate clients; I was carving out a nice niche for myself. I buzzed into work with the usual brusque, rude entrances, required for someone of my particular stature. Once inside the safe confines of my office, however, the remnants of last night came back, and I snorted a line in the bathroom that made everything big and puffy, prepared for a days worth of fixing, cajoling and tempting fate until the last man left, and I sat staring out at the rainy mess of streets and congested traffic. I noticed the grand oak tree outside my office, enjoyed its majesty while sipping on a gin and tonic I procured from my office fridge. The clients liked it when I kept booze around, as it tended to lend itself to an air of relative sophistication.

“Your not going to do that again, are you, stick your little dick into me again. I just might have to tell Gloria, Georgie, what do you think about that?”

“Steph, please we’ve been over this before, can’t we just deal with this like mature adults?”

“But your not a mature adult, Georgie, you’re a fucking kid, you come to me at night with your pathetic sobbing and your incompleteness and think that two shags a week will solve the fact that you’re a pitiful man who wields his power by squashing out the feelings and shoving that shit up your nose, inflating your fuckin ego and I cant take it anymore, if Gloria knew….”

“You wouldn’t fucking dare you slag, with all that’s happened”

“You’ve never been one at confrontations Georgie, that’s why you arrive so late, you fuck me, snort another line, have another drink and mount the battlefields against yourself, and its too much for me to deal with, this is, not fun anymore”

“You bitch”

“Georgie”

“You’re the one that introduced my to him, to Noel, to my fucking dealer, you’re the one who said ‘you could do with a bit of charlie’ you’re the selfish cunt who got me into this, who made me leave Gloria, who started the late nights, and now your going to leave me out there with Gloria and the kids, this fucking habit and a list of clients who don’t know what I’ve done in the middle of winter, at the tail end of a fucking maelstrom of a year you fucking”


And then there was this screaming just this massive screaming that filled the cab. And with his head white-hot and his hands trembling, he slammed the door, dragged her out of the car into a slump in front of her gaff and sped off down the road.

“Just getting those reports done sir, the Barclays account, yeah that one. If you’d just wait.”

He had fallen asleep at his desk, when his boss decided to pay him a visit, as disheveled as George was, head down in front of an empty glass and papers, contracts and confidentiality reports scattered onto the floor, where his chair had rolled over these contracts. He’d had a paper cut earlier, and the blood had flowed out and onto this sleeve.

“Aw fuck Georgie, get yer act together mate, you can’t have a client in here”

Jim or “Jimbo” as George called him was an old friend and loyal boss of ten years. They routinely had drinks, boasted of fictional sexual partners, inflated their profit margins, and generally had a fine time off the clock. Jim had spent many a Sunday afternoon on their settee, complimenting Gloria on her mixology skills. Jim had noticed how over the past few months George’s productivity had gone to shit, but was unwilling to admit it to himself for awhile.

“Corporate just called Georgie, they want to speak with you, I think its serious this time mate, I can’t put them off anymore.”

“Aw fuck Jimbo, what am I going to say, look at me, I’m going to get a fucking divorced, lets get a pint.”

George managed to push a lot of the sadness behind him, handled conveniently in the lavatory of the local with exactly two lines. It rubbed out the raw stinging from earlier, and with the aid of a few pints of Tetley was actually able to have a good time. Repression was a skill George was managing to master throughout this period he described to Jimbo as an ‘experimental phase’.

“I was seeing this girl, you know, your working late, and a friend asks you out for a drink, only you don’t come home to your wife, you stay out a little bit later on the second date, to see what happens. And the next thing you know your in the middle of a full-blown affair, and your just fucking sick at the sight of yourself in the mirror and even the extra shags on the side aren’t enough to disguise the fact that you’ve fucked up a beautiful thing, the only decent thing in your life, so I let it all go, and I told her, ‘we can’t do this, I cant do this. I can’t do this to Gloria’ and I felt fuckin’ better, I tell ya.”

He set his pint down, his mind reeling with all the details he had left out. Reality was coming back harder this time, weighing twice as much, requiring twice as many lines to put it behind him. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, he dropped his stash into the bowl, straight into the toilet, right after finishing the last line, rubbing his teeth. He quickly excused himself, from Jimbo, who was well aware that Georgie was quite pissed, but slightly less of a miserable bastard than he normally was.

George drove around for a few hours, trying to refill his stash, with an increasing sense of hopelessness running through him. His gestures and sayings went out a little bit faster, and he fell asleep somewhere outside the Asda parking lot, three kilometers from his home, where Gloria sat red-eyed and sobbing in front of the television, stroking the family calico.

Morning came with a large crash, and he realized that someone had hit his car. He was still in the same agonized position, and despite the amount of coke he’d consumed last night, he felt surprisingly ok, as long as his thoughts drifted away from the loss of his entire stash from the night before. Which was easy on this particular morning, because someone was knocking on the window, jarring him awake.

“Oy, oy there mate”

“What? Where am I?”
“At the Asda mate, I just hit your motor.”

“But the hood its fine.”

“I hit the back I’m afraid, it’s all fucked”

It took George all the energy preserved through a torturous night of sleep to get up out of the leather bucket seat, and into the cold misty air to see about the back, which was fucked, but only slightly, a bit more than a fender bender, rendering his car still drivable if a bit of an eyesore.

“Oh, its allright. It’s not that bad. Look. Would you happen to know where I could score some Charlie around here, see its late --well early – but I.”

“Sorry mate, can’t help you there, here’s insurance information, but. And excuse me if I appear a bit out of line on this, but you look like shit, you might want to go home.”

Something registered in George just then. A switch, metallic and vibrant with a tremendous electrical storm surging through it, because in a manner of seconds after the unsolicited recommendation, George had punched the man in the mouth, knocked him to the floor, and proceeded to kick him until he could no longer move.

After an immediate evacuation of the Asda lot, George called Jim on his mobile. “I’m getting a divorce, Jimbo, I’m going to need the rest of the week off. With Jimbo’s approval, something along the lines of “Well, the time could do a world of good mate, you’ll see” George sped home; ready to read Gloria the riot act.

He’d had a good hour and a half to come up with the speech, constructed during a nasty slog of a traffic jam on the M4. Storming into the home, George wasted no time in reading out the laundry list of things that hade made him feel inferior. He smashed a few knickknacks, told his wife the pathetic slug of a man he’d been before was gone and that she might as well get used to it, grabbed a suitcase, stuffed willy nilly with scotch, boxers, and a few undershirts, threw a handful of ties around his neck and returned to the car, knocking the left hand mirror off of his wife’s Peaugot as his arms trembled on the steering wheel, en route to the Hotel.

George’s room was on the fourth floor, tall enough to offer a sizable view of London’s west side, while at the same time not high enough for him to do anything rash. He sat out on the porch, smoking a Benson and Hedges cigarette, and drinking J & B straight to the bottle.

Addiction had been a constant companion to him, but it took cocaine to turn him into a self-descrutive maniac. He sobbed in between gulps of scotch, the edges of his posh London view growing softer as the daylight bled into the mixed rouge of evening, and the room span around until he managed to sleep soundly, half empty scotch bottle overturned on the balcony, the drapes swaying to the breezy evening on the 13th of January.