La Folie à deux - Part One Chapter Two Chapter 2. The Good Times Are Killing Me The day wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He was tired but not in an overly unpleasant way. The kind of tired that made you think less, so that the passage of time through banal activity seemed to go faster. He hadn’t sold anything but then none of the other battery chickens had either so at least there was safety in numbers. He’d allowed himself to be suckered into the usual spiel when he’d applied for his current job. The small, professional sales team description that suggested it might at least be semi-tolerable and a City centre location that meant at least he could be surrounded by the welcome bustle of civilisation during his brief lunch hour. Of course it had become all too clear very quickly that this job was exactly the same as the countless others he’d found excuses to walk out on in the past. The numbers game approach to sales, get a thousand monkeys with typewriters and hope that they write Shakespeare excepting of course in this case they had headsets. It wasn’t just the facts of his day to day job that disgusted him so much, the constant little lies and little manipulations, the false humility and deference, the pretence that you were acting in a strangers best interest, no, it was the people places like this attracted. The smell of failure clinging to the older ones, the undeserved arrogance dripping of the youngest, the wannabe yuppies who lived with their mothers, the casual misogynists, the chatter about whatever bullshit, soul-dead piece of televisual shit the newspapers had told them they should be obsessing over. These weren’t people; they were just nasty little cogs in some horrible machine built as a mockery of what people could be. He never told them this, he felt detached enough and to be fair he even liked some of them on a casual, personal level. He was quite happy to kill time chatting nonsense and subtly and not quite so subtly winding them up. But it still added up to some kind of slow inescapable poisoning of the soul. The trouble was he didn’t know what else he could do. He always felt he was smart enough to see the gaudy bars of his cage for what they were but he was too dumb to do anything about it. Maybe that was a cop out as well though. It wasn’t that he was too dumb, maybe he was too scared and besides maybe they were better off anyway? Was it better to think you could see the truth of a sickeningly wasteful situation but then be paralysed into inactivity by the revelation or was it better to try and make a #life within the lie. Were the sales-monkeys he was surrounded by better off in the fantasy than he was outside it? Did they think these same thoughts or variations on them? Was his detachment even his elitism, if you could call it that, entirely misplaced? Maybe everyone thought like this they just kept their mouths shut. That would be even worse, self imposed solitary confinement through cowardice and a withering of the soul. It was 11.00 by the time he started to feel vaguely awake and normal and he’d already smoked eight cigarettes. He picked up his phone with his right hand and casually tossed it into his left, an effortless manoeuvre born of a #life wasted in call centres. He was supposed to wear a headset but he hated the thought of being indistinguishable from the rest even in that small detail. He also suspected on a fundamental level that no one who really mattered spent the day with a headset on, so he refused. He bashed out the numbers for “Sunshine Florist”, the next prospect in his CRM. It rang out and then cut to a stock answer phone message. The dusky feminine voice, the same voice that tried to sell him car insurance, toilet tissue and he was certain after a trip to London, had told him over the carriage tannoy what the next tube stop was, informed him that they were not available. He dropped the phone back down. “Why the fuck do they bother having an answer phone and then not have their own message? It’s fucking lazy and it makes em look like dicks.” He wasn’t really speaking to anyone in particular. Nicki was flirting with a client and barely registered him, Ollie creased up and started laughing. Ollie was a chubby Ghanaian, bald with a wide genuine smile and a twinkle in his eye. John had asked him if he was Black Buddha once and got the expected stock response of spasmodic laughter and shiny white teeth. He liked Ollie, he laughed at pretty much anything he said. He spent a sunny Friday afternoon testing this to its limit once. He quickly established he would laugh at even a meaningless look and shrug of the shoulders. He’d obviously decided that he was a “funny guy” on first impressions and so now just assumed everything he said or did was a joke without necessarily needing to check the facts. This didn’t bother John. Frankly any escape from the monotony of his job suited him fine. He liked Ollie’s attitude as well, he had a kid from a failed relationship in his early twenties and because of this worked harder than most. He wasn’t a great salesman, he was pretty mediocre, but he worked harder than the rest because he had something he was working for. John respected that, and he was also envious of it. He was aware that all the most meaningful accomplishments he’d ever achieved were for something bigger than himself and he longed to have something like that in his #life again. Something real, something important, something true. Plenty of the others seemed to be working hard enough to afford shit watered down coke at the weekends and the occasional sly lunchtime session. He couldn’t get his head round the appeal of doing a line in the office toilet. To him drugs had always been about context, surrounded by people you had a bond with, shared music, shared experience, above all an escape from the shitty nine-five. It just seemed to him pointless posturing to do it at work and anyway it’s not like you could fully cut loose and make the most of the experience anyway. Like an erection in a strip club. Pretty expensive way to get hard and then not be able to anything about it, what was the point? “Don’t you dare use that language in front of me.” Nicki was off the phone. She was very good at her job, John suspected because she was too dumb to fail. The fact she mostly sold to men in garages helped. She was from somewhere in the north east and was certain that she was very glamorous. John couldn’t help winding her up at every opportunity but somehow that had developed into a strange camaraderie. She didn’t have a clue what John was, she didn’t meet men like him in the circles she moved in. She associated with bouncers, petty drug dealers and wannabe rappers. She didn’t have a clue how to file john. “Fuck off Nicki. You coming for cig Ollie?” I can’t do this anymore he thought to himself as he stood up and sighed. ** Before he knew it, it was lunchtime. He made his excuses for the usual pub invitation; he rarely savoured being lightly drunk at the office it just made him tired and want to be there even less. He wandered the back streets of the old light industrial parts of town that skirted the centre. They were quickly becoming largely empty flats for young professionals. Any character and history ground down and homogenised in some desperate naive assumption that this was “The London Of The North”. No it fucking isn’t he thought to himself every time he heard the phrase. Or if it is it’s the shit, soulless bits most Londoners couldn’t give a toss about anyway. They were remaking the world in someone’s image and that someone was clearly a cunt. All glass and what he assumed were supposed to be exciting angles. He was pretty sure that the tower blocs that blighted the skyline, which went up in the 60’s and 70’s, were thought at the time, by a similar breed to whoever spawned their current analogues, to be modern and chic. There was probably some bitter loser much like himself, decades before him, who saw them for what they were. Cathedrals to mediocrity and despair, the chrysalises for slums in the sky yet to be born. He probably had bigger side-burns though. There must have been some tipping point in the not too distant past. A peak whereby change had stopped being something good and stopped being something that showed forward momentum for mankind and just became a way for things to get slowly, inevitably worse. He knew this to be true, it seemed obvious to him. Things were getting worse, people were getting worse, he was getting worse. He used to be fiercely proud of where he was from, but that was when he felt he had a stake in it. The people he cared about had mostly gone, the places he remembered fondly had been changed beyond all recognition. The faces he was surrounded by seemed to get younger and younger and more “Hollyoaks” everyday. He couldn’t decide if this alienation was because he was genuinely detached from the world due to some suspected but unconfirmed superiority or just because he was turning into a sad, miserable old fucker. Probably a bit of both. Even before he’d run out of women he had any interest in fucking he’d started to feel like the oldest swinger in town. In his early twenties he had to admit to himself he hadn’t been that choosy when picking partners but the parameters for holding his attention or even his interest seemed to get narrower and narrower by the day. He tried being his old self, but it just made him feel paper-thin. Maybe he was, maybe all this introspection was just vanity to cover the fact he was a creature of no substance. He had gone for a drink with an old friend from a previous job not long ago and had admitted to him after his most recent dalliance with a girl he neither wanted or needed, that what he really truly longed for was a punk, supermodel, genius. He didn’t think his prospects for finding such a woman were that great here, they probably weren’t great anywhere and he also suspected that such a creature would be unlikely to be interested in him anyway. Why did he think so highly of himself but at the same time hold so much contempt for himself in so many ways? And love, whatever that meant, he’d never felt further from it. Not the love you think you have when you’re a kid. Anyone could pretend that they had that and he suspected most people did. What he meant was that glorious soul lifting kind. The kind that makes you think there’s beauty in the world, the kind that makes you want to be a better man. The tragedy of that love which he thought he’d known maybe twice, the horror of it, was that the loss of it, the failure of it, made the world an uglier place, made you retreat back to being a lesser man. The peaks of its highest elevations never quite reaching the depths of its lowest valleys. That kind of love, so rare and so shocking in the quickness of its absolute dominion over him, took so long to recover from he suspected maybe you never did. If it doesn’t kill you it covers you in scars. Sears the metaphorical flesh. He longed and feared for it in equal measure and knew that there was always a chance the next time might finish him in some fundamental way. He’d reached the city centre now, it was late autumn, the sky was a serious steely grey and there was a crispness to the air that hinted at another hard winter. He reached into his pockets for the articles needed to roll a cigarette. Just as it was lit and he took that first drag like a drowning man desperate for air his phone alerted him that he had a text. Hello love can you get us some snouts on the way home? Xx It was his housemate. She must be skiving again or have a day off. He’d never really got his head round her calendar. This was one of the occasions where their usually shared poverty was out of sync so he didn’t mind the responsibility of feeding her nicotine habit, they had spent enough desperate Sundays scrabbling together rollies from the butts, overflowing from ashtrays from the last time they had any money. That had cemented their friendship really, that shared experience, that strange community. When he’d first moved in they hadn’t really spoken and then when he had his heart broken the last time, what felt like years but only months before, Sadie and John had started hitting the town together. They had overlapping friendship groups and similar tastes in music so bonded pretty quickly after that. Neither of them was unaccustomed to the late night comfort of strangers but they’d never slept together. That would have broken the bond somehow and the relationship was more like siblings than anything else. The roles changed sometimes he was the big brother sometimes she was the big sister but they looked out for each other in their own way. It wasn’t long until she referred to John as “The Wife”. If it had just been the good times that they shared though he didn’t think there would be that same depth of connection. He never spoke to her about it but he always felt that he and she both had a hole in them in some way and that the parameters were similar. He could tell or at least he thought he could that there was a deep and keen sadness they both had. They were both lost in their own ways and the fact that they had each other made it easier to bare. He was also glad he had someone he could care about that wasn’t the cat. He took out a pen from his record bag and wrote on his hand cigs sades. He almost always had something written on his hand, it was the only guaranteed way he could rely on himself to remember important information. He sometimes wrote notes in his phone that he hoped he could later use for writing, that of course he never got round to actually doing, these were usually composed late at night and depressingly made little sense in the cold light of day I never thought I’d survive the good times That was the only one that was obvious and direct in its meaning. It was true and he knew it. He hadn’t planned for a future and now well you couldn’t call this one, this was, well Limbo. He realised he’d nearly run out of lunch hour so he quickly ate the cheapest sandwich he could find and a Belgian bun whilst worrying about his flabby stomach. Fuck it he thought as he saw himself reflected in a shop window, you’re still pretty easy on the eye. He’d gone for a red-tie and the standard black shirt today and thought he looked pretty good in his crombie and red doc martins. He’d obeyed the letter of the dress code if not the spirit. He realised he hadn’t replied to Sadie. Reeto la. Let’s get hammered and go for a boogie on Friday. I’ve got some dollar so it’s all good. Xx It was Wednesday, half way through to be precise, which meant he was half-way through the week. The thought made him feel a bit better. ** “And when your all alone don’t forget me. And when I’m all alone I won’t forget you, cos I’m on the wrong side of the tracks and I did not know until you turned your back, I’m living the blackest years of my #life and I did not know until you said goodbye. Goodbye!” He turned the music off and slipped of his headphones as he arrived back at the office. He barely registered the afternoon meeting. The usual pats on the back and gentle reminders that people needed to improve their call-times and the quality of their pitches and that extra training was available if people wanted. Could you train me to give a fuck he thought to himself? He wished he had a trade, he wished he could do something real. He was pretty sure plumbers didn’t feel like this. He just wanted something he could touch, something that didn’t rely on what amounted to skill at manipulation. Even on good days he felt like a snake-oil salesman. He probably shouldn’t have fucked up university but he didn’t feel that would have given him that many options anyway. The realities of university had disavowed any dreams of academia he may have held as an adolescent so he guessed a degree might have just meant this but in a slightly nicer office and living in a slightly nicer house. He wasn’t sure if that would make him happier or he suspected even more miserable. He guessed he’d drunk deep enough from the well of poverty but felt uncomfortable with the idea of wealth. He couldn’t shake the feeling it would make him a traitor in some way. Maybe he should just make the most. Maybe if he faked enthusiasm for his #life it would somehow work out, he realised though even as this crossed his mind that he didn’t know who he’d be faking the enthusiasm to? He decided you can probably only lie to yourself if you don’t realise you’re doing it. Fuck maybe he was already doing that? How could he tell? He stopped this train of thought when he realised all he was doing was adding another layer to his introspection. I’ve got to get out of my own head for a bit he decided. I need a break from myself, some distraction, some peace. Just for a little while. How the fuck do I do that? Hopefully getting wasted on Friday would do the trick. It then dawned on him that Sade’s may suggest they get cocaine when he’d be drunk and vulnerable to suggestion on Friday. Oftentimes he was glad to be but he really didn’t want the stuff now, not when he felt like this. To be honest it had been a long time since he’d got any enjoyment out of it, there was a time when it had given him a clarity of thought that he welcomed, he’d say it switched on his reptile brain, old primal circuits, all id without the whiny ego to kill his buzz. These days it just made him more aware of the blackness in him, it just made him crawl home alone and curl up into a ball. The tears these little episodes inevitably brought weren’t even cathartic, they just came on in horrible, unstoppable bouts he’d choke down to hide the sound from Sades. Like the vomit of his despair. He didn’t want her to see him like that. He didn’t want anyone to see him like that. “Fuck yeah! Lets dance like prats and try and get you laid. Xx” Maybe he should try and get laid, sex was important. He might meet someone amazing and he hated the thought of getting really into someone and then finding out they were shit at sex. The woman he thought at one point he’d spend the rest of his #life with had been a one night stand that escalated. He wondered how she was. He no longer loved her but he didn’t like the inescapable truth that she hated him. He tried to reconnect and get some kind of absolution but she’d refused. He’d stopped trying now. He then began to think of all the embarrassing, shameful, sad little encounters he’d had to get through to meet her. The ratio wasn’t great. Maybe he shouldn’t try and get laid. “John, you are so lazy. Do you not care about your call times?” It was Nicki, she smirked after she said it so it was clear she just wanted some attention. “Not feeling it today old son.” A remark chosen to confuse and annoy. “Old son?” Mock indignation and a shrug of the shoulders. “Alright “Mum”, Jesus!” He picked up his phone and idly scrolled through his list of calls, “Sunshine Florist”. Yeah that’ll do, their probably not there and at least it’ll make it look like I’m trying, he thought. In his more professional moments he’d come to the realisation that it actually took more effort to not do much work than it did to put even a superficial amount of effort in, and that it made the days drag on even more. This epiphany in no way helped his motivation however. Something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He looked away from the BBC news website he was idly viewing and nearly laughed in shock. “I’m sorry but the person you’re trying to call.....” It couldn’t have been more than an inch and a half tall, almost the shape of a man but cruder, not misshapen but fundamentally basic, like a child’s drawing. “Is not available.......” It walked with a head bobbing arm swinging gate, almost nonchalantly from behind his monitor, he noticed or at least he thought he did through the thought stopping intrusion of it into his #life that it looked like it faded somewhat at the edges, like it was disappearing from the outside in. It was completely black. A completely black stick man was walking across his desk and had now disappeared behind his telephone. “Please leave a message after the tone.” His thoughts lurched back and forth between curiosity and fear. Finally curiosity hesitantly took over and he grabbed for his phone pulling it back and up. He felt the fear run down the back of his hand in that rushed movement. Not knowing if something was going to grab him and he instantly recalled the feeling at the strange sound that frequently disturbed his sleep. There was nothing there. “Your mental!” He couldn’t tell if she was genuinely annoyed and she certainly couldn’t read his expression. She cracked a smile and threw her head back and laughed, her long black extensions falling off her shoulders. “Your proper cracked. Hahaha, I don’t even.....Oh hello my names Nicki could I speak to the owner of the business please?” And like that she totally forgot what had been so funny and got back to her rote fashion pitch. He looked around, Ollie wasn’t at his desk and none of the others seemed to have noticed. What the fuck was going on? He didn’t feel that tired but he guessed it could be the bad night’s sleep he’d got. But then he’d had worse and not, well hallucinated, that’s the only word for it. He didn’t feel that stressed, well he did but it was just the usual background level he’d almost become accustomed to. Fuck maybe it was years of not looking after himself properly catching up to him? Maybe it was a flashback, but then he didn’t think he’d done much stuff that could prompt one. He Googled; Can ketamine give you flashbacks? The girl’s health website at the top of the list didn’t seem to confirm or deny. Although it did say that, the next entry LSD, could and didn’t mention it for ketamine so he reckoned probably not. He’d hardly ever had LSD and only then in weak doses so he reckoned that couldn’t be it. Calm down, he thought to himself. It’s just one of those things, you’re bored and tired and it was probably only a matter of time before your head played tricks with you like that. It’s just #lifestyle catching up with you. This voice was the one that sometimes came into his head, the part of him that acted as the friendly policemen of his mind. It would sometimes appear in desperate moments but usually only for minor crises, truly awful bleak times it left him to his own devices. Devices that invariably in those situations he’d turned against himself. He performed a mental inventory of other occasions where there was obviously something very wrong with his head. These were times when he’d been doing a lot of drugs and mixing and matching and cutting and pasting and staying up for days on end. There was the funny, déjà vu, he guessed you could call it. He’d been afflicted with it for a period of about two years just as long ago. It wasn’t déjà vu but that seemed the only appropriate word. He’d all at once be overcome by a song he could only remember during an attack, a feeling of nausea and of sensory overload and he’d have to sit and breathe deeply till it passed. He’d wondered if it was some minor form of epilepsy or was in some way related to the thankfully rare migraines that sometimes paralysed him with agony. It definitely felt like bad wiring. Like the horrible counterpart to when he’d felt once, on a ketamine high, that his blood had turned to luminal copper wiring heated and lit with an electric current that filled him with a vibratory revelry. And then there were the occasions, generally after very strong pills, where during the long comedown he’d be holding a perfectly normal conversation and his talking companions eyes would briefly melt down there face. That had happened so often at one point he’d stopped reacting to it and it was always over so fast and so obviously related to the crash after the weekends highs it didn’t bother him as much as it might. But the thing was, neither of those maladies felt like this. They were both obviously products of his head, they were clearly sensory but at the same time they were obviously miss-firings of normal brain activity temporarily hijacked by some possibly deserved and certainly self inflicted gremlin of the mind. This felt externally real. But then it couldn’t be, how could it be? There was no context or explanation for this. He was prepared to believe in ghosts, he even thought he’d had brushes with them a couple of times. That didn’t mean he thought they were necessarily sprits of the dead though. But even the broadest explanation might struggle with tiny black stickmen. No it was just one of those stupid things it didn’t mean anything. Yeah he’d forget it soon enough, even now he was starting to question what had actually happened, as the freshness of the memory faded. He reached into his coat pocket which hung off his chair and rolled a cigarette. He was half way down the stairs before he remembered the man with the bowler hat at the foot of his bed. ** By the time it came to the hour long walk home, it was getting dark and chilly. He didn’t listen to any music, there was none that suited his mood. The commuter traffic provided a reassuring background susurration, as he walked much slower than usual past the crowds of office workers heading home and students heading out. He wanted to drink very badly, to lose himself in stupor. He checked his balance by the university through a graffiti strewn, kebab stained cash machine. Not enough for anything decent but he could get cheap cider and black current. It meant he’d feel like shit guaranteed tomorrow but it was a shitness he could handle. He was no stranger to post-drunk #depression, although he found the obviously artificial come downs from ecstasy strangely easier to deal with. He didn’t like this, this feeling that things were unravelling around him. Every time he passed a hidden bush obscured pathway he couldn’t escape the thought some great black dog would leap out at his side and tear his face off. He rolled and smoked through fingerless gloved fingers in quick succession, feeling his chest tighten at the abuse mixed with the cold air. Get drunk with Sade. Get really drunk with Sade. Get so drunk they both passed out on opposite sofas. Yeah that’s the plan. It’s a good plan he thought. He didn’t need this. He didn’t directly think of the possibility of what it meant. Some thoughts were to terrible. They terrified him. His mind no longer happy with petty torments turned fully against him, losing himself, become something else, something that would be totally rejected by normal healthy people. No don’t think that. That can’t be happening. People that happens to probably don’t realise or question it. Yeah it was ok to think it now. Mad. He couldn’t be going mad. The truly mad don’t realise they are, do they? He thought about it. He wasn’t sure but he thought there was some logic to the idea and it made him feel a little better a little more himself. If he had any mental health problems it was probably #depression, but then he’d read somewhere that the clinically depressed thought they were to blame for all their problems and he didn’t truly feel like that, not fully. The semi-comfort of his internal reassurance almost carried him home. Then he saw the girl with the face made out of wicker. somewhere that the clinically depressed thought they were to blame for all their problems and he didn’t truly feel like that, not fully. The semi-comfort of his internal reassurance almost carried him home. Then he saw the girl with the face made out of wicker.