3:AM Magazine

By Nick Garrard.

A flicker and a hum.

‘And it’s on.’

‘It’s on?’

‘Yes, it’s on.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Now now Mr Beaton, I can understand you’re nervous.’

The doctor giggles and runs a hand though his gingery moustache.

‘But do try to relax, make yourself comfortable - hell, you might even enjoy it. Remember, this is all in good credit - you’re shaving months off your sentence and all you have to do is take a little nap. Think of it as lost time returned.’

He walks to the other side of the room and bothers a bank of dials and buttons. Strapped to a soft-backed chair, Murray squeezes the leather grips and flinches as a mangy old nurse tightens the toggles across his chest. A silvery mesh is placed over his head. Cords flex and unfurl, attaching themselves to the corners of his mouth where they suckle and pulse like calves at their mother’s teat.

‘Really, you’ve nothing to worry about’ says the doctor, turning and grinning while his hands slow-dance across a keyboard. He flashes Murray with cracked yellow teeth and winks.

Soon, stray worm trails of light form at the edge of Murray’s vision. The humming builds, the room softens and he smells tobacco smoke wafting through the air.

‘You best read him his rights Angie, before he slips off into deep time.’

The nurse assumes a stiff, upright posture and purses her lips. When she speaks her voice is unexpectedly soothing, like soft cake. She performs the words looking down at her nails, already bored.

‘The purpose of this exercise is to recover memories blocked or obscured through trauma. The device we are about to use is a prototype and may carry unforeseen side effects. Throughout the session you may experience blackouts and loss of clarity. You may feel nauseous and anxious. This is perfectly natural…’

She pauses to clear her throat of catarrh.

‘…You may experience time as a hollow vacuum or feel yourself present in several moments at once. Transition from memory to memory may feel like a steep descent down a narrow hole. Time may bunch up and slow down or speed past at accelerated rates. Your senses may become scrambled and you may experience colours and smells as flavours or textures. This is not uncommon. You may become aware of slight reality bleeds, of dreams and other media mixing with personal experience. Do try to remain calm; the playback will be much smoother.’

The list continues but Murray is soon drifting off.

When his heart rate settles and the monitors are set in place, the nurse wanders outside to drag on a cigarette.

This morning the comedown is biting and sore. A snarling headache rears up to meet the light. Checking himself in a mirror by an open hallway, he sees a slither of lumpy vomit gracing his lapel and a thick bruise running down the side of his neck.

A woman is screaming. Somewhere a siren howls.

He takes a quick look around.

This is not his house and that on his hand, that is not his blood.

Not all of it.

Turning to leave he trips over something solid. His boot comes to rest on an outstretched palm.

‘Although, I don’t shuppose.’

An old lady slumps her head on the bar, slurring into a spent glass.

‘I don’t shuppose any of you are interested?’

In the afternoon light she seems as frail as a paper lantern.

Murray looks over and wonders; what if she were to die waiting for a drink that might never arrive? Surely no-one would notice - not until the staff pull the doors shut and sweep the place clean?

It is early afternoon and already he feels exhausted. Portraits of fist fighters in striped jerseys hang from the walls. The ghost of smoke drifts across the air, punctured by beams of flickering sunlight. Time slows to a treacle drip, served up in half-hour measures. In the lonely corners richer lives bundle up, wasted.

Maybe, he thinks, the old lady is right; none of them are interested - they’ve heard these tales many times before. In places like these, drunks like her are ten-a-penny, pressing their lives into other people’s laps. He wonders if he’ll ever sink that low, become another walking autobiography.

There’s a drink in his hand he doesn’t remember buying. Some days he tells people he’s been dry the best part of a decade. Maybe that’s true, he’s never been sure, but today is not one of those days - it rests on a plateau somewhere in-between. Officially he’s in recovery, yet the word is loaded with false hope, suggesting something lost and found - a promising future traded in exchange for a slow-addled liver.

He’s been through the dredger, worked the 12-step programme and made his peace with fate, but he’s also lived long enough to know this sober face is not his own. It doesn’t fit, straining at the edges where his feelings push to escape. Inside, the thirst is lying dormant. He gazes at the rows of bottles behind the bar and feels it squirm and writhe. Its breath, warm and welcoming, ripples over the back of his neck.

By a grubby sash window is Welwyn Butcher -’Welly’ to his friends, if he had any. He stands proud and overbearing, the highest paid bully on prime-time television. A red-faced man in a simple blue blazer, he pauses from speaking only to gulp at a wobbling tumbler of scotch. He seems to have been dragged forth, bones and all, from some distant century - in pre-war times his hectoring flair for verbal violence might have brutalised the rabble in a rundown public school. Murray has written for him before - jokes and cheap one-liners to soundtrack his pawing over pretty young actresses. For Murray that had been his springboard to greater things, wider success across the Atlantic which left in its wake dim memories of worthy dramas broadcast to cultured insomniacs. It is Murray’s bitter experience that when he writes with a broad stroke the public laps it up, gawking.

Welwyn gazes at the crowd down the end of his nose, an exploded strawberry of burst capillaries.

‘I’ve always thought…you’re only as old as the person you feel.’

Saying this, he casually molests a passing waitress. The sycophants yowl with approval. Murray orders another drink.

Returning from the bar, he recognises his old friend Tull standing awkwardly at the back. If Welwyn resembles a single joint of overcooked beef, then Tull is a patchwork of sluice meats and off cuts. He pushes back a lock of lank hair and tucks it behind his ear, smiling tepidly as another joke descends like mustard gas on the hooting crowd.

Murray catches his eye and grins. He sweeps an arm aside to launch him from the bar and knocks over a glass - more there than he remembers. He steps forward extending an open hand but the carpet seems to have snared him at the ankles. Stumbling, he goes nowhere but down, landing with a crash among cigarette butts and chewing gum wrappers. There is glass studded in his elbow and somewhere a woman is asking if he’s alright and yet now he doesn’t feel the need to answer because the room is starting to swirl and as he presses his face to the floor, he feels it buckle and writhe like wet cement.

He has the strangest feeling that he’s somewhere else already.

He surfaces with his lips wrapped around the neck of a whisky bottle.

Around him, the rubbish is arranged in towering piles, a sketchy metropolis of beer cans and takeaway boxes.

Putting down the bottle, he takes another look at the time.

The LCD display flashes in quiet distress.

3:36 AM

Even now, sleep seems a distant prospect. He has been up for days, scratching himself in a filthy bathrobe. Murray sighs and presses further down into his armchair, picking at a toenail and staring groggily at the television. The volume is set to a low rumble and from this distance he can just about make out the picture, a slow tracking shot from the bonnet of a car. The camera moves down an open road at night, picking out its route in twin beams of light.

Cut to the interior of the car. In the passenger’s seat is a small man. Bald, Italian looking. He polishes a revolver with an oily blue rag, looks over his shoulder and mutters something sharp under his breath. The camera pans across to the driver, a Hitchcock fantasy in an immaculate olive green coat, full lips and blonde hair blossoming from a perfect oval face. One hand trails from a window, a cigarette burning between slender fingers.

Now as he watches, a memory jars loose. This is a face he knows in every detail, one he has lain next to and smothered with kisses. Lucinda, the promising young actress he plucked straight from stage school. She has returned to him, out of the past and plastered across the screen. This is the face he will leave his wife for (has that happened yet? He can’t be sure). As he watches, the signal fades and her image distorts and flickers. He’s losing her already. In the semi-light, close-ups shimmer with woozy detail.

She opens her mouth and he knows the words before she speaks them.

These are his. They feel like the first thing he ever wrote.

This is The Long Drop, a murder mystery told in broken pieces. For him, this had been a first lesson in failure, a full-blown turkey that sank with barely a whisper, butchered by lazy scheduling and production meddling at every level. His first dealings with the American studio system had wound their way to a slow, unflattering end.

To a blank-faced room of studio heads, he had pitched it like this: each episode had been written in carefully disjointed sections, a confusing puzzle meant to run out of order. Circular plots, internal logic, call-backs to future events all wreathed in a smoky noir atmosphere of betrayals and double crossings. The executives had seen great merchandising potential, an immersive universe of books, t-shirts and branded nothings in every available colour. Gulping at coffee and downing doughnuts whole around a fine grained table, their eyes had swum with figures.

He had wanted the viewer do the thinking but, in the end, they hadn’t been trusted to think at all. His backers lost their nerve at the last minute and tore each episode to pieces, hammering out a new structure and murdering the show in the process. From there the ratings tanked. What little audience he’d already gathered embraced the last echoes of his peculiar logic, picking each gnomic utterance and cryptic image apart in chatrooms and websites, hunting for clues in silences and strange juxtapositions, most of which stemmed from the awkward patchworking of his own original words.

Soon they abandoned in their droves and the show disappeared unfinished. The mystery went unsolved, it’s ending a barely remembered sketch buried somewhere in a forgotten notebook.

These days he was writing cheap suburban sitcoms, dissecting family life from the seclusion of a second floor bedsit in a cold district of the city. These days he was heading out less and less, seeing only the television for company, living life at the dull bottom of a bottle. These days he was rotting from the inside out.

‘Life is hell,’ his characters quipped, to gales of canned laughter, ‘get out while you can!’

These days he was starting to agree.

‘Murray, is that you?’

‘Yes, hullo Angela.’

Murray winds the cord around his fingers, leaning back in his chair so that the front legs hover in stale air.

‘You sound chipper love, not back on the drink, are you?’

‘A little, yes. A bit stressed is all. Nothing you’d call a problem.’

”It’s not me that does though Murray is it? What would Helena say?’

‘Not much. We’ve separated. She doesn’t agree with my appetites.’

‘Well. I’m sorry to hear it love. Mind you, shows how long it is since we last spoke. May I ask why you’re calling? I was starting to wonder about you.’

‘Well, you’re my agent Angela. Aren’t you supposed to call me?’

‘Only with good reason love, only if the work’s on the table. Been busy have we?’

She knows exactly what he’s been up to. Her voice hums with sarcasm. He imagines her sat smugly in her Berwick street office, Bluetooth headset sprouting fully-formed from her ear. From here he can almost hear her cracked lips rattle as a smile forms across her face.

Murray pauses in silence. She starts to chew softly. Angele used to smoke constantly but her specialist has recently convinced her to quit. Now she munches through a constant series of pistachio nuts, shells littering her desk like spent bullets. In a year’s time, a smiling doctor finds a lump the size of a baby’s fist clinging to the wall of her left lung. Immediately after he tells her, she laughs and lights up.

‘Angela, do you remember that actress I cast for The Long Drop?’

‘The bimbette - mouth like a wasp sting?’

‘That’s the one. Do you think you might dial her up? I have a proposal I’d like to run by her.’

‘I’m sure lots of people do love, face like that. Anything I should know about?’

‘Don’t be crude.’

‘I’m your agent sweetheart - that’s what you pay me for.’

They’ve been milling around all day, hungover and stewing in their own sweat. Murray has been making eggs but, now that he’s been sober a while, he starts to feel the thirst again. There are a bunch of them spread across the sofa and the floor, all people he invited back when they’d been turned out from every bar going. There is glass ground into the carpet and a number of small holes burned into sofa. From up in his bedroom, music plays.

Above the hissing of oil in the pan he hears someone fumbling with the key chain at the door.

‘Are you heading out?’ he asks a man he doesn’t recognise.

‘Sure.’

‘Could you head to the offy? I’m running dry.’

‘Sure.’

He hands him a £20 note and never sees him again.

‘Did you mean what you said?’ she asks, wiping her sweat on the pillow.

‘Absolulely.’

Under the covers he slides an arm across her belly, tracing the ripples with an idle finger.

‘Don’t!’ she shoots back, rolling away, ‘Not now.’

She’s not the first girl he’s disgusted. He’s swimming with booze, full to the very top. He used to chew mints before he came home, but now he no longer cares. The game is up. The transatlantic commute is taking its toll. Lost time bundles up and collects, weighing down on them both.

She shifts away; inching across the bed and making sure no parts of their bodies are touching.

With his head pressed tight to the mattress he feels every creaking spring as a thundering split of the earth. A chasm emerges between them. The distance is immense.

‘I wouldn’t mind if I thought I mattered to you.’

‘y’do, y’do’.

He grasps clumsily at the words but they seem to spill from his mouth before they can be properly moulded into shape.

‘And I can’t imagine they’ll have you working long if you keep drinking like this.’

‘N’your right’

‘Of course I am. Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?’

He can’t. He doesn’t, because he is no longer there. Now the mattress is an ocean and he slips beneath the surface, deep into lolling green waters. At the same time she is breaking his heart, it seems he is in a hundred different places at once; walking the street with nowhere to reach at the end; collecting his things from work and walking out a final time; kicked out at last orders and landing with his foot in something rotten. He’s drowning in every bad decision he’s ever made, every time that he’s buckled and run, swept under by his own cowardice. There’s so little light left he starts to panic. Down here is where the ugly breed are, the hungry animals with twisted, broken faces. The pain, when it settles, is exquisite. It hurts so much that he thinks maybe he should start sharing a little of it around.

Tull grimaces.

‘It’s not your fault at all Murray. They’re just not very happy with it.’

He taps his cigarette out on the windowsill. Ash collects among dust and flies.

‘It’s all change round here.’

He smiles awkwardly

‘All change!’

‘How long have you known?’ Murray asks.

He is sat in his favourite chair, staring past Tull and out onto the street below.

Outside, a single light fizzes in its socket.

‘Now, let’s not lie to ourselves Murray - we both knew it was in trouble. They never understood it from the start. You remember that first screening? When the lights came up you could have heard a pin drop. Not fun to be there at all - like watching your parents fucking.’

‘Sure.’ Murray nods, but doesn’t remember.

‘And it seems that the recuts haven’t helped either. You’ve been haemorrhaging viewers for weeks. So, in a word, it’s over, before it ever really began.’

There’s a beat in which the silence touches everything. .

‘But listen…I’m curious. How was it going to end, your story?’

‘I…well. It’s figured out, I suppose. Not clearly. But there’s something there. An image.’

‘Go on,’ says Tull, ‘impress me.’

‘Well, you see, although we’re jumping around through the story all the time, by the end there’s someone to take the fall, a character we single out for the final part. Someone who was always there, but hiding in the margins. And you realise that, well, he’s been telling the story the whole time from his cell, thinking it through and working it out before they…they, lead him to the chair. So, as the story goes on, he’s been working through the mistakes, correcting things and rearranging them, trying to find a way out because he doesn’t remember the night it happened…. and he’s convinced he’s innocent, keeps telling everyone he didn’t do it. But still, the timeline’s all messed up. He’s had all sorts of parts of it put in the wrong places, words from the wrong mouths, that sort of thing.’

‘I’m hooked,’ says Tull, overplaying it. ‘And then?’

‘So, they’re leading him out and down the hallway, at the end of which is the chair waiting for him, and he’s running it all through his head. In real time, this is most of the episode, just him walking down that corridor with a guard on each arm. But now, for the first time, the story is working through in sequence. He gets closer and closer and the story’s working through in his mind, getting nearer and nearer to the part where it all goes black for him.’

‘So?’

Well, suddenly he has a revelation. It hits him.’

‘Yes?’

‘He knows exactly what happened.’

‘And?’ Tull leans forward, impatient.

‘He did it. He killed her. On a quiet, unremarkable day, something in him snaps. He walks into a stranger’s house and bludgeons her to death. Then, as soon as it’s done, whatever switched in him switches back. All the gangsters and criminals floating around the story mean nothing, because ultimately some random bloke walks in from the night and smashes a stranger’s face in, before wandering out and back into the darkness.’

‘It’s a happy little world you live in, Murray.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I can’t help but feel you would have pissed off more people than you already did.’

‘Well, my ignorant friend, the point is this: he’s been protesting all this time and her family have seen him, come into his cell crying, held his hands and promised to free him. There’ve been press conferences and concerts, everyone rallying around him, and all in the name of his innocence. And as he walks into the room he hears the crowd outside chanting, calling for him to be freed. We close on that, the chanting, as he lowers himself into the chair. All the other sound filters out. The point is, all this time he was carrying around the crime, the cause of all his problems, and he didn’t even know it.’

‘God Murray!’

Tull pauses to stub out the cigarette.

‘You’re such a lapsed Catholic.’

The feeds are running, regular and clean. A computer screen burbles contentedly to itself, like a toddler practising first words.

‘How is he holding up?’

‘All well doctor.’

‘Good good.’ The doctor pauses, passing a curious eye over the readouts.

‘The material’s interesting, too.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, he’s slipping in and out all over the place. Quite a creative mind.’

This last observation, the nurse delivers with the cool distance of a terminal diagnosis.

‘Any bleeds?’

‘Some of his memories seem to be compromised, yes’

‘And do we have what we’re looking for?’

‘I can’t be too sure. Right up until the minute, yes. Fine all the way through, but not at any point where we might be able to gather evidence.’

‘So, no mention of the incident yet?’

‘I…I can’t be sure, but it might be present in other places. Perhaps.’

The doctor fixes his hands behind his back and puffs out his chest.

‘Well, keep digging, keep digging. The truth always comes spilling out somewhere.’

It is late, as it always seems to be these days. Murray rarely sees the sunlight - it left alongside obligations and responsibilities. He hasn’t shaved and now that he passes under the full beam of a street lamp, he notices his trousers are crusted with dirt and half-eaten food. He has the address written in scratchy biro on his hand and as he turns a corner he realises he must be getting near. Now he wanders down a back street and emerges somewhere in the middle of a row of terraced houses, pauses a moment to drain the last of a bottle and then tosses it into a hedge.

Over the street he can see the house. Lights are on and music drifts quietly up from her basement flat. He didn’t know any of this would happen, not until late this afternoon. Over breakfast everything seemed to fall into place: it was a fire like he hadn’t felt in a long time, an arrow-straight certainty that had seen him up and out with a speed and confidence he had forgotten he once possessed. He has been pounding the streets all evening, working this through, preparing.

Now he stalks across the street and marches up the steps to her door, pressing a finger strong onto the buzzer. He pauses a moment, collects himself. From inside, footsteps come and a voice he recognises says -
‘Coming, coming.’

She slides the door open and, eyes falling on his face, recognises him with a certain amount of surprise.

‘Murray? I -’

He smiles. Doesn’t say a word, just bares his teeth. A hand moves into a heavy pocket and grips something cold and hard. He reaches up and out, readying himself and as the moment peaks falls, irretrievable, into blackness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Garrard is completing a Creative writing MA at the University of Manchester. He is a co-editor for 3:AM and has written for Penpusher, Trespass, Literary Review and others. He rarely talks about himself in the third person.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, June 29th, 2009.