Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 43
Sign: Taurus
State: East
Country: UK
Signup Date: 4/2/2009
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May 27, 2009 - Wednesday
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Category: Writing and Poetry
RAIDERS
It was late, nearing five in the morning and Barwise was casting about in the back of a taxi. His restless posture alternated between lying on his side with an arm pressed beneath his hip and his boots jammed under the driver seat, or holding onto the door-mounted arm rest and forcing the side of his face up against the cool misty window in the hope that sweating, ashen flesh and condensation-fogged glass would form a seal robust enough to keep him from keeling over again.
“Yeah, thanks, anywhere here,” he said, fumbling for the door handle as the taxi idled around the bend past the Co-Op. He paid the tenner and climbed out onto the cold, damp High Street. His dandelion clock silver wig caught on the top of the door frame and dragged back over his head like a hood.
He watched the taxi pull away and stood there, swaying on the pavement. He readjusted his head-piece, smirking like a hopeless bastard. He wobbled on his hired silver platforms.
By all accounts he’d had a good night. New club in town called Glitter Dammerung, late seventies end of an era glam night club. A barroom blitz of retro groove. Tonight was Afrogeddon. Hence the outfit. Hence the fuckin outfit.
Barwise had loved the jaded magnitude of the Seventies. He recalled his childhood vividly: a sudden disgorgement of cultural tastelessness spewed unchecked from the black and white parenthesis of the sixties; a time he mused when his parents had become strangers in a world they had taken for granted, a world emerging humbly from the war. Something else had taken over, something chaotic and buggering and coarse. Everything slipped momentarily into a sudden spacey future furnished with lousy technology. The minimalist’s nightmare; a science fiction envisioned millennium but with Ronco hardware.
He teetered on the curb, going through pockets for keys to his flat, and as he did so he was suddenly aware of something huge blundering across the street to his right and disappearing into the entrance to the station on the corner. He whipped his head around, which proved unwise. His ankles buckled and he went over. He lay there, distantly aware that his wig had come off and was blowing up the road in a stiff breeze, like a glamorous tumbleweed. He sat up and felt the sudden, bitter flood of saliva puddle under his tongue, which at this juncture of the proceedings can only signify one thing.
Having divorced his evenings consumption of extortionately priced bottled lagers in a messy and drawn out affair, Barwise tenderly made his way to his feet. A little clearer-headed, he wiped his mouth and frowned, remembering the charging shape he had glimpsed peripherally a moment earlier. The station was closed this time of night and should have been gated, but he was sure he’d seen it go in under the darkened sign. There was no way something that big could be huddling out of sight, even if it was standing there pressing its bulk against the gate. Why was he thinking about the thing trying to get out of sight anyway? There had been something furtive about the way it had shot across the road like that and disappeared, a bit like it had been lurking on the corner waiting for him to look away before making a dash.
He decided against investigating. In his state. Could have been anything. He retrieved his wig from where it had lodged in a doorway and crossed the road on rickety legs. He jabbed at the lock with his key, trying to accuse the door into opening, and stumbled into the hallway.
“Fuckin’ what?” he inquired of the darkness as he walked into a cluster of obstacles barring his way into the flat. He lost his balance and threw an arm out to steady himself but the fist clutching the slippery nylon wig slid against the gloss painted wall and, if anything, precipitated his collapse. He shot forward and nutted himself insensible on the substantial plaster architrave surrounding his bedroom door.
He lay there unmoving, splayed and thickly bleeding amidst the tumbled pile of Trish’s bags.
“I’m going to live with Martin,” Trish said, realigning her bags by the door.
Trish held up a hand, bossy little palm outward, fingers stiffly together like a policewoman on traffic duty. She always looked away, eyes closed and chin uptilted when she did this to him, long disdainful of his excuses, and it was a gesture that never failed to stop him in his tracks.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said.
“You don’t want to hear me say ‘Martin’?”
Trish rounded on him, “I don’t want to hear your voice at all, okay? I’ve had enough and I’m leaving.” She gazed levelly at him sitting there on the sofa, knees together, clutching a frizzy ball of silver material in his lap like some laughably pampered cat. His face trembled with remorse and the unhinging pressure of a cast-eyed hangover. “I’m going to live with Martin,” she sighed.
“Martin?” Barwise said in a small tearful voice.
Trish didn’t slam the door. She closed it with a tightly controlled snick that resounded nonetheless with decibels of finality. Barwise stood at the window looking out onto the road and watched the taxi driver loading Trish’s things into the boot of his Cavalier. They shared something; a joke perhaps, because Trish smiled, then laughed, and then looked back at the flat. Her eyes shone with that cold righteous vindication she could summon effortlessly to confound any attempt he made to justify himself to her.
I won’t miss that fucking look, thought Barwise rancorously. Loaded up, Trish climbed into the front seat and they sped off. Sped off to Martin. Martin, that preposterous little Amway rep whom Barwise had come home one afternoon to find setting out his stall in their living room. Trish enrapt and giggling over his patter, his demonstrations of eco-friendly cleaning products (“Yum,” he phonemes absurdly, dipping his finger into a pot of drain pep and sucking the cream greedily into his mouth.), his gleam-eyed affiances of wealth and his curt dismissal of Barwise’s derisory opener, “It most certainly is not pyramid selling!”
“Bollocks. I’d like you to leave now.” Barwise had said, stepping unmindfully through Martin’s picnicked out wares. He threw himself onto the sofa and switched on the telly to watch the snooker up loud.
“Gather your goods, my man.” Barwise dismissed, and Martin, having mutely complied with the wishes of the master of the house, exited. “I would be happy to continue the demonstration another time, Tricia.” Martin said at the door. As, it appeared, he had.
“Little cornholer,” he apprised Trish, “prissy little tit was the same at school, astronomy club-type, nibbling on a Penguin at break time all on his own with a copy of Angling Times and brown shoes and one of those Adidas satchels with the adjustable strap and front pocket for your folders that they don’t - surely mustn’t - make anymore. We did him over once, tipped all his pens out. You know what we found at the bottom of his bag? A ten pence and two pence sellotaped to the plastic. His mum had put them there for emergencies. Fucking emergencies, like if he got done over and had his bus fare nicked. Ten p for the bus and the two p for the phone. Fucking marvellous!” He chuffed, “so we nicked it. Christ,” he said, suddenly serious in his reverie, “two p for the phone. Those were the days, Trish. You could get the shit kicked out of you, phone your mum in tears and still have change for a cream egg.”
“You cretin!” Trish had yelled at him, “How dare you treat Martin like that.”
Barwise, who had gone off on a tangent in his head, suddenly snapped back to the reality generated by his crass reportage. “Trish, love, I thought you’d be glad to get shot of the mutt.”
She stood by the door, slowly shaking her head and glaring at him with unconcealed disgust. “I like Martin, he’s kind and not a bit like you. He respects people and he has ambition.”
“He’s a door to door salesman selling detergent flavoured yoghurt.”
Trish flounced across the room and picked up a magazine. “There’s an article in here about you,” she flapped the magazine at him. “Julie Burchill’s right; you’re a Manboy. All Playstation and Loaded and crying over football matches. Useless. Martin’s the real man.” She threw the magazine onto his lap then turned and huffed out of the room.
Barwise raised his eyebrows at the TV. “Martin’s a cunt,” he muttered and returned his attention to watching Jimmy piss another frame up the wall.
Initially, Barwise had enjoyed a period of brief elation following Trish’s departure, that strange fugue men often find themselves in immediately after the break up of a long-standing relationship. He was free. He could do as he pleased. He could stay up late, play his music loud, go down the pub all the time, eat shit, watch snooker, not bath, fuck other women.
He charged around the flat with a bin bag clearing out the rest of Trish’s stuff: books, magazines, ornaments, videos (aerobics workouts that he’d bought her and she’d never used, Friends, This Life, a whole set of Branagh’s Shakesploitation movies) and photos. A pitifully small remnant of her presence in his life for the last six years.
He was free. He could do as he liked. He could sleep poorly and wake up alone, spend too much on drink, get undernourished, watch videos alone, be spoken to at work about his poor self-care, have existential panic attacks in the small hours and question the entire direction of his life, terrified of a lonely future, realise that he’d forgotten how to approach women and come home from the pub alone each night for a shamefully hollow wank.
He held a copy of a sweet film he had watched and enjoyed with Trish, something they had both had in common, and began to fill up. He put the bin bag gently down by the front door, went over to the sofa and had a cry.
“I’m in bits, Micky. I feel like I’ve had a raison d’ e c t o m y.” Barwise informed his friend.
“Eh?” Micky mouthed through the froth at the top of his pint.
“She was my reason for living, Micky, my be all and end all. My baby.” A grimace spasmed his eyes shut and sorrow-masked his mouth into a grim bow of torment. “And now she’s gone. Shacked up with that little dopper from school.” He rummaged savagely in a packet of dry roasted.
“Martin Gromerulus,” mused Micky, “old Emergency Bus Fare. Still I spose he’s come on a bit since then. Drives that Subaru, innit?”
Barwise tipped the peanut dust into the palm of his hand and got it into his mouth with elaborate loose-lipped puckerings, like a horse taking a sugar lump.
“I haven’t eaten for two days,” he said. “I can’t go round the shops on my own. It makes me feel like a loser. I could eat the arsehole out of a dead rhinoceros, should the opportunity present itself, but I just can’t be fucked to cook. I think I’m getting depressed.”
Micky, who didn’t come down the pub to talk about emotions, shifted uneasily on his stool.
“I keep bursting into tears,” Barwise lamented, wells of dampness gathering at the bridge of his nose.
“There’s Dave!” Micky ejaculated hoarsely. He scooped up his pint and left Barwise sitting alone, blinking in moist regret. A while later he began staring shark-eyed at a table full of seventeen year old girls over by the triv machine until they became uneasy with his attentions.
Feeling a free-floating kind of depersonalisation, an hour later he went home and got the porn out.
8:18 PM
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