TOM REMEMBERED THE first time he left his body. In this same hospital. December ’99. Sixteen years old. Lying on his back, attached to a monitor by wires — his chest hadn’t needed shaving that time, skin smooth as marble, wrapped like clingfilm around an anorexic pigeon — Tom’s bed the farthest from the door.
The lights on the ward were off. Moonlight made the tinsel on the ceiling sway like a temptress in a silver dress. Breathe. Feel. Frozen fog. Salty air. He’d felt the paramedic’s warm breath on his cold cheek. Felt every stone in the road as the ambulance wailed through town. But his eyelids stayed shut. It felt like a dream.
He’d landed on the promenade with a sickening crack. That’s how Duchess Dolly, resident drag queen at Cinderella’s across the road, described it to the emergency operator. Said she’d been lighting a cigarette out back, kneeling between two bins to protect the flame, when suddenly a sickening crack cut the atmosphere, a crack so sickening that she immediately started to gag and only stopped after she’d managed to get her trembling hands to her mouth and take a drag on the cigarette.
An old tramp with a bushy white beard had been sitting inside an antique fishing boat at the top of the beach. Swigging from a can of Special Brew, away from prying eyes and thirsty unfortunates. With his back against the wooden frame, the world outside disappeared, only the clouds remained, drifting slowly across the night sky.
Tom experienced the fall like a leaf in autumn. A feather in a pillow fight. The tramp in the boat said Tom fell from the sky like a man whose parachute had failed.
Tom knew he wasn’t dead because he could hear the waves washing into shore, kidnapping pebbles, sacrificing them to their Sea God. Not that he’d been expecting to die. Or to live. He’d just lifted himself over the railing, one leg at a time, and stepped casually off the edge into freefall. Free of expectation.
CRACK!
In the bed next to him, an old man recited Arabic poetry in his sleep. Two snorers on opposite ends of the ward exchanged animalistic grunts like tennis opponents. Tom had been dreaming he was on a small boat, under a bright sun, on a calm sea, urinating over the side. Gazing into the spirally ripple his stream produced on the water, when the gentle beep –– beep –– beep of his monitor became an endless flat squeal, yanking him from the boat, dumping him unceremoniously back onto the dark ward.
Two doctors entered at the far end. Rushed to Tom’s bed. Pulled a curtain around them. More doctors joined them. Tom’s bladder felt like a water balloon connected to a broken tap, expanding like a mother’s breast every time her baby screamed. Someone would have to bring the cardboard jug for him to pee into.
He greeted the doctors, was telling them they were just in time, he was about to soak the sheet. But they ignored him. They’d ripped the gown off his shoulders and a doctor with a bald spot was pumping up and down on Tom’s chest, as beads of sweat fell from his forehead like drops of dew from a waking flower.
A couple of hours before going SPLAT! Tom had been walking the streets, checking phone boxes and parking meters for left behind coins. Hungry. There’d been nothing in the house except drunk parents taunting each other, so he’d gone out. Walked the streets with his girlfriend. A woman actually; ten years older than he. Stopping in this doorway to kiss. In that doorway to rub each other’s warm spots through their clothes.
Now Tom realised he was floating like a birthday balloon, eye-level with the tinsel, babbling to nobody about wetting himself. The bald spot bobbing up and down below him like a Halloween apple, the doctor pumping on Tom’s shell, surrounded by weary-looking colleagues, shifting from left foot to right in their matching purple Crocs.
“If we get married, we can live together. If we live together, we can…” She separated her knees, top button of her jeans undone. Guided his hand. They were at the foot of her block of flats. She lived on the thirteenth floor with her father, who spoke no English and had lost the plot after a short aggressive disease had robbed him of his wife. She had never allowed Tom inside. There were limits.
Tom stopped kissing her, pulled his body away from hers, wished her all the best but he was breaking up with her. She cried. Said she couldn’t understand. Tom couldn’t understand either. Anything. He said goodbye and headed towards the city centre.
Now it was morning. The lights on the ward were on, the sky outside the window a metallic blue-grey. The old man in the next bed nodded Tom a greeting. Tom noticed his mother standing at the foot of the bed, wearing her baggy cardigan with the deep pockets weighed down by cans. She kissed his cheek loudly. He wiped it with his hand.
“You almost died last night!” she said in hysterical tone, her vacant eyes bone dry. “They had to perform an emergency procedure!”
The way her mouth curled slightly in the corners, the marble-like eyes of an inbred goat, betrayed the excitement her crocodile tears were intended to conceal. Tom could see his mother rehearsing in her head the phone calls she’d make as soon as she got home: garner maximum sympathy for herself then ask to borrow money.
“In a couple of days the Millenium Bug is going to turn off all the life support machines,” she said, matter-of-factly, just before leaving. “They’ll all be killed.”
At first Tom didn’t notice the couple, walking ahead of him towards the beach, holding hands. His head was still spinning, trying to process why he’d just dumped his girlfriend without warning — where had that come from? He recognised the couple. Eva Drazik and Davey Chapman. Next-door neighbours. Boyfriend and girlfriend since before they’d first pulled themselves up and stood on two legs.
They were heading to the cinema. Davey wanted to see Fight Club but Eva laughed at this and told him she had chosen Sixth Sense. She warned him not to eat popcorn before his upcoming fight. “But it’s Christmas!” Davey protested.
“Doesn’t matter,” Eva said. “The other guy won’t be eating popcorn, so if you don’t want him to knock your block off you better not eat it either.”
Eva had once drawn the attention of the class to a wet patch on Tom’s crotch after he returned from the water fountain. Everyone laughed, none louder than Mr. Boatman. Davey had invited Tom to a New Year’s house party a few years earlier, only to humiliate him by asking, “What are you doing here?” and not letting him in.
Outside the aquarium, a small roundabout served as an island for people crossing to the beach. Tom didn’t want to be forced into small talk on the island with Eva and Davey, while they waited for the green man to start flashing. So he dropped to one knee, fiddled with a shoelace, watched the couple cross to the island.
It all happened so fast.
A Range Rover ran a red light, smashed into the side of a Vauxhall Nova, sent it spinning across the island like a tornado. Eva was tossed through the air like a dog’s toy and lay screaming in the middle of the road. No sound was coming from Davey, who was squashed between the battered little car and a crash railing. The driver’s door had come open but the driver was still in his seat. The Range Rover’s tyres squealed as the offending vehicle fled the scene.
A man and woman in hotel uniform came out of the hotel on the corner. They ran to the car. When they reached it, the woman exclaimed, “Oh, no!” and turned away. The man put his hand on her head and guided it to his shoulder. “Oh, God, no!” the woman said again, softly. The man dropped his head.
Eva was screaming. The purest expression of physical pain, the purest expression of grief. More people had materialised and were standing over her.
“Nobody move her! Wait for the paramedics who know what they’re doing!” a man shouted. A woman took off her coat and put it over Eva. Another woman put hers on top. Eva screamed like a banshee. Every dog in the city went berserk.
Tom was still on one knee, fingers on shoelace, frozen. People ran past him to the island. When they discovered the situation on the ground, strangers put their hands on each other’s shoulders. Men put their arms around female companions and said in solemn voice: “Come on, we’re no use to anyone here. Let the firemen deal with it.”
If Tom hadn’t stopped to pretend to tie his shoe. That scream. Firemen cutting the metal railing with a chainsaw. Paramedics in luminous coats. Oxygen mask. Body bag. That scream. If they’d chosen to see Fight Club instead of Sixth Sense. That scream.
Tom was kept in over New Millenium’s Eve. Nurses wheeled a TV into the ward in the morning so everyone could watch the global celebrations. At lunch time Australia entered the new Millenium. No plane fell from the sky. At dinner time, Russia entered the new Millenium. No nuclear bomb self-detonated. At midnight Tom and everyone else in the country entered the new Millenium. Nobody’s life support machine switched off. Nurses brought every patient a slice of cake on a paper plate. Said things could only get better.
The drop from road to promenade was considered too short for a suicide attempt. Because of this, and because there was alcohol in Tom’s blood, his fall was recorded as misadventure. Another underage pisshead patched up and added to the list. Hospital staff unaware that shortly before dropping to the concrete, Tom had headbutted a condom machine outside a Boots’ pharmacy. Almost knocked out, he’d staggered in a circle like a wounded antelope.
The hospital spat Tom out to a weather-battered January morning, Y2K. There was nobody to take him home, so he walked the hour along the beach in the hard rain. The living room curtains were closed when he arrived. Tom’s father slumped in an armchair, three empty Special Brew cans on the floor next to a bucket of puke. Open can in hand. Golf on TV. Tom gagged as the stench poked the back of his throat.
His father looked at him dripping water on the floor. Slurred the words: “Been out?”
Tom climbed the stairs. His mother called out from the bedroom: “Love, is that you? Bring me up a cider! Your father’s in one of his silly-arse moods!”
In his room, Tom packed some clothes into an old schoolbag. Went downstairs and quietly out the front door. Sat on the small wall outside, under the rain. Realised he had nowhere to go. Went back in, unpacked the clothes, closed the curtains, got into bed and stayed there until all the birds had migrated back from their winter holidays.
He never spoke of his out of body experience. Nor of headbutting the condom machine. Nor of how he’d ended up spread out like a starfish on the promenade.
Tom had never forgotten the time, at the local train station when he was five or six years old, that his father had told him to always stand near the back of the platform when waiting for a train, so that no one could run up from behind and shove you onto the tracks. It was a life lesson Tom had obeyed instinctively ever since. Like not running on black ice. But only then, eleven years later, as he watched Davey’s limp, lifeless body being zipped up inside a bag, to the soundtrack of Eva’s screams making sure no one in the city slept, did he actually think about it: how any stranger could kill you – literally kill you – in a split second of madness. Permanently end your life and ruin countless others, including their own, because of one uncontrolled impulse.
Tom had a million impulses a day — always had. Most of them controlled, but not all.
In his first (and last) school nativity play, when Joseph and Mary knocked at his inn, instead of telling them there was no room, Tom said: “Come in! You can have my bed! I’ll sleep in the barn!” — and couldn’t understand why, when every adult in the audience had laughed, he was forced to sit out playtime for a week as punishment.
Suspended in middle school for pouring superglue on Mr. Boatman’s chair. Tom’s parents billed (never paid) for a new pair of trousers. Boatman running across the school car park covering the ripped arse of his trousers, white underpants signalling surrender. Kids almost choked to death they were laughing so hard.
Suspended in high school for setting off the fire alarm. Two fire engines dispatched. A thousand students evacuated onto the field to be counted. When asked why he’d done it, Tom had no acceptable answer: just saw that big red button, punched the glass and didn’t think about it till all hell broke loose a moment later.
He picked up a pebble, moved it between his fingers, it was smooth. There was nothing to stop him launching it at those two bodybuilders engaged in a shirtless push-up contest outside the kebab shop over there. Instead of going to bed tonight, tossing and turning with a restless mind refusing him a moment’s peace, his life would take a different path. Maybe it would lead to a murder charge and life behind bars. Maybe to a hospital, if the pebble missed and the roid-rage twins got hold of him. Maybe just to a short hit of adrenalin as he ran away, laughing.
He dropped the pebble, kicked it to the kerb. Entered the all-night shop, behind a group of thirteen-year-olds with their hoods up, reeking of tobacco and sugary alcopops. The kids piled into the sweet aisle, picking up and putting down packets of M&Ms and Skittles, while the Bangladeshi shopkeeper watched them intently.
Tom took two cans of Special Brew from the fridge, put them in his pockets, walked quickly out the door without looking at the shopkeeper.
Once outside, he started running and kept going — unlit streets, the moon hidden by clouds, a steep hill, a stone wall, a graveyard — eventually stopping under an oak tree in front of a church. Panting, he could feel every pulse in his body beating, like the flashing green man that should have escorted Eva and Davey safely to the other side.
He removed a can from his pocket. Opened it. Foam sprayed over his jacket and the grass. He lifted the can quickly to his lips to not lose too much. He’d never tasted Special Brew before. It smelt of his father’s burps. Reflux acid. Puke in the bucket next to the armchair. As the syrupy liquid filled his mouth, Tom understood that Special Brew tasted exactly as it smelt.
He swallowed the first mouthful. His eyes filled with water, then his mouth, and he vomited violently. If only he had some crisps to soften the blow — but he couldn’t return to the shop to steal crisps, the shopkeeper would consider it a slap in the face.
The memory of the sickly taste made Tom turn his head and puke up some more bile. Then he thought: What does it matter if I throw up or not? What does anything matter?He pinched his nose, tilted his head back and poured the can down his neck in quick full-mouthed gulps. Some of it came back up, but most he managed to keep down. Instantly he felt the ground moving. The tree and the church spinning. He stood up, swayed from side to side, rested his arm on the tree trunk, steadied himself. Staggered to the wall at the back of the churchyard. Unzipped his flies.
“Oh no you don’t!” a rough old voice disturbed the silence. “If you wanna piss, go over there and do it behind that tree! Not near my bed, thank you very much!”
The face of an old man, protected from the elements by a thick white beard, looked up at Tom from the foot of the wall, his body wrapped in a sleeping bag like a human burrito. Tom jumped out of his skin. Quickly zipped up his flies. Apologised.
Then Tom said: “Why are you sleeping here on the wet grass and not in a…”
“Doorway?” the man interrupted. (Tom was going to say hostel, but he kept quiet).
“Because…” the man grumbled, “some maniac’s going round torching sleeping bags. Old pal of mine got done like a jacket potato. Smart ones ain’t taking any chances.”
Tom handed the man the can of Special Brew. The man said: “Thank you, son, that’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
A cat let out a long moan that sounded sexual, before chasing a rival off its turf.
“Gonna share that or what?” a gruff voice slurred from a little farther along the wall.
The bearded man climbed out of his sleeping bag, rolled it up, tucked the can into the crotch of his falling-down trousers and set off in the direction of the beach.
“Don’t go! Stay!” the gruff voice slurred. “Don’t be selfish! Just a taste!”
Tom followed the tramp in the direction of the beach, unable to get the image of the man’s friend being cremated in his sleep out of his head. No matter how much we think we’ve got things under control, he thought, at any moment a stranger can appear from the shadows and set you on fire. That’s what Dad wanted to teach me that day at the station.
Sudden nausea struck again, unannounced, causing Tom to stop outside the pharmacy and throw up in the kerb. When finished, he lifted his head and saw the condom machine on the wall. Without thinking, he ran full-throttle into it, headfirst. The blow to his senses made him stagger like a wounded antelope. He laughed uncontrollably. Shouted: “DESTINY!” Laughed even more loudly. Crossed the road to the beach. Looked down over the railing to the promenade below. Saw his forty-year-old shell lying face-up, grizzled, dishevelled, eyes closed, chest shaved, wires attached. How had he got so old. In fact, when Tom looked more deeply, he hadn’t changed at all.
He lifted himself over the railing, one leg at a time, and stepped casually off the edge.
Landed with a thud that opened his eyes.
I remember reading an earlier draft of this, and I didn't want to comment until I'd given it yet another reading. I like the structure of the timeline, I think it reads not entirely linearly but cyclically. From what I'm interpreting (and this might be completely wrong), is that Tom feels his life was always going to turn out this way, like he can’t escape the inevitability of it all. This is the reason for his outbursts. Like the cycle of alcholism from his parents will always end in his (self) destruction. For me, seeing his own body and falling into it at the end is a metaphor for taking control.
Somebody is going to do it for you if you don't do it yourself. It's a way of making sense of the random acts of violence and fear.
The ending seems quite hopeful. He finally opens his eyes so he can see where he's come from.
Again, I might be misunderstanding some things. I'll give it another read and reassess.
I'm glad to see you posting again, it gives me a bit of a kick up the arse to actually finish something.
You asked elsewhere why I’m not writing fiction … it’s because I can’t do this, what you’ve done here. Fantastic. Grabs me by the throat and says “Pay attention.” And I get to the end and I’m not quite sure what’s happened, but it’s good. Glad to hear your voice, Kris.