The Sad and Sorry Tale of my Own Untimely Demise: III

The Man in the Bowler Hat - Rene Magritee, c.1964

I must apologise for the spasmodic nature, quantity, and indeed quality of these updates. I am fleshing out a rough draft as and when I have the time, which is rarely. These drafts, I am then simply posting for the doubtable interests of yourself, so a lot of the sentences, and some of the more unpopular words, are being replaced at later dates, but that is not for you to see. Here is what I have determined is for you to see, and I highly recommend, as these posts follow only arbitrary beginning and end points, reading (Part 1) & (Part 2).

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The passage of time, it is said, is a great healer, but combined with a lack of  consequences,  sobriety, and police investigation it is a certified doctor. 

        And so, driven by mounting invoices at my own address, a misguided sense of cleansing through exposure, and a desire to avoid a rather persistent and dubiously pregnant girl, two months after having accidentally committed murder, I took up residence in the scene of my own crime, and as way of vicarious atonement, resolved to let the liquor answer for my sins. The matter of the missing dustbin, was for the time forgotten, or at least suppressed heavily. Doubt not though, dear reader, that any of this was undertaken likely; and one can be assured that from the back seat of my Ford Mondeo, amongst the remnants of fast food chicken boxes, Whyte & Mackay, Benson & Hedges, and the torn pages of Raymond Chandler, (who I had taken to reading, but eventually resorted to chewing) I watched that house until the sun was dizzy from chasing the moon. And not once did I see a soul approach it. 

  Not even the postman. 

Even junk mailers seemed, disinclined, to write. And so what once was legally his now became ostensibly mine. However, I admit I felt so bad about the whole affair that I was reluctant to ever do much more than sleep in his spare room, use his toilet, and eat any food with a sell by date on it. The other rooms I rarely ever ventured into. The front room I have never seen, the wine cellar was resolutely locked, and the other rooms are gloomy, dusty and full of books that I as a writer have no appetite for. I rarely ventured out of doors for the first few weeks, so petrified was I of being accosted and exposed by the first elderly pedestrian that I should chance upon. But eventually boredom, and a sudden drop in the supply of tinned food, forced me out into the harsh lamp-lit world of the dead night, to hurriedly steal towards an never-ending convenience store, and having done my dishonest shopping, to slink back once more. After this escapade I began to feel a little bolder, and began to visit the local bar of an evening, The Panda & Tortoise, whose staff were as fashionably transient, mundanely detached and as  enervatingly numb as the name would suggest. Garbed in labelled polo shirts, beach shoes, and denim jeans designed to prevent unnecessary conception, this inaptly dressed army of the undead seemed more suitable for one wishing to remain unremembered, than the shady confines of a pub harbouring the close-knit remnants of  the inexplicably stereotypical pool room sharpers, who one can only assume have been lurking near the fruit machines for so long that they hadn't even notice the 70s end.

Nonetheless, it was a pleasant bar, where the ale was cheap but strong, the women high maintenance but susceptible, and the music dirty with the crunching bass and megaphone vocals of blues-rock. All in all, it was the life of an art-house writer, so I saw it through my sophomoric cinematic thoughts. In reality I was a freelance art critic, who was running up ever more increasingly against the paradox of seeking literary fame, and keeping my change of address unknown. The greatest problem was mostly in receiving checks through the post, as one cannot survive of the charity of dead men indefinitely.

It was this very same idea that stuck in the back of my throat as I awoke in May to an alarm call of cold-sweat and damp sheets, coughing and racking my lungs as though I was trying terminally to dislodge the unpleasant realisation which had rattled the cages of my dreams and awoken the fear of my eyes. It was a realisation that made me want to cry and wretch and blubber and froth, all of which I promptly did, before thrashing blindly to one side with my left arm until it's hand found the radio dial, rolling limply from the volume wheel onto a pack of cigarettes which, upon bleary eyed inspection, contained one pink lighter and half a cigarette. Which was very disappointing. With smoke now fleeing to the ceiling, I stretched forth my right hand and grabbed from within the folds of dirty sheets a battered notebook and a badly bitten pencil. Whilst the jarring tones of the radio roused me from my numbing sleep I made out the time from the wall-clock across from my bed, opened the notebook to a heavily annotated page, and jotted down the information accordingly: 

'08.45:' It read, 'Cough, now dry, throat, like gravel, mild improv. on Tues. Radio still persisting with soul destroying phone in comp, still not heard back. Fear the worst. prize money.' 

        These last two words I scrawled largest of all and underlined many times, with multiple exclamations added as the pencil gorged into the paper. Then I unwittingly fell back to sleep, and it took a further three repeated incidents before on the third I was compelled to get a glass of water. Ten minutes later I was in the kitchen rubbing my toe and swallowing an aspirin for my head, cursing the household appliances in their complicity to see me maimed by degrees. The toaster was prone to electrocute at will, the kettle liable to overflow onto plug sockets and hands, and all were in cahoots with the stairs in their relentless attempts to wreck havoc through guerilla tactics and loose planks. 

I had often wondered, through forced bites of brittle black toast, whether the house could possibly be out to get me, or whether, more pressingly, it was haunted by the spirits of any disgruntled previous occupants. I had on one occasion sought in the local paper a psychic who might be able to offer professional advice without posing a threat of credibility in a court of law, but on that occasion the psychic, a man named Terrance who wrote the horoscopes for some kind of woman's weekly and liked to talk too much about Florida, ran from the house in a fit of panic and incredulity, screaming something unintelligible about a cult. Which was just as well, as I hadn't any money to pay him with, and in hindsight hadn't really thought the idea through properly at all.
        However, on this particular morning my inane fear of kitchen utensils was somehow both sharpened and numbed simultaneously, by the paralysing realisation that had stalked my dreams and haunted my awakening steps. On the morning that would be my last, as I unknowingly said goodbye to the rising sun, and failed to leave a forwarding address for the moon, I was staring blankly into the depths of blackened crust as the last of my store of toast grew cold in my trembling hand. 
        It is said that man's greatest fear is his own mortality, but once this slight inconvenient blip has passed it simply becomes a matter of what he's going to do to pass the time. And as I sat and watched with watering eyes the fine crumbs of burnt bread break off beneath my clenching fingers, I was not, except by extension, in fear of my approaching death. Though if I'd have known how quickly is was travelling it might have merited more thought. 
        For I had already discovered a fear that could make a man flee the gates of Eden, eschew the warmth of love, and shun the comforts of life. It was a fear that had been on my lips as soon as I had awoken this morning, but that had been forever slowly rising and frothing through my subconscious until my tongue could taste its scum. It was, put simply, the nerve shattering, debilitating, soul destroying realisation, that I needed to get a job.