The Telephone

”As for the life of flies I have no time. You call me a dog and I’ll be at your heel begging for a scrap of food and the love I receive when the mood takes you… more often than not it’s a kick in the guts. Tail between my legs, I’ll keep coming back for more… I’ll keep coming.”

Stuart raised his glass and tried to focus through the haze of another binge. The glass slipped through his fingers and plunged to the bar, scattering, like pigeons, the peanuts in the bowl, before splitting fragments of glass, gin, tonic and ice over the vicinity.

”Who knocked my fucking drink out of my hand?” he slurred at the ever-thinning air.

Stuart punched wildly before picking a fight with the fruit machine and then the jukebox. He won neither. Regaining his composure, he quickly lit a cigarette in the hope that it would cover his embarrassment.

”One more of the road, please barman,” he pleaded in a whining voice, rather more like a child than a 26-year old man.

“And one more for Wendy, wherever she is and whoever she’s screwing at the moment.”

Stuart leant back and the world went black as the sky swallowed the sun. He collapsed heavily into the molten floor, into the pit of bastard snakes.

The audience of other drinkers, bar staff, and alike, watched him fall but no one came to his aid. Stuart was the one who was often in this state and it was such a regular occurrence that it was almost possible to set a watch by Stuart’s drinking antics, which always ended up with him disintegrating into the floor.

Stuart was a dog. Stuart was a bum. Stuart was the unwanted kick in the guts.

”Where is my drink? Where is my…”

The voice tailed off into oblivion and no one dared to answer in case the beast on the floor woke up.

At around two in the morning, Geoff stepped around the bar with a bucket of cold water and threw it over Stuart, whose clothes were already sodden with urine and alcohol. His face and hands were spattered with dried blood from the self-inflicted wounds of a man out of control in his fight with reality. Stuart murmured as Geoff flung him headlong out of the door, harbouring a secret hope that he wouldn’t be back. Ever.

The cold night air came like a punch to the face for Stuart and he came to as if he’d never been drunk. Then he remembered. He tried to walk but his legs had ceased to function. Balancing against a lamp post, Stuart tried to get himself together for the journey home. It was a journey he would complete and he knew it. Stuart fell on all fours so that he could not do any further damage to himself. This was a manoeuvre he’d practiced many times. He lumbered on to his bedsit, stopping occasionally to vomit.

The telephone rang, splitting the silence in two. Stuart woke from his restless slumber. He crawled on all fours again, this time from his site of sleeping, wincing in the pain of his cut hands and knees that was stabbing him. He reached for the receiver, but an invisible force seemed to keep pulling it away from him. Anger swept over him and he surged for the annoying ringing telephone and he made it.

”Hello,” he said, but the other end of the line was dead.

He replaced the receiver with a harsh bang and cursed the caller for not waiting longer at the other end. He threw a glance at his bedside clock, which returned his stare with a deadpan look and announced that it was 11.02am.

Stuart clambered to his feet, but sat back down swiftly as the world seemed very unsteady on its axis and the room spun in never-ending circles. Stuart clutched his stomach; it felt as if someone was washing their clothes in it and the machine was on a fast spin. He retched and vomit filled his mouth. He managed to hold it back and swallow it down. The first meal of the day was always the worst, wasn’t that what his father had said after a night on the beer? Stuart gagged again and then passed out.

He regained consciousness and again the phone was ringing in what was becoming a personal recurring nightmare.

”Not again!” he said, the déjà vu sending a shiver down his spine.

He saw his senses scattered aimlessly around the room and gathered them into his arms and the picked up the receiver, if only to cease the constant ringing battering his eardrums.

Stuart was still reeling from the thought of already having been in this particular position before, but he managed to stammer a greeting down the wire, only to find it was, for a second time, dead. He couldn’t believe it. Not again.

He pushed his bulging eyes back into their sockets and combed his hair with his splayed fingers and then let out a blood-curdling scream. He took a deep breath, which penetrated as he tried to calm his pulsating nerves. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... he didn’t get as far as ten before he screamed again.

Was he delirious? Was he finally going insane? His head hurt the more he fruitlessly searched for the answers. He decided against thinking about it any further and returned to the sleep from which he’d been rudely woken once. He embraced the unconscious state he had known many times since Wendy had left him. At once the smile left his face.

When Stuart has finally fallen into a deep sleep, he dreamt of how his life was before the accident. He’d had a well-paid job, a wife – no, a loving wife – and a little boy, whom he had adored. Wendy and Christopher; how he could see them vividly in his dreams, but they faded away when he reached out to them or looked upon them with his misted eyes.

Then it was the same; his dreams always followed a similar pattern of events. This was the scene of the accident. This was it.

It was all a bit of a blur to Stuart, as if he were trying to focus with his eyes half closed. He tried so hard to shift the amnesia cemented in his mind, Then he had it. That was it!

A bad mood had eclipsed him that day. He had woken late and Wendy had not had time to fix him breakfast as usual. Work had been playing on his mind. Stuart had definitely been preoccupied and he just didn’t see the truck. He stepped from the kerb, into the road.

It was all a blur,

Stuart had woken in hospital. The nurses had disclosed some information – how he’d been in their care for twelve weeks while he was in a coma.

Where had his life gone? Stuart could not, for the life of him, remember all that had occurred that fateful morning. It came back to him slowly, creeping up on him in his dreams. It was then that he had turned to the bottle for comfort. It helped to blot out the painful memory of that eventful episode.

Stuart’s drinking had started as the odd one or two in the evening with his meal and had progressed like a forest fire until he had started drinking heavily, arguing with Wendy on an almost constant basis.

The next part would never be a blur to Stuart. He would be forever haunted by his actions towards Christopher.

Oh, it was so stupid, so pointless now he could analyse it.

Chris has been playing outside, kicking a ball against the wall when it had accidentally hit the window. Stuart had reacted like a man possessed by the devil. He had grabbed hold of the whimpering child, beating and shaking him. Stuart was incensed. Wendy had screamed and picked up Stuart’s bottle of gin. She had his lifeline and she was threatening to smash it.

She wouldn’t. She couldn’t, not to Stuart.

He had dropped Christopher as if he was a rag doll and snatched the bottle from Wendy’s hand. He had watched as she’d grabbed the car keys, bundled Christopher into her arms and driven away. She had left him.

The divorce was messy, but the bottle had, as always, helped Stuart through. It has been his tower of strength, his only friend. The bottle had never turned its back. It had been his therapist ever since the accident.

Stuart woke with a start, bathed in a sweat and the stench of vomit. His room looked like the aftermath of a personal holocaust. The war still raged and Stuart was fighting a losing battle against himself.

The telephone rang again.

This time Stuart was fully awake and he had the receiver in his right hand before the second ring had sounded. He spoke down the line with an anger and assertiveness he had never possessed before. He barked the ‘hello’ down the line and he was greeted by a voice from the other end of the line, one which struck a chord of familiarity with him.

”Look out of the window, Stuart. Go on, look out,” the voice stated before the line went dead.

The voice was gone.

Stuart sat on the edge of his bed for what seemed like an eternity, until he had obtained enough courage to pull himself to his feet. He was unsteady but he managed to stumble forward. He pressed his face against the window pane and peered out. He scanned the road outside and his eyes fixed themselves on a figure in the telephone box across the street. The familiarity that Stuart had experienced earlier came again.

He watched transfixed as he saw his own body in the phone box, dialling his home number.

Tears streamed down Stuart’s cheeks and he clasped his hands over his open mouth. He was shaking uncontrollably as he ran headlong to the mirror on the dressing table. He looked hard at his reflection but could see nothing but a grey, listless figure. Stuart fell to his knees and wept.

The mirror shattered and the glass shards pinned Stuart to the floor. He was dead.

The police arrived several hours later and forcibly entered the bedsit. The officer who stepped in first reeled at the disgusting odour, clenching his stomach as he moved forwards slowly. The air was thick with the reek of death.

”Looks like a suicide John,” said the constable, his teeth clamped shut in an attempt to stop the rising bile.

Just then, the telephone rang. A puzzled look fell over the faces of those officers present, as the telephone had been disconnected some six months previously. Curiosity tapped the young constable on the shoulder and he reached down, picked up the receiver and placed it against his ear.

A voice that the constable was sure he’d heard before said:

”Look out of the window constable. Go on, look out.”