HUMAN BEINGS ARE GOOD

Hi, and thank you for dropping by.  As you may know, the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (Jan to April 2013), which you can read here, or buy as an ebook or kindle on amazon, if your morals allow it.  Since then, this blog has been the general musings of me, Benjamin of Turnham Green, an escapee from the grips of a hideous fifteen-year addiction.  The title of the blog might now really reflect the content now, although it is still, as much as ever, part of the narrative that began way back, and I hope you find it vaguely interesting.  I have just made a discovery, which this posting is about.

HUMAN BEINGS ARE GOOD

Yes, after years of research into the darkside, I am coming to realise that some human beings are good.  I guess it's possible that all are, except for the fact that they were got at, damaged, vandalised, misled, abused at some point, and they became infected, like a computer, with various viruses and malware.  Addiction, I feel now, was like a virus in me - time was, only a year or two ago, when I felt predisposed, programmed, compelled, to go and score crack regardless of the situation in the fridge, regardless of whether I had other arrangements, regardless also of whether I could 'afford' it.  It was priority one, whatever else what going on in the world, whatever responsibilities I might've had.  I don't say this with any pride, or glee - now, it seems a bit like a different world, a darker world, like a dream, half-remembered, or rather a nightmare, one that leaves you feeling troubled and unsettled the whole ensuing day.

One can talk about addiction in the same way one lives it (in circles) - what came first the drug or the hole it seems to fill, however fleetingly.  Now, though, I am gradually finding that life is, and has been, going on around me for over a decade.  I've begun writing again, performing a little bit of comedy, and even working in my local charity-shop, which is full of such a broad spectrum of people that I think if it were an actual rainbow, there would be everything from infrared to ultraviolet, and new shades either side.  A dance-tutor, a student from Luxembourg, an ex-Welsh miner, a retired Spanish teacher, and a couple of people who have 'had issues', not unlike my own, it would seem.  All in all, the vibe is good.  My eye condition, which amongst other things, includes very dry eyes, and limited sight, doesn't seem to like the dry, dusty environment, and I've been struggling with this for a few weeks now, but I'm determined to weather it, find a solution, because, already, I'd miss the company and the sense of functionality I get from being there.  Ah, how nice it is to have a sense of functionality - I think everyone should have one.  Also, my problems, although not gone, are getting more and more first-world as the weeks go by - I live in one of the richest countries in the world, and, even with a Conservative government, still find I'm pretty well-catered-for, although I know plenty of people who aren't.  Like many sane people, I hope this current shower (government) are ousted in May, but there's nothing controversial about that.

Even as I write, my eyes are extra-blurry, feel very dry, and I don't know how they will be tomorrow, or in the days ahead, but I want so much to continue at the charity-shop that I'm willing to weather it as long as I can.  Already, I've been to a nice birthday-party, and there's a leaving-do next week, which will be sad, but social, and meaningful.  These people have mostly been working there a few years or more, yards from where I was skulking around trying to score, hoping to score, having scored, not wanting to be seen or known.  Life was ticking along all around me, and I, as if in a darkened cloud, wandered back and forth, perhaps with the odd odd look, but more than likely without making much of an impact at all.  But I'm glad that dark cloud has dissipated, at least so far...

I actually get a sense of satisfaction and 'integration' out of being among people, not all of whom have been scraping around using crack for years - steaming a dress with a hissing snake-neck steamer is quite a satisfying task, as is learning to use a till, and giving the customer the right change, and putting a different CD on when the music stops.  Today, we had Ray Charles on, which a woman commented on, and I think he made for good retail music, as we sold quite a lot this afternoon.  And there I was, on my stool, behind the counter, chatting with my Spanish colleague, and others as they dotted by.  What's more, they seem to like me.  I, in particular in the years of my addiction, was a very unreliable, secretive, thoughtless, and ashamed individual, treading water frantically for no change.  But now, I don't know how, I genuinely feel like I can go forward, without living in terror of relapse, or going back into that trench of an existence, where only slithering things exist, hissing and jeering from cracks in floor (but not like a steamer).  The steamer is a virtuous serpent, a vacuum-like head on a snake-neck, with a tank of boiling water being sensibly dispensed up the tube, to cleanse a garment.

I could try to make out that I have been steamed, cleansed, but that would be crass.  But I don't feel quite so grubby as I did, creased and crumpled.  For years, I didn't think anyone would want to pick me up off the floor, let alone look at me, spend time with me.  Now, I don't feel quite so bad about things, sitting behind the counter, knowing how to use a till, saying hello and goodbye to people, and being as sure as one can be that I'll be there next week, rather than down an alley round the corner.

Bizarre the change from the chaos to the counter in the charity bazaar.

Oh dear, that sounds like a bit of an overambitious attempt at a phrase.  Anyway, I hope you're ok, and if you're not, one thing I can tell you is that if you are somewhere that seems to have no door, no hope of escape, that might not be the case - if you've been told addiction is a disease, or are using this phrase to condemn yourself to a terminal ending, I would like the suggest that addiction is a decision, a set of choices.  I thought, at my worst, that it was happening to me, but I was the author of it all.  I hope that doesn't sound crass, because one thing I'm not is a paragon or saint.  But, for the first time in years, struggling in many ways as I still am, I'm relieved, perhaps even pleased, to have a chance at life.  Even at my worst, I had more than many - now, I feel unburdened, and hope I can be a more altruistic person from now on.

There's more I could say, but won't now.

Thanks for dropping by, and here, as usual is a link to one of my songs on youtube, which I'd be chuffed if you'd like to listen to...just click on the title here...Tarantula

Maybe tomorrow?

CAN YOU HELP?

Hello, and thank you for passing through.  You may know, the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my book, 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (Jan to April 2013).  You can also buy it as an ebook on amazon too, if you do that kind of thing.  If you do, please leave a review.  There are three good ones so far, but I'd like some more, whatever your opinion of the book.  Anyway, today I'm trying to enrol some help.

CAN YOU HELP?

Well, now that the traumas of Christmas, New Year, and Valentine's Day have gone, only Easter and unforeseeable eventualities can harm us.  I hope you survived, and are surviving.  Seems it's the time of year when arguments, relapses, divorces, and gory car-accidents happen.  Let that phase be over now, let a new moon glisten in a velvet vista above ya.

I haven't written for a while, because I've not had anything to say.  I've just been quietly bewildered as to why I haven't used crack in so long.  Time was when I felt like a shirt going round and round in a tumble-drier, with no washerwoman to free me from my fealty.  (There are washermen, too, although spellcheck will try to tell you otherwise.)

Then minutes, just resisting, turned to an hour or so, which, after a long while, turned into a week or two, then a month, six months, and beyond...

There was no epiphany along the way, although the past two years have felt like a slowly unveiling epiphany, a cosmic dove revealed from under a neckerchief.  Like looking at an hour-hand on a clock, it moves, but you don't see it.

I'm no total abstinence from everything kind of person, I won't lie, pretend I am, but somehow, I find myself recognising myself, sometimes with a frightening start.  Seems there's no stranger like self.  But here I am, gradually reassembling myself like self-aware Lego.  And I even find a bonus-box of extra bits, with eagle-eyes and sonic-probe.

But the help I'd really appreciate, perhaps from you, is to get more readers for this blog, which I intend to use more often now, still under the same title, but hopefully with more good news than in the early days.  It would be great if I could get to 10,000 visits - at present, it's around 8,800.  So if you could share this blog with people you think might find it of interest, I'd be really grateful.  I've begun performing comedy again, writing songs, stories, poems, and I'd like to broadcast them, share them, with you and others, on here.  I'll fill you in on more soon, with video, new songs, and other bits.  (I bet you can't wait.)

So, thank you for being there, and thank you for being you.  Here's a little poem I've written lately, and a song to click on below:

ASBO SALLY

She’s good at what she does,

but what she does is bad.

It’s not easy living
this rock-hard life,
one day up,
three in bed,
like concrete’s been laid
in your head,

waking at noon

to a tenement sky
wishing it was easier and cheaper
to die.

Sally was got at,

now it’s her chance to get at,
getting on well at it too,
seeking as she was sought,
clawing as she was clawed,
tearing as she was torn,
teaching as she was taught,

Sally’s in a rage,
can’t turn the page :(

 

Secret Sally,
freelance resurrecter,

turning skin to stone,
at the bottom of a bin-chute
in a postcode near you,

but if she gets paid first

and can run,
she will run…

‘Seen Sally?’

‘No mirror has done.’

That's the end of the poem, and here's the song I mentioned, it's a safe click to youtube on the title here:  The World Is Full Of Whores

See you soon.

WHO WAS I?

Hi, and thanks for dropping by.  You may know, the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my book, 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (Jan to April 2013), which you can read here, or buy on amazon as an ebook, if you do that kind of thing.  Nowadays, this blog is the sporadic emissions of yours truly, Benjamin of Turnham Green.  I'm rather tired, but feel, at the close of Valentine's Day, that I should check in with my fan-base...so here is tonight's emission...

WHO WAS I?

Now, looking back on a year or two ago, and beyond, when addiction was as automatic to me as a spin-cycle is for a washing-machine, I wonder if I might have overdisclosed at times, told too many people too much about myself, or at least what seemed to be my self, at the time.

But then, I guess you can't undisclose the disclosed.  Even if one goes about redacting every detail that's out there, what's already known will still be in the memories of previous readers, who may wish to do you down, or use stuff against you, even if it was said or done in the darkest time of your life, wrongheadedly, cruelly, thoughtlessly even.  But, on a more personal level, I wonder who I was back in the day...the day of addiction...the day that only lasted six hours, until the money ran out, swiftly followed by me, home to bed for two days, until more money was poured into my account, when another daytrip to dissolution and despair would ensue...

In my little book, 'How To Become A Crack Addict', I pretty much refer to sexual abuse and prostitutes in the first thousand words, or thereabouts.  Would I tell a stranger at a bus-stop my life-story in such vivid terms as quickly?  Well, time was when I might have, especially if it was the 237 bus, of which there aren't that many.

But what is disclosure?  It is the revealing of a fact.  What is overdisclosure?  It's an opinion.  Truth is, in holding back certain truths, even if only alluded to, I would have made my little book less 'true'.  I guess, in my way, that the job of a writer is to walk the tightrope between what the reader needs to know and what you want them to know.  This can be like pigeon-stepping along a strand of Rapunzel's hair, hung taut above a never-sated gorge of flame and air-crinkling heat - precarious.

Now, do I want people not to know what I did, who I was?  What's the point in rewriting history?  Forensics can always find the original message under the scrawl.

And the truth is, to me, I don't know who I was, or who I am now.  Sometimes, lately, having begun doing some things I love, like comedy, music, writing, reading, even having a social life, I recognise myself, an old self, that needs a dusting off, but is still pretty functional, whereas sometimes I feel unfamiliar, unintentionally airborne, as if walking on blustering updrafts from some zero-gravity simulator for trainee astronauts, treading clown-like on bulbous buffetings from below.

I carry these thoughts, I feel these feelings, I type these words.

I guess it was me all along.

I'll try to check in tomorrow, unless Rapunzel's hair snaps, mid-ravine.

Here's one of my songs, if you'd like to listen.  I'm hoping to write more soon...just click on the name here and it goes safely to youtube...no Rapunzel hair dangers...Windswept

Thank you for dropping by.

CHRISTMAS, NEW YEAR, AND ADDICTION

Hello, and thank you for visiting.  You may well be aware that this blog begins with the text of my scintillating ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict', which I may soon be retitling, and marketing again, in a cottage-industry type of way, you understand.  But if you want to read it in its original form, under its original title, you can do so here (it's the first 22 posts, from Jan to April 2013).  Since then, I've sporadically added stuff to this blog, and I thought I should at least check in, if that's not too crass a term.

CHRISTMAS, NEW YEAR, AND ADDICTION

I haven't got anything very witty to say, I fear, except that I know how hard it can be for people generally, enduring that build-up, or is it build-down, to Christmas, with all its enforced jollity, and parties to worry about relapsing at, or after.  I'm no twelve-step purist, and so I do have a drink or three at times, and maybe even something you might find in a Glastonbury-type setting.  But I, somehow, have managed to eschew the awful crack, and the obligatory heroin comedown, for some months now, although, as Christmas loomed, from about November 1st, I could feel myself congealing inside, as if a womb were forming that was going to give birth to the most hideous of ill-timed relapses.  Only a few years ago, I was using crack compulsively, even if I had empty cupboards and no more than thirty quid to my name.  One Christmas Eve, I met a using associate called Kenny, on the Uxbridge Road, here in Shepherd's Bush.  Within moments, we were on our way to spend the thirty quid round the corner.  It was, in theory, my rail-fare to my parents, who ended up not being visited, at least by me.

Then, because of a Bank Holiday, money went into my account earlier than usual, and I was back out on the hunt on Boxing Day, having spent Christmas Day mostly in bed.  I found someone who recognised me down some frosty sidestreet, and we ended up quite literally skidding down the road to the dealer's hovel to squander another hundred quid or so, most of which she kept for herself, even though I'd paid for it.  Sheila, as she was called, came back to my shell-like cabin, and we smoked the last of it, with a bit of heroin to soften the crash, but nowhere near enough, and I found myself bitterly resenting her, and everything she did, and said, scraping out the pipe, fucking about with foil, and generally scavenging for what recycle she could get, which was as good as nothing. 

Then, when I said I needed to go to bed, bitter and sweating like a dog, she eventually consented to leave, packing her carrier-bag with a few essentials, and going.  One of the essentials she packed was my portable telly, which she swore she could get some money for, and, having done so, would come back for another smoke with the proceeds.  I don't know how she managed to carry the thing out of the building, and down the road to the minicab office, where she was apparently going to sell it, but she somehow lumbered out with it, skidding down the icy pavement like half of a post-holocaust Torvill and Dean tribute-act.

She said she'd be about forty minutes, and I lay on my bed, clockwatching, sweating, hoping, listening out for any sound that might be her.  But, of course, she never came back, and I spent many a month after this without a telly, which I missed surprisingly little, but it would have been nice to have arrived at that revelation from a nobler starting point.  Months later, I saw Sheila outside a café, and she said she still had my telly, because she couldn't sell it, and that if I wanted it back, I could come and collect it.

I didn't bother.

But Christmas and New Year can be so stressful, and heavy with temptation, and I only hope that you, and those around you, managed to get through it all relatively unscathed.  One thing I have learned, through my efforts in the past few years, is that it's never too late to try again, and change can and does happen - in fact, change is the only constant.

And on that semi-philosophical note, I wish you a happy new year, and a peaceful and healthy one too.

See you soon I hope.  Oh, and here's one of my songs again...  Get Out Of My Room

WARNOGRAPHY

Hello, and thank you for dropping by.  You may already know that the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (Jan to April 2013).  I'm thinking of calling it Blind Man On Crack, just for the hell of it, but until that time, you can read it here, or on amazon, if you wish - it costs £3.35 or so, and if you buy the ebook, I would really appreciate a review...I have three so far, all good, but I would like more.  And so here is today's little instalment.  I honestly don't know what I'm going to say, but I thought I should check in, if only for my own peace of mind, and the mild entertainment of my 2 followers...

WARNOGRAPHY

Well, in my virtuous state of abstinence from crack, and other heavy drugs, I just wanted to vent what I think may be an opinion.  Here in England, in November, we have Remembrance Sunday, where we all remember people who've got done in in wars, with particular attention paid to World War 1.  That's fine.  That is a good thing.  But this year things seem to have been a bit fetishistic, in my opinion.  There is a sea of poppies, the symbol of the blood of the fallen, pouring from a window of the Tower of London, and spilling into the moat, numbering around 880,000, which is apparently the number of English and 'colonial' soldiers that died in World War 1.  This too is fine.  But I have to be honest, I get sick of seeing everyone on the telly wearing a poppy like they'd be shot if they didn't, like they're setting an example for the rest of us...I mean, some of us, virtuous as we are, are thinking daily about the pointlessness of life, and the even-more pointless nature of death, in particular in wars that should never have been fought in the first place.  Every news bulletin has that ingratiating tone, which I assume we are meant to adopt, when it talks about remembrance, poppies, what the queen did, and what texture the Prime Minister's shit was the day he went to see the sea of crimson flora at the tower.  I heard on the news that a soldier had done a sponsored run around London to raise money for the fallen, and his run was in the shape of a poppy, i.e. circular, with a slight crimp, and maybe a stalk.  He'd lost a limb in a recent conflict, and this I also respect, and empathise with.  But the news bulletins loved it, and I fear that next year we'll be thinking how we can outdo this year's grief-fest, and then, in 2018, on the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War One, what will we do then...how will we better this fest, the traffic-jams to the Tower of London, the silent milling crowds, paying their self-centric respect to the fallen as they scan their smartphone across the ruby sea, and put it on a sepia setting, to evoke a more innocent time?

Maybe the X Factor should factor in a competition for 2018's remembrance, or perhaps we should convene a Grief Olympics, especially for people who want to be seen to mourn the most.  Is it fair of me to use the word warnography?  Well, I improvised a little song called that, if you wanna hear...and here's the link to it on youtube.  Thanks for letting me rant.  Oh yeah, and no, I haven't used crack lately, which is great, cos I want to buy my friend's little girl a nice Christmas present this year, and a few grown-up friends too.  Only a few Christmases ago I was in bed, having had my telly taken away by a mad woman, who'd said she'd be back in an hour, when she'd sold it.  I never saw her again.  Maybe she died in a war.

I hope you understand the spirit in which I've rattled this off.  I just don't like enforced circuses, and I feel like the past few weeks have resembled a bloody kind of big top, in which the clowns are mostly politicians and newsreaders, and those who're looking for something to pin their personal grief to...

And on that bombshell, I shall leave you with this link to my song.  I thought it was a bit of a racket, but some guy on youtube seems to like it, so what they hey...!  Click here if you feel inclined...Warnography.

Maybe tomorrow?

THE JOYS OF RECOVERY

Hi, and thanks for dropping by.  You may know, the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (Jan to April 2013).  You can read it here, or buy it on amazon, if you prefer, it's cheap.  Now, this blog is the sporadic ejaculations of your dutiful blogger, Benjamin of Turnham Green.  I hope you enjoy today's ejaculation...

THE JOYS OF RECOVERY

Truth is, I'm quite tired, and my fingers are thudding down onto the keyboard like the heavy legs of a shire-horse.  But I had in mind to share one thing with you, and one day you too could be like me...

In my abstinence, and occasional serenity, I somehow won a little short story competition, and I thought you might, or not, like to read it...

Here it is...

ON GOING BLIND

Amok in copses, wild in municipal allotments we’d run, throwing matches lit over blazered shoulders, hoping our uniforms wouldn’t be identified by uncalled-for onlookers.  Jet-black’n’wet in our wake, Morrissey danced a zigzag through nascent flame.  It was too early to know if we were in trouble yet, as we tore across the Town Hall car-park, and into the air-raid shelter, ivy-clad.

Morrissey panted and pawed in the grit, seeming to know we’d overstepped.  Through mesh, David said small fires were forming, pooling their rapacity to flourish as one.  This was more than just knocking on doors, or stealing gum.  Can’t undo the done, I thought, in honour of a senior family member.  I could almost feel myself telling myself off on their behalf.

David had to take Mozza back - he walked him for an agoraphobic lady, who stayed indoors making lavender potpourri.  He said we should go, but I was afraid, half-thinking to earnestly seek assistance, making out to anyone who’d listen that we’d stumbled on the blaze, playing Doctor Who among the plum-trees.  My head was aching again.  Was it guilt, as that same senior relative had once suggested?

Lead jangling, the pair shuffled out, and I followed, smelling smoke, choosing not to look back.  Down the subway slope at speed in a shopping-trolley, dog chasing, David dared on, as I stumbled in his wake, dodging broken glass and dog-mess.  Then, surfacing by the bingo-hall, we parted at the pillar-box.

Home, I could hear a sibling strumming, smell a joss-stick.  In my room, Kate Bush was still spinning, needle having missed the cradle.  Sibling had a guest, the record-shop owner, bearded and bespectacled, demeanour of a Timelord, but for the beard – Timelords rarely have beards.  He was at the top of the stairs, and I wondered if my face looked convincingly innocent as he smiled and waved goodbye.

From the end of my bed, I could see into nextdoor’s garden - even the mouldy Satsuma I threw down the day before was still there, gleaming by an upturned bucket.  The back door showed activity, a figure, vertical and vitric, made many behind corrugated glass.  It was Wendy, and out she came with bin-bag hanging.  She looked up, waved, and when our eyes met it felt as if I saw beyond her face, and she mine.  My brain felt probed, researched, lovingly reconnaissanced.  She did a little jig with the bin-lid spinning, like those ladies in Mikado.  Then, closing the door, multiple Wendys vanished in shade.  Sibling called up the stairs, asking did I want cheese on toast.  Mum and dad were at a parents’ evening for the other one.  I called down yes, and lay on my bed, cos my eyes felt gritty.

Later, when mum and dad were back, I ate some salt’n’vinegar crisps, but they made my mouth sore, and they weren’t even that vinegary.  My eyes had kind of sleepdust on the lids.  Mum took my temperature, and it was a little bit high.  I watched Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em in my pyjamas, and went to bed, but felt hot, even though it was November, and the window slightly open.  I thought about the fires, those orange demons we’d left to their own devices amid municipal plum-trees.

When I woke, something was wrong.  My eyes were all crusted up, wouldn’t open, and my mouth was like paper.  I called out, and mum came, and when she saw me I could tell there was more.  She said I had a rash on my face, and when I swivelled round and put my feet on the floor, there were blisters all over me, like bubblewrap, on the souls of my feet too, and I couldn’t put any pressure on them, for fear they’d burst.

‘I’d better call an ambulance,’ mum said, and used the phone on the landing.  Her voice sounded unfamiliar, like a blackbird singing in a minor key at unrecognised weather.  I’d been in trouble with the ambulance and fire-brigade before, for sending them to fake emergencies, reporting a fire at Lance Baxter’s house, whose dad was a racist, then watching the engine arrive from the end of my road, to no blaze.  Mum sat me up, but I was breathing with a wheeze, and her hand on my forehead felt so cool it almost stang.  She wiped my eyes with a wet tissue, and they opened a little, but were gritty.  The light through the window seemed to glare, and I shrank from it.  I had a glass of Ribena by my bed, but when I tried to swallow it, that hurt too.

It wasn’t long before an ambulance came, and a woman and man took me out on a stretcher.  I couldn’t put my feet down cos of the bubblewrap.  Out on the street, I was slotted into the back of the ambulance, and the siren began, and my mum sat next to me in her red jumper.  It was like being in the womb of a screaming woman.

When I got to the hospital, nurses circled like vultures of altruism, put a thermometer in my armpit, and when a doctor came, he said I should be put in isolation.  Soon I was in a cubicle on a creaking metal bed, with a tube down my throat.  Before me, thick glass, the children’s ward beyond, to my left a window showed the garden, where a man was smoking in the drizzle.

My dad arrived, cos mum had rung him at work, but they were only allowed into my cubicle with masks over their mouths, not because they’d catch what I had, but because their germs might harm me.  Dad looked like stone, his trapezium face rigid, eyes almost crossed with bewilderment.  A nurse said it was best if I was left for a while, and it wasn’t long before I was staring, leaning back on a pile of plumped pillows, at mum, dad, and the siblings, lined up behind the glass, their faces like I’d never seen them, zipmouthed, due to lack of reference points.  I think I’d been given something to make me go to sleep, cos next thing I just woke up with my head hanging down, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Next morning, my eyes were gummed up, and my skin felt so tender.  The Scottish nurse came in, with cream for the inside of my mouth, which was all roughed up with thrush.  The medicine was called Daptharin, and meant to be orange flavour.  She dabbed my eyes with wet cotton-wool, and slowly I pried them open.  She said, ‘Can you see the locum in the garden?’  I looked at the window, asking, ‘Is it foggy?’  She dropped the wool in the bag on my locker, and said the doctor would be in soon.  The orange flavour stang my throat, and I felt like I was lying in leaves.

Feeling down my side, the blisters had mostly burst, but the skin around them had peeled off, and I was lying in flakes, feeling nakeder than naked.  Then I realised it wasn’t foggy outside at all, it was foggy everywhere, a white veil had fallen between me and the world, outside and in.  I held my hand out, but saw little more than a flesh spectre, unsure even as to how many fingers I was holding up, failing a test that I myself had set.

My mum had stayed over in a room for family, and was soon at the end of my bed, her voice kazoo-like, due to the paper mask.  I mentioned my vision, thinking I might need contact lenses like one of the siblings.  I’d never known her so uncertain, so not knowing what to say.  If she couldn’t console me, then something very serious was afoot.  And when the doctor came, they went outside and I could hear them discussing me.  It was his belief that I had something called Stevens Johnsons Syndrome, which was probably due to a toxic reaction, maybe to a medicine, and he asked her what, if anything, I’d taken in the past month.  She told him about a few painkillers, something for a sore throat, then began to cry, in case she’d given me something harmful.

Later, dad arrived.  They were both allowed in, masked.  I was given a portable telly, but I couldn’t see it, and it was too far to reach from the bed.  I wondered if I would get lunch, but that’s what the tube was for, putting liquid goodness down my throat on my behalf, because I couldn’t swallow.  My temperature was now really high.  Mum stayed in the family room for the next few days, as I, peeling and delirious, listened to programmes I wouldn’t normally have watched, or listened to.  Each morning, I was eased sideways onto a waiting stretcher, so my bed could be changed, and I could hear the dead skin falling to the floor, like confetti at a ghoul’s wedding.

News of my demise had got home, and to school, and one morning my mum brought in a get well card from Wendy.  She handed it me, I ripped open the envelope, and pulled out the unreadable card.  I could never see Wendy again, I thought, because of what I’d become, like someone in Doctor Who who gets turned into one of the monsters, and although they have a human mind, they’re now a flailing thing, with pincers and the eyes of an insect.  Mum read Wendy’s words, but I felt like I was in a different universe, and the portal was like a funnel, you could only go one way through.

Days passed, and once my skin begun to heal, and I could swallow again, I was allowed to eat something soft, jelly and blancmange, but I just had the jelly, cos the blancmange had skin, like custard.  It was November 5^th, and the hospital was having fireworks, and I was wheeled out into the children’s ward, where I could watch the display.  By now, my temperature was nearly back to normal, but even propped up on four pillows, and pointed at the window, I could still only see fireworks that rose above the level of the windowsill, the top half of a Catherine Wheel, the fizzing tip of a Roman Candle, and other jubilant flourishes.  Then, festivities done, I was wheeled back into my room, where I spent the next few days.

And then, one morning, the doctor said I could go home, but it didn’t feel like me going at all, or at least not the me who’d arrived.  Seems I couldn’t see, and my new skin was shiny and sore.  It hurt just to put clothes on, but off I went in the car in a pair of dark glasses, because daylight was now too bright, and I said to mum I was like a pop-star who didn’t want to be recognised – but there’s a thin line between vanity and paranoia.  At home, one of the siblings gave me a card from both of them.  Dad described it.  It had a TARDIS on, but the words inside sounded awkward and unsure.

Dinner was soft, mashed carrot’n’potato, with melted cheese, and it wasn’t long before David came round.  He’d been walking Morrissey down the municipal.  We went upstairs, and he said our fires had petered out, because it was damp, but there were dark patches where some had nearly taken.  Nextdoor, a dustbin-lid rattled, and David confirmed to me that Wendy was in the garden.  I pictured her little jig with spinning lid, her corrugated selves shifting behind glass, the mouldy Satsuma, and how I’d learned to see, and be seen, in a way I’d not known before.  David read his card, without even handing it me first, and I felt ashamed I could no longer run amok with him, making fires, doing dares.  Had she seen me?

 

End.  Thanks for dropping by.  Here's a song...

BELONGING

 Hi, thanks for popping across.  I wonder if you know, the first 22 posts on this blog are the text of my ebook thing, called 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (Jan to April 2013).  You can read it here, or buy it on amazon if you want.  If you do, please leave a review if you have the time and inclination.  I've sent it to a few agents, and the like, it's at a couple now, and I await their considered musings.  And here are my considered musings...

BELONGING

I wonder if what we call addiction should be called not belonging, and wanting some chemical compensation for this feeling of asideness.

Things make us lonelier than we were before they happened, because they only happened to us.  I guess this is why people feel less alone in groups with a commonly held belief.

Puberty's enough to knock anyone of their rocker, however good their parents, school, or record collection.  Pubic isn't public, though it happens to everyone.  It's the scar we disown.  No hymns to hymens.

Here's a song if you'd like to hear it...I'm Too Tired To Kill You

Thanks for dropping in.  Maybe tomorrow?