extract from a work in progress...
Perlman forced one eye open in the manner of an astronaut terrified of vertiginous re-entry to Earth. Blinded by searing white light from an unidentifiable source, he groaned. He was lying on a couch he didn’t recognize with an unfamiliar blanket tossed around him. He was somewhat aware of being fully dressed - minus shoes.
A polluted sea rose in this throat. The taste in his mouth was heavy with residual malt. He had to get up fast –
A voice emerged from somewhere above. "Lou."
"Don’t talk so loud, please." His voice was thick, definitely not his own. He forced the slitted albuminous eye wide, saw the blur of a familiar face. "Betty?"
Ah, he grasped a fragment – this was her flat, and it was her couch where he’d fallen, and she’d generously tucked a blanket around him.
"Let me help you up, Lou. You’re still buckled."
She tried to move him. She was strong, but he was heavy as a fresh corpse. He made it, with her assistance, to a half-standing position. Then somehow crumpled and slid from her hold and found himself on all fours. He felt suddenly wolverine, with an urge to bay at the moon, any moon. She helped him upright again and walked him down the hall, a dead man’s slog to a chamber where he’d be strapped in a chair and cyanide pellets dropped into a bucket of something. And say goodnight, Gracie.
She ushered him inside the toilet, shut the door, retreated. A mercy. He saw the bowl and lurched for it. On his knees, he purged violently, then flopped against the wall. A second wave assaulted him almost at once and he plunged his head into the bowl with such velocity that a giant octopus tentacle might have reached up from the bend in the flushpipe and seized him with intent to drag him deep into some weird underwater hospice where mermaids with incurable flipper diseases lived out their sad crippled lives. Join us in the unfathomable brine, Lou.
After that he crouched, thinking, No more, no more. He was weak and sweating, but at least he was ejecting poison. He heard a knock on the door, and Betty’s voice. "Can I come in now?"
He tried to say aye. It came out like a death-rattle.
The door opened. He looked up at her through watery eyes. "Pathetic intit?"
She took a towel, dampened it under the cold water tap and bent over, pressing the towel against his forehead. "Think your ordeal’s over?"
He wasn’t sure. He was frail and queasy, and fault-lines of pain ran directly behind his eyes. He was soothed by the towel, touched by Betty’s concern.
"You need Alka Seltzer."
She held out her hand. He reached for it, and climbed to his feet in stiff stages. In the kitchen she thoughtfully pulled a cord that closed the slats of the blind and eclipsed the sun, and told him to sit down. He obeyed. He wanted to brush his teeth, gargle, change clothes, acquire a whole new outer layer of skin.
"Drink this." She offered him a glass of sparkling liquid which he held to his mouth. Fizz tickled his nostrils. He swallowed, then belched with enough ferocity to speed-fill a balloon. He set the glass down and propped his elbows on the table and placed his head between his hands.
"Did I hear you say something about crippled mermaids?" she asked.
"I don’t think so."
"Sounded like it."
So there was leakage now? How often did this happen? Thoughts became words and they slipped out. He was turning to a mumbler, a schlepper who frequented dusty bookshops or library stacks or greasy cafes and uttered his thoughts for others to hear.
She touched his skull softly with the tips of her fingers. "What goes on in there, eh? When do I get full access."
"It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you," he said.
He was no boozer. In twenty years he hadn’t drunk to excess. At his late brother’s wedding, in fact –
But this memory was one he wanted to avoid.
"Why did I drink so much last night," he heard himself say.
"Don’t remember? Give it a minute."
A minute. A long minute. He let it sink in. Billy Tay, yes - it came back like a flawed firework from a half-forgotten Guy Fawkes Day. Tay, Chief-Superintendent, Perlman’s nemesis, had been suspended yesterday afternoon pending an inquiry into his operation of Force HQ. Such joyful news for Perlman. Such sweet justice. Then his memory plummeted – what came next? Unravelling, he stared at Betty with a look of bewilderment. "Tay, right, I remember – how the hell did I get here?"
She shrugged. "All I know is I got home around seven and you were in the kitchen already pickled – "
"Pickled? Try Bransonized."
"But happy as a lark, because you’d been reinstated, Lou. You just started celebrating too soon. With good reason, mind you."
Reinstated. How he’d yearned to hear that word. He’d been out in the cold so long he’d developed frostbite of the spirit. And now he was back where he belonged, no more the exile. He was exonerated, pardoned, it felt bloody good, more than – but wait. Wasn’t he supposed to report for duty to Acting Chief-Superintendent Mary Gibson today? No, that was surely tomorrow, definitely tomorrow.
Tomorrow was Restoration.
Today was strictly for recuperation.
"You must’ve come here by taxi. Your car’s not outside." Betty ran a hand through her gray-blonde hair, the style of which she was forever changing. Today it hung to her shoulders. She wore black Levis, a simple dark blue shirt with white buttons, a plain silver wristband. He looked into her eyes, blue as swimming-pools on a flawless summer day.
He didn’t remember any taxi. "Jews shouldn’t drink."
"And Orange bands shouldn’t have flutes."
"We’re like Eskimos and Apaches. It’s not in our culture to bevy - "
"Culture schmulture," Betty said, and sat facing him across the table. She glanced at the stuffed ashtray. He thought he caught a slight frown but he wasn’t sure.
"I don’t remember you coming in," he said. "How much did I consume?"
"A whole bottle of Bells."
"You’re joking - "
"Cross my heart."
"You’ll spare me details of any daft things I said or did?"
She looked at him with sympathy. "Of course."
Perlman was relieved, and thanked her – he had no idea what layers of personality were trapped beneath his sober everyday self, what acts of outlandish behaviour. He didn’t want to know. Some revelations were best locked away.
A whole bottle of Bells?
She reached for his hand, gripped his fingers. He inclined his head toward her arm and rested it there. He felt peaceful and safe - then just for a moment a memory intruded, cracking the crust of his hangover, and he was back in Tay’s office on that terrible day George Latta, Tay’s hairy-handed court jester, had shown Perlman the fucking nightmare photographs –
I’m not going there.
Perlman leaned his head against Betty’s shoulder and closed his eyes. He was content to sit like this for the rest of his life, enervated, depleted, enjoying her nearness. But their quiet intimacy was abruptly wrecked by the cock-crowing tone of Betty’s mobile phone in another room.
"Don’t answer," he said. "Keep the world away."
"Right. Who needs it?"
And the mermaids, he thought, keep them away too, far away. Now other things gatecrashed his fragile tranquility, reminding him of a promise he’d made to Betty, one he hadn’t been able to keep.
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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