Richard
Wasted your life in black and white
�Vulture stalked white pipe lie forever; Wasted your life in black and white.� Kevin Carter, Manic Street Preachers
He stared through the glass into the murky liquid. It was his sixth pint- or maybe his seventh. Who cared? Certainly not him. And there was no one else to care. Not even a barmaid. Not even the village drunk. Village drunks� do they have those things around anymore? It seems all the alcoholics nowadays are overweight professionals with red faces, mortgages and wives who want holidays to Tenerife. The rain pelted the window of the pub. He hated the rain almost as much as he hated the sun. No, no, no� hate was too strong a word. It implied energy. It implied passion. It implied a love for something, somewhere, and that was too much like hard work. He sipped his pint. Lynton was a nice place. Nice was the right word. Not astonishingly pretty, not amazingly friendly, not incredibly exciting. But it wasn't bad. Just... nice. He sipped his pint. It was a mediocre pint with an average price.
He laughed bitterly to himself. Chairman of the rotary club, committee member of the amateur operatic society. All completely, utterly, thoroughly pointless. And besides, he thought, they should know better than to put him in positions of responsibility, even false responsibility for raffles and table sales. He mumbled that everybody knew what happened the last time. But no one knew. There was no one there to know. There was no one there to care. He sipped his pint. It wasn't that he didn't like the village, or his small semi detached house, or his respected role within the community. It was a retirement dream, invading a rural village with his na�ve suburban ways. Not that there was anybody there to point out his na�ve suburban ways, considering that most of the village were retired people on exile from the suburbs, who shared his na�vete, who crinkled their noses at the smell of cowshit, and still leapt from the sudden sound of the shotgun. It wasn't the fact that it was a Disneyland type rural village, with imported residents who were hardly the �real thing�, many coming for their weekend retreat from the bustle of the city having priced the locals out of the market; after all, the locals he did know were annoying inbreds with bad breath, and the sooner they were all forced to bugger off, the better. It wasn't the fact that it was claustrophobic. True, sometimes the thought of everybody knowing your business got a bit harrowing. But still, looked it with a positive light, it came as a quaint part of this rural perfection, and even the most vicious gossip was without a doubt better than anonymity. No, what annoyed him about perfection was the fact that it wasn't perfect. There was always the background interference of past shouts. And one of these days the past would catch up with him, or the present would get too much for him. Either way, the outcome would be the same. He'd be sipping brandy in the study, reading the business section of the Telegraph, and suddenly his hands would shake, his chest constrict, each breath be drawn as though he was under water, only to be coughed up again by a set of lungs turned traitor, demanding ten fresh breaths of which he would be lucky if he could manage one. Suddenly the glass would slip from his hands and fall to the waxed wooden floor, where it would smash as though in slow motion, its impact with the ground like an explosion. Then he would follow the way of the glass, slipping out of his own hands and falling to the ground. And although he would not be able to see his own eyes in the last few seconds, filled with fear, shouting as though in a vacuum, he knew exactly what they would look like. He knew because he had seen them writhing in the faces of young men who had trusted and respected him, who had laughed at his crap jokes and sang along with his tubthumping nonsense as they marched onward, one second chuckling, the next still with a vacant smile as they lay dying or dead, an eternal indication of an error of judgement at the back of his mind. The eyes hopeless, yet accusatory. They were clearly asking one question; why? It was a question he asked himself on occasion when he couldn't find easier things to occupy his mind with. Like now. But the answer that came was the endless silence, punctuated only by the rain. He sighed and sipped his pint.
Sometimes he liked to be alone. Just to sit in his study, reading the Telegraph with the hopeless hope that knowledge will set him free, allow him to conquer this punishment, every time flicking over the share prices wondering, hoping; will this be the business section to end all his business sections. But this was not one of those times. This was a time when he wanted meaningless chatter, wanted false roles, wanted manufactured smiles. Today, he just wanted something to keep the memories at bay, something to drown out the screams of the dead, something to occupy some brief shard of this endless living death. Perhaps he'd find that something at the bottom of the next glass.
Richard Irvine