Goatie

MIASMA. That’s the word I was trying to remember. It’s all a bit stupid. It doesn’t really exist in the same way it did then as an invasive force. But you’ve still got the hangover of the word hanging like a bad smell.

When the sky is blue and canal boats putter along, painted in bright colours, it reawakens a sense of awe. The latest phone, or car, with all their gizmos, never could touch me. I’m old- fashioned that way. When I go jogging along the canal path, I don’t pump myself up with shitty music. I just want to suck it all in. The smell, the taste. Not that monochrome world of being in a loop.

I don’t want to admit I’ve come down with some bug. After Covid, everyone was an expert. For or against? As if life and death is a popularity show. Vote with your body. The weather had turned in an afternoon to sleet and rain. But there’s something else on the edge of things. Yeh, I know. Paranoia. As if something is watching me. Coming closer. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It’s not as if you can admit that kinda shit to anybody. It’s easier to say you’ve just got a bug.

My concentration is shot. I can’t watch the telly. I know, it’s all shit, anyway. Nothing worth watching. I pick up a book detailing Britain’s historical dealings with the United States. Put it down again. Try a novel set in Glasgow. Murders and detectives and double dealing. I eat that shit up. But it doesn’t work.

I know I’m putting off going to bed. I feel there’s something watching and waiting. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I check under the bed and make sure the door with the boiler inside is properly shut. I can’t sleep. Even having a wank doesn’t help. I pray with the desperation of the unbeliever on the edge of a cliff.

I fall into sleep. I’ve read about REM rhythms and the four stages of sleep. How a body prepares itself to let the subconscious take control. Sometimes I’m aware of a jerking movement. But there’s something there tugging on the line. Waiting for me to fall. Coming closer and out of the unconscious pool. But also in it. Getting onto my bed. Kneeling on my chest and strangling me.

My struggles are authentic enough to choke me. But I can’t move. I scream. But it’s all in my head. I’m powerless.

I wake up gasping. My bed awash with sweat. I reach for the light switch. I’m alone, of course. There’s no one to tell since she left me. I wouldn’t tell her, anyway. It’s stupid. Nightmares.

She’d have liked it. Me being so powerless. And tried to fuck it out of me. Sex was the question and answer for everything. At twenty-one, I could hardly wait to be in the same room as her and fuck her. I was astonished how much she’d changed by thirty. I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as her. I couldn’t wait for her to fuck off. I kicked her out. If it hadn’t been for the kids, I’d have probably ended up strangling her. Maybe this was payback. She’d put some kind of spell on me. There’s little doubt I’m becoming a total nut job.

I go full tonto. All that health shit. Cold showers. Plant-based menu. I stopped boozing.  I run along the canal at night rather than go to bed. I’ve got as far as Dumbarton, but usually it’s just Bowling Harbour. It’s nice there among the boats and down on the water.

One night for a change, I took the route down by the Clyde at the Saltings. The waves lapping against the shore. It reminds me of being a boy and digging in with my plastic bucket and spade. Some bits are marshy. I’ve got to be careful which way I go.

I hear someone behind me. I know what you’re thinking. This is the kind of place where swingers hang out. But it’s not that kind of breathing. I broke into a sprint. It was agony, but it was catching me. But when I turned there was nothing.

I sat on the wall near the public dump. Well lit up. The Council tried to discourage looters. You thought it would be the opposite, inviting folk in to take the rubbish away. I was so tired, I shut my eyes. I heard whispering. I remembered that was the place where the paedophile rapist had taken that wee boy and hid his body. I knew I was going out of my mind. I’d have to get help. I phoned Hughie.

We’d went to school together. He got married at seventeen to the girl we all fancied. He did the right thing. Not because she was pregnant, but because he was going bald. We both knew by the time he was nineteen or twenty, no woman would look at him without laughing. And not in a good way, because he could be a funny guy. A very funny guy. He acted like a singleton right to the bitter end. That was Hughie. A man to be looked up to.

Strangers assumed Hughie was my younger brother when we went to Spain. It didn’t really matter which bit we hit. We weren’t there to learn the lingo. Hughie’s cure for the night terrors was being a night terror. But he was rarely up before one o’clock. Beer for breakfast. I went along with it because it worked.

But I was awake before the sun came up. I was in no state to go jogging, but I glugged down a bottle of water and went down to the beach and followed the shoreline. A faraway rock took the shape of a great cathedral when I got closer. A town with narrow cobbled streets sprung off it. I’d money in my pocket and I was thirsty. I looked for somewhere to buy water or juice.

The cathedral door was open. I poked my head inside. I’ve always loved the smell of incense. It’s a Catholic failing, like Dylan Thomas’s ideal that death will have no dominion. When, of course, it does everywhere. Especially in a forty-foot sculpture of Jesus dying on the cross. The crown of thorns makes me wince.

I didn’t want to disturb the monk that is lighting candles at the side altar, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. He wears medieval garb, a robe cinched at the waist and a wooden cross around his neck. I paused to gaze at the arches covered in devils and chimera peeking out with stony eyes.

He waves the taper at me. Ushers me closer to light a candle for the Virgin Mary. I wonder if I’ve any low currency notes in my bumbag to pay him off. I didn’t want to offend him, but did that awful charade of speaking in pidgin English that I don’t speak Spanish.

‘No matter,’ he says. His English better than mine. ‘Just light a candle to the Mother of Christ that she might see it in her heart to pray for you and call on the protection of her blessed Son. Because your journey in not long. And the drop is short and quick.’

‘Whit dae yeh mean?’

He gripped my wrist and put the lit taper in my hand and guided me to the candles. But when I held the taper to the wick it spluttered out. In his hand light bloomed. With mine, only darkness and a fizzing sound.

‘Whit does it mean?’

He rattled on about the architecture and how the cathedral had been created, rather than built, with the help of devils. That the townsfolk still locked their doors and put shutters on their windows at night, because they could hear the devil’s whispering and calling. It was often like a goat’s bleating. One had a strong voice, the other weaker.

He shrugged, ‘Youngsters mocked their elders, said it was the sound of seagulls come to scavenge, carried by the wind.’

‘But out on the water, old fishermen tell the story of seeing two lights on the beach, waving in and out. Two goats on their hind legs, holding a lamp. One has a man’s face and a goat’s beard. The other, a she-goat, has the face of a Madonna. And if she catches your eye, you’re doomed. They talk in a language never heard. But when the conversation lulls, they bleat into the darkness. And the darkness answers.’

I joke. ‘That sounds like Hammer House of Horror.’

He didn’t understand and asked me to repeat what I’d said.

‘No,’ I wave a hand, not wanting to make a fuss. ‘It’s alright, but do you believe it.’

‘Of course,’ his sunken tonsured head and folded hands, suggested solidity and not frivolity. ‘Because I’ve been here long enough to hear and see them. They know me and my ways.’ He nods. ‘And they know you. And your ways.’  

I told Hughie all this when I got back to the hotel. He thought it was dead funny. His answer was to get drunk. I was in total agreement. We were on holiday. That’s what we done. But no matter how much booze we flung back we were on the verge of being sober.

‘Whit’s the matter wae yeh?’ I asked Hughie as we downed another double.

‘Dunno,’ he admits. ‘Couldnae sleep. I thought somewan was fuckin about next door.’

‘Nice,’ I laugh, sipping at my beer chaser.

He laughed too, but it was hollow. ‘It wisnae so much that. It wiz someone whispering. Every time I sprung up, it stopped.’

His hand shook as he picked up another double vodka. ‘I know this’ll sound weird.’ Took a deep breath and downed his drink in a oner. ‘It sounded like fuckin goats.’

I joked. ‘Ghosts? Yeh said? That’s fuckin weird.’ But I could see he was a bit wired and downplayed it. ‘Sorry, goats, as in bah!bah!bah!’

‘That’s a sheep, ya daft cunt. No a goat!’ He stood up on a chair, and bleated like a goat.

Not like a goat. Like an actual goat. I can’t explain it. We were in a modern city, in a modern bar, with dozens of people of different nationalities. Not all of us were drunk. The Sun sent out a team of reporters to find out what happened. They went for the Dionysian debauched angle that had teenagers scrambling for the latest flights.

It was every man for themselves. I turned off my phone and was glad to get home. Hughie didn’t make it back. He was in prison or an asylum. He’d a daughter that was trying to fix him up. I left her to it and went on sick leave at work.

I got Valium from the doctor and street Valium too. It’s the only way I can sleep. I leave a glass of water by my bed. In the morning, it’s empty. I didn’t drink it. I know I didn’t.