Now or Never 3

I looked at my phone to find out the time. It was a quarter-to-four and my mind had had enough.
I’d woken from a nightmare, in which I could remember taking something out of my mouth and trying to dissolve it under a hot-water tap. It was oval-shaped and almost transparent but for its intricate framework of atom-like structure, like an alien’s egg. Under the tap, it failed to dissolve, so I put it in a mug and poured in piping-hot water from a kettle, but it remained intact, a glasslike artefact.
I dwelt on the nightmare’s meaning and interpreted it as a message to stop smoking. Something cancerous had hardened inside me to the extent that it had past the point of remedy. The egg had bred its disease and crystallised into my body. Unless I gave up, I’d have no chance.
That’s my take anyway.
By this time, I was awake. A smell of something quite pungent and rank hit me and I couldn’t work where it came from, but then I remembered last night.
They’d been at it again, throwing leftover food and fags out of their windows above me, hacking up wretched mucus, and I think I heard someone puke.
As I’m on the third floor, which gives onto the roof of the dancehall, I can smell everything that degrades there. Last night’s heat was stifling, so I’d kept the window open. Bad mistake.
Then I realised that the bastard upstairs from me had his telly on and was still busy slamming his door.
After a while, I got back to sleep, murmuring ‘fuckin’ man cunting shit’, imagining myself going up there and booting his door in and kicking five shades of crap out of him with matey’s baseball bat. ‘Slam yer door now, fuckhead!’
At breakfast, I sat with Andy and discussed the weakening fragility of our minds.
‘I think I’m going nuts, mate,’ I said, but he’d heard this many times before and said nothing.
‘Honestly, if they don’t stop puking and spitting and throwing shit out their windows, I’m gonna do something bad.’ I’ve never known myself to be this intolerant of others, but it’s horses for courses, I suppose. You can only take so much.
Andy identified. His window gives onto the main road. ‘Fuckin’ police were at it again last night, fuckin’ wah-wah wah-wah all night long. Must have happened at least five times.’
He’s pretty clued up on the police and knows they’re not allowed to use their sirens between eleven at night and seven in the morning. He’s thinking of making a complaint, for what it’s worth.
I told him not to bother. ‘It’ll only end up coming back to haunt you.’
As he was out of tobacco, I invited him to my room for one and we got onto the topic of drugs.
He’d never tried any before coming here. He’s tried everything apart from heroin now.
‘I took acid before I had a spliff,’ I told him, momentarily lapsing into morose regret for a second and then letting it go. After all, I’d bounced off walls and had million pound thoughts and danced like a shamen and seen angels making love.
Yesterday was horribly boring. Probably the most insanely boring day of my life. I saw a news item about how prisoners on Caribbean islands are given large rocks to chisel into small shapes to pass the time and felt a glint of envy.
Apart from going into town and trying to get Andy a phone contract with my provider, but failing, I’d spent most of the day in my room, baking away, hoping a pal might call to take me away from the madness, the noise and the sheer hell that is the YMCA.
On the way back from town, Andy picked up a flyer from a cocktail bar that offered a free bottle of Corona and gave it to me.
Every time I went to use the internet downstairs, someone else was on it. When I eventually got to to use it, the guy that had been on before me came back and said, ‘what you doin’?’ so I said, ‘using the fuckin’ internet, what does it look like?’
He got angry and told me that I didn’t know who he was, to which I agreed, adding that I didn’t want to, either.
He turned to the little black guy who’s always there and says nothing apart from ‘you got a burn?’ and asked him why he hadn’t saved the computer for him, but I interrupted and told him that I’d heard him say that it was too slow and that he’d go and use his laptop instead. Then he explained that he wanted to use his laptop to download what was on the internet of the computer but I said I didn’t bloody know that, did I?
Big and black, I could see him puffing up, so I took my sunglasses off and placed them on the table, but then he backed down and went to shake my hand. Moments later, the computer crashed and I lost the email I was writing to my Dad in Cape Town, who’s got skin cancer on his face, Alzeimer’s and is going blind. Thankfully, he’s just married his faithful secretary, who I don’t entirely trust, and she reads for him, although I think she’s quite a selective reader.
About a month ago, I saw an IT guy bring in new computers and stupidly thought they were for us. When he carried on through to the staff room, my heart sank.
‘You’ll get yours next week,’ he’d said, understanding my pain.
‘Yeah, and pigs fly,’ I replied.
Then he got funny. ‘They do if they’re in a helicopter.’
Thing is, if we weren’t here at the Y (O Y), the guy with the laptop would have definitely knocked me flying.
I mean, if this little contretemps had occurred on the average council estate, he’d have made my life a living nightmare and put me in hospital when the level of fear was just right.
If he raised his hand here, he’d be booted out.
I know it’s a dangerous game that I’m playing, but the anger is so etched on me now that I can’t seem to help myself. I know it’s a false economy and that I can’t carry on like this in the real world because I’ll be lumped bad before long, and maybe even taken out.
After the handshake, he was quite amenable.
‘Listen, mate,’ he said, ‘we’re all in this together, yeah?’
I agreed, explaining the way I’m thinking these days.
He laughed. ‘Anyone that comes here normal leaves mad, it’s the way it is.’
But I didn’t like that. I was going to get out of here with my mind intact.
I went upstairs and tried watching the telly to separate myself from my surroundings, using it as a sort of babysitter. Baby watches telly, telly entertains and takes baby away from the quizzical thoughts that his bickering parents have instilled before leaving for a ‘deserved’ night on the lash.
The effect didn’t last long, and, as you know, I’ve cracked, so when the doors started slamming and I’d done my murmuring, I realised that I couldn’t handle it a moment longer and got up to knock on my neighbour’s door.
The mixed-race nutter opened the door and said, ‘yeah?’ so I said, as calmly as a man can with his eyes bulging out from their sockets, ‘is it you keeps on slamming your door?’
He showed me how he shuts his door (the basic half-slam) and then opened it up again. ‘See?’
What I could see was the big black young guy that deals skunk to the sixth and seventh floor boys over by the window. (I get it, my neighbour’s the main dealer and the young guy does the ten-pound bags for him. Lovely.)
‘Sorry, mate,’ I said, ‘but it’s driving me mad with all the doors slamming and I just wanted to know who’s doing it.’
Then he changed. ‘Well don’t accuse me, alright. It’s not me so don’t accuse me, yeah.’
He had nothing on apart from shorts and I could see his muscles, all cut up. He tensed his stomach muscles like Ronaldo does on the billboards to sell perfume, erect and tight like an in-built penis.
‘I’m not accusing you? I was asking, that’s all.’
Again, like the laptop guy, he offered his hand out for me to shake, and I realised again that if this had happened on a council estate, I’d be laid out and his feet would be turning my face into mush. Care in the community.
On a mission, I left and went to knock on my other neighbour’s door.
Before knocking, I noticed a long crack in the wall surrounding the door-frame. Aha, I thought, this is the one.
But a little black girl opened up and peered around the door to greet me. ‘Hi,’ she said.
I asked if she slammed her door because it was driving me loopy.
‘No, it’s not me. I don’t slam my door. All the slamming comes from the other side of the corridor, I reckon.’
I didn’t believe her (because the walls judder on our side) but left, saying ‘sorry to bother you’.
I looked to the row of doors on the opposite side and wondered if I should try a few, but felt a strange sense of danger. Maybe the killer lived in one of those rooms, I thought. He wouldn’t be so nice to me. All it would take was for him to crack, then it would be just like on an estate, only worse.
I went downstairs to use the internet again, and saw that one of the white lads had brought his little son in.
His son was trying his best to get a football out of a plastic bag tied to his buggy and I wanted to play with him, so I told the tattoed, thick-veined father that I’d have a knockabout with him.
‘No, he’s gotta learn, mate,’ he said, lightly smacking the hands of his son without interrupting his conversation with a support worker about extra funding for something.
‘Learn about what?’ I wondered. ‘How to be denied just like you were when you were his age? Look what it did to you. Just look at where you are now, twatface.’
There’s no way I’d bring my children here, not that I can see them.
I couldn’t stand to see the child whimper, so I ducked into the web and concentrated on a site for penniless writers to retreat to in France that a friend told me about. Apparently, you can write in peace with bed and board if you put in a few hours’ work every day. Just the ticket, if only I didn’t have to fight to see my children in court for God knows how long.
When the theme to The Prince of Bel Air came on, some of the black guys started singing along to it. Before you knew it, the child and I were beaming with joy at the jolly commotion, and then another load of guys came in and joined in. They danced around the room, checking to see if I found it distasteful as they went. If only they knew that I had a heart, even if I was white.
I think that this was probably the best moment I’ve experienced here, and we all laughed when the music stopped. The child was clapping and I was holding back tears. His father hadn’t even noticed his son’s awakened joy, too busy calculating the extra reward for his embittered laziness.
Being the weekend, there was no dinner last night so I spent the evening reading ‘The Society of Others’ by William Nicholson (which is brilliant), drinking tea and nibbling half-price Hobnobs to stop the growling.
I was confused to find that the slamming had mysteriously stopped. For a short while, it was bliss.
Oh, I didn’t bother to go to that cocktail bar to get my free bottle of beer last night, but Andy had.
I forgot to tell you.
At breakfast, he asked if I’d gone and I said ‘no’. Then he told me that someone from the hostel had given him a flyer and when he got there, half of the YMCA was down there. He said it looked like the canteen!
What happened was that one of the lads had passed by the cocktail bar and nicked a whole heap of flyers and then doled them out.
Now we’re all banned, so I don’t think I can use mine.
‘One fucks it up for the lot of us, hey,’ he’d said, but I didn’t see him complaining.
One thing I need to be careful of is people seeing which website I use to post this little diary of mine. If they read it, I’m brown bread. Toasted to perfection.