Dreams of a Better Place - Part 2

Trevor's daddy looks away from the TV long enough to tell Trevor to hush up, Trevor giggles and copies him 'smush shup!' and goes back to his toys, all of them scattered around him haphazardly. His daddy turns back to the idiot box and stands up and turns it off. He says to Trevor, "Come on Lil' Trev, it's time for day care." His dad can’t wait to get Trevor out of the way so he can have some peace and quiet, even though Trevor rarely makes a sound when playing for fear of getting a smack.

Little Trevor doesn't much like day care, but even at such a young age he understands what it means when his parents say 'It has to be done' when they talk about shopping or working or when they used to change his nappy. Some things have to be done. Like day care, and going potty, and kissing Mr Bumbles the Big Brown Bear goodnight and keeping his night light turned on...

Trevor follows his daddy to the car with the characteristic huff and shuffle of the young who think they've got it hard, stopping at the door to let his daddy put his puffy coat, gloves, and bobble hat on him. He then wraps a scarf around Trevor’s so tight that he can barely breathe.

It’s snowing outside, and poor little Trevor would freeze unless he was wrapped in so many layers that he could only waddle like a penguin when he quickly toddled back into the house to grab Mr. Bumbles. He couldn’t go anywhere without him.

****

Mark finally woke up, and there was no way of knowing how long he had been out for. The sky was still the same baby blue colour, and the cocaine was still that brilliant white. His mouth tasted like ass and his head felt like it was housing a concussion band in which all the members were irate bulls.

He was shaking and sweating, and through the haze of the worst hangover he had ever experienced, he realized that there was no sun in the sky. Had there been before? There was no way to know. He rolled to one side in the ‘snow’ and felt his stomach shift and lurch, and he thought he might vomit. It growled loudly, the only sound in this barren heroin desert, and it seemed enormously loud. He now realized that his mouth was more like bone dry ass, and his tongue was cracked and bleeding.

He was so damn thirsty and hungry, dying for a coke and something coated in grease… that would go down nicely. Then he would try and sleep this off, and after that start all over again. Climbing to his feet, he felt his head go light and he almost collapsed from dizziness. Sweat was running down his body in rivets now, and he faintly lamented the wasting of all that perfectly good liquid, even if it was probably almost one hundred percent alcohol.

He looked around and again as far as he could see there was nothing but booze and drugs. Taking a few staggering steps, he climbed a slight mound of coke and craned his neck (this brought fresh dizziness and nausea) and tried to see further. No burger stands or water fountains anywhere. He tried to lick his lips but his tongue was like sandpaper against them.

Maybe this - whatever this was -wasn’t heaven after all. There certainly wasn’t anything heavenly about this hangover or this incredible hunger and thirst. He crouched down and grabbed another bottle of JD handily within reach, and tried to chase the hangover with a bit of the hair of the dog. He promptly vomited his guts out (maybe quite literally, there was a fair share of blood in his vomit) and he threw the bottle away as he inhaled deeply and tried to wipe the sweat from his face.

He whacked himself in the face with a bottle. He looked at his hand, stunned. There was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in it. He threw it away again. He looked at his hand. It was there again.
“What the fuck?”
He tried dropping it on the ground. It got halfway to the cocaine drift at his feet and then reappeared in his hand, as if he was in a film and the editor had tossed in a random jump cut. He would have thought this was impossible, but was anything around him or anything that was going on right now possible? Hell no.

The only thing that seemed real anymore was this god awful hangover. Heaven… this was not. Even though as far as he could see there was more of the same, he began to walk. Slowly and staggering, he picked a point on the horizon and fixed on it, walking towards it and trying to ignore how damn ill he felt. As he walked he felt like he was hallucinating, he saw flashes of his life before him as his memory slowly and sluggishly pieced itself back together. He saw himself taking drugs and drinking almost every night.

He saw how he lost his job at the bar, and how his spiral of self destruction began. He saw a drunken young lady in a little black dress leave the bar by herself, and he saw a burly man stagger out the door after her, into the driving rain. He felt the same suspicion again and the same anger as he followed him out and saw the man beating the woman and pushing her down a dark alley.
“What do you think you’re doing, asshole?” Mark called, trying to sound strong, trying to disguise how frightened he was. The guy was head and shoulders taller than him and probably twice as wide.

She screamed for help, lying in the trash strewn alley with her dressed ripped, her nose possibly broken and her eye swelling shut. The man turned slowly, staggering slightly on his feet as he did.
“Mind your own business, or I’ll kick your ass next.” It came out as little more than a slur, just one long word, but Mark got the basic gist of it. He was already soaked to his skin but hadn’t even noticed. The man turned away from him, apparently thinking Mark wasn’t worth worrying about.

The woman tried to climb to her feet and slipped in the mud. Her long blonde hair was plastered to her face, and the rain made the blood run down her face in drips of pink and disguised her tears. The man rounded on her once again, raising a fist that seemed to be the size of a massive boulder. Mark swallowed his fear and reached down to the alley below him, lifting a discarded bottle out of the mud and quickly looking behind him, hoping someone else would come along and stop this.

No one did. It was down to him.

The girl screamed again just as Mark smashed the bottle into the back of the man’s head, hitting him square between the ears. He expected a satisfying clunk, and then the man would fall face forward into the muddy alley, unconscious. What actually happened was much less satisfying. The bottle smashed, cutting strips of flesh off the man’s scalp and slicing deep into a few of Mark’s fingers.

The stranger flinched, howled like an animal, and rounded on him. The neck and top half of the bottle stayed in Mark’s bloodied hand as the man lifted one of them massive fists, and Mark imagined the man would punch so hard that it would knock his head right off his shoulders.

Mark managed to try and make some sort of movement just as the man swung and instead of getting hit square in the nose, the fist smacked off his forehead, sending him sprawling into the mud just like the girl, and making the alleyway explode into a fiesta of light and colour.

He lay there, dazed, with the pounding rain thundering onto his face, and the man approached him, either forgetting the girl or wanting to rid of this new pest first. Mark was sure that if the man was sober and his punch more focused, his skull probably would have been cracked. As it stood now, he knew he was going to have a seriously nasty swelling going on up there tomorrow.

The man lifted Mark out of the mud by the neck of his t-shirt with one hand and then right off the ground, until they were face to face, Mark’s leg’s spinning wildly and uselessly. The man drew his fist back slowly, and a malicious grin spread across his otherwise drunken and vacant face. It struck Mark at this moment just how ugly this man was. Snot and blood (the latter probably not his own) ran down his craggy face and mixed with the rain water. He had small dark eyes, like a pig, and also a dirty great snout of a nose, not unlike a pig.

The man opened his mouth and slurred more speech, saying, “Once I finish you off I’m gonna have some fun with that dirty little blonde over there.” But it mostly came out as ‘oneefisnifhsyouoffimgonnahavesforoetihthatdirtltoetltlteblondeeeoverrrrtherrrr.’ Mark, still somewhat dazed, suddenly remembered he was still holding what was left of the broken wine bottle in one of his hands that were dangling uselessly by his sides. With his free hand, he grabbed the giant slab of meat this pig called a fist, acting as though he was struggling to get free.

He readied the bottle, coiling the muscles in his arm, waiting to strike, as though he was a snake. The man was so drunk he couldn’t see straight, and Mark was so dazed that he thought there was two of this man holding him up, standing side by side in the alleyway. It made for a fair match, really.

Mark waited for the man to swing his fist, and as it moved towards him he lunged his arm out, striking fast like a cobra, except instead of delivering a bite and venom, he delivered a nasty slice across the man’s throat, cutting his adams apple and probably something else important, judging by the way the blood began to spurt out with such enthusiasm.

The man gasped in pain but his fist continued its arc to the side of Mark’s head, again exploding the world with brilliant light and not so brilliant pain. He fell to the mud as the man left go of him to tend to his throat, which now looked like a second mouth beneath his first, and both seemed to be gasping and choking in agony. Mark looked up just in time to see the blood and realize that if the man didn’t die from that, he was one tough cookie.

He also had time to think that if the man did survive, he would subsequently probably choke the life out of Mark’s unconscious body and then move on to that poor girl. Mark set his head back down and lapsed into unconsciousness, his poor battered skull ringing like a million slot machines hitting their jackpots.

Back in the bizarre land of cocaine, Mark laughed bitterly and rubbed his forehead where he had been punched, without realizing. He still had a faint lump there that would never go away, not without plastic surgery. After all that trouble you would have imagined he would have work up in hospital, with the blonde girl looking all cleaned up and all the more beautiful, sitting by his bedside.

She would have explained everything to the police, he would have been a hero for saving her from probably a horrible fate, and maybe she would take him out to dinner to say thanks and - blah blah blah, no such luck in the real world.

When Mark fully came back to consciousness, he was being dragged roughly to his feet, and his hands were being bent behind him and cuffed. It had stopped raining, and there were still remnants of the man’s blood on his clothes, and the murder weapon lay close at hand in the mud. A few police officers were struggling to fit the dead man’s amazing size and girth into a body bag, and another officer was reading Mark his rights and all that nonsense.

He was too dazed and dismayed to do or say anything. The girl was gone; the rain had washed away any sign of her. Both her blood and the tracks she left in the mud. There was nothing to prove that what had happened here was anything other than a bar- fight between two men that turned into a murder. To the police, the answer to what had happened was obvious, and no amount of pleading on Mark’s part would make anyone believe otherwise. Especially once the results from the drug tests came back.

The other man may have been the one who died, but Mark lost his life too that night. He lost his job, he was jailed for two years (the sentence was reduced on self defense) and he got our early for good behavior. Now with murder - even if it was self defense - on his criminal record, he had no hope of getting a job anywhere. His previously habitual drug and alcohol abuse that he kept in control and was going to give up soon (honestly!) spiraled out of control. He was treated like a criminal, and like scum, by just about everyone he met and everywhere he tried to get a job, so that’s what he became. Right up until -

He still couldn’t remember, how had he got here? He rubbed his aching head again and tried to swallow, but his mouth was so dry his throat clicked like a gun being loaded. He lifted the bottle of JD to his lips. He paused, and looked into the murky depths of the bottle. He wasn’t a bad person; he had tried to be a hero. He was a victim of circumstance and just plain shitty luck. If he carried on taking drugs and drinking alcohol would it really help? Would it help anything?

He had loved working in the bar, and not because of the easy access to the booze. If he tried hard enough to prove his worth and make people see past his conviction, maybe he could find work in something he loved again, and try and rebuild his life. Remembering that time in the alley made him remember that he used to be a good person, he used to be kind. Where ever that girl was, she was grateful to him. He could make someone feel that way again about him again. Make someone feel he was more than a conviction; make them feel he was a human being. If he ever got out of here he swore he would.

As much as it pained him to do it, he moved the bottle away from his lips and up-ended it, pouring it all on the ground. The brown booze soaked through the cocaine, staining it. He threw the bottle away and ignored the sin all around him. He kept walking, watching that same spot on the horizon, not surprised at all when the bottle didn’t return to his hand this time.