I Remember Nothing

Sunday morning came. At least I think it was morning. It was light anyway. My head hurt, my mouth was dry, and I was sweating like hell. There was noise. A lot of voices in the house. My mum and dad? There were more than two voices. Male voices. Strident, aggressive.  A high-pitched voice, one I recognised as my mum’s offered tea and biscuits to the ‘guests’. I lay there thinking I was in the middle of a dream, but my dreams were interrupted by my bedroom door being thrust open.

‘John, these police officers would like to speak to you’ said Mum, her careworn face etched with deeper lines than usual, ‘someone’s been killed’. ‘They say they’ve got a warrant to search the house!’

She pointed out the door, across the hall towards the front room where the raised voices were.coming from.

My hangover was replaced by an overwhelming fear as the adrenalin kicked in, laced with a touch of paranoia, ‘police officers ‘, ‘someone’s been killed ‘, ‘warrants’, what could that possibly have to do with me?

‘Ok, Mum, just give me a minute to get some clothes on’, I said trying sound as calm as possible.

She left abruptly. I could hear the distant rattle of cups and saucers in the kitchen as she made tea for the officers.

I put on my jeans and trainers. The Motorhead t-shirt I had worn last night was on the floor stuffed half under my bed. Why would I have done that? I pulled it out from under the bed, the logo obscured by dark crimson staining, a finger touch and lick proved this to be blood, that horrible coppery metallic taste, like old pennies. But whose blood? I stuffed the t-shirt right under the bed and dragged out my old denim shirt from the wardrobe, putting it in on quickly. What had I done last night, and to whom? Those two questions would no doubt be put to me by the Cops.

Taking on an air of calm, I entered the front room.

 Dad and Mum looked stunned, an uneasy silence hanging in the air between us.

The Cops asked me my name and were asking me to assist them with their enquiries and stressing that they only wanted to ask me a number of questions ‘down at the station’ to eliminate me from their enquiries.

I left the house with the two cops wondering what the hell would come next.

During Saturday, the busiest time in the shop, Al had come in by asking me if I fancied going for a drink that night. I agreed hastily as my slave driver boss glared menacingly over in my direction. It was Sunday tomorrow, so I didn’t have to get up for work. I would just get pissed tonight, it had been a crap week and I really needed to raise some hell.

I had  just turned  eighteen. I worked in the shop during the week while awaiting the results of my exams. I hoped to go to Art School in September to do graphic design and ultimately design album covers. I was really into music and had wanted to do this for the last five years, because I loved album cover art, especially those designed by Joe Petagno, who did the Motorhead album covers. My adult life stretched out before me, like a blank canvas ready for painting,  a much, much longer version of the summer holidays at school you were wee.

Earlier that summer, Al and I had been in a band, perhaps more of a 'collective'. We 'jammed' , and had never played live, we wrote our own songs and taped them in Al's attic.. I sang, he played guitar, electric and acoustic, while Ramsay, a taciturn longhair from our year in school, played bass. We had various folk who came and went from the line up, a couple  of anarchy punk types , Phil and Dave , who were are college with Al, an older hippy guy called Fat Chris who loved Theakston’s Old Peculiar and such drinks and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of folk music, such as Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny , John Martyn and Roy Harper and brought his experience of acoustic guitar playing to the collective, and last bit not least, a really quiet guy called Ron who loved Pink Floyd and had been cellist  in the school orchestra. We didn’t have a drummer, which had never really mattered.

Ron's  cello became an integral part of a punked –up version of ‘Home Home on the Range’, which really had to be heard to be believed.

We recorded Wire’s ‘Strange’ with me singing in a Jim Morrison-esque style, or so I imagined, my deep voice booming in the attic room, reminded me of the singer of Joy Division too.in my daydreamings. We had made a few tapes, maybe we would get a gig in a pub or something, maybe one day we would be famous, and it was early days yet, very early days.

That night Al and I were pissed , absolutely pissed. It was great; his folks had gone on holiday and left him in charge of the house. We had been at his folks’ drinks cabinet helping ourselves to the expensive  malt whiskies, vodka and brandy and now we were going back to the pub we had been at earlier. This was a great place to be in the long summer nights. It was a grand old house which had been transformed by a local businessman, into a bar-restaurant, opposite an old Gothic house that reminded me of the house in ‘Psycho’.

I had thrown up earlier and a splash of puke stained my jacket.   I looked at my face in Al’s bathroom mirror, the image wavering in my blurry vision, from would be rock star in black Motorhead T-shirt and black cord jacket, jeans and boots to round faced, ruddy cheeked, just former schoolboy.,  as I wondered how Lemmy from Motorhead managed to play the bass after drinking all the Jack Daniels and vodka the music papers said he drank. So, this was being pissed, I thought, trying to act and think sober. I had been out drinking a few times, but I had never really tasted spirits before, and I could really feel it hitting me.

My legs were beginning to feel rubbery, my balance a little dodgy,

My head was brimming with the music we had been listening to earlier. Al had introduced me to the music of Iggy Pop, The Sex Pistols, The Saints, MC5, and more of Wire that night. My musical palette had been pretty limited at that time, taking in the likes of Motorhead, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath and more recently sixties stuff like Hendrix and the Doors. Now that I was working, I had a wee bit of money to buy albums and buy albums I would. I didn’t want to just be a heavy metal fan, a punk or whatever, none of that tribal shite. I just wanted to like what music I liked, guitars and loudness being the common denominator.

I staggered along the smooth tarmac of the street with Al leading the way unsteadily shouting the words of Iggy Pop's ‘Raw Power’ into the night to anyone who was listening.

A few curtains twitched at this commotion he was making, nosy neighbours in a posh area.

We went back to the pub and had a couple more pints of lager.  Oddly I remembered my dad telling me not to mix my drinks a while ago, but it was too late now. My vision was swimming, swimming lengths. I was seeing double and my speech beginning to slur. I was slurring to Jill Stephen, my Mum’s mate’s daughter and some blonde girl I didn’t know, and she was telling me to fuck off, that I was pissed and that I should fuck off home. Maybe I was embarrassed about being pissed in front of Jill as she was someone I had really fancied at school, but I staggered off into the night in the opposite direction from home.  I wasn’t cool enough for Jill anyway; she hung out with bikers these days.

Somehow, I managed to lose Al that night, one minute he was talking to some folk I didn’t know, and then had disappeared into the crowd at the bar.

My staggering brought me to a chipper where I bought some chips and a can of Coke thinking this would have the effect of sobering me up.

The blurred figures behind the counter handed over my chips and Coke; I chucked a handful of coins on the counter and lurched out of the place.  I vaguely recollect swearing as I left. On the way home I vaguely remember falling in hedges and throwing my chips high into the air at Queen’s Wynd shouting and swearing at some folk. My t-shirt had sauce down the front, my jacket was soaked from the fall, had it been raining earlier on? I limped towards home; I must’ve fallen harder than I thought.

After several fumbling attempts at turning my key in the lock, I got in the house, I knew my folks were out, so I legged it to the bathroom, feeling the surge of nausea forcing its way up my throat.

I knelt down as if to pray and threw up until I was dry retching, the toilet bowl firmly in my embrace like a long-lost relation, the words ‘kiss the porcelain’ popping into my head, a possible song title?

My guts ached from all the puking; God only knows how I would feel in the morning.

I stripped off and fell into my bed; my clothes chucked every which way across the bedroom and fell asleep as I hit the pillow.

Sunday Morning came. At least I think it was morning. It was light anyway.

Once down at the station, the Cops led me from the patrol car to an interview room, which was basically a table and two chairs and a window, which I suspected might be a two-way window.

My first thought was I remember nothing.

( Footnote: The title comes from a song by Joy Division, which is very much of its time, the time I am trying to evoke in this fictional piece- The start of the 80s, the early experiments with alcohol, the wannabe rock stars, who never made it. I think it works!)