The Spirit of the Stairwell

A baleful sun rose over the grey streets of New Malden as I hauled my tenderised carcass up from beneath the sheets. It seemed like a low life bar and a bottle of gin were a match made in hell and my throbbing head and half-closed right eye testified to this fact as my teeth rattled in my head and my jaw squeaked like a rusty gate.

Film club.

I poured myself a hair of the dog what gnawed my head off as my gut lurched unpleasantly beneath the starched cotton of my second best shirt. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to take this but the time was bearing down on me like a runaway engine that had jumped the tracks at Clapham Junction and was barrelling down on me spitting sparks and tearing metal with all the demons in hell tumbling after. And stuck in the back of my head was a thought, the ultimate itch I couldn’t hope to scratch – I had arranged this, I had brought this event down upon myself as surely as if I had put my .45 in my mouth, hooked the trigger and made a fist.

And so they came. The dregs of society, the poor and the hopeless, the chancers, the misfits, the bums. The drunks and the floozies, the dirty cops and the wild-eyed crooks. They sat in my apartment, they smiled smiles that never reached their eyes and licked their cracked lips as the whole caper played out before them in a succession of high-contrast, staccato images full of betrayal and depravity.

I sat in my faded leather chair and waited for trouble.

But that’s the thing about trouble, it strolls round the corner when you’re thinking about better days, never when you’re expecting it. The whole shebang past without a hitch, they even seemed to enjoy themselves the shmoes.

I got out alive. I made it.

And now as I look at the future through the bottom of a dirty hi-ball I can feel its icy fingers enclose me.

I am a damned man and I’m playing with borrowed time. I’m going to do it again. Damn me.

I’m going to do it again.

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