I was outside, sitting on the drive. It was uncomfortable. Someone had been sick on it. It wasn’t me, I was sick on the lawn and on a cat that had been up to no good in the shrubbery. Legs were next to me. I looked up them. Standing over me were Eddie Finch, Jack, and Judy.
‘Eddie!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were here tonight.’
They exchanged looks.
‘He’s always like this,’ said Judy. ‘He’s too wussy for this sort of thing.’
‘Always was,’ said Jack. ‘Used to throw up if he had Woodpecker, and that’s pop.’
‘How much has he had?’ Eddie asked.
‘Half a pint,’ said Judy.
‘As much as that?’ said Jack. ‘He’s getting to be one of the big lads.’
‘Wine,’ Judy added. ‘Two cans of Brew and half a pint of wine.’
‘Well most of the wine’s on the garden,’ said Eddie.
‘Two cans of Brew? Call a fucking ambulance,’ said Jack.
‘You’re an ambulance,’ I said. I knew I’d got the joke wrong, but they were all drunk and I thought I’d get away with it
‘There, he says he wants an ambulance. He knows he’s overdone it. Stick to the Vimto, mate.’
I noticed that Eddie had put his arm around Judy, and that Judy didn’t seem to mind. I told them both what I thought about that. I tried to tell them, anyway. The words came out overlapping and stretched.
‘Yeah mate,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve had a bit too much tonight. See Eddie? He’s going to take Judy home. Put her to bed, mate. What you’d be doing if you weren’t on the drive of this charming residence. I’ll take you to mine, you sleep on the floor. Throw up on the floor and I’ll murder you. Fair play? Fair play. Eddie’s got his car here. Haven’t you?’
Eddie nodded.
‘Shame you’re nobody special,’ said Eddie. ‘Good story if you’re famous, drunk in Stourbridge. Good story if you do criminal damage on the way home.’
‘Useless bloody story if it’s just Sam on the pop,’ said Jack. Judy leaned down to kiss me. She came in too quickly and I flinched. Jack and Eddie picked me up.
‘Now the walking thing,’ said Jack. ‘We need to do the walking thing.’
We were in the park, close to the lake. Another chunk of the evening had gone. It was like having your life edited by the British Board of Film Classification. All of the scenes ended in odd places and some things were missing altogether. A duck quacked a series of little quacks. It sounded like it was laughing. I was sick in the duck pond.
‘That’s the vomiting thing,’ said Jack. ‘We’ve done that. We’ve done a lot of that. We don’t need to do it again. It’s not helpful. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, and I’m fucking sure the ducks aren’t happy about it. The walking thing. This is Mary Stevens Park, and I don’t live here. I live at my house and we have to get there in time to go to bed. Now do a straight line. Not into the lake. Leave the cat alone, Sam.’
I was in Jack’s kitchen. There were noises from upstairs.
‘Lisa’s up,’ said Jack. ‘Because of what you did to the cat.’
I was sitting on a chair that seemed to slope in all directions at once. Jack was sitting opposite me. He slumped his elbows on the table then put his face close to mine. His nostrils twitched and he moved a little further away.
‘I never got to tell you, did I?’ he asked. ‘Eddie got in the way. Must have known there was a story coming. I was going to say, do you remember when we were twenty? When we killed those five people?’
I threw away a chunk of the evening.
I was in bed. It was a hard bed, and the room was doing acrobatics. It did flips and cartwheels and somersaults. I could smell vomit. Perhaps it was the cat from four or five memories ago. The smell surrounded me and I fell asleep in it, just like Jimi Hendrix. Except that I woke up the next day.
III
In the morning anything could have happened. I wouldn’t have known about it. I didn’t wake up until the afternoon. By that time the smell of vomit had become the smell of dried vomit.
Someone had been sick on me in the night.
Jack gave me a cup of coffee and some helpful advice about drinking, and then I went home. I remembered Judy leaving with Eddie. Eddie didn’t strike me as reliable. What was Jack thinking of, letting Judy go off with Eddie Finch? Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys for an exclusive. Come to that, Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys just for a laugh. I didn’t know what he might have done to Judy for a laugh. I’d be sure to count her kidneys the next time I saw her.
She was at my house, waiting for me. She made me a cup of tea and made me have a shower. After the shower she sniffed me and told me to take my clothes outside and burn them.
‘Don’t bother getting out of them either, you drunken bastard,’ she said.
I had a feeling she was upset about something.
‘I’m sorry I was drunk,’ I said.
‘Drunk? I can cope with drunk boyfriends. They’re easier than sober ones. At least they’re honest. But there’s drunk and there’s paralytic. How did you get home?’
I didn’t know. That had fallen out of my head.
‘I knew it,’ she said, scrunching her face. A scrunchy face on the girlfriend means, Sam’s in trouble.
‘We went to the park,’ I remembered. ‘There were ducks.’
‘Lovely. You and Jack went for a stroll in the park. I was driven home by Eddie Finch, who has always wanted to be a rally driver. How do I know this? Because he drove me home at seventy miles an hour, going sideways for a lot of the time. He has fog lamps and bumper stickers and roll bars. There’s you, puking all over the wonders of nature, and there’s me, being driven home so fast I got there before I went out. Of course, I had to sleep with him. He’d driven me home, it was the least I could do.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘I may be. We’ll have to see.’
‘How many kidneys do you have?’
‘What?’ Judy went to the living room and came back with a cigarette. She had started smoking after going out with me for a few weeks. I’d tried to give up but it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t tried to give up. She claimed she didn’t smoke much. If she didn’t, either my cigarettes were evaporating or we had some woodlice in the wainscoting that were going to have chest problems when they got older.
I didn’t know what wainscoting was. I thought it was something low in the house, around the level of skirting boards. Or was it on the roof? I wasn’t sure. I did know that I shared the house with woodlice. I presumed they were busy eating the floorboards from under me. If you went into a dark room and switched on the light, there would be one or two woodlice in the middle of the room, heading for nowhere in particular.
Woodlice have an interesting life cycle. As I understand it, based on personal observation, there are four stages in the life of a woodlouse. Firstly there is the not-existing stage. You don’t see baby woodlice, perhaps because they’re the size of molecules. You do see them when they get to the second stage, which is pretty small woodlice. Then they become pretty big woodlice, and then they become unmoving woodlice that turn out, on closer inspection, to be empty shells. If you turn them over, all of the workings have gone. They’re empty. No legs, no feelers, just shell. How