Joe

It’s weird. I get flashbacks. Flashbacks to a different time, a different place. Sometimes they’re like the purest memories. Other times it’s more déjà vu. Too much booze, perhaps. Too many lines. Mostly I ignore them. It’s easier that way, safer. I’ve pretty much given up the booze now anyway and the last drug I took was a Lemsip. I say pretty much. What’s a wagon if not something to fall from? But I fall rarely and never far. Straight Joe, grateful Joe, back from the abyss and not wanting to return to it Joe, that’s me. And I stay safe within her arms.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’ve become all puritanical. There’s still twenty cigarettes a day, still the parties, still those times when the only thing to do is say feck it and give in to a reckless urge to do something precisely because that little voice that lives in the back of your head, that bastard little voice, says don’t do it, Joe, don’t do it, what will they think, what will they say? Well, they can mind their own business, can’t they? They’d never understand anyway. Besides, there’s a buzz to be had from going to a club, dancing, playing, laughing, acting like the funniest guy in the world and then driving yourself home, knowing that you’ve had nothing stronger than a couple of spicy tomato juices and a fizzy water, watching as the drunks are assaulted by the cold night air and seeing them reel towards empty taxi ranks and the Kubrick-like lottery of the nightbus. Stay safe, sister, mind how you go, brother, reality’s round the corner and it’s armed with a hammer. Bang bang. Plink plink fizz. Ouch.

And yet even within the safety of sobriety, there are moments. Moments like last night. Last night, as I stood huddled in a doorway, jacket collar turned up against a wind on vacation from Svalbard, feeling the beats from inside pounding the walls like artillery shells, sucking on a Marlboro Light, when I saw – what? Who? Someone, something in the shadows, something or someone, lurking just out of reach of the cool electric glare, a someone or something not quite there, a someone or something without a true form, not quite whole, not quite there. But here. It was here.