clean up

Clean Up

I have just tasted the meal which I had last night once again, only

this time it was laced with stomach acid and bile and didn't taste

half as good. Sometimes a one-way ticket is so much better than a

return one. When you know the drink is alcoholic and it still tastes

inoffensive and you can knock it back like orange squash you should

know that the next morning is going to be messy. Noodles strangely

look quite at home floating in a toilet bowl -- it's surely what diced

carrots were made for. I had better flush or we might have to endure a

repeat performance, not that I'm sure it wouldn't just be a rather

protracted bout of dry-heaving. Anyway, enough about the puke.

This place looks like shit. Imagine a biblical plague where the sky is

full of prophylactics raining down instead of frogs and you've got an

idea of what a task I have before me. My girlfriend looks like she was

gang-fucked by the entire Planet Of The Apes, but that's what comes

from a Rohypnol-spiced night of no-holds-barred fucking and drinking.

She slurs some kind of sweet nothing at me through her confusion and

then waves me on my way, returning to the depths of sleep as soon as I

leave the room. I make my way to the kitchen and the medicine cabinet.

I can still hear Suze snoring like an amorous elephant ... I'd fuck

her now if I didn't have my tidy head on.

I drop a couple of Alka-Seltzers into a glass and feel my stomach

lurch as the smell of the old plink plink fizz rises up to my

odour-shy nostrils. I will follow up these little white fizzing

wonders with some pro-plus and then, with my rubber gloves on and

looking like some medical worker about to search an anal cavity, I

will commence with the clean-up operation.

At least there is one consolation -- that stupid junky bitch Rhona

didn't bother to show up: I missed her outstanding blow-jobs, but the

litter of used and blood-filled needles is something that a hangover

doesn't need adding to its recipe. The number of us who have had to

have AIDs test thanks to her way with the old crap-filled vein spikes

is too many to count. Thankfully neither her nor her victims have yet

come down with anything -- more through luck than any grand awakening

of the mind to the dangerous possibilities.

Somebody has shit in the litter bin, and I thank god for Suze's

insistence on always lining it with a bag. Beer shit always smells ten

times more awful than sober shit. Its removable, but still, who wants

to have to carry a bag of shit out to the bin in the too-bright sun of

a too-early morning? Not me, for sure. The smell nearly overrides the

chalky-tasting indigestion remedy's magic.

The downstairs toilet is the thing that finally empties my guts. I see

sick in the toilet and, as you would, try to flush it away, only to

realise, too late, that John has puked in the cistern once again and I

have to witness a liquid curtain of sick swirling down that porcelain

throat. I am sick again. I close my eyes this time when I flush. How

the fuck am I going to clean this little mess up? I think I'll leave

it until I feel in a less delicate state.

I open the door to the TV room and the cyclopean almost-gaze of my

sister's cunt stares up at me. Am I embarassed? Not particularly. I am

an aesthete and can appreciate beauty. Does the maxim look but don't

touch apply here? For decency's sake I shall answer yes, though, I

hate to say it, my trouser-snake, nature-driven and blood-engorged,

provides a devil's advocate argument refuting any morality. I close

the door, punch myself in the nuts for my perversity, and note that

another room has just shifted from the check-list of today's chores to

the list for put-off-until-tomorrow. The physical world shifts a lot

faster than the world of ideas which always seem to lag behind, at

least in my experience.

The kitchen sink calls me back. Something has fallen and broken in

there. I must shift all the leftovers and debris of meals and munchies

into the waste-disposal unit and the dishwasher. It takes me at least

twenty minutes, maybe half-an-hour, to clear all the crap away and put

the dishwasher on. Suze will be pleased when she wakes up that she

doesn't have to deal with all this -- she's not exactly what you would

call a domestic goddess. The only time I have ever seen her use a

cookery book is when we were skinning up the other night. Cheese

toasties don't count as cooking. Ah, but who the fuck cares? She is

beautiful and she is the coolest person I know, and for some strange

reason she feels the same way about me. I wouldn't do this kind of

thing for anyone else. She could be accused of forcing me into a

psychic corner where the untidiness is so mentally damaging that I

have to act, but there is nothing so considered and planned about her

actions -- they just happen.

I know at least that any indiscretions which I was involved in last

night will not cause any friction between her and myself, because she

would have been involved in them -- we are like cyclists on a tandem,

we ride everywhere together. The polaroids on the side-board mean that

either one of our pervy or artistic friends who had been side-lined

from the main action was trying to get a shoe-in -- he has kept up

with the pace and made quite a good documentary effort here ... very

artistic. I think it is Jake, I'm sure I recognise his sense of humour

distilled in the angles and composition of some of this wonderful

fuck-art. Jackson Pollock dribbled paint across his canvas, we have

gone for the porn alternative. I am hard just thinking about it.

I now go about and open all the curtains, let some light filter

through the fosslised stratas of good-time overspill. There is enough

here to fill several black bags. Which is what I do.There is so much

ash here in these ash-trays you could con a year's worth of families

at a crematorium that actually sells the bodies for experiments -- I

once worked in such a place, so I know what I'm talking about.Once I

have removed all this and found a surface I will have to start

polishing and cleaning up residue, my least favourite part of this

whole cleaning thing.

But first, for some reason that I come to question a lot over the

following days, I decide that I have to go and look out the window,

and, following the strange discovery that our garage door is shut for

the first time ever, I decide to go and investigate. I wish I had not

looked out of that window because I am not a driver and would never

normally have to go into the garage. What's the use of regret now

though? Well, in regards to going into the garage at least and looking

out of the window. The thing that I found in the garage ... that is

the source of enough regret to pepper the rest of my days. If the

thoughts that burst in my head were bullets I would be holier than

Swiss cheese.

Weird, that is the word which sums up what I was thinking as I walked

through the house to the door which opened into the garage. I didn't

expect anything other than weirdness when I got there -- perhaps

someone playing about. Playing about or fucking in the car. I nearly

puked again when I saw what I saw, and at that point I had nothing

left in my stomach.

The stench in that small, enclosed space was amazing -- smoke so thick

and toxic that just travelling from the adjoining door to the remote

control to open the garage door nearly killed me. Standing there,

looking in through the window of the car, shocked to a standstill of

thought and movement I did my lungs and my throat no good at all. My

witness statement took an age for them to get because I couldn't speak

at first due to the fume-wreaked damage, then shock carried me onwards

in a wave of silence. I was the moment-trapped screamer of the Edvard

Munch painting -- I sometimes think I still am. I still will sit and

stare into space occassionally, and all I can see is that frozen

tableau -- it drapes my mind like a pall, a blind-fold for the

present; the suffocation of memory.

She had definitely wanted to go this time. I have never heard of

someone being so thorough in guaranteeing that they will never be able

to be revived. As I peered down at her stillness, unable to breathe,

all I could hear were the cruel words which I had thought earlier.

Those words circled around in my head like the eye of a storm that is

never going to let up. The tears stood in my eyes, they filmed my

vision, but they would not spill. There was a lump like a fist in my

throat. And then I passed out. I was unconscious and lucky not to

follow after her into the next world.

Suze had to identify Rhona's body, but it was just a formality, much

as the interview with me was. Every single detail of what had befallen

Rhona was there in Rhona's handwriting, on that tear-stained,

blood-soaked paper. She had overdosed, slashed her wrists, and, as if

to make trebly sure, she had run a pipe from the exhaust of our car in

through the window to that front seat which became her dying place.

I was the reason she killed herself, the stupid fucking junky, I'm not

worth it. I know for sure that after this I am not going to fuck about

anymore. I nearly lost Suze through this, and I couldn't bear that.