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Strangers with faces like the backs of Thumbtacks


B. Lawrence

    Maybe the Doctors were trying to kill me. The medicine didn’t work. It was a scam. The drugs just made me worse, so maybe the Verve were right. They had told me it was Venlafaxine, but it was cut bad with something because those Pills butchered me. The way that dirt rattled around in my stomach, if you shook me, I would have sounded like a Maraca. That combined with the other filth cascading through my veins, made the dreams even worse, but my lids still wouldn’t stay closed long enough to find out how they ended. The unfinished dreams of fights. Of me, and another young man, in an alleyway. In my dreams, both of us with bruised knuckles and fists, locked in our brutal dance, until I woke, cold and sweaty, knowing I had been in a fight and was in one still.
    Not sleeping was what led me to Katie in the first place. On one of those “dating” apps young people use instead of talking to each other. After a few messages, we met at the Stone Lions in the Town centre. For those of you not from Nottingham, whatever you’re imagining in your head is probably close enough. The statues are a Nottingham institute since we have nothing else to build a city around other than Poundworld and misery. It was cold enough out, that my hands were numb, but I walked round the Lions a few times before arriving to not be early. The slush from the snow seeping through the holes in my boots and the sky was dark blue, changing its mind from day to night. Katie was leaning against one of the Lions. When we walked to the bar, she told me while she was waiting, three guys had approached her claiming to be her date.
    At the bar, the Bouncer stood in front of the archway entrance and looked up from his phone. A smile for Katie. A frown for me. He waved Katie in and made a big show of blocking me with his hairy palm before looking at her chest and checking my ID. It was a Provisional with my face half scratched away. He looked me up and down.
    “When’s your birthday?”
    His eyes were dark black, smouldering in the lined sockets.
    “....June”
    “Yeah idiot- what year?”
    “Every year”
    “You taking the piss?”
    I took a step back....
    “12th of June 1994”
    Then slowly reaching forward to take back my ID.
    There were no seats, except upturned craft boxes with peeling wallpaper. No tables except flat-pack bookshelves set on their backs, covered in posters of bands. Black and white monochrome of rock stars dead before any of us were yanked out of nonexistence. Our souls forced into this shallow meat. Me and Katie got in the queue to get served. When we got to the front, the bartender with the piercings rolled her eyes.
    We sat at some boxes next to the door while I learned that Katie worked in marketing or something and had a Pet or something. She called her Pink Mini a “Madam” because it wouldn’t start when she wanted it too and thought car insurance was too expensive. She loved her parents, and said that having big boobs meant she couldn’t wear most kinds of dresses. Looking down and realized I had sat there before. Once, me and Amy had sat there with knives, carving obscure references into the soft of the table. Artwork parodied on phone billboards. Quotes from books I pretended to have read. Back when I wanted more than anything for her to want me. The Beautiful switchblade marks, cascading around the beer-soaked boxes. Spirals of a failing relationship.
    Walking back to Katie’s place sent shivers of broken glass up my leg. I fell on some hard earth a few months earlier, and the joint gushed blood like a geyser. At hospital, I saw the Police beat a suicidal man and a child danced in his blood, but that’s maybe a story for another time. Maybe too dark for here. Long story short, I limped out after swiping a crutch someone had left in the waiting area. Eventually, I did some Physio on it and Mum got me a knee brace, but it never worked the same way as before.
    Katie’s place was a flat share twenty minutes out of the darkness. There’s a toothbrush in my back pocket just in case, so I brushed while she talked her empty talk out of the hallway. After that, we made it a few times and then talked a little. There was no love in it, but it was better than I usually am at fucking because the drinking made the voices stop. Her room felt hot from the Christmas lights, and old cigarette smoke. My leg brace itched and itched, and It was easy to imagine my flesh festering. Going back would be worse. That hospital of the dead. My leg withering and dying and maybe being hacked off by a nervous medical intern. After me and Katie were done, I drunk from an open bottle on her bedside. After a few swigs, she told me the bottle was full of cough syrup and after putting it down she asked me the usual questions. Where do you live? Did you go to Uni? What did you study? Etc etc. Ancient History, but this doesn’t usually interest women. Weirdly, it did spark Katie a little. She told me that in Ancient Sparta, if a man ever put his hands on a woman, or hurt them too badly, then the woman had to get a piece of pottery urn and slash it across the man’s face. Slash him bad enough that he’d always have a scar. Then other women would know to stay away from him. She said this wasn’t optional, but that this was a civic duty for citizens to perform for the good of the city. How you could bring that back now, and it would still work. How men would have it coming. Leaning on the bed putting my knee brace back on, Katie told me more about how hard her job was.
    
“That’s pretty rough”
    “Yeah...
yeah it is” she said “I’m working tomorrow too”
    “Oh, okay we should probably get some sleep”
    “With you here, I don’t feel like we’re going to get much sleep”
    “Honestly, I’m like totally done”
    “...Yeah I’ve got to get up really early”
    “Brutal”
    “........................”
    “Marketing all the stuff you do must really take it out of you”
    “.......................”
    “Oh wait.... You want me to leave?”
    “Yeah, If you don’t mind”
    “...........”
    “...........”
    “.........Was that really cough syrup I was just drinking?”
    “Can you just leave please”
    The way back to the bus stop was through the 3 am darkness of residential streets, half-remembered while my brain was still in heat. It might as well have been a hundred years ago. At one point I stamped on some chips dropped in the road. The white potato and polystyrene crushed between the gaps in the paving slabs. Sometimes hearing the echo of odd laughter or screams through the empty spaces. Behind every dark alleyway, probably a clown or a murderer or a BBC presenter from the 1970’s. Empty starving streets and alleyways, full of strangers throwing you away like bad takeaway.
    I got a burger waiting for the bus to come, and it was so bad, I spat most of it back in bag. The thin slice of cheese and soggy bun tasting like yeast infection. As the night bus came, some dregs shuffled on, and after beeping my card, a guy started to argue with the bus driver because he didn’t have the right fare. As his voice got louder, everyone was trying not to look. The guy kicked off even worse when the driver told him to leave, but he wouldn’t leave and stood in front of the doors scanning the faces that squeezed by him onto the bus. I was trying not to sweat while also wondering whether getting stabbed would make Katie feel guilty for kicking me out. Probably not. The man without the fare shoulder checked an Asian guy as he walked off the bus. I sneaked a look at him while he kicked at the glass, from the other side.
    He was a middle-aged man, with a dark face and beanie hat, not wearing a shirt. A tattoo of a knife pointing downwards ran from his chest to his groin. In one of his hands was a polystyrene cup, and with the other hand, he reached down his trouser leg to pull out a knife.
    “I’ll fight any one of you” said the man without the fare.
    No one answered but the blade glittered in the darkness. There was thin glass between us and the doors were still open.
    “I’m the badest dog in this place- NG7- big bully boss man- NG7!”
    I’m from the NG5 postcode, but it didn’t seem like the right time to mention this. The driver was reading a paper through their see-through protective barrier.
    “NG7 NG7 NG7!”
    Everyone was looking away. My head turned towards the scene of the crime. The other me had pulled the strings.
    “Get off the bus Wasteman”
    His eyes not just on me but all of us. The man in the seat behind started to rock in his seat and whispered to no one in particular.
    “I’ve done kickboxing for ten years- If he comes for me- I’m no pushover”
    He wasn’t going to help....
    “I’ve done Kickboxing- If he comes at me- know what I mean- I’ve done kickboxing”
    The man from NG7 wasn’t laughing anymore, and no one was telling the driver to drive. The illusion of the safety of silence. The more time I spent not getting off the bus the bigger and bigger he got.
    “Get off the damn bus!”
    
The driver still didn’t drive. I couldn’t look away, so I saw as he danced the blade up close on my face, through the glass.
    “Drive!”
    A woman was shouting to the driver. He put down his newspaper and finally looked at the man with the knife before shrugging his shoulders.
    “I’ve still got a minute”
    “He’s going to stab us, just drive!”
    “I’ve got thirty seconds, I can’t leave till then-”
    “He’s going to kill us FUCKING DRIVE!”
    “There’s no need for bad language Miss, none of you better complain”
    The driver pulled the bus away from the curb as the doors clunked shut.
    “.... (mutters) bunch of snowflakes”
    The man without the fare looked at the objects in his hands, before throwing the polystyrene cup up the bus window. Pink.... It was full of Pink milkshake. As the foam dripped down, I saw a long scar running down the side of his face.

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