Graham's Birthday

The sash window took quite a bit of strength to open, so I gripped it firmly with both hands and positioned my elbows so they were directly underneath before shoving it hard.  It opened with a satisfying squeak.  There was an old lager tin I was using as an ashtray, which just about balanced on the outer sill.  Annabel didn’t want me stinking the place out, she said, and I respected that, even though she was kicking me out in a week or so.  She had someone lined up who was actually going to pay the rent, apparently. 
  

I sat on my chair next to the window and lit up.  Smoking was still a pleasure to me, all these years down the line.  After a couple of long drags there was enough of a column of ash at the end to tap into the eyehole of the can.  I liked the ritual of it.  Little things please little minds, I thought. 

Through the window, I could feel it, that change in the season.  Something was rotting, maybe it was everything.  I looked at my fingers, and imagined them crumbling, flaking away into nothing.  Maybe this cigarette was the one that would kill me.  The breeze outside spoke of death, but death comes in many forms, I thought.  And then I remembered.  Fuck.  It was Graham’s birthday! 

The door opened, and Annabel appeared, wrapped in a blanket whose original pattern had long since merged with the evidence of its various uses.  She looked like she might be naked underneath.  Her hair, a dance of sprung coils which had moved of its own free will last night in the living room, now collapsed alarmingly across the right hand side of her face.  Her lipstick was smeared rouge, her eyes pale marbles with scarlet speckles.  Her grimace revealed a gap in her teeth, a recent development of which she had no declared knowledge. 

“Milk Steve.  Milk.  I need fucking milk.  Go on, get me some milk.  You’re not fucking doing anything else.  I need fucking milk Steve.  Get me some.” 

She bashed a pound coin on my beside table.  I picked it up, it was shiny and new.  “It’s Graham’s birthday today, I almost forgot”, I said. 

“Keep the change”, she said, “and don’t spend it all on sweets”.  Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, I thought. 

Annabel was on her morning milk thing.  Last night it had been cognac.  She’d had a few people over, and ended up dancing in her underwear stood on a chair.  Her sexual charm was like a rough piece of carpet she used to hide the rotten boards of her character.  Perhaps she’d gone to bed with someone, perhaps he or she was the one who wanted the milk.  Whatever. 

“I’m going out for a walk” I said.  I don’t know who I said it to exactly.  Perhaps to my mother, who always bemoaned my aversion to fresh air.  I might text her later, I thought, just to let her know.  Annabel raised her eyebrows, then left. 

Graham’s fucking birthday!  And I’d almost forgotten it!  Suddenly I had a mission on.  I got dressed in the warmest clothes I had.  Graham’s leather jacket was at the back of the wardrobe.  I brushed off a few cobwebs and pulled it on. 

I was heading for the hill.  Just thinking about it made me feel nervous, sort of excited and sort of sick. 

There’d been a time when this town was surrounded by a thick band of beech wood.  Now there were just little pockets of it.  As I walked up the main road, cars and lorries screaming past me, I looked back and saw the town, and wondered if this sad outcome had been planned, or had just sort of happened, one bad accident after another.  Then I ducked down the little footpath by the new estate.  After the estate it bordered a fallow field and a wood yard, and then ascended to a peak, a small hill hosting no more than a dozen trees.  It wasn’t on the way to anywhere, so it was deserted, even by dog walkers.  Nevertheless, it was special.   

Grange Park School still sat far below it, although it was called something else now, Enterprise Academy or something.  The hole in the fence that Graham and I used to crawl through was still there.  This was where we used to smoke dope at the end of the day before we headed home.  We’d come here to celebrate Graham’s 18th birthday, with a children’s birthday cake I’d bought from Iceland.  So I always associated it with his birthday.  And I loved the colours of the leaves, the pattern of decay around the base of the old bench, and the strange fungi that grew from the death below. 

I got to the top, and sat there for a few minutes, trying to get my breath back.  Fucking cigarettes. 

Just being there, just sitting there and thinking about Graham stirred something up in me, something like a deep love or a pain, or an addiction.  I felt held somehow, held together by memories and the ritual of just being there, like I had last year, and the year before.  The pattern had established itself and felt embedded in me.  I wasn’t really a fan of structure; jobs, girlfriends, that sort of thing.  But this was different, this was totally mine.  

I had a quick toke from the pipe Graham had given me, then lay under our favourite tree as we had done 
then.  I could imagine his leather jacket and long straggly dyed-blonde hair, his Dr Marten boots, the insane grin that had won him a succession of attractive and short-lived girlfriends.  We’d have a smoke and just talk, or rather he’d talk and I’d listen.  Graham’s mind was a great traveller.  I remember him taking us to Morocco, where we would smoke exotic pipes in the sun or trip out in the kasbahs.  We’d hitchhike and busk our way through France and Spain, despite neither of us playing a musical instrument.  Or we’d drive down the coast of California on a pilgrimage to find Ken Kesey and the Beats.  Sometimes the journeys he took us on were more abstract, mythical visions of underground worlds, pixie forests and ancient sages and skinny-dipping nymphs.  And always, at the end of each journey, he’d sit up and say “So we’re gonna do this yeah?  We’re not just going to sit and fucking talk about it, we’re gonna actually do it yeah?” and his eyes would have this special twinkle and I’d say “Yeah!” and he’d say “Fuck yeah!” and so the deal would be sealed.  And we never did any of it, and it didn’t seem to matter. 

Today the sky was blue, the shadows hard.  I masturbated for a while, thinking of Annabel standing on the chair and what might have happened afterwards.  When I knew I was going to come I rolled on my side and closed my eyes, felt my ejaculate pump out into the open and pool on the autumn leaves.  Then came the guilt, and the shame.  I got up and trod the evidence into the earth, rubbed it out of existence.  Then I tried to cry.  I produced a couple of tears, but that was it. 

Graham had gone out with Annabel once.  But the real love of his life was Crystal, a gangly exchange student from Canada with wire-framed glasses who always seemed to be reading.  She came up here too once, made us put dresses on and photographed us.  Graham looked prettier than her.  I just looked like a stupid fucker in a dress. 

They only went out for three months, but she did something to him in that time, set off some chain reaction that he couldn’t control.  For the rest of the time I knew him he was always talking about her, writing to her, obsessing about whether she still loved him and planning that final mythical journey, to Canada, to find her.  It was touching for a while, but then it got boring and I wished he’d just shut up. 

He was lonely I suppose.  He once asked if I wanted to suck his cock.  “I don’t think that’s the answer mate”, I said.  “No, but it’s an interesting question”, he replied.   

Then he found it, the thing he’d really been looking for.  It came wrapped in silver foil and took him somewhere beautiful.  This time, I wouldn’t go with him.  I didn’t see him for a while, and then one morning he turned up at my door and asked me for some money.  I gave him a tenner.  “When will I get it back?” I asked.  He took off his leather jacket and gave it to me.  “Security”, he said, and that was the last time I saw him. 

I was still waiting for that tenner.  I waited all afternoon.  When it got to 6 o’clock it half-clouded over and the sky was full of colour – reds and oranges and blues.  Then the show was over, and I was cold.  It was time to leave.  I took a little bit of hash from my tin and sprinkled it under the trees.  “Happy birthday mate”, I said. “Something for later”.   

Ritual was good.  It was structure, it was real and true.  The rest of the wasted earth had nothing on it and I gave it nothing in return.