CHAPTER 1
I put the bike in the shed and settled the rucksack onto my shoulders as I tugged the straps tighter to compensate for standing upright.

There was quite a weight in it, and I had been out of the pedals for each bump to spare the seat post from the risk of breaking. What a farce: an aluminium and carbon road bike with a twenty stone man on it. In lycra. I still felt the disgust from the night before, when I had had no time for tea before the music club, and sat by the window in the Charcoal Grill awaiting my burger and chips. The two drunks had chapped on the window to get my attention, then made a point of laughing in my face. Bastards.

I limped up the stairs to my flat, the weight of the rucksack loading my sore left knee, and went through the ritual. Computer on and working through log on. Kebab and chips to one side, and wine straight into the fridge. The bottle had a screw cap, so break the seal to stop it shrinking with the cold and into the freezer, so I could have my first drink quickly. Password into warmed up laptop. Unwrap the kebab, onto a plate, chips into a bowl with a good dose of salt and vinegar. Bad for the heart, yeah, right.

Everything into the living room, apart from the wine, and pick some music….Lisa Ekdahl, let’s have some memories. Settle into the chair, call up the mail, delete the spam and phishing and pick out the two or three real messages. Start to eat.

There were only a couple that evening, one from Ginny in the cycling group.

“Adam, not seen you out for a while, you OK?”

I looked down at the screen past my gut and sighed. Ginny was one of my thousand cuts, part of the flensing of my life as I cut away any possible collateral damage, as the Yanks call it. When I went, I wanted as few hurt as possible.

“Sorry, Gordon Girl, got a lot on. PTSD playing up, combined with some stuff that’s a bit sort of congenital. Will be out once I get sorted. Hugs to all”

That should hold her off for a while, I thought. As I had cut away the dross people had stopped dropping by, so I could relax more. The kebab and chips were gone by then, without the subtlety of touching the sides of my throat, and the grease coated my fingers, lips and beard. I wandered into the bathroom and got most of it off, then pulled off my cycle shirt and shorts, shoes and socks, and went naked back to the living room, collecting a glass and the bottle from the freezer as I went. I liked my white wine chilled, but there isn’t enough in a bottle, and a box takes too long to chill, so I had evolved this system to let me have a drink as soon as possible but still have enough to do the necessary and nightly job of getting me hammered.

I suppose the technical term for me would be something like a functioning or functional alcoholic. I drank every day, including after night shifts, when I would get in too tired to stay awake but thirsty enough to fight sleep till I had killed at least a bottle. It was the only way I slept; if I went without, I either tossed and turned wakefully all night, or I saw the boys again, felt the heat on my skin and watched their faces as the flames caught their hair.

That was a thought, and I fingered the small burn on my left hand as I thought “Not tonight, lads, tonight I shall mostly be pissed”

I shifted position a bit, reaching down between my bare thighs to haul out the deformity, which was fucking uncomfortably dropped down and painfully crushed, and not for the first time considered taking a blade to it, solving so many problems in one neat slice.

Lisa was singing “Du Sá¥lde Vá¥ra Hjá¤rtan” and I started to weep a little at her voice’s vulnerability and sweetness. I logged into the dating site once more, just on the off-chance, but once again it was peopled by idiots who thought that repeated requests for a shopping list of perversions would get them closer to God, or de Sade, or von Sacher-Masoch. I had tried telling those who contacted me that I just wanted to talk, not discuss their O and A levels, but every time I logged in I got a steady stream of offers of sexual diversity that made me want to throw my laptop into the street.

That night was no different, and I closed down the two over-persistent and oversexed individuals who wouldn’t or couldn’t take a hint, and dropped into the cycling forum, saying nothing, just seeing who was about, what had changed since I stopped playing so active a role. The bottle was already empty, so I hauled myself up for the wine box, and Lisa sang “Du Var Inte Dá¤r Fá¶r Mig” and then “Att á„lska á„r Stá¶rre”

I sang along with her, “Att bli á¤lskad á¤r stá¶rt, bara att á¤lska kan vara stá¶rre” and my voice couldn’t do anything to bring feeling to the words. I had a little buzz on from the first bottle, which let me relax enough to at least hit the notes, and then the box was filling my glass again as Lisa came to an end. I could do the second, but her first clause was beyond my dreams. I decided to stick with the Swedish stuff, and popped in Den Fule, and drank some more.

Two in the morning, laptop still on my knees, in ‘hibernate’ mode, and Swedish folk-punk still playing in my headphones on repeat. A full glass stood beside me, and I knocked it back in one before stumbling into my bedroom. That was a mistake, falling asleep in the chair. It meant I might have visitors in the night. I did my best, settling myself down into the most comfortable position I could manage and trying to focus on my favourite daydream, but my sozzled mind couldn’t decide whether it was to be the genie, or the nanobots, or just the waking-up-it-was-all-a-bad-dream start. I mean, they were all the same daydream, or fantasy, or wishing reverie, or prayer, in the end.

And the Pan-European surged beneath me as I followed the car through Morriston, blues and twos on, giving my commentary as I went.

“Yes, I am pursuit trained and on a vehicle equipped for recording. Vehicle is a Vauxhall Corsa, licence plate number whisky fife fife niner tango kilo November. Eastbound on Clasemount Road. Speed is six zero, six zero. Three occupants. Male driver, IC1, white baseball cap, dark top. Right right right Mount Crescent. Right right right Penrhiw Road. Speed now fife zero fife zero.”

“Traffic car en route, eta two minutes, 512.”

“Roger that. Left left left Long View Road. Wrong side of carriageway, oncoming traffic swerving”

“Traffic eta now one minute, 512”

“Right right right Elan Avenue. Speed now four zero four zero. Stopping…..ready for decamp!”

The vehicle suddenly did a textbook bootlegger turn, and I found it coming back at me, and the front wheel of my bike hit its bumper as I was thrown completely over the roof. Stay loose, tuck, roll, trust the armour and your lid, Adam, fuck that hurt. I heard an almighty bang, and they had gone through some railings and met a steel lamp standard and the brick wall behind it. I found I could stand up, and this was the real part, the memory part, it was the next bit that always got worse, as the joint in the passenger’s hand ignited the petrol that had splashed out of the cans they were carrying in the back, where they had been siphoning fuel all night, and there was a hiss and a crack as the whole back seat went up in flames. My extinguisher was on the bike, and the bike was still in the front of the car, and I ran forward in time to see the driver’s face as he turned to me and mouthed “Please…” just as the whole thing went bang and I was thrown halfway across the street.

The three of them got out of the car to smile at me, heads like burning coconuts, and that smell, the petrol and the pork, as the traffic lads got out and came over to stand with the dead boys and smile at me, and call me a coward.

The alarm got me up, just before my bladder, and I filled the kettle as I hopped from foot to foot, and made a pint of orange squash to break the seal of crap in my mouth. I drank it sitting on the toilet as my bladder let loose a bright orange stream of dehydration piss, and wondered how it would all end. Liver? Heart? Or just my own helping hand? Sod it, I would feel better once the hangover went. I chucked the wine box back in the fridge; it still felt heavy enough to do the trick that night, when I got back from work, to try and keep the dead boys away.