Bradford Middleton

A Night in the Life

Hank puts the book he is reading down and walks the few feet to his kitchen sideboard where he pours himself a large, a really large, glass of the cheapest wine any supermarket in this town by the edge of the sea has to offer.  In this town, hell in this life, that is all he has ever been able to afford, the cheapest anything… the cheapest wine, the cheapest room, hell it’s just been a cheap kinda life and certainly shows no sign of changing since he’d passed his half-century a few years before.  He takes a drink before walking the few feet over to his window, his world is so small almost everywhere he likes going is generally just a few feet away, and peers out.  Down below is an alleyway and that is the place Hank has grown almost obsessed by since he moved into this tiny one-room deal a few months previously.  A tiny one-room deal in an ever-growing list of one-room deals he’d experienced in this town before either eviction or just pure simple need to escape came a calling.  

The few months have seen Hank read a lot of books and drink a lot of wine and generally try and live his best life but somehow it was always that place just four floors beneath his window that always somehow managed to drag him in, somehow always managed to grab his attention.

Tonight he spies beautiful sultry Tatiana entertaining a mark as best she can in the condom and needle festooned hole she calls her work-place and all of a sudden he feels a pang of jealousy.  The lucky scumbag who’s enjoying himself with that super-fine piece of hotness is surely, Hank thinks, as he desperately tries to get a better view, one of the luckiest sons-of-bitches on the face of the whole god-damn planet right now as he hears her moans reach his open window.  

Hank reaches for his glass and drains a big long measure before moving back to his chair, the solitary chair in his room, where he’ll sit.  He’ll contemplate Tatiana and all her wondrous assets and skills, at least those he can imagine, and he’ll roll a smoke but just as he places the newly rolled smoke in his mouth a loud wailing sound emanates through the floorboards from one of the rooms downstairs.  The sound of a woman crying fills his room and as he sits there he knows there is only one thing he can do; he leans over and switches on the radio and suddenly the magnificently heroic sounds of Bruckner’s Third come to save him from the torture of having to listen to someone else’s misery.  Hell, he’s got enough of his own to deal with let alone having to endure anyone else’s!

He smokes his smoke and as it nears its end he drains his wine, another bottle gone in his ongoing lifelong war with reality, and as he gets back to his feet he moves first for another bottle before spying another view of the wondrous Tatiana in all her wild animalness going at it hard and heavy down below.  Hank doesn’t care if its the same guy, a new guy, hell all he knows is it ain’t him down there and that’s enough to make him almost want to start wailing his own sadness but right now he knows there is drinking to be done.  He picks up the fresh new bottle and pours it in large, really large, and gets straight into it and soon, he knows, it will be time to call an end to the insanity of his life for another day.  A day, like so many before, when even the idea of going out there, where the other people live their lives, simply fills him with revulsion at their pathetic existences, their pathetic so-called lives which show no sign of life at all.

‘Working the 9-5, the damn mortgage and car and family and pet, all it does is keep you a prisoner of the system you fools! What a ridiculous existence!’ he thinks as the sun blinks on the horizon and Hank knows it is almost time.  He returns from the toilet down the hall, drains the remnants of his wine in one fell swoop and as he climbs into his single bed he knows the squares are just beginning another of their damnable days.  One of those damnable days when they’ll work hard, in that searing heat, all to make a rich guy somehow even richer whilst, well, they’ll earn just about enough to keep them coming back.   It’s always just about enough for their pathetic lives, enough for their insane desires of cars and children and houses and total abject boredom as far as Hank can tell.  A life, an existence even, that is so far removed from the lives he encounters on those rare adventures out of his room or on those pages of everyday madness he so keenly reads he can barely understand let alone comprehend anyone wanting to live that way.  As he rolls the final smoke of his night he pulls his current book off his bedside cabinet; a collection of short stories from some degenerate across the pond, and as he turns to the back cover he takes in the author photo and the mad smiling face staring back at him is sure of someone who has lived, and as he lay in his pit he sparks his smoke alive and reads the back-cover blurb again.

‘A genius of the streets,’ one of the critic raves as Hank smokes all the way down to the roach before stubbing it out and after laying the book down he almost immediately falls to sleep, dreaming, as he has almost every damn day since he’d been priced out, of the mad swirling metropolis only sixty short miles up the road.  That seething hate-filled metropolis that had once been home but which now felt a lifetime away from his ramshackle room in this dilapidated madhouse by the sea he’d called many things but never ‘home’; it has never been that to him and it surely couldn’t now ever be, not in this lifetime almost certainly.

As the masses began to pour onto the streets later, escaping their retail and office-bound nightmares, Hank finally pulls himself out of his pit of a bed and is immediately back into his routine; the routine that has come to rule his life.  He wakes and immediately switches on his radio.  His room fills with the sound of Gustav Mahler and almost instantly the kettle is boiling as he prepares his first mug of tea, his first caffeinated hit, of the day.  The first of many and the perfect accompaniment to the ubiquitous smoke which he rolls and pops in his mouth as he allows the mug to cool.  Sparking it to life he begins to think of what needs doing that day, there is never much but, today, Hank knows, with his wine supply running dangerously low, he must somehow navigate his way to the damn supermarket down in the marina.  Only a twenty minute walk for sure but through some of the most crime-ridden and notoriously mad streets this town has to offer and Hank knows he, as usual, ain’t going to be able to do it on an empty stomach.  As the tea runs to its end he busies himself with preparations for a fry-up of epic proportions.  A fry-up and a large, a really large, glass of vin rouge he knows will help.

The fry-up sure does fills his stomach, one of the first things he learned upon leaving home was to never go food shopping whilst hungry, and he knows that once he’s rolled the ubiquitous smoke for the walk he’ll be ready to hit the street and sure enough moments later he is locking his room and is heading on down the stairs.  As he approaches the front door of the block of flats he spies Tatiana rocking up to her nightly show and as he pushes the door open he can hear a few voices call out.

“Hey lover,” a rather hopeful older blonde, around Hank’s own half-century, suggests as he walks past her and off into the night.  

‘So far, so good,’ Hank thinks as he, at last, hits the promenade but spying a few randoms, possible wreck-heads, lolling towards him, he steps over to the curb and with his head down just keeps on going remembering past run-ins with chancers like them.  The few random occasions when they had mistakenly taken him as being one of them, one of those derelict junkies who’d lost everything and somehow never seemed to care.

“Hey mate can you spare me some change?” a young guy in his early 20s asks him from within the confines of a sleeping bag but Hank, knowing he never has any spare anything, just walks on by.

“Hey mate,” another voice asks as he approaches the ramp that leads down into the marina, “can you spare me some change?” they ask and as Hank looks up he spies a 40-something guy dressed in a winter coat fit for the Arctic Circle and with his feet clad in a pair of trainers Hank would spend on a weeks’ rent on his feet.  As he always does Hank just walks on by knowing the place he is going could, although he certainly hopes isn’t, be even worse.  Walking down to the car-park that dominates the outside of the massive store Hank spies a few randoms, a few up to no good and as he walks he can feel a couple of sets of eyes piercing his back with a fury to suggest it ain’t going to be an easy homeward journey.

Finally walking in the main entrance Hank spies a lone security guard sitting in his little cubicle; he looks as if he would rather be anywhere else in the world right now than here and just that second Hank sees a gang of rogue drunks walking out carrying boxes of beer he knows exactly why.  A huge display just by the front door now standing empty and Hank knows exactly what has just gone down and as he walks in he spies several faces from down his end of town, it appears, helping themselves to whatever takes their fancy too.  Hank has always, for some reason, held himself higher than your average down-and-outer or your usual drink or drug casualty, and as he goes about his business, he knows he must never let himself get that low.

The shop done, the wine supply secured, he heads on back out there and the second he spies someone clearly making eyes at his bagful of wine bottles he knows he’s got to be quick, he needs to get off the street as soon as possible and despite the mild distraction of Tatiana on his corner, that is exactly what he does.  Twenty minutes later Hank is back in his room and the wine is flowing and everything, at last, seems back to normal or at least as normal as this life will ever get.  The crying woman from downstairs returns to haunt him as those with nothing in their lives beyond their work turn to their beds but as Tatiana goes at some lucky scumbag’s meat Hank knows he’ll somehow get on through.  He switches his radio on and as Ligeti’s non-harmonic sounds fill his room he rolls a smoke and reaches for his glass of wine and as he lifts his book off the bedside cupboard he knows that, right now, he wouldn’t live his life any other way.