Room Full of Crap

He sat on the bed-settee in the room full of crap and opened the packet of cigarettes, pulling the silver paper marked 'pull'. The tailored tubes sat there like bullets in a magazine. 'Old Familiar'. He took one out, put it between his lips, and lit it with a match from an old box. The smoke tasted like shit and burned into his lungs, reminding him that 'Old Familiar' carried the promise of self-destruction. He remembered the reason that he had given up in the first place. He spent the next few minutes sitting down on his bed-settee in a kind of haze, his mind needing sleep, and his body aching with fever. The cigarette in his mouth and the taste of tar in the back of his throat made him wretch, the puke pulsing up into his mouth. He swallowed it down and carried on smoking the cigarette. There were nine more nails for his coffin in the pack and he would swear that when he had finished them, they would be his last, but in the meantime he had the rest of the pack to help him get used to the idea.

He smoked right up to the filter and then tried to extinguish the cigarette in the ashtray on the floor. On the radio, his only distraction, was a bad pop song, the cigarette lay burning with a flicker of life - sending smoke into his eyes. He felt like a human ashtray. He sat with his head resting on the wall half-conscious, his mind full of disjointed words and ideas that seemed logical to him. Life was fascinating but it all seemed so unreal like the music swaying though his nausea. There was no solidity, just a sticky sickness - a confusion that he could not organise or keep.

What had happened to the wolf in him? The old instincts seemed to be asleep. He wondered where his self-respect had gone. As a child he had believed that he would be great. This had been his armour and his sword - his 'Fuck you!' to all the other kids that were more successful or popular. 'Just you wait and see in a few years. I'll be up there and you'll be on the floor wishing that you had shown more respect while you had the chance!' It was just an excuse then, and now he was here on this bed-settee, in this filthy flat with barely enough money for a loaf of bread.

He blamed it on bad luck, but knew the real culprit was his habit of procrastination. Why do it today when you can do it tomorrow? It was such a stupid thing to do. He always felt so bad. A panic would come over him, as he would always let the bills come flooding in. After the first few polite letters the correspondences would become redder and more threatening until the respective organisations would threaten him with court action. Only then, at the last minute of the last day would he phone the electricity company, or whatever, and beg for mercy. Then there would be such a feeling of relief that he would wonder why he hadn't paid the bills on time in the first place. He would then make promises to himself to be more organised in future.

It was this self-organisation thing that defeated him. He was certain that he could be really something if only he could organise himself for a bit, but the energy never seemed to be there. The small bit of focus that he occasionally mustered would never last. He could just about manage a typewritten page of prose, or two verses of a song, but he could never finish anything. This was the reason, or so he believed, for the general failure of his life. He could half-heartedly run the first few steps of the race but could never finish.

Today he would try a bit harder. He got himself a cup of tea and sat down in front of his old Zephyr typewriter and poised his fingers over the keys and waited for the starting gun. The radio buzzed and fizzed some rubbish not conducive to his creative process. A channel change revealed a concert for a dead princess. The typewriter looked like a cruelly devised finger-trap. The page was blank. He felt green. Then the phone rang and he lost focus.

Paul Sloman