The Escapist

In slow, badly choreographed movements the journalist’s body tightens and convulses, propelling him further into the entry. He heaves from the pit of his stomach, where last night’s port and brandy sits like a diseased, heavy pregnancy, and gropes at the brick wall. At the corner of his mouth his tongue lolls foolishly between his teeth, a copper-soaked sponge swelling awfully against each dry retch. Finally, he doubles over, legs crooked and uncertain, and vomits. For several moments he remains like this, hollow and tingling with relief, his eyes fixed on the strange flow of crimson below.

Do you see, he thinks, guiltily, how the colours blend?

The asphalt glistens dimly and he retches once more, causing a single line of wiry yellow phlegm to unfurl from his bottom lip and freefall magically, like jaundiced silk, down to the ground. He closes his eyes, collapses into the wall and whispers: ‘This has to stop.’
Back on Old Compton Street it is raining – not politely, as it had been in the alleyway, but heavily, horizontally. People weave around him, buttoned up, scarred with scarves and umbrellas and hurried expressions. The journalist weaves too. His feet fall in exaggerated strides to combat the bizarre weightlessness of his hangover. There is rarely a Morning After (or, more accurately nowadays, an Entire Day After) in which this feeling – as if he is watching the world on a television screen – does not take hold. It is like spiralling or spinning away: the pleasant numbness of intoxication turned on its head and distorted; the understudy to drunkenness, whose effects are infinitely more dizzying than her predecessor’s.

But already he knows this will not end today. There is only one way to soothe his current ills and that is drinking. A vicious, hideous cycle (he knows this too) but as he imagines only heroin withdrawal to be slightly more agonising than this, a nonetheless appealing prospect.
On days such as these he reflects upon his constitution with audible distaste. He is both enthralled and angered by alcohol’s empty promises; by the way it cripples and throttles his motivation. Today (there is no doubt about it now) is Re-Remembrance Day. In minor stages he will bring to mind everything he has ever thrown away. So nobody dares to wear poppies for people like him, and so they never stand with silent dignity (and collection buckets) outside banks and supermarkets, but there are people who sympathise with his cause. Their dirty fingernails, deathly coughs and tight skin punctuate London like spectres, each hoping for loose change and strangers to recognise their plight.

This last thought causes him to slow down and root inside his pockets for money. He finds nothing and picks up pace again. He knows where this kind of behaviour will take him. He has watched it happen in other people’s lives: the meaningless decline, the self-medicated implosion of men and women (but mostly men) as they stagger from modest and degrading jobs, to unemployment benefits, to public houses, to bookies, and back round again – this time without occupation. He sees them in pubs in Finsbury Park, and Ladbroke Grove, and Bethnal Green, nameless to all but their own, their harrowed skin stretched tight and drawn yellow by alcohol. And, yes, he keeps time with this crowd but he does not belong to them. Still, he feels it is neither snobbish nor delusional for him to think this way. Rooted, as he is, in this class, he both understands and empathises with its predicament. Hopeless and lacking opportunity, the weathered men crawl from boozer to boozer, effortlessly aligning themselves with one another as their complexions grow ever more pallid, their souls ever greyer.

And who can blame them? Born out of (and into) misery, bad luck and an inherited sense of failure, they have been worn down and beaten up since the day they arrived – unplanned, unexpected and unwanted. The journalist had witnessed it most obviously during his adolescence when the barroom of the Golden Cross had been occupied each night by his father’s cronies, and the entire place had filled up with cigarette smoke until it resembled an enormous concrete lung collapsing inwards.

He wonders now, as the early morning commuters bob and weave by sex shops and bars, hooded and faceless beneath their umbrellas, how many of Soho’s beautiful people are descended from the same stock he sprung from: that sub-class – no, that de-classed mob of non-workers which exists in council estates and tower blocks beyond the Westway. Away from the pink pound and the post-production houses (but not too far) there survives, stronger than ever, the filthy pennies and public houses of his upbringing. He goes back sometimes – against his will and better judgement he returns to the places that shaped him.

It is a bizarre existence he has sought out for himself. Beyond the newspaper’s King’s Cross offices – that glass and stone structure populated by an elite faction of the rational Left - there is little that distinguishes the journalist’s actions from those of his barroom piers. What he earns, he spends. His modest wealth is merely distributed, and re-distributed, in establishments strikingly similar to those his father had once frequented. Still, he often ponders the consequences of his consumption. At university, when the strength of his words had equalled and, he felt, justified, his intake, an entire universe of promise had lay ahead of him. During those hopeful term-time evenings, he was able to stifle the onset of alcoholic paranoia simply by convincing himself that what he wrote was ‘destined’ to be published. It had been enjoyable then too, the intense nights in front of a typewriter regulated by bouts of playing guitar and listening to Tom Waits. He cannot remember the last time he picked up a guitar. He cannot remember the last time he enjoyed writing anything. Neither, he realises now, can he bring to mind a recent occasion in which his drinking has been anything more than a formulaic, half-successful mechanism for dealing with a pre-existing hangover.
‘Feeling rough?’ Someone might ask him. ‘You’re just as well cracking on. That which kills you cures you.’ The collective reaction to self-inflicted ill health rarely changes, whether it be from colleagues at a broadsheet drinks meeting, or seasoned regulars at a lock-in. All very well so far as one never considers the inverted form of this helpless advice, which assures its dedicated followers that eventually even the cure will kill you.

The journalist slows and takes shelter beneath the canopy of a coffee and bagel shop. A mixture of sickly breakfast scents, entwined as they are in the morning air, pollutes the space around him and he is surprised to find his stomach does not flutter at their arrival. Perhaps vomiting, a sad and desperate act which as a younger man he found almost impossible, has set him on the slow road to recovery. With this minor grace in mind, he stares out across the street. Over the road, holed up outside yet another coffee shop (because Soho, in its infinite bohemia, is constructed almost entirely of coffee shops) a professional looking middle-aged man is talking on a hands-free mobile phone. He is smiling, and talking with great animation, and the journalist cannot help but smile too. Not because this is a peculiar sight, or even because he admires such energy, but because the only thing which tells the Casual Observer that this stranger is not trapped in the first stages of madness, is the small expensive device he is holding proudly in front of him. The world, he figures, has changed dramatically – and with such technological wonders still to come! In sixty years, when he will have almost certainly slipped from the mortal coil, what then will seem commonplace on Old Compton Street? What once unimaginable behaviours will have been adopted by the wealthy and longed for by the poor?

He turns his attention away from the man and considers buying a bottle of carbonated water - the latest in a series of hungover indulgences. The prospect of heightened dizziness, and withdrawing money, and standing in a queue, and pretending to be well, puts him off and he continues walking.

At the end of the street, outside the Palace Theatre, he pauses again. His face feels flushed and hot, his stomach empty. He turns clumsily into the wall and takes a hostile glance at himself in the glass frame of a Mamma Mia poster. For a moment he stares dumbly, terrified by the unfamiliarity of his own skin. Its default complexion, even in this tainted light, has faded.

The journalist looks back upon the street. God bless Soho, he thinks. God bless it for being here now, with its labyrinth roads and landscapes within landscapes. At home, there is writing to be done and, later, much later, when the world is a little steadier on its feet, he will return to the laptop with a concentrated ease to finish an article for tomorrow’s press, comforted by the insurance of its definite publication. He retraces his steps now, heartened by the proximity of his immediate destination. First, onto Wardour Street, then to Brewer Street, and finally to Beak Street, where there is a pub that will be open already. This evening, if it ever comes, is best left for this evening. He does not feel guilty. It is, after all, Re-Remembrance Day.