Germination

The large window at her back lights up the photographs and doodles of tattoos on the wall. The chair is worn and shiny with use, the blue and white of the foam pokes through holes worn by other peoples' skittish hands pulling at the tatty threads. The rain outside bounces off the glass, and the traffic as it trundles past the studio. The whole city goes by, as her hands tap nervously at her phone as she sits. She waits. Her stubby, rough skinned fingers hit the keys as she sends messages to her friends. This tattoo is a birthday present to herself for her 18^th. She wanted something that would last, and what lasts longer than a tattoo, right?

She will turn 18 in 23 days and she hopes that the tattooist cannot tell that she isn't old enough. She is getting more added to the previous one, a rose she'd had done a couple of weeks before. A voice calls from the back and she goes through to the small room. It smells of faintly of antiseptic, like the dentists or a hospital. The walls are painted pink and yellow, an odd colour combination for the tattooist who sits in it, with his black rubber gloves and his heavy rock music shrieking out of the speakers, making the pictures on the walls shudder slightly. The tattoo inks line one side of the room, the bottles smudged with fingerprints. On the opposite wall there is a mirror, resting on the floor with a handprint once belonging to a small child in the centre. She wrinkles her nose. It smells clean, but it looks a bit dirty.

The tattooist adjusts the chair to the right height before she sits down. He stands her back up and applies the purple transfer to her side. She goes over to the mirror to check her new design. Perfect. And her mum won't see it if it's there. Her nerves increase as she goes back and settles back down in the chair. She turns towards him as he questions her about the design she is having extended, a red rose which is still slightly sore. It's only a week old. It's fine though. It looks like it has healed enough although he warns her it might hurt more than last time. She sits twisted in the chair, peering down at the transfer, biting her short nails even shorter. He orders her into an uncomfortable position, and starts up the tattoo gun, its needle dipped in the black ink he has placed on the table besides him. He begins, and the pain is not as bad as she thought it would be. It vibrates up her spine, like an electric shock. The music is drowned out by the angry buzzing of the needle. It sounds like a razor, accompanied by sharp strokes as he draws on the outline of a new flower.

Suddenly, her phone vibrates. It was one of her friends, replying to the message she'd sent before. The tattooist's arm had been resting on her back pocket to steady it. The vibrations added to his already shaking arm and the needle slipped. Where there was supposed to be a leaf, there was now a thick black line. She looks down, and promptly burst into tears. Shit. Don't worry, I can fix this, he says. He grabs a biro off the table, and draws on more lines. As she looks, they turn into tendrils, emerging from behind the leaves. The design, perhaps poorly chosen in the first place, begins to grow. It looks like part of her, emerging from inside her as he erases her skin.

How's that? He asks, and she tells him that it's perfect. The needle starts up again, and she shuts her eyes. She imagines the design growing and growing, until she is covered in its creepers and flowers and tendrils. It covers her in ink. It covers her scars, the ones she had inflicted last year. The ones that she thought looked like maggots on her arms. She remembers having needles in her skin then, as the doctor sewn up the wounds. She'd watched, fascinated, as the gaping bloody wounds had disappeared, leaving behind bright blue knots of thread against the now thin red lines.

Right. Time for a break, he says. He stands up, and stretches his arms above his head, hands clasped. He pulls off the gloves, and throws them in the bin. Reaching into his back pocket, he pulls out a packet of cigarettes. Want one? She nods, and takes one from his hand. They go through to the front, and he holds open the door to let her outside. The rain has stopped now, and the sun is showing above the buildings. She puts it in her mouth, and lighting it, inhales and exhales deeply. The smoke wreaths before it is blown away to nothing by the wind.

When I were a lad

Back when I were a lad,

It weren't like it is today.

We used to be more friendly, like,

We all knew our neighbours.

I blame all the immigrants,

Coming over here, taking our stuff...

 

What stuff?

Why, back when I were a lad

There weren't no bloody immigrants

No, not like today

I knew my neighbours,

Knew 'em all by name, like.

 

Coming over here, taking our jobs, like

They haven't got jobs of their own? Stuff

'em I say. Mrs Jones, my neighbour,

Who I've known since I were a lad,

Says some of 'em swore at her today.

Too many bloody immigrants.

 

I can't stand these bloody immigrants,

Coming over here, and taking our houses, like

They've got a right to 'em. Free stuff.

That's all they are 'ere for... when I were a lad

We didn't have foreign bloody neighbours.

 

I don't want 'em as my neighbours

Have you seen these bloody immigrants,

I saw this one lad,

Rude as you like,

Stealing from the supermarket, putting stuff,

Down his trousers today.

 

These bloody people. Everywhere, today.

They're not prepared to help their neighbours

With things you might need, just normal stuff.

You won't get help off the immigrants.

They don't even talk to you, like.

Not like when I were a lad.

 

Today, the old man spat hate about immigrants.

Neighbours? Who'd want to be yours, like?

Stuff you! Glad I'm not that bitter, thought the lad.

Intihar

The title for this entry means suicide in Turkish, playing around with the notion that people that try to commit suicide are somehow 'chicken'. It is a non-fiction piece.

I tried to kill myself once. I was nearly successful. A weekend of too much drinking and partying, a way of avoiding the caustic truth that once again I had managed to upset the man I loved to the point where he couldn't even be friends with me. Again. All I had done was tell him that my biggest fear was for him to leave me. Silly girl. No one wants to hear that. At least he didn't. He started behaving strangely after that, until eventually communication broke down entirely, and he finished off by telling me he didn't think he could be with me anymore.

 

I remember that evening quite well, considering . It was a Tuesday and I was out, watching a band in the Blues Bar. It was a busy night in there, lots of people dancing and shouting in each other's ears, trying to make themselves heard over the music. I couldn't get into it. I vaguely remember speaking to Matt, his face pale against the dark of the bar as her leant over to make sure I was ok. I think he offered to come crash at my house if I needed some company, not anything sexual, just one friend looking out for another. I said no. I think I had already decided what I was going to do. I remember walking home. It usually only takes 10 minutes, but I was weaving and wobbling along the pavement, crying as I tried to send my lover a text. I finally managed to write what I felt was the perfect thing to say.

 

'This is all your fault.'

 

After all this was over, the thing I regretted most was these five words. What if I had actually managed it? How could I have put the blame for something this awful at someone else's feet?

 

I worked myself up into a frenzy of snot, tears and shaking. I could barely get my keys in the door when I eventually arrived home. I knew that I had a strip of amytriptaline tablets in the cupboard in the kitchen. My flat was a mess, from where I had just dumped coats, bags and shoes over the weekend before heading back towards the madness I was in now. All I knew was that I didn't want to wake up in the morning. I got a glass of water and proceeded to pop out pills onto the worktop. I remember thinking that it was actually quite difficult to swallow loads of pills. You have to do it a few at a time, not all at once. I managed to get down 28 tablets, and went and sat on the sofa. I felt calmer. And then it hit me. What the hell had I done? Shit. I rang my best friend. I had sobered up; I think it must have been the shock of the situation. She eventually answered, and slurring, I told her what I had done. Since that night, I have tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be her. Sure, I'd rung her in the past and needed to go to hospital for self-inflicted cuts and once, a minor overdose, but never anything on this scale. I imagine her waking up, sitting up from the sofa where she'd dozed off watching her favourite show, standing up and hurrying out to the car to come and save me again.

 

By the time she arrived, only 10 minutes later, I had started to feel drowsy. I told her I didn't need to go to hospital, and started to doze off on the sofa, after sweeping all the mess off onto the floor. She jumped on my computer and looked up the side effects of an amytriptaline overdose. She came over to me, and shook me awake. 'Nope. We're off to the hospital.'

 

I staggered out to the car. I gave Anna my keys to lock up; I couldn't keep my eyes open. There was no traffic on the road, and she drove too fast. We arrived after only a couple of minutes. All I remember is getting into the hospital, stumbling into A and E, finding a chair to sleep in. the lights were really bright and I just wanted to shut my eyes.

 

I don't remember very much about the next 36 hours; brief glimpses of green and bright lights. No, not THAT bright light... Although I do remember one brief scene when I woke up because someone was touching me intimately. I remember coming round and trying to fight them off, and having to be held down by my family as the nurse put in a catheter.

 

When I came round, I couldn't move. Not an inch. They'd pumped me full of diazepam to try and slow my heart down. It had been going at nearly 200 beats a minute for hours. I'd been in intensive care, which I only found out after a nurse came to see how I was doing and told me. When the ability to move and speak returned, I demanded they took out the catheter. Awful thing. Makes you feel like you're pissing and pissing nonstop. I wanted a cigarette. I looked out of the window, which was high up the wall, and my mind went blank as I stood up to look. These rooftops weren't the rooftops of Harrogate. It turned out I had been moved to Leeds hospital, but I didn't know that. I thought I'd managed to kill myself, and ended up in purgatory. Not that I'm religious, but it turns out you do think some ridiculous things when you've just woken up from a self-induced coma. Not to mention the ridiculous things you thought that got you there in the first place.

 

A woman from the psychiatric ward came down to talk to me. She took me off to a private room, and asked me the usual questions. I had been asked them so many times before. Why did I do it, did I still want to die? Mostly, I just felt stupid. Like I'd let everyone down.

 

Sometimes, I still think about doing it. Just a flash across my mind if something has got to me or if someone upsets me. Sometimes it's just silly things. Not been able to get an essay finished. Saying something dumb. The thought appears, like the glimpse of a fish in a river, a flash of silver and then gone. I won't be trying again though. The pain and hell I put my family through showed on their faces, and while they said the most loving things to me that day, I knew what I'd done to them. Never again.

seeing glass

The streetlamps stutter and die, the barely perceptible humming turns silent, replaced with the sounds of cars. At first, just one or two, but later there will be a concerto of beeps and rattles and growls. For now, there is near silence and Henry wonders what it was that woke him up. Liz always maintained she couldn't hear the streetlamps, that he was making a fuss over nothing. Admittedly it wasn't overly loud, but that was what made it worse; an insistent mosquito humming at the periphery of your hearing. He'd have complained to the council long time ago, but she'd talked him out of it.
The room is still dark, the morning light not strong enough to have made its way past the curtains.

He turns, half asleep still, and reaches his hand over the wrinkled duvet to where she used to sleep. Now, he goes to bed alone after yet another unfulfilling evening, where he watches telly with the sound up just a bit too loud, and dram after dram of whisky. Anything to blot it out. The silence in the house is ear-splitting now that she's gone. He sits up slowly, using his elbows to force him up, fumbles for his glasses which he carelessly threw on the side, and hauls himself out of bed. On with the dressing gown. One of the belt loops has broken, and he struggles to reach around his back to tie it. Bloody hell. If only Liz could see him now, she'd bloody kill him. He left last night's clothes at the end of the bed, in a sad looking heap. She used to go ballistic if he didn't put his clothes in the wash. Said that he was a cliché for leaving his dirty socks on the floor. The room is untidy, and it smells like old man. When had that happened? How the hell had he got so ancient?

Oh yes. That was what woke him. Today was his birthday. Silly how these things slip your mind. It used to be that he would wake up early, excited to get his presents from the family. He remembers John and Will, bouncing in with a tray of breakfast, half the tea spilled everywhere in a rush to get him to open his yearly packets of socks, pants and ties. And Liz, after the excitement had died, would send them away to give him his special birthday present... Hmm. Bet no one has bothered to get him anything this year. John and his family might have sent him a card, the wife reminding him dutifully. Liz used to do that. Ring them up and remind them that it was coming. Not now. Will would have forgotten. The neighbour, Ada, has hinted over the fence that she would expect him to pop over for tea. Interfering old baggage. She was always coming over, trying to look past him when he opened the front door so that she could tell her friends how the house has gone to pot without Liz here to look after it.

Anyway. Better get to the toilet. His bladder usually has him up a few times in the night. A few times too many, and he was starting to get, not worried, no, but it preyed on his mind sometimes in the middle of the night. He should probably go to the doctors, but he didn't want to make a fuss about something that was more than likely nothing. He shuffles down the hall, and into the bathroom, pulling the stiff cord to turn on the light. The tiles are really cold under his feet. British Gas put the prices up again this year, and he refuses to pay their extortionate rates while he's asleep and warmed under the duvet. He wishes he could find his other slipper. There's one under the bed, but the other one has vanished. Although, he must have come upstairs with them both on. It must be in the bedroom somewhere.

He sits down to relieve himself. His balance is going, and it saves having to clean up if he misses the bowl. The busybodies at the council had come and installed handles next to the toilet for Liz when she had first got ill, and he now used them himself. Bugger. No loo roll. He shakes himself, and pulls himself up, trying to not look at his hands, which have started to look like they are made of crepe paper. Feels like it too. As he does, he catches sight of himself in the mirror. That's not him looking back. The man in the mirror is small and tired, a wispy grey cloud around his head where there should be dark brown locks. He peers in. His glasses are slightly lopsided, and they cover wrinkled and saggy eyes. He has a few days stubble, no, almost a beard and he looks fragile. Like he could fall and break at any moment. He glares at the man in the mirror, and the man there pulls some kind of grimace back at him. Bloody hell. Better get cracking. It is his birthday today, after all, but it's bloody miserable getting old on his own.

Tanka

In a cold doorway

he huddles in an old mac

his breath visible

like mist in the air

The morning brings grim release

Beautiful lady,

perched on a stool in the bar

she asks for a light

for the cigarette she holds

a ruse to attract clients

skinheads in black boots

hang around outside the shop

waiting for their chance

to make their views know round here

with fists, blunt bats and sharp knives

The needle goes in,

the plunger pulled back slightly

until a bloom of red shows

then down, forcing the drug inside

The first hit was the best though