Jeremy Clarke
Already a subscriber? Log in
I’d been to a few pubs and a New Year’s Eve party. I’d smoked skunk, I remembered. And I remembered Tom’s partner’s brother telling me about the book he’d read that had changed his life. I remembered, too, his telling me the book’s main message was that we must try to ignore the negative commentary going on in our heads. I stopped for a moment to listen to the one going on in mine. Today’s wasn’t a negative commentary so much as a chorus of disapproval with whistling and jeering. To use a footballing analogy, I was Tom Adeyemi, the full back on loan from Norwich to Oldham, standing in front of the Kop. I looked at the snake. It was staring unseeingly ahead. The head was perfectly still, as though its senses were delicately attuned to pitches, registers and vibrations reaching it from both the natural and supernatural worlds. It was not impossible, it seemed to me in my febrile state, that it was also listening to the negative commentary going on in my head.
I wished I hadn’t smoked skunk at that party, I really did. That was the worst of it. Skunk utterly destroys me. I can feel the effects for days and even weeks afterwards. All things being equal, I’d sooner tuck into a plate of dead man’s fingers, served piping hot, and sniff shoe polish for afters, than smoke skunk. But it had been a long while since I’d last smoked the stuff, and I suppose I must have foolishly thought my mind had regained some of its former resilience. Well, it hasn’t. And now I’d woken up in that familiar paranoid state in which I sincerely believed my mind to have been irreparably damaged, and that I was possibly about to suffer a heart attack and die, here, in front of this snake, having failed God and my family and wasted every opportunity.
The bar manager opened her eyes and turned her head to look at me. ‘Are you all right, Jerry?’ she said. She’s a caring person. ‘What are you doing down here?’ I said. She said that she’d come downstairs to be sick and decided to stay down in case she was sick again. ‘Which bed did you sleep in?’ she said. ‘Yours,’ I said. ‘Mine?’ she said, surprised. ‘I didn’t notice you were in my bed.’ ‘I didn’t notice that you were in it, either,’ I said.
And we stayed like that, each lying on our respective sofas in her front room for the rest of New Year’s Day. She smoked joint after joint and told me her life story and about her dream of opening a bar in Spain; I helped myself to her tobacco and papers occasionally and otherwise lay there like a dying duck.
She’d been addicted to prescription drugs once upon a time and had pulled herself together. A single piece of advice from a drugs counsellor had turned her life around, she said. She would never get better, this drugs counsellor had told her, until she stopped seeing herself as a victim. That one sentence had hit her with all the force of a revelation and she hadn’t looked back. ‘Why don’t they teach the kids these kind of life skills in schools?’ she said indignantly.
I looked at the snake. It seemed to be weighing the inadequacies of the school curriculum with the utmost gravity. I had a burning question, too. ‘Does he come when he’s called?’ I said.
Also in Society
Also by Jeremy Clarke
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in