In the Morning I'll Be Gone Read Online Free PDF

likely story but I was so addled I couldn’t tell whether it was legit or bollocks . . . I went home in a taxi, drank a vodka gimlet, took 10 mg of Valium, half a dozen aspirin and went to bed.
    In the wee hours I woke and looked at the aspirin bottle next to me and wondered whether this had been a cowardly, half-hearted suicide attempt. Cowardly because I still had my service revolver, which as an ex-policeman I was allowed to keep for up to a year after I’d left the force. That was the way to do it. Point blank with a hollow-point .38 slug straight across the hemispheres.
    My guts ached and I walked to Carrick hospital and a surprisingly full waiting room. Lynchian post-midnight bus station characters. The Open University on a black and white TV. A beardy physicist: “Life is a thermodynamic disequilibrium but entropy will take us all in the end . . .”
    Yeah.
    My guts were killing me so they put me on a drip. The doctor on call said that I would live but that I wasn’t to mix my medicines. He gave me a leaflet on depression. I went home, wrapped the bed sheets around me, and went onto the landing. My newly installed central heating had sprung a leak and the repairman had said that he needed to get a part from Germany to overhaul the whole organ-like apparatus. It would take weeks, he explained, maybe over a month, so I’d rented another paraffin heater and in truth I liked it better. The paraffin heater was my shrine and I bathed in its warmth, its sandalwood aroma, and the light of its magenta moon.
    I lay before it and let the hot air wash over me like a blanket.
    A long time ago I had killed a man with a heater like this.
    No. Was that me? Did such a thing really occur?
    Or was it a fragment, a dream . . .
    Oarless boats . . . Dream ships . . . The half-light of the wolf’s tail.
    Dawn.
    I went downstairs.
    Rain. Sky the color of a litter box. An army helicopter skimming the dogged brown hills.
    I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I was skinny, scabby, pale. My nails were long and dirty. My hair was unkempt, thick, black, with grey above both ears and on the sideburns. I looked like the poster boy for an anti-heroin ad. Not that I’d go that route. Not yet. And speaking of the exotic gifts of the Orient . . . Wasn’t there a . . .
    I rummaged in the rubbish bin under the kitchen sink and found a roach with an inch of cannabis still left in it. I made a coffee and topped it with a measure of Black Bush. I went back into the living room, searched among the albums until I got the Velvet Underground & Nico . I put on “Venus in Furs,” drank the coffee, lit the roach off the paraffin heater flame, and inhaled. Paraffin. Hashish. John Cale’s viola. Lou Reed’s voice.
    Revived somewhat, I went outside and picked up the milk bottles. There was a strange car four doors down on the Coronation Road bend. A white Land Rover Defender with two shadowy figures inside. A man and a woman, she in the driver’s seat. I made a mental note of the car, popped the top off the gold-topped milk, and poured it into my coffee mug. I stared at the car and drank. It began to drizzle from a dishwater sky.
    “Jesus is Lord!” another one of my enthused neighbors yelled as a morning greeting. I took a final look at the car, closed the door, and went back into the living room.
    As I lay down, Lou Reed sang of weariness and being able to sleep for a thousand years. The music ended, the stylus lifted, moved an inch to the left, and the song began again.
    There was a faint creaking sound from outside. Someone at the gate. The post or the paper or—
    I grabbed the revolver from my dressing-gown pocket and checked that it was loaded. But somehow I knew that the people in the Land Rover were not going to be terrorist assassins . . .
    I heard voices and then a confident rap on the door knocker.
    I went into the hall, looked through the fisheye peephole every cop had installed as a necessary precaution.
    The man was a tall,