Like it Matters Read Online Free PDF Page A

bearings and I badly needed air
    And I forced myself through the noise and the UV wash in the upstairs bar and back out onto the balcony. The cool air blew away some of the fever and things started swimming back into focus. I was covered in a greasy kind of sweat and I really, really just wanted to go home—
    And I suppose I might’ve been staring, or maybe just hanging too close to their table, I’m not sure, I wasn’t really noticing anything—
    But next thing I knew, Phil’d come over and he was leaning close to me and talking right down into my ear. He wasn’t shouting—I think he was trying to be as cool as possible—but he rasped his words and I could tell he was trying to make me scared.
    He asked me what the fuck my problem was. I was ner- vous and I told him everything. About how I’d just bunged a pepperball by mistake and how I was just trying to get some air before I went home—I promised him I just wanted some air and then I was going home
    But it didn’t slow him down, he pressed in closer and then I remember he pulled my hair so my eyes and my ears were both close to his mouth, so I had to watch him say things at me—stuff like how we weren’t the same, him and I, how he wasn’t like me and he never was, and how his life was even better now and I just needed to
fuck off
, this was his bar tonight.
    I had enough money for a taxi but the thought of catching one didn’t even cross my mind.
    I started walking home—hating myself, nearly boiling over with it—and then when I got to the Adult World on Victoria Road, standing there under the throbbing neon and feeling it put a kind of sheen on me, feeling like it was very close, the world outside, and if I could just pass over I’d be okay, I got the other capsule out and opened it and stuck it up the other side of my nose.
    It was all blurred swathes of orange light and shadows
    Ghouls on the pavement
    Cars passing soundlessly
    A world of patterns I sped through like wind. It was mind free and it was wonderful, all the way down Lower Main and I did two loops of the last block home and even for a while after I’d gone into my room and stretched out on the bed, I remember there was a time there where I wasn’t thinking—I was just seeing, breathing, feeling …
    Before the claws sunk in
    And then I could hear them, and then I couldn’t stop hearing them—
    Berating voices—a whole coven of them chanting in the dark.
    All the classic ones. I hated myself for the drugs I was on, and I hated myself for every drug I’d ever taken and for the fact that deep down I knew I was always going to want to take more. I hated that I was lying in a bed in a warehouse in Salt River, and that if I showered the next day, I’d do it in a YMCA down the road where people bet things like drugs and women on games of pool. Most of all, I thought about my dad and I hated myself for everything there but especially for not stopping that day, when that might’ve been
him
, fucking begging on the side of the road—
    And it shocked me, the coldest thing I’d ever felt—
    You hit twenty-seven three months ago, Ed
.
    How much smart money’s down on you turning things around from here?
    On really bad comedowns like that—it started after I’d skipped town but then it was like a recurring thing for me—I’d worry about dying with my life in that kind of state. And I used to get this picture come to me, this vision, of my soul skulking around in the afterlife all haggard and drawn, nursing an eternal grudge against me for the things I did to it down here on earth. It used to make me sad, that image of my soul up there like an old guy in a gown smoking outside a hospital, sometimes sad enough to keep me sober for a decent spell.
    But that night after the Kimberley Hotel, I wasn’t feeling sad and I wasn’t worrying about dying—I was worrying about
not
dying. I was scared about what was going to happen to me if I wasn’t stopped.
    Finally it started to get light