Acid Bubbles (29 page)

“What the fuck… Peter? You scared the shit outta me! What d'ye want?” Lenny's words were so mangled it was difficult to understand anything. The sentiment was obvious.

“That bastard Bob has done something terrible. I was there when he did it!” I said, and I wondered if the filthy other me was going to get to the nitty-gritty and explain what had happened. I waited.

“And?” Lenny slurred.

“I want to forget. I need something to make me forget,” I replied. As this was going on I was starting to wish I could hit myself hard to force myself to tell the truth about earlier that night. It continued in language veiled in the obscure. At some point Lenny suggested I climb on the scooter. I'm still alive years later without dreadful scarring. I could safely assume drunk as Lenny was, he wasn't going to crash that night. This was already ancient history.

“I'll fix you up with something. You won't know if it's Christmas or the summer holidays!” Lenny said.

I was hesitant to climb onto this scooter. However, the other Peter was only too willing to climb aboard, and I didn't have the option to say no! I'd always imagined Lenny was very small time, and possibly he could get me some drugs, cannabis, weed and nothing more. That night I was to discover how Lenny made his money. The journey could have been terrifying with an inebriated Lenny on wet roads. It was nothing of the kind. The speed was moderate and the scooter was rock steady. He possessed an enormous capacity for alcohol.

We arrived in minutes at a small terraced house in a quiet street near the centre of town. This could only be described as tatty. The downstairs windows were covered over with metal sheets. The front door looked industrial and the upstairs windows were covered in wire mesh. Two or three bore the scars of diligent stone throwing or airgun use by local youths.

“Welcome to my house of fun,” Lenny said, as he staggered up the short path to the front door. The little garden to the right was chest high with weeds, but more than weeds appeared to grow in the small patch of oily dirt. Other things pushed their way up through the soil and to my amazement they were remains of old motor scooters and motorbikes. It was as if Lenny had half buried them in the garden before the weeds grew, most were so embedded in the ground I think he'd inherited them with the house.

Off the scooter Lenny staggered so much I didn't think he'd make the door. It was remarkable he'd ridden the motor scooter arrow straight, stopping at every light, and never veering off of line. Lenny reached the door and had it open in seconds, then staggered back out towards the street!

“What you doing Lenny?”

“Riding the scooter in. Not leaving her outside for all the local wankers!”

Moments later the scooter roared past me over the step and into the hallway. There was an inch to spare either side of the handlebars and Lenny was inch perfect. The scooter was leaning against the wall and the fabulous Mr Helmet fell to the floor in a heap, dragging himself towards the open front door. Moments later we were behind a locked metal door, the hall illuminated by sickly light from a fifteen watt bulb. With no wallpaper or carpet this place was more than depressing. A pit!

Lenny told me to stay still and wait. He reappeared only seconds later holding out his hand. What he held out to me was probably in his possession all along. This could be a trick to fool people into believing he never carry anything. If he didn't carry the drugs they must've been on a tabletop in the next room, it was that quick.

“I'll give you these four. A gift for a mate,” Lenny said, offering me four small white pills. To my surprise the other me, the desperate me, didn't hesitate and threw all four into my mouth.

“Jesus Christ! Spit them out or make yourself sick. The toilet's down the passage,” Lenny said, in a voice even and sober. Jesus, this man had some capacity.

The other me took no notice swallowing all four pills in one gulp.

“I need something strong, I need something that will make me sleep,” I heard myself say.

“It's LSD you daft twat, really good stuff. I don't know what four tabs are going to do to you!” Lenny said, as the other me slumped down onto the settee in the small lounge. This settee had seen better days. The person sitting on it had seen better days.

I was thinking I'd gone to sleep, but deep down I could hear a keening sound, Silent crying, bubbling painfully below.

Then I was on my feet, then I was on my knees, then I was on my stomach. I was slithering along like a snake attempting to get out of the front door, a seven-foot-high front door. I struggled to get under the top of the frame that was crushing me down trying to keep me in the house. I struggled myself free out into the fresh air, and the open countryside beckoned.

I had no helmet, I had no care, I was kissing the sky, I was touching everything in existence, colours that sang, and doorways that shrank. I mounted Lenny's motorbike. It started first turn of the key, not even a kick required. I rolled the machine off the stand powering it into the night, the road a glistening ribbon of blackness passing beneath my wheels as Lenny's street rushed away behind me.

Lenny looked out into the street, looked out into the silence. He hadn't seen the motorbike go. The apparition he witnessed was me sitting on a derelict weed entangled motorbike growing out of the garden. I was holding the bars with a firm grip, rolling and leaning as I went through the corners, wiping hair from my eyes as it whipped my face. I was doing 50 miles an hour, no 500 miles an hour, no 5000 miles an hour through a night where the road was long dark and fast. I was screaming out the engine noise at the top of my voice. How I didn't do permanent damage to my vocal chords I'll never know!

“Stupid bastard!” Lenny mumbled, as he moved outside to drag me indoors for my safety and his. Mostly his!

I pitied myself sitting on a derelict broken motorbike growing out of a front garden as the drug fuelled Peter became gripped by a terror at the approach of a monster. The past me was racing along dark roads and now out from pitiless oily blackness came a giant spectre with huge grabbing claws. Something horrible and alien happening, something the insane me couldn't explain!

“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! I screamed.

The wild motorbike ride was over, but not the crazy journey.

To travel hopefully is better than to arrive. This is often said, but to travel with hope you have to know the direction. I was travelling with no signposts, with no map down the road I didn't know, full of dangers I couldn't perceive. What to do next was always my big question. Time was sprinting by. I had the drugs, but after talking with the family I'd gained a new sensibility. I didn't want to pass them over to the businessmen. This was a sensibility that could change with pragmatism if my bones were at serious risk.

Where to next? I would go to Samantha's and if everyone was out I'd search the garage. Was she privy to some of my darkest secrets? We shared many things, some already dark secrets. Perhaps Sam was in deeper than I realised. Then again, I knew her in one way and I didn't know her at all. I would have to be careful what questions I asked. This was Monday, and I didn't even know if Samantha worked. I didn't know anything about her. Time was flying by, it was almost midday, and in only six or seven hours I would be trapped in The Cauldron with the lunatics. I was desperate even with the backup of my mother and sister. I was starting to think about running away rather than wasting my time looking for what I was starting to believe I'd never find. The problem with running; I'd put my family in grave danger at the hands of the lunatics.

My sister would drop me off after another ride of terror on the back of her Trident. It was as if King Neptune himself was torturing me. “White-knuckle ride,” is how people describe rides. I can tell you my knuckles were so white they were almost luminous in the dark. We arrived in minutes, and anybody following me would have been hopelessly distanced in seconds. This was my sister's excuse for having the throttle open. If you could achieve 120% throttle, then my sister had it on! She was the caring one who looked after animals, but human beings?

I was stepping from the motorbike as the seat rushed from under my leg, Jane disappearing into the distance, again with unnecessary haste. Her need to hold the throttle open had not diminished. She was still giving it 120%, and that's how I was going to search. If the booty was there I was going to find it!

No cars in the drive, including Vicky's, I was thankful. Mike must be at work and Sam would be out somewhere. I let myself in with my key thankful the house wasn't equipped with one of the new alarms systems everyone's installing. More affluence meant more burglars, more alarms. My calculation was poor.

The alarm went off, a loud bell on the outside, a siren on the inside. Surprise made me go rigid. There it was on the wall next to the front door. It had been there all the time and I'd not seen it. The alarm box with its legend, “After 30 seconds the police will be called automatically”.

Minutes passed and the alarm was screaming into my head. With these minutes I was lucky because panic had trapped me in a time warp and only six second's had passed. The entrance to the house seemed so full of noise it penetrated my nervous system. I would have to run. First I stared at the box looking for something, and I spotted a small keyhole. I had keys for everything, my flat, main door, front door, some other key for something, and more keys that didn't belong to anything. Did I have the hidden safe in the house? I started this question in the middle of my search for the alarm box key! How could I be so distracted at a time like this? The police arriving would bring up no end of unanswerable questions.

It would be on the same key fob, you fool. I couldn't find it! With what I'd found in my flat I had twenty keys and not one of them was remotely like the barrel key for the alarm box. I was going to have to run. Time was moving on, another ten seconds wasted in fruitless search. In the time it takes to hyperventilate once or twice, if I didn't find the key I would have to go. Five, four, three, two, silence!

The alarm had gone silent with a second to go, was this some kind of trick? James Bond movies always have bombs that stop with a second to go, and didn't they start up again when nobody expects it? Then it struck me the police were on their way. I had no alternative but to run.

“Have you forgotten everything?” Samantha said, from the top of the stairs, naked apart from high heels, red high heels, Monday shoes.

“What?” One adrenaline driven part of me was getting ready to run, and another part of me looked upstairs. That part too was driven by a different adrenaline and hormones.

“The key, you remember we lost one, so at the moment it's under the phone table,” Sam said.

I shrugged my shoulders in an expression of, “Oops I forgot”. She'd turned it off upstairs with a hidden remote switch that doubled as a panic button. I didn't know I had a Monday morning appointment, and I was late, not by much, but late.

“What part of 11am is midday?” Samantha said. She was smiling down at me, and didn't look too worried about my tardiness. She looked amazing to me. I was thinking she'd spent the extra time making herself look special. Bright cherry lipstick smile and red high heels, it's the little things that count. Perfect nails, hands and feet, the perfume, the exact amount of tousled hair to look sexy without looking unkempt. Then of course the jewellery and the one piece she wasn't wearing. This was the only finger on her hands free from expensive baubles.

“I want you to be the teenage boy again today. I liked it, a lot!” all said in a soft voice. It turned out I wasn't going to disappoint!

“No problem, no problem at all,” I said. I had, after all, lost my virginity only forty-eight hours before! I was a seventeen-year-old boy lost in a maelstrom of unknown intrigues. Perhaps being with her now wasn't just sex. Sam's age gave me a strange twisted version of mother like comfort. In my state of amnesia I didn't know what my relationship with Samantha was, totally sexual or more?

“You didn't tell me you loved me on Saturday morning,” Samantha said. I was halfway up the stairs, and more than halfway to knowing the truth of our relationship. During the sexual teaching on Saturday morning she repeatedly said she loved me. I thought she was talking about the physical. I now knew our relationship was stronger and stranger. How I'd coped with the thought of Mike coming home drunk from the golf club wanting his conjugal rights, and Samantha had coped with me in her daughter's bed, I had no idea! How I'd managed to work my way into half the situations I now lived through I had no idea. Was I crazy?

I vowed to myself that I would make furious love to Samantha until she was exhausted, giving me chance to see the inside of the garage, it could be empty for all I knew. Of course nothing goes to plan, does it?

I drifted into the afternoon wrapped in warmth and pleasure. Time floated by, minutes passing in luxurious passion filled seconds. I let myself go, immersed myself in the pleasures and comforts of the flesh. Sometimes we were in an Olympic wrestling arena with a frantic haste, an athletic concert of movement. Other times we lay almost within stillness, the comfort so loud in its silence, to be broken once again by frantic hard muscle and flesh, against soft feminine form. All this seeped into my memories of love and desire. Lying wrapped in each other's embrace in the bright early afternoon sunshine, remains a singular moment, so ingrained in memory it has become the mark by which all such moments are measured.

We had returned once more to the Olympic arena. The urge to satisfy our carnal lusts drove us towards the wild, coupled in a frantic tangle looking for a moment of wonder when we could be at the pinnacle of satisfaction together. I think I was pulling at her hair, clawing at her buttocks, her hands tearing at the back of my thighs, and I was driving us on at full charge down that lustful highway, high in my seat being the carriage driver, pushing her on in front of me, looking for the moment when climax would stop this onward rush, and once again we'd embrace as exhausted lovers.

“You fucking disgust me, you filthy cow!” The words were shattering. This was a large brick breaking the symmetry of a perfect picture, smashing the moment. Breaking the sensual comfort we'd created on that bright afternoon. These words moved the story of my stupid life further down its crazy road.

“How can you fuck an old woman?” Vicky said, home early after suffering stomach cramps at college. She'd returned to rest quietly, discovering a house full of musk and copulation.

With the first words I had thrown myself off the side of the bed, pulling myself clear of Samantha with a violence that made her cry out . I left her face down on the ravaged bed, alone under the scornful eye of her daughter, a stupid knee-jerk reaction to a vulnerable moment of sexual nakedness. The moment my body hit the carpet I felt like a coward, a deserter. The floor was a sanctuary away from accusing eyes. I was beginning to look under the bed for more cover, so small in a situation where I should have been so much more.

Samantha rolled herself over moving towards Vicky, she swung her bare feet to the floor, not rolling off my side into the pit of cowardice. No, she moved to expose her full naked womanhood to her daughter. This was a form of physical defiance, a way of not losing her place, showing her daughter she was desirable, and physical love wasn't just for the young. She rose naked standing inches away from her daughter. In all this time Vicky's vitriolic barrage of words never stopped.

Most of the words referred crudely to parts of the body. The remainder denigrated her mother Samantha to the status of trash…The whole tirade was focused on her old body, how she looked naked, not how she'd acted. Vicky didn't seem concerned who she'd been sleeping with, or the fact she was married to her father, Mike. Everything in that household circled around the planet Vicky, and this girl was mortified because a young man could find –her mother – more attractive than the centre of her universe. Herself!

They were standing only inches apart, her mother shorter by not wearing heels. Vicky raged on taking everything in at a glance, accusing her Samantha of having bad hair, saggy skin, mottled flesh and too little of anything attractive. By now I was less than a man and stood watching from the other side of the bed. In essence the classic fool, I was re-enacting a farce, holding one of the crushed pillows across my manhood, hiding it from both women who'd been so close they could taste it. What was I doing? I didn't leave the room in shame, I didn't retreat into the bathroom to get dressed and worst of all I didn't defend Samantha against her horrible child.

How this woman could love a man so weak was a mystery, but then I didn't know what we'd been together. I didn't know the man I was a week ago, and I was a frozen spectator. What happened next should have pushed me into action if only to save the relationship between mother and daughter. I watched on from the edge of the arena, a voyeur of the terrible, somebody who should live in shame for this lack of spine.

A harsh blow with a clenched fist woke me from my trance. I think I could have been accused of catatonic voyeurism if that's possible.

The power of the punch was startling, connecting hard on the edge of the jawbone, a full haymaker of a knockout blow. I didn't sway under the impact of the blow. Nothing in my body juddered after the contact, though the blow hit me very hard. It had shocked my senses, because the clenched fist had been delivered with firm purpose on Vicky's jawbone. She was semi-conscious on the floor, now silent and pathetic. She looked like a collapsed pile of clothes, her face hidden under a tangle of hair. The shocking silence in the room was counter posed by the shouting inside my head, voicing a hundred different instructions. None of these I obeyed. Useless is a term used for many things and can encompass many forms. At that moment I was the genuine definition of useless, fully awake, and asleep on my feet.

Mother and daughter were together now, Samantha cradling her daughter's head, stroking tangled hair from her eyes, looking with desperation to see if she'd done permanent damage, ruined her perfect, not so perfect little girl. I watched as if it were a television programme, some dark comedy or a tragic tale of a broken home. I think I'd managed to achieve the broken home. I hoped there was comedic interlude coming up to soften the blow.

Vicky was alive. She hadn't swallowed her tongue, nor had she suffered a broken jaw or lost teeth. With agonising slowness life was coming back. She was crying and mumbling words of love to her mother. Samantha was just pouring out the word, “Sorry”, over and over again.

“Peter! Peter!” Samantha was shouting at me.

“What?” I managed to say, breaking myself from this sad useless catatonic voyeurism.

“Go now. Please leave, Peter, get your things and fuck off!” Samantha voiced this sentiment with aggression.

The look on her face said it all. I had done nothing to intervene. I hadn't defended my lover with declarations of love and support. I hadn't poured oil on raging waters. All I managed to do was stand there like a dick holding a pillow across my genitals. I should have been hiding my face in shame for my lack of action. Running would have been better than standing there. At least it would have provided a diversion, something to break the women's toe to toe confrontation. Nothing looks more stupid than a naked man running downstairs with an armful of clothes.

My grasp on the situation was weak, and I moved from catatonic to stupid. I retreated into the bathroom to get dressed, to cover what both had seen. I could have collected my clothes and walked downstairs, even got dressed outside. No, I took three minutes to get dressed in the privacy of the bathroom. When I emerged into the bedroom still heavy with the scent of physical passion Samantha was wearing her dressing gown.

Vicky was sitting on the edge of the bed next to her mother. She leaned on her soft shoulder, all the while being stroked, loved and told she was special. I emerged into this world and the next words spoken didn't come from Samantha.

“I don't know who you are! Last week you were a man, now you're just…” Vicky said. Her voice was quiet, but the look in her eyes was very loud. She continued, this time with more force, “just a stupid bastard. I was only with you because of Dave. He wanted to know what you were doing. You were a good laugh and I began to love you. Now you are just some stupid boy!”