The ski-suit

Standing in his living room in a full-length ski-suit, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a man who was trying on a recent purchase in preparation for a holiday, but, on closer inspection, you would see that this man was in fact barking mad.
Unshaven, bug-eyed, crying his little heart out and sweating profusely, Jim stood in the middle of the room like a boy who had wet himself. Looking into the mirror, the highs and lows of the last year had flashed before him.
He remembered buying the ski-suit in Whistler and he remembered with whom he’d bought it. He remembered coming back with his beautiful girlfriend and then he remembered, to the smallest detail, the day he picked up a drink; the day she left, the day he threw it all away.
From that day on, his life had been an exercise of crashing, bewildering disaster, a life set in motion on a matchstick downhill slalom track inside a novelty whiskey bottle.
The champagne-soaked days at Ascot soon dried up to find him scrunching betting slips at the local Ladbrokes, the raucous pub sessions with fair-weathered friends making way for solid all-day home-drinking, the self-congraluting nights of passion with high-class hookers replaced by lonesome, dead-eyed net porn, the white nights with old work chums transformed slowly into elaborate cat-and-mouse sorties for crack from Clapham’s worst.
Standing there in the middle of the living room, Jim knew that the decision he had just made, the reason why he wore the ski-suit, was final; the only way to set himself back on the right path.
Having wrung dry the golden handshake he’d received from the firm of stockbrokers in under a year, he had tried to sell his Rolex earlier in the day at a pawn shop to buy enough coke and whiskey to kill himself, but hadn’t been able to go through with it.
The Rolex signified everything he had once aspired to, and the thought of actually selling it to pay for his death had revealed a side of himself that he thought had been lost forever. With a jagged stumble and melodious farewell, he made his way back home.
The blackout from the night before played tricks with his mind. He’d woken up covered in blood but after patting his body anxiously to find the place where he assumed he had stabbed himself, he found nothing. Not even a scratch.
He tried to backtrack to where he’d been and what he’d done, but everything was a blur from the moment he ordered his first drink at the pub at dusk.
Snozzled from the bottle he’d polished off that morning, desperate to stop the shakes, Jim hatched a plan of resolution. There would be no selling of the Rolex and there would be no death.
The flat and all the back-rent he owed would be compensated by his generosity in leaving his paintings and furniture to the landlord, from which he assumed a tidy sum over and above the amount due could be realised.
Jim wanted nothing of the past to blight his vision of a new life. He wanted to do away with all that had blinded him, fully aware that his affection of money had driven him to despair.
He’d tasted sober living before, so why couldn’t he have it again? If it was all about rock bottoms and desperation, he already had a headstart.
All he needed was the swanky ski-suit, built for temperatures of minus thirty degrees. This one possession would be his sole companion in the park, where he would happily live like Ray Mears, away from money and people and everything else.
The duck-down cushioning (the finest in the world, he recalled) would allow him uninterrupted nights of sleep in the bushes of Weybridge Park as he detoxed himself to sober living. He would find sustenance from the bins of local shops and dwell with nature.
That was the plan, anyway.
As he stood there, crying in the mirror, the doorbell rang and Jim jumped into the air, causing the mini faux-chandelier to come away from its ceiling hook and fall onto his head. Still attached to its electrical cable, the chandelier sat cradled there and for the instant that he stood still, wondering what to do about the bell ringer, he looked like a spaceman in a psychedelic helmet.
Shaking it off and leaving it to dangle, he moved towards the front door combatively.
‘Who’s there? What do you want?’
‘It’s the police. Open up. We need to talk to you.’
Jim ran to the back door but there was another officer waiting outside.
‘We need to talk to you. Please open the door, otherwise we’ll force entry.’
Once they’d smashed the door in, they found Jim sitting forward on the sofa.
‘James Mullen?’ said a policeman, standing over him.
‘That is I,’ slurred Jim.
‘You are under arrest for the murder of David Barroughs.’