P= They Ate the Truth part 16

This is what I am doing in my hotel room. I am slicing up stubby
little limes into halves and by rotating my wrist over a glass juicer,
providing juice for a virgin Cuba Libre. The smell is quite intense and
makes me think of smiles. I am listening to New Order's "Temptation" on
repeat play, 'Oh, I've never met anyone, quite like you, before.'

From time to time, I am reading a little of James Ellroy's American
Tabloid, which is a very punchy, but complex book. Every couple of
pages someone changes sides and begins blackmailing the person they
were previously in partnership with to blackmail someone else.

I am also thinking very hard about pirates and trying to name as many
as I can. I am also smelling, from time to time, my left wrist where
the skin is tender and where I have sprayed some Thierry Mugler
cologne, bought the night before. I am also eating fizzy popping candy
and I have emptied a sherbet fountain into a bowl and am eating soft
heaps of white powder off the stick of liquorice.

There's a theory that you can't keep five things in your head at once,
that one always falls out. The idea is to keep myself as busy as
possible mentally until Kilroy comes on, to stop me from dislocating
and to stop me from going out to buy another bottle of light rum from
anywhere prepared to sell it to me for a hundred quid at this time of
the morning.

This is the theory. I don't claim that it works.

They can kill you, but we can kill you worse.

For some reason, I don't think that's an idle threat.

And that idea of mine that if the bugs got out, that I'd be the last
one left, that's not a runner anymore. I couldn't feel worse about the
situation I've put Bill in. This is Guilt, without a doubt. The sherbet
is making the inside of my nose itch. The thing that keeps coming into
my head, despite all these other things that are supposed to be filling
it up, is the little rhyme that Orwell uses in 1984 - 'underneath the
spreading chestnut tree / I sold you / and you sold me'.

I always liked Spider-man as a kid. He had superpowers, sure, but he
also tried to do what he thought was best and didn't always get it
right. Every now and then, they set up a cliffhanger whereby he had to
choose between two lives to save, with no way to save both. Now,
Superman, you'd know would save both, somehow. No dilemma there. But
with Spider-man there was that possibility that he wouldn't and would
have to deal with it. I always felt cheated when he managed to save
both - the choice was the whole point. Who do you save, your best
friend or your girl? Harry Osbourne or Mary-Jane Parker ?

Who am I supposed to save?

Oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got blue eyes, oh you've got grey
eyes.

You always get sick of sherbet fountains well before you reach the end
of the packet. And the odd thing is that that pile of white starts to
get tinted with the brown you get from touching it with the moist end
of the liquorice stick. Liquorice is a funny word. You pronounce it
liquor-ish, but there's nothing like liquor at all about it. It's no
damn help at all.

Lorrie got herself into this, I think. She was a spy, or whatever,
working for Chesterton. Okay, I think they were the good guys, but I've
no way of knowing. I don't know if they were government approved, or
what. Whatever, she wanted this life, she trained to make men fall in
love with her. Maybe she even did that to me. Perhaps I only felt there
was something mutual because that was what she does, that's how she
makes men feel about her. Lorrie is in this because of her
choices.

Bill is here because I put him in a situation I had no right to put him
in. He's there because of me. It is my fault. Nobody else's. Not
Lorrie's, not poor dead Alastair or plump jocular Chesterton with his
empty head.

And I've never met, anyone, quite like you before.

Captain Kidd was the toughest of all pirates, in my opinion. For a
start, he could take Long John Silver, who couldn't have been all that
mobile what with the wooden leg and all. Sure, Blackbeard is a threat,
with his disdain for human life, but Captain Kidd was lighter, more
agile, and just plain smarter. Cut another lime Alex, Kilroy'll be on
in a minute.

I cut the lime and squeeze it dry - not as simple as lemons, because
you can't just squeeze them in the middle and hope for the best. You
have to rotate them, come in at angles to make it work.

All this multi-tasking is also supposed to stop me thinking about the
dream I had last night. I was on the tube, the light that is margarine
yellow but feels grey, I've spent the last week underground. I'm
holding on by a strap, missing the leather ones they had years ago.
These plastic ones don't give you the same feeling. The tube isn't
full, so I don't know why I'm standing, unless it is to feel the
sway.

The people on the train are business folk, blank eyes, shirts ironed
while tired. There's a rustling, obviously they are all about to read
their newspapers. The rustling sounds louder, softer.

I look at the blank men, and each of them are holding a bird, fat and
black. Probably a rook, or a crow. They are different sizes, and black
as you can get. Some people think black is all the same colour, but
there are as many blacks as greens if you look hard. These birds are
black like rained-on roads.

The blank men take out instruments, rib-spreaders. They insert them
into the chest of the birds, carefully and open them up. They spread
the birds by the wings, like books. Like newspapers. They then begin to
poke around in the pink and wet, feeling their way through the
entrails. And they say things like "Brown's a fool if he thinks Blair
is ever going to stand down", "There's no movement in steel, I see. "
"It says here that Veron's going back to Lazio".

And I just can't stop looking, as these men read yesterday's events in
the guts of birds. The word is haruspex. I saw it somewhere. It means
reading the future from the entrails of birds. Usually chickens,
usually the future. Haruspex.

My head just stores up this sort of stuff, I can't lose it. I've read
this definition somewhere and my subconscious mind throws it into a
dream with tubes and rib-spreaders (a lesson for all, it is always a
mistake to watch ER before going to bed). Even thinking about the way
my mind collects useless information reminds me of something else, the
Plath line "I've married a cupboard of rubbish. "

Jesus. That's a dream I hope I don't have again.

Up down, turn around, please don't let me hit the ground.

What makes me think I have a choice anyway? Of whether to abandon Bill
or betray Lorrie? I can't contact her, all I can do is wait and see if
she sends me the signal, then put our plan in place. If she's bad, she
maybe won't want to see me again, or even if she just believed what I
told her about being too weak to protect her. If Chesterton had really
put the works on me, maybe I would have revealed how she was to contact
me if she wanted to.

If she does get in touch, what should I do? I don't think Johann is
going to harm her, and I do think he'll harm Bill if he doesn't get
what he wants. If what he says is true then he's fallen in love with
her just as she's fallen in love with him. Let the two of them get on
with it. Nobody told me I've got to save the world. The world can look
after itself.

Kilroy is on. He smarms his way down the steps with fake-tan and
sincere smile painted on like a ventriloquist's dummy, the paint is all
wrong, the tones aren't true. I wish we had the guts to just be utterly
false with our talk shows, like Springer. The lack of taste is better
than this cosy hatred and self-interest.

The show is headed "If he's done it once?" and is about women, or men,
who are in relationships that began as affairs, the subject being, can
there ever be trust when you already know the love began with betrayal
and hurt.

That's not important. The woman four rows in on the left is important.
It is Lorrie and she has the best legs I've ever seen. She is smiling
in hope that I'll be there to catch the message.

Tonight I think I'll walk alone, I'll find my soul as I go home.