Crimson - c/o: Mr. Nobody.,

Crimson

Another hotel. Another kitchen. Another fire escape and more toxic lung punishment, caffeine intoxication taking the baton from the alcohol that is fighting a losing but valiant battle.It could be anywhere but is so happens to be here with me stuck right in the middle of it. Its been my escape for the last week from the life that crumbles around me but a lonely one filled with a million words, a thousand feelings and an eternal sadness.

I have made a lasagne. Served a burger, a few steaks and that has been that. Its an agonising way to make money. Its like being in purgatory - bartering my soul to the devil for a measly thirty pieces of silver.

Its nearly over though for another evening but life outside of this perfectly gleaming, large, airy and empty kitchen is a world that currently scares me and the fear threatens to consume all that I am. I smoke more, l light another cigarette, inhale deeply, longer, stronger. I need the nicotine to fill my lungs, I need to feel something other than this. I need to lose this fear. Caffeine has brought me right back into the game. Alert. alive, agitated and high. Its sparked everything from the night before that is now the day, the edges smudged, as the night falls once again it only seems like a heartbeat ago I was toasting the end of yesterday and welcoming the moon and the stars. My destination somewhere high, somewhere far away from here to watch as London sleeps the night away.

The hours instead of cooking have been inspired by music and comedy. My mind set free to wander this evening to other places, to other times. To ponder of what I have lost and marvel at what I have. Wishing, always things could be different. Wishing always things could be perfect. It never can be. So wishing I remain. Wishing to be home to her. To see her in that crimson dress she was wearing last night.

* * *

Wembley seemed to be scattered with rainbows wherever, whichever way I looked. Strips of rainbow, Japanese rainbow cut across the pavement I walked. Pretty, random and captivating for my racing mind and failing sight. The night sky dances with the dying day sharing and swapping their colours creating surreal landscapes and postcards from Albion.
The magic and the serenity seemed lost in Wembley Park well weathered and wrinkled, dirty with the years, decades underneath the shadow of Wembley Stadium.Fast food outlets breeding neon and obesity litter the streets. Hotels surround like citadels – the castles lost years ago. Giant concrete monoliths making the panoramic view an ugly one at best. Bars that have been battered, repeatedly by marauding fans of all factions. Almost transfixed in shock between event. I walk by and they remind me of rabbits stuck, staring into the headlights that mark their untimely end from this world. Their life and their livelihood a saddening statement but a profitable one that befits them the entrance to the tree-lined streets that almost seem a world away from the giant holding pen for the stadium and arena.

The lighting and my tired but alert mind freed my imagination and it flew, it flew to so many places I felt myself spinning as I climbed the steps that surely can only be modelled on some idealistic view of heaven. A god complex in an architect, just what the world needs. There must be a hundred. Steep and seemingly with no end. The summit always invisible until the final step, and the barriers. The fifty safety jacketed officials, paid for what. To stand there, Drink tea, Be abusive to degenerates, fair dodgers and any member of the public that isn’t blond or beautiful showing some thigh or a little breast. Oh how I would like to kill them all. My rage nearly gets the better of me as I stumble for my ticket and head into the dirty and hot underground.

I dreamt for the first time in many a month the night before last. I’m afflicted, gifted maybe diseased with nightmares of the woes and ills of mankind. Of acts and scenes torn from the devils scrapbook. Its not suffering – its just another place that takes a while to get to know. To understand the limitations and boundaries. There are obviously no rules. That’s where the nightmares take hold and my will is broken, tortured and dammed in fire. My dream could be a script. Easily penned by Tarantino or the cinema he has spawned. Graphic yet reminiscent of a cartoon. Comical yet horrific.I was never really there.It was my face transposed onto somebody else playing a role in a film that was supposed to be real and I was aware of this the whole time. Just watching, terrified because I knew it was me but also subdued enough to watch and to let the story unfold. Good versus evil and love all played out in perfect tones of crimson.Notably it’s the first night in many a month I slept alone and without her. Another room. On the floor. A makeshift bed. I slept from late night into late afternoon. Refreshed but disturbed. Graphically remembering every detail, sensation and feeling from my dream left me still there seeing things from a distance, seeing everything in Crimson.

* * *

I was slumped into a corner, a piss smelling corner just outside the entrance to London Bridge station, waiting, watching tourists and travellers flowing as if water through and around the buses and taxis. Relatives waiting, pimps and prostitutes stalking.Flowing – bathed in a Sodium glow that twisted and manipulated shadows into figures from the underworld. Skewed signs into abstract art and bounced off the interlined girder roof that almost gives the image of the original wooden trussed pitch roof some a hundred and fifty years ago.The Saturday night slags and chavs staggered into a city braced for madness and violence in the name of fun. In they flow from the satellite towns where Yatzy’s is posh and special brew is breakfast. Here for fights and fornication spreading their seeds of despair as far and as wide as they can be scattered in another lost night in the garden of the devil. (evil?)

My train, minutes away, if all can be believed and my final mission, albeit a fifteen minute mission will be underway. From Wembley Park to Peckham and my home. My girlfriends home. My girlfriends parents home. A flat underneath a beautifully trademark Victorian house that reminds me of the home I never had. The flat, a conversion, her legacy. Her foot on the ladder.

I look around and as the smoke clears I can see I have created a perfect cigarette circle all around me. At least ten butts litter the floor forming a perimeter and a long stream of smoke forms a stream flowing all the way through the station. There is a little part of me that is challenging cancer to a fight. A fight to the death. Only one winner. Perhaps it’s the only thing naturally left for me to fight. Another crimson encounter. To beat cancer. To receive that touching sentiment from strangers. Unbridled support from loved ones tingled with pity and despair . I plucked myself from my thoughts and wander, perhaps stagger as my co-ordination is damaged by the things I have consumed. The train journey so brief, a montage in images and colours, so quick I nearly missed my stop. The stairs leading out – guarded by two very ugly, very nasty looking half-breeds adopted from a laboratory somewhere. Probably ex-research. Infected, Jacked up. There eyes glared at each other. Ready. Waiting for a weak moment by its owner. A moment of indecisiveness or simple stupidity. Then they could finish this. I walked through them trying the best to curb the fear that had gripped me and the dark place my mind had gone. They smelled it but I was gone bounding down the fifty steps three at a time into the ghetto that is Peckham. Regeneration and re-building of Peckham only shifts poverty elsewhere, further out, as new money beats no money. It’s a sad day for London when real London fades further and further away until it is no longer more and its a sad day every day i arrive home and the landscape looks different. A little more polished. A little more of that shiny new glint.

The same kid, cracked out, eyes as black as Opal, asks me every day for money. Each day he tries to sell me something usually and with an annoying of repetition drugs he does not have. His transparency makes him no less of a threat. I wonder where he is at night. Where does he sleep. Does he even sleep. Can he sleep. The repetition of walking the same few hundred yard patch every day taking in two rows of shops, and of course a pub, separated by Asylum Lane and the railway bridge above carrying people into the city. A barber, a beauty parlour, café and several fast food outlets dot the landscape. A real Caribbean takeaway – where they are so stoned, so lazy most days they forget to make food and turn away scores of people seemingly on a minute by minute basis.

The kid. He walks amidst the same people every day, asking the same people every day. Trying to work the unworkable scam and until one day he stabs someone seemingly random but all together predictable. If not that then someone puts him out of his misery and around here who knows – its perhaps amusing, like having a jester, a performing monkey with a miniature cymbal spiralling so badly out of humanity.He is here again, separating me and a two minute walk past the phonebox, next left and home.“you got any money” he stares. Evil. Pure evil stares at me. I can feel myself trembling that I, because I am who I am, will be the person to tip him over the edge. I fear I am the only person that shuns him so sardonically, sometimes with haste and sometimes in anger but always shuns.“No” I shout at him and run, run away. Faster and faster until I hear the crunch of the stones, the gravel, the driveway. I’m here, The stitch hits me hard and I feel sick. I am home. Home. Her home and then all and everything comes flooding, painfully. Filling my head past breaking point. I need something. I need anything. I rush down the stairs, keys trembling, they make the lock first time, the security light blinds me, I stumble into the darkness.The lightswitch is flicked. Light, bright blinding light and horror fill all.My trembling stops. My breathing becomes shallow, a mere whisper.My heart. My heart is gone I think.My eyes crimson. Mirroring crimson all around.Crimson everywhereBlood everywhere.I walk coldly into the bedroom opposite just illuminated from the hallway. The white sheets near soaked, saturated with her blood.And there she lay in a pool of crimson that looked just like watered down ribena.