EXTRACT FOR
Snowflake In A Snell Breeze
(Author Unknown)

PART ONE

Death of an Angel



      Two spectres swim about the room like Angels startled by the strangeness of their human form. The first, a fallen angel, whose murdered expression is as dead as the rest of her, she's weary and drags herself along. The second, with glowing Cherub eyes, who's still alive out there, somewhere in the city, right this instant, without a doubt emotionally torn to shreds by my actions but, if I know anything of her, still delighting in the dance. 

      It's because of this Cherub that Death in the form of a lamprey, who is most definitely no angel, has been knocking at my door for quite some time now. This Cherub follows me into my dreams and turns them sour. Sour enough for the lamprey to scent. This is one angel who's killing me softly. As my mother was over fond of saying to me when I was an over energetic kid she's wearing me away to a bus ticket.

      Each glance from those angelic eyes rips into my flesh to this very day with the savagery of a wielded dirk. Anger I can take, forgiveness, I find unforgivable. This won't go on for much longer, this lamprey that lives inside of me is growing bolder by the day. She lives off my fear. Soon she will feast on it.

      A chip pan that's caught the gas has found its way into my head. It's going to explode sending shards of skull fragments into the already crumbling ceiling. I force my eyelids apart, the July sunlight's abnormally furious, it pierces holes in me. 

      This is hell. I see I'm on my own. I'm not usually on my own but I see that any woman in her right mind wouldn't have to look at this dump twice before giving it a severe body-swerve. I wouldn't blame her for one instant.

      I shift and there's an odd, hollow rattling. I'm not in a bed. I manage to peer against the glare. I'm lying on a cracked, tiled floor of a rented room in what had better be a very cheap hotel. I'm surrounded by a collection of empty bottles and beer cans. It comes back to me, I took a swan-dive off the wagon a week or so back.  

      Hell hath no fury like a bottle scorned. My brain's still manufacturing poison to fight off the poisonous alcohol that isn't there. Ergo, it's poisoning me instead. Every nerve in my body's screaming at the top of its voice like the wife I've never had.

      A little bit off in the distance stands a bottle with more than a whisper of the amber nectar lurking mid-way up the label. The Booze Fairy's been here in the night. Bless her tiny soul. My entire body heaves a sigh of relief. I reach out, unscrew the plastic cap, and take a big swig. My gut ignites. This masochistic act jerks the self-preserving part of my brain into action. I take another swig. 

      Now I'm capable of thought. I take out my Mobile. Push it close against my half-working, half-open, bleary, bloodshot eyes, it tells me it's ten-fifteen and it's a Thursday. Apart from this it's a useless lump of tech. The contacts section's empty. I like to keep it that way.

      I'm fully dressed, shoes and all. My suit's in good nick. It should be, it cost a bomb. I might be a piss-artist but I'm a well dressed one. My maternal gran left me a monthly allowance and, to add insult to injury, my shag-buddy, Nell, keeps buying me stuff. 

      I'm always being looked after by birds. Never ask for it, to tell the truth it embarrasses the hell out of me but there's no stopping any female once she gets it into her caring head that some joker needs looking after. Nell's a frustrated nurse.

      I stagger into the bathroom. I'm six-two, the mirror's at five eight, I bend my knees a bit. The mirror's in a nasty mood, it lets me know what a waste of space I am. I stick my tongue out to show it that I don't care. How's that for being all grown up? 

      My name says that I'm from one of the twelve ancient clans of Scotland but there's more than a wee bit of the Viking staring back at me. I run some cold water, splash my wee bit of a Viking kisser, flatten my hair and settle for that. The bottle's still in my left hand. I finish it.

      I worked in the States for a fair bit so as our American friends would have it, this is a window of opportunity. There's no more rotgut in the room and if I didn't buy more last night then there wasn't no cash.  I gaze into the mirror to see if it's about to congratulate me on the astuteness of my deductive reasoning but there's only a troglodyte living in there so he ain't able to grasp it.

      I've no idea of where I am but there's always an AA meet going on somewhere. Never again will I put me through this. This time it'll be permanent. I'm twenty-seven years old for Christ's sake, I'm no kid any more. What I need to do is to concentrate on some addiction that isn't as dangerous in the dark and doesn't hurt this much in the light. 

      These thoughts trip and tumble over each other in their desperation to be recognised. Before I've enough time to change my mind I rush out of the door and down the hall desperately looking for an exit. I've no idea what door it is. Let's face it, in this condition I wouldn't recognise an idea if it fell on me. I find the lounge. 

      The telly's on. Alethia Dawns is on. It must be a repeat of a repeat of a repeat of one of her shows. She's big time famous, she's big time shaggable. My heart stops every time I see this one but then, this happens with just about every other guy in the entire country. We're all being hypnotised. She acts on us like a drug. 

      I felt passion once, real passion, and this is it. This is exactly how I felt, way back then in my distant, virginal past. Not fondness, not sympathy but that frighteningly awesome, soul-wrenching emotion that goes under the general heading of love. I don't feel much of anything these days. Haven't done in God only knows how long.

      There, on the screen, with her astonishing grey-green, almost angelic eyes, she just stares, listening to some calming mantra in her head. I'm guessing it's her director counting into her earpiece. Suddenly, like some automaton having been switched on, her features break into that flashing, infectious smile that makes her eyes dance and her perfectly formed breasts deliberately quiver. 

      She does a sort of slight flounce of her shoulders so that those breasts now jiggle and her dress is drawn upwards to expose the full length of legs. She begins to stalk forward. She's taunting the audience, she's taunting me. Asking the question, do I want her. 

      The resounding answer is, a million times, yes. In my well pissed confusion, desire and the ultimate drug, love, fuse themselves into an erection. My emotions are wide open. I shouldn't be capable of having an erection in this condition but I do. There's a burst of music and rapturous applause. 

      I'm held bound in front of the home-cinema-size telly. At this moment in time, held in the instant, there's only Alethia and me.  The dream's faded, the fantasy has shifted itself into the background. At this drunken instant, Alethia and me have become a reality. An item. She fills me, overwhelms me. I relax into it.

      Finally, no more hiding, no more searching. I'm home. At rest with Alethia, of all people, at our own fireside in out own cottage on an island, Skye or Mull, where no one can reach me. Bliss. No aching, no pain, no promise of the punishment to come. Only angelic bliss.

      And then the instant's gone, Okay, so I'm half-pissed. I'm released back into this cheap, cold room in a cheap cold world on the outermost fringes of the cheap cold Milky Way with only the hangover from hell for company.

      Alethia Dawns is in her mid-twenties, bright, rich, witty, and a published psychologist. Her programmes focus on the three main addictions, sex, chemicals and firewater, you know, everybody's into one of them these days. At one time or another, I've managed to be into all three. 

      She's right, all of them are drugs. They're identical if not in nature then intent, we use all three to get us off the sink-hole we've made of this planet. It's not a matter of giving up on drugs, in this modern world we just can't manage to get through the day without them, it's a matter of choosing which of them's going to do you the least harm.

      I have an epiphany, this is what I need to change my life. I need to get out there into the real world and go after some woman just like Alethia Dawns, this is the one thing that'll stop the lamprey. A woman just like Alethia Dawns and a family round me, my family, my kids, our kids. A life that's accepted as normal filled with shagging, sobriety and sunlight.

      Everybody that I know, or have ever known, has talked about normality as if it's boring. It isn't boring. This is boring. Being a tearaway day in and day out. This is boredom personified.

      A second wave hits me with the force of a Tsunami, why somebody like Alethia Dawns, why not Alethia Dawns herself? If anyone on the planet's going to understand me then it has to be Alethia. The thought startles the hell out of me. This is radical stuff. Her and me are perfectly matched, well, we would be if I sobered up some, stayed off the hooch and settled for good sex on a regular basis, I know this for a fact. 

      I'm astonished that I've never considered it before. It's so obvious it's downright scary.

      'Give yourself a reality check, Michael my son.' I'm talking to myself, again. 'You are pissed. A wee fantasy the likes of the one you just had is one thing but what you are considering here is for real. She lives on a different planet and you don't own no spacecraft.  She's from way up there in the stratosphere and let's face it, fella, at this right good moment in time you would be lower in her eyes than pond life.'

      Disgusted by this rancid chunk of reality, I get back into the hallway then head for what of all the doors can only be the front one. It's got mock stained glass on it with an angel, nimbused in light, ascending to heaven. Why doesn't the likes of this ever happen to any of  mine? This Christian lot get the one's who offer them unqualified love and atheists the likes of me get the one's that give you the willies. Christian charity my rear end.

      Out past the angel I rush. The sole purpose of her being here is to have us mortals pause and consider. At this right good moment do I think of God?  Do I consider the fragility of my own mortality? Does the image of Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Mohamed spring into my favoured brain? Like hell. The only thought that manages to hit my noggin as I stagger and involuntarily brush against the door on my way out is, 'Fantastic tits.' 

      Out I go and stumble straight into the middle of a busy Glasgow Street and its unforgiving traffic. I wasn't to know that I was in the city centre, was I? 

      There's a screeching of brakes. 

      "Moron, I could've killed you." The lorry driver drops down from her cabin and is screaming up into my face from about chest level. As she braked the huge metal fender did forcefully connect with my right leg. I experienced something like it last year but with a private car. 

      I ended up in a plaster that nobody signed for six weeks. The rule of thumb seems to be--if there's a crunching sound then a bone's been shattered but if there's just a jarring like now then it can only be bruised. I'm limping so, no problem. Lay on MacDuff, do your damndest.

      I ignore her and her anger and stagger on past. I know it's swelling but, thankfully, over the past week and whatever, I've downed enough Jungle Juice to anaesthetise your average adult Killer Whale with a toothache. 

      I pause for thought, asking myself if I should slap her on the jaw or something. I'd really like to do this. Not a big slap, just the sort of slap that you see a doctor give to some woman on the telly that's having a hysterical fit. I figure it would be an act of kindness, really. She's being way too ridiculous about all of this.

      I decide against it. Not only have I never slapped a woman, I've never managed to slap anyone. The only slapping I know anything about's what I've seen in gangster movies so I immediately recognise this impulse for what it is, a booze-induced fantasy. 

      Besides, by the look of her, unlike me, she's not a thinker and a lover but a right wee mental case. What's clear to me is that this wee head-banger would side-step my slap, kick me in my balls so that I doubled over and then split my kisser wide open with her steel-toe-capped, working boots as I was on my way down. 

      I decide that discretion is the better part of valour and do a runner.

      "Want to be locked up, you alky," she screams, "locked away for your own good."

      She's shaking, I've got to've given her a scare but I don't give a toss. I'd like to give a toss, I usually I do give a toss, especially as far as the opposite sex are concerned. Really I do, I can't pass a polystyrene cup if some good looking young bird's squatting on the pavement bursting for a fix without tossing something in but this time I don't care. My senses are in stasis. 

      I know what I've got to do. I know where I've got to be. I can't stop for anybody or any thing, my entire life's about to change. If I so much as hesitate then I won't go on. I'll just sit down and sleep against a wall. The cops'll be called in. I'll experience the ignominy of having to spend the night banged up in a cell. 

      I make good my escape and leave her cursing.

      Now that I know exactly where I am, I know where the nearest meeting's about to take place. I stagger on. It's only a few streets away in the local Community Centre. All Community Centres look alike. Red roofed, white walled. Prefabricated and with an unconvincing welcoming board up outside of the door. In its unconvincing certitude it's impossible to miss. I stagger on in. 

      The meeting's always at twelve. It's held down in the basement out of sight of the real people who frequent the social events that they hold for real people on the main floor. We do not socialise, we are the fallen.  We are tolerated but distinctly unwelcome. A sub-species. We haunt their imaginations like the vampires and werewolves of ancient myth.

      At the end of the entrance hall I fall down the short flight of white concrete stairs leading to the basement. I twist my ankle. There's a sharp burst of pain before it's, once again, numbed into non-existence by the moonshine gifted by the Booze Fairy that I swallowed earlier.  

      This isn't an AA group that I attend with any regularity but I've been here before, they know me. Everybody knows me, I've been around for about three years now, ever since I returned to my home city of Glasgow from a life in the States. A country that has quite a few  Glasgows of its own but none quite like this one.

      As I go in through the doorway of the meeting room I bump my head on the door frame, no pain. This joins the previous bumps, I fell against the sink last night when attempting a wash and again hit my head on the side of the toilet seat as I crumpled past onto the tiled floor some time in the night. 

      This joker's a right mess. He isn't me. He's a piss artist. He ain't anybody I'd ever want to know. The sooner he gets out of this brain of mine the better. I want to exchange him. Christ, let's face it, an orang-utan's got more self control and a whole lot more class. I want to specialise exclusively in the shagging drug from now on. I have to keep my eyes open for the right opportunity. Back to Louis Pasteur, chance favours the prepared mind and all that.

      The basement's like all official basements, you smell it before you clap eyes on it, whitewashed and damp. As we are transient ghosts we're not allowed to leave any trace of ever having been here. Not so much as a gravestone.

      The posters are already up on the walls not with drawing pins but with Blue-tack: Don't lift a drink, lift the phone: Trapped? There is a way out. Contact Alcoholics Anonymous: One Day at a Time: Live and Let Live: Keep it Simple: Sssh, Don't Wake the Beast: Only One Drink Away From Drunk, with the Unity, Service, Recovery logo dominating.

      The meet proper won't start for other sixty-five minutes. Three women are already there. Two of them making the sandwiches and the tea the third setting out row upon row of tubular steel, green canvas seated chairs for the congregation.

      I watch them, women at work fascinate me. They're so into it, so set to the purpose, every single thing has to be just so. They actually care about the look of everything. They want it to be pretty. They want it to give pleasure. Us guys just want to please ourselves and get it over with, we just toss it all down and see what's on offer.

      Minnie's the first to respond.

      "Christ, young Michael's pissed." Minnie's eighty-five, to Minnie everybody's young.

      Sandra, who's in her mid twenties, divorced and looking after her four kids, is right behind her. "Give him here."

      "What are we to do with him?" asks Karen, who's only seventeen but is already an established alcoholic, having been getting legless with her parents since she was nine. 

      They no longer have lives, they have routines that shackle them to the mindless repetition of their own personal mantra in the form of active meditation. The knit, they talk, they walk, they clean, they slice, they bake, they knit.

      "Michael, you wi' us?" Minnie asks.

      "Yeah, yeah, of course," I mumble.

      "What're you doin' here, you here to quit?" asks Karen.

      "Yeah, no, could be, don't, don't, don't know."

      "Punters the likes o' you sicken ma happiness, Michael, just piss off," frowns Minnie.

      "Could spit in your eye and flood your memory," snarls Karen. "Piss off, waste of space."

      "I'll phone you in an appointment with the Community Addiction Team, Michael, you want me to do that?" asks Sandra.

      Michael isn't my real name, nobody tells the whole truth in life and in AA where anonymity's the name of the game it gets to be even worse. In AA a Binman gets to be a fighter pilot, a career criminal gets to be a saint. You name it, it's accepted and acceptable. The Community Addiction Team's National Health, very official. They'll want a real name, a real address and to do a real background check. There's no way I can handle this. I've got to stay out of sight. 

      "No," I say so forcefully that I unintentionally spray spittle all over poor Sandra's kisser. This sort of thing sets up visions of Dr Frankenstein's Monster after he inadvertently drowns the young girl in the original black and white movie. Then he's chased through the night by the mob into a windmill and then the mill set on fire. I don't fancy allowing nobody to put a match to a bunch of firelighters under me, thank you very much.

      "Don't want that addiction lot, don't want to get sober, just lookin' for some tea and sympathy. Well, you're no' gettin' it here, Michael, now piss-off out of our sight 'til you decide to grow up," Minnie's serious, her tone's hard.

      I stagger forward. The only barrier lying between me and the wall's the High Table. It's already been laid out. Dark cloth with triangle facing the body of the hall and the symbol of this particular chapter dominating the centre. A big picture of the joint founders William Griffith Wilson to one side and an equally large one of Doctor Robert Holbrook Smith complementing it on the other side. 

      I see this before the table and me collide. As it's only a foldaway aluminium framed table it collapses almost as the same instant as I do and we both fall to the floor in harmony. They say that crap floats, not in this instance it doesn't.

      Bliss. I black out. 

      When I waken the meeting's in progress and I'm sitting in the second row from the back. My headache's still with me. My gut's churning. The acid from throwing up over the week is still burning my tongue and mouth. My entire body feels as if it's been kicked by a rugby team. Apart from this I'm feeling just dandy.

      I see an apparition. Only two rows down sits Alethia Dawns, taller than the people around her, even the guys. She's here in person and even more beautiful than on the telly. In some way she knows how much I need to be with her and she's made a point of coming. 

      She must have heard about me somehow. I know word's got around that I treat women right but I never thought for one minute that it would reach out beyond the outer limits of AA. Sweet Jesus in the rain, I must be almost famous. 

      She is famous. She is a television star and yet she's put me first, in front of her career, in front of her way of life, in front of everything. She's made the first move. She is here and she's so eager that I don't have to do a thing. All I have to do is say yes.

      Then, in an instant, I'm dropped from a very great height and land on the cold hard pavement of reality with an almighty thump. It's not just painful it's downright embarrassing. 

      What a load of codswallop. My bloodstream has to still be producing brain-rot. This crap is nothing but a bout of the d.t's. I'm finally fodder for the laughing factory, stick me on the assembly belt and shuffle me along on the ga-ga belt, straight-jacket and all. 

      I look again, more seriously this time. This isn't Alethia but somebody that's a whole lot like her and is all too real. She's hot  as hell. 

      I'm dumped unceremoniously back into my own body. Nothing's changed. Not a thing's altered. It's only the same old me. Headaches, body aches, you name it, doesn't matter a hoot, I still have to get randy for anything with long legs, big tits and a heartbeat. 

      I'm always like this. This is my proof of existence. My way of getting in touch with the throb of life once I'm on the way out. Always need the intimate caress of a woman. Right now I need a woman more than I need oxygen. I'm consumed by a desperate necessity to prove to myself that I'm still alive. I desperately need a fix to calm me down. I need to know that I'm if not loved then I'm at the very least loveable.

      I'm not daft, I know fine well that what's about to take place ain't love. I know exactly what it is but beggars can't be choosers. I accept it for what it is and glamorise it along the way until it fits the bill. Just about every relationship that I've ever had except one has taken place entirely in my imagination anyway.

      I go towards any woman I've only just met as a promise. It's not the act, not the shagging itself but that single instant of expectation beforehand when nothing seems beyond the pale. When I can actually believe that I might just be able to hold it in my grasp again, the real deal. Heaven not on a plate but in a bed, between the sheets. 

      But, strangely, the first time, the only time, way back in my virginal years, that's exactly what didn't happen. There was no sex, there wasn't even any tongue bashing. There was only the certainty of being adored and of adoring the close proximity of another human being. A tranquil yet exciting state of existence far beyond the pale of everyday life.