Meantime

by Frankie Boyle

‘Do you have anyone to vouch for your whereabouts last night?’ ‘No …’ I vaguely remembered talking to someone, making a phone call, then remembered it was to Iron Man in a dream. I’d been having a lot of dreams about Iron Man, but this wasn’t the place to get into that. Perhaps there was no place to get into it. I let the silence hang.

I had learned over the course of the previous minute not to answer anything honestly without careful consideration. My honest answer would be that he looked like he had a skincare routine and went down on his middle-aged wife twice a week with a ferocious sense of duty that passed for love.

There was a long, disappointed silence. He groaned and appeared to start writing out what I had said in longhand. I wondered how much detective work could be involved in finding the number of a flat in a building you had just visited.

She had a big, shabby, clothes-strewn room with a vague air of humanitarian crisis.

Sometimes he spoke like a man falling asleep, and other times like the same man waking up on a bus.

I opened another browser window for porn, kidding myself that I might still go back and learn more about the thrush. I briefly worried about why I’d blamed my inability to recognise a common thrush on the death of the planet; but then there’s nothing quite like typing the word ‘reality’ into a porn search engine to make you worry about what sort of person you are.

Glasgow is utterly black at 6 p.m. in winter. British Summer Time is something to do with farming, but if I was a farmer and my life consisted of wringing chickens’ necks and putting my hand up animals’ arses, I’d have wanted to work in total darkness. Oblivion.

I’ve never seen the point of dreams. You rest so your body can repair itself, and your brain’s contribution is to screen vivid footage of you being on a safari holiday with your dead uncle and Sir Kenny Dalglish.

Marina would have done exactly the same with my murder – pretended to be really upset to change her shifts or something – and I’d have saluted her for it from Hell.

Every little snowflake is unique, but it’s all just snow.

Were we going to keep listening to the same old rhetoric? she asked, rhetorically, to general nodding and applause. She mentioned speaking truth to power, which I always think is a weird phrase because class relationships are essentially sadistic, and there’s no point explaining your pain to people who are just going to feel slightly aroused.

I tried to make conversation with him, but his almost surreal lack of charisma made this difficult. He seemed like the sort of guy who needed to clear his throat to get his reflection to come to the mirror. He was maybe a bit overwhelmed by the melee that was developing around us, and I could sympathise. I used to have a kind of flat-pack, outgoing personality that I could throw together to get through family occasions and stuff, but over the years I seemed to have lost a few screws and bolts.

She flicked her ash into a little ashtray that was a little sixties-style plastic ball, a charming conversation piece that would no doubt soon kill her and everyone in the building.

I wasn’t sleeping great, and I’d been trying to cut down on drugs by drinking a lot.

Actually, I felt like an old man kicked onto the stage of an opera whose major themes were alienation and psychosis.

‘You had trouble answering the phone? You neurodivergent cunt.’ Donnie had been sent on compulsory equalities training after some work catastrophe, where he had been compelled to learn a raft of terms he now used as abuse.

Fatima looks at me. ‘I know it’s horrible what happened to Marina. I never understood what your relationship was, to be honest. She said it wasn’t sexual … She gave you a wank at Glastonbury or something?’ ‘Mumford and Sons were on. There was nothing else to do.’

Now I was in the bath with a mild beer buzz, looking at my phone. Of course, they’re not really phones, and if someone had phoned me on it I would have screamed.

I flicked listlessly to the BBC News website. ‘What’s your favourite British movie ever?’ it asked me, for reasons which were unclear. I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the chattiness of culture; it all sounded like the inane shit you might babble to someone who was slipping into a coma while you waited for an ambulance.

Social media always gave me a bracing sense of despair and suffocation, and I rarely engaged with it. I planned to go on Twitter when Sean Connery died and post: ‘They’ve shaken him and he’s not stirred’, but that was it. I remembered Marina saying, ‘It helps me with my loneliness. After a few hours on there, I think “Thank fuck I’m alone.”’ One problem is that there’s nothing more embarrassing than hearing someone say something that sounds clever to them. Then there was the way that people carefully faked everything about themselves online but chose to share their actual political opinions – the most damning thing about them. And the beautiful people who always had a couple of pictures where they pulled ugly faces for a lau...

I’ve always had a certain kind of cosmic horror. I suppose I struggle with the idea of being on a spinning rock that’s flying screaming across an empty cosmos. I think it hits me hardest when I see a person emotionally connect with some mundane task. Watching someone angry that there’s no photocopier paper on a planet that’s hurtling through space makes me feel weak and nauseous.

‘You lied?’ One of my weaknesses as a compulsive liar was imagining that other people always told the truth.

My digestive system was still tackling last night’s fish supper like someone crushing rubbish down in a bin.

‘Thought the cunt was one of our learning-disabled brethren,’ Donnie wheezed. ‘Vital that all public buildings should be cared for by a hostile pensioner, absolutely vital.’

He’d clearly been fit years ago, but ran to fat now, like an outpost being reclaimed by the jungle.

‘I find it hard to imagine you falling for someone, Felix.’ ‘Well, when you come from my background, your first girlfriend is also the first person that ever touched you, pretty much. You just imprint on them like one of those baby giraffes that thinks a Jeep is its mum.’

Donnie shook his head. ‘I hate Twitter. Maybe it just replaces the void left by God – something to perform morality for.’ ‘Donnie, that’s uncharacteristically philosophical.’ ‘I got it from a tweet,’ he admitted, grudgingly.

‘Your generation’s so different: maybe ecstasy chilled everybody out, I don’t know. You’re all into Munro-bagging and sea-kayaking. We’re out hill-walking every weekend. I’m living the life of a fucking sherpa, just trying to keep my relationship together. My body thinks I’m fleeing genocide.’

‘But … no … Donnie, this is morally wrong. They didn’t know what you were. You lied to them.’ ‘Who’d sleep with any guy if they knew who he really was? If you’re shagging a woman you’ve lied to them.’

I’d never really liked the police: people have complex problems, and maybe the best person to solve them isn’t a guy with two GCSEs and a stick. I decided not to mention this.