Everything that's in my head

Chapter 1

Adam had been crying now for a staggering three hours and thirty seven minutes and if truth be known, he was getting really sick of it.


Crying for this long had been an exhausting experience.  He was under the illusion that after a while the tears would subside and he would have ‘got it off his chest’.  But as he hit the three hour mark he realised that the condition was chronic and felt he would be crying for the rest of his life or at least that’s how it felt.  He would have to go to work crying, catch buses crying, search for change in his pocket crying,
Funerals would be OK though, as no one would notice but other than that, it was just tears, tears and more tears
And they just kept coming, running down his face in a seemingly unstoppable fountain of misery and despair not forgetting the uncontrollable sobs that threatened to tear his stomach in half.

On one occasion that morning he had let out a feminine shriek so loud that it had embarrassed that tiny, tearless part of his brain that was thinking at the time.

 ‘What if the neighbours hear this?’ 

All morning, since 9:00 Adam had been plunging into rooms hoping to find solace in a book or on the telly, only to emerge seconds later, unencumbered with solace and hysterical.  At 10:05, he tried lying on the bed with a pillow wrapped around his head but he sobbed in to that all the same.  He tried holding his breath, running on the spot, breathing deeply; all the tried and tested old wives' tales dished out to bloody kneed school boys none of which seemed to do the trick..

At 11:30 Adam was disintegrating like a blazing, ice filled comet.

That tiny part of his mind that remained dry was by 12; 00 thoroughly disgusted with all this unstoppable misery and wanted out.  At sometime during the morning it had hatched a devilish plan and was now, as Adam sat sobbing in the kitchen, about to put it into action.
It chose its moment with perfection.

Adam rose slowly from his hunched position and stood by the cooker, his favourite place for thinking and mulling over things.
That tiny, dry part of his damp mind chose this moment to speak and did so with clarity and economy.

‘These tears will have to stop……………………………………………..one way or another’.

The voice was not that of Adam but a deeper, more authoritative voice that carried gravitas and a sense of command.

The tears stopped dead.

Presently, as Adam’s fingers gingerly coaxed the plastic ice cream container towards their outstretched tips, he realised that a chain of events had been initiated and he was quite taken up by the whole thing.
 
‘Gosh!’
 
Something was saying in the back of his head.

‘This is for real'.

Standing a tiptoe, he teased the thing gently over the lip of the cupboard and vainly tried to bring it down without spilling any of its contents but the multitudes of vitamins and aspirin contained within,  spewed across the floor in an infuriating fountain, fleeing to all four corners of the kitchen with a horrible and unnerving clatter.

Through red raw eyes Adam bent down and instinctively began to pick them all up.

He came across a tube of pink Germoline that had wedged itself between the chair and a leg of the kitchen table and pondered its potential for taking life.

‘Would it be possible to put too much on?’

He asked no one in particular.

‘It’s for eczema’.

Came a reply from somewhere deep inside his head.

But by actually reaching for the medicine container, Adam had crossed a point of no return.  He had set a course and was now committed to seeing it through to its final destination


He swung the utility door open and noisily hunted for some orange flex he knew lay within.  In the semi-darkness a tool-box fell to the floor, an aluminium ladder collapsed on him, and the ironing board threatened to open out, trapping him inside.  Oblivious, Adam pressed on, hands moving by feel, he finally managed to track down the brightly coloured cable and almost with a flourish pulled it from the murky interior.

He squatted down and set about fashioning himself a primitive noose.

After several failed attempts it suddenly occurred to him, that as he lived in a flat and was over six feet tall, there would be nowhere to suspend himself.  He was the highest thing there was.

Not to be out done and with his dander up, Adam marched purposely back in to the kitchen and with unseeing eyes opened the knife draw.  He rummaged noisily inside before eventually producing a lethal looking carving knife.

He ran his index finger along its long since blunt edge.

‘So be it’, the unfamiliar voice said solemnly and Adam searched for a steel with which to sharpen the blade.

When satisfied that he had done enough scraping he tried it out on a thumb.

A line of blood followed the knife’s progress from the nail down to the knuckle.

The knife was placed on the table and Adam fetched half a bottle of wine from under the sink.  An improvised plan was unfolding: guided by an invisible hand.

He pulled the cork out with a squeak and poured himself a generous glass of Rioja. He drank half straight down and felt the warm liquid hit his stomach with a satisfying, steadying glow.

Next, he chose some Mozart, any Mozart, from an untidy pile of CDs and fumbled the shiny disc into the player.  The orchestra struck up and Adam put pen to paper.

Sorry about all this, it began.
Sorry to let the side down but I have to go
Just couldn’t hack it. Have been feeling unwell.
Adam.

He read it back A suicide notes go this was pretty uninspiring stuff.  He couldn’t be bothered with ‘I bequeath’ but this was akin to cancelling the milk. No, he would have to come up with something more befitting the occasion. After all it wasn’t everyday that you decided to do something so drastic as to despatch yourself to the ever after.

His pen began to scratch feverishly across a piece of scrap paper that lay to hand.

I haven’t gone; I am still here. I will be with you everyday, walking beside you. In the night sky I will be one bright star looking down. I will lie with you, and take you by the hand gently to sleep. I will be the sun that warms you and I will be the food that nourishes you.  I will be the atoms in your heart and the salt in your tears.  Remember me.

Adam put the pen down, transfixed with indescribable grief and walked the walk of a condemned man to the bathroom that now served as a scaffold.

Wanting to retain some dignity he nipped in to the bedroom and retrieved a pair of bathers from the pants draw.

He ran a bath and got in.

With a deep breath, he pressed the shiny hard edge into his left wrist. Thick red blood bubbled to the surface and squirted out in a thin and constant stream.  Adam watched fascinated by this impromptu anatomy lesson and gazed at the deep red slit.  He laid the now bloodied blade onto his right wrist and sliced down hard.  This time the blood gushed and frothed around the opening like a burst water main and cascaded up his forearm.  He plunged it into the water and closed his eyes.

After a while, with one eye open he looked around the avocado green interior and realised he wasn’t dead.  The Mozart was still playing and the glass of wine still had a gulp left in it.  He daren't look down into the bloodied mess that had once been a clean bath and wondered just how long it would take.
Minutes?  Or hours? He had lost all track of time.

He closed his eyes again, and tried to think of something that would cheer him up.

His thoughts drifted gently to a bar he had often frequented in his youth; a noisy, busy place of seemingly endless summers and rock and roll music where he had sat on a stool and laughed and laughed and laughed. It was a Bacchanalian oasis, a place of laughing and forgetting and it had been his spiritual home.  It was, for him at least, his Valhalla.
He closed his eyes and went to sleep.

The green overalled paramedics cursed and sweated his blanched, lifeless body out of the bath and onto the floor. They had received the call only half an hour before going off duty and this is exactly what they didn’t want: a pointless and incomprehensible suicide.

They had arrived in a blaze of melodramatic sirens and flashing blue lights to find the front door open and a dead Adam in a bath. He was long gone and a cursory glance by both of them decided that any attempt at resuscitation was pointless.

They had not been privy to Adam’s slow, glacial demise. They had not been around to witness his complicated and ham-fisted attempts at living, and therefore had no emotional involvement.

Adam, who could have brushed past them in a pub or MacDonald's only the day before as a perfectly fit 40 year old, was now an awkward sack of dead tissue that would soon start to bloat and stink.

There would be no heroic return journey to A and E.  No grateful patient sitting up in bed surrounded by cards, grapes and relatives various. Any sense of urgency had long since dissipated and now it was a chore.

This wasn’t their first nor would it be their last.  They had scraped up and bagged quite a few in their time.  The whys and wherefores didn’t feature in their young professional lives.  Adam’s wheezing shuffle from his mortal coil would only get a small mention between a hastily cooked pizza and the telly.

They zipped him up in a black heavy duty rubber bag and wheeled him to the ambulance.
Years before, Adam had been stopped in the street, one bleak autumn day by a pinched looking student and asked if he would like to donate his body to medical science.
The student in question was a very earnest, gangly boy of about 20 who wore an ill-fitting NATO combat jacket and who spat a little when warming to his theme.  He evidently believed deeply in what he was saying and Adam, wanting to edge away, took in very little of what was being said.  He signed on the dotted line, if only to get rid of him, and walked off down the street, clutching his shopping. He didn’t give it a second thought but mused briefly what a strange and complex thing death was and when it came, you wouldn’t miss your retinas or heart for that matter.

When his key hit the front door, he had completely forgotten about the incident. A letter came a week later, thanking Adam for his public spirited gesture and that: if he wanted to change his mind, he had thirty days in which to do so.  Adam threw it in the bin.

So when the pathologist’s circle saw began buzzing at 3000 rpm closer and closer to his shaved scalp, it was a strangely ironic situation: that such a random, forgotten meeting would bring Adam to this place so many years hence.  If he had been aware what giving your body to medical science had actually meant: IE being stripped clean of all your organs by underpaid lab technicians,  dead or not dead, he would not have signed.  Adam was squeamish to say the least ,so having his guts dumped unceremoniously into a bucket and his liver put into a large glass receptacle marked ‘Liver’ would have repulsed him beyond measure.

His brain was eased out of its bony casing and placed in a jar of Formaldehyde.  It was then transported on a trolley with a couple of other brains to a dark room, deep inside a London Hospital and stored on a shelf, and there it lay for the next 200 years.

The rest of him, his bones and other sundry items, were interred in a grand yet gloomy Victorian cemetery on the outskirts of London, an hour’s journey by rail and tube from his brain and other organs.
His carcass was conveyed, with a degree of solemnity, to an area set back from the main path that overlooked allotments.  His grave lay amidst thick, purple brambles that ran wild in summer and from which huge, juicy blackberries, thick as a man’s thumb, hung, basking in the dusty heat of the day.

The burial, although sad, passes off without major incident.
Although the pall bearers, unaware of Adam’s eviscerated state and expecting a heavy load, did hoist his teak sarcophagus onto their shoulders only for it to fly into the air and nearly crash land onto the roof of the hearse behind.  The chief pall bearer managed to grab hold of one of the handles, before the coffin got truly airborne and effortlessly pulled it down to its rightful place.
To the casual observer it seemed as if this was part of some strange funeral rite. That coffins were indeed tossed into the air prior to their journey to the afterlife.  Lacking any weight to slow them down, they set off at a jaunty pace with the chief pall bearer, ever the professional, digging his heels in to slow them down to a more respectful gait.

The vicar, being high church, felt queasy about burying a suicide and went through the ‘ashes to ashes’ in an unconvincing sing-song kind of way that he affected when not theologically happy with events.  Nobody noticed as no one was really listening.  Being too stricken with grief and lost in worlds of their own, everyone present just looked at their shoes and waited for the time when they could go home.  He had to clear his throat to signal the end of proceedings and people began to drift away, in one’s and two’s, scrunching back down the path before disappearing with much slamming of car doors and revving of engines.

And so the years passed.   Adam’s memory and cruel passing were buried under a blanket of platitudes.  As with all bad things in life, people gradually got over it and went about their daily business with less and less pain until Adam became a picture in a frame and not much else.  Grieving relatives came and went to his ever increasingly mouldy and overgrown gravestone until they too passed on and so, in the end, no one came.  Anyone who had ever known Adam eventually died out, until there was no one to even distantly remember him.  Presidents, like fashions, came and went.  Horrific wars were won and lost. New discoveries were discovered and taken for granted. The oil ran out as did the gas even the coal dwindled into nothing.  God was forgotten then remembered then forgotten again.  New messiahs took centre stage only to be ushered off to make way for some other idol that captured the public’s imagination.  Rome, the eternal city, was sacked again only to be built again as were all the other major cities of the world.  Chinese became the world language to be replaced by another language that was easier to pronounce.  And so it went on, like an endless play with a thousand acts and billions of players.  On and on remorselessly until the birth of Earnest Serius and then at last, the end was in sight.