Wednesday Write-In #46

 

This week’s words were:

hamlet  ::  prescription  ::  sorting  ::  missing person  ::  cocoa

 

Room With A View

I do wonder, sometimes, what it’d be like. Running away, I mean. Disappearing. Just getting on a bus, then getting on another bus, taking the first train you see, and then just burying in wherever you end up. Going to ground, isn’t that what they call it? Slipping in under the radar. Get a bedsit, a black-and-white telly, a fridge and a window, ideally with a view, and you’re sorted. Nobody would even notice I was gone, I reckon. There’d be none of those ‘Missing Person’ posters with my mug on, none of those telly interviews where the ‘concerned’ family passes around a hanky, blubbering about how much they ‘just want to know if our darling is all right,’ or any of that rubbish. My removal from the world would be so easy, so straightforward. Wouldn’t even cause a ripple in the pond of village life. Nobody in this hamlet I have to call home would even look up from their cocoa to see me pass. And if they did, they’d probably think: About time that scrounger took ‘imself off. Good riddance. And you know another thing? They’d be right, and all. 

I wonder if they know that I hate every last hair on every last head of every one of them. It burns me, right, like someone using my soul for an ashtray, stubbing out the fire of their indifference right on my heart, like it was nothing.

That feller needs a good sorting, I know they say, behind my back. A good kickin’, more like, someone else laughs. Let ‘im ‘ave it wi’ the ‘obnailed boots, eh? Their laughter is a grinding, knocking sound, like bone on bone. Oo, but we can’t say a word against ‘im. We’ve got to be ever so respectful, on account of his ‘illness’. Right, lads? The laughter is cruel now. It feels like a bat inside my head, fluttering and shrieking and clawing at my brain.

I have three weeks’ worth of meds left on my prescription. I’d take it all at once and go out with a bang, if I thought it’d stop the laughter – it won’t, though. I know that much. They’d still be laughing at me in fifty years – do you remember that drooling idiot, used to live up top of Cliff Street, did ‘imself in? – but where there’s a will, there’s a way. All I need is for one of them to hit me, just hard enough, and it’s all my problems solved at once.

I don’t have money for a bus, or for a train, or for a bedsit. Of course I don’t. There’s no money for a window with a view.

So, I’m off to pick a fight. It’ll be easy – I’ll just follow the laughter.