Hope is a waking dream

The place was a far cry from the teak lined doorways and leather studded queen furniture sets

of the old Robin Hood pub on the corner of my old street. My feet had dragged me here, not

my head to the dark forrest, a bar on the edge of town. How I got here I would never

know. Riding the monotonous waves of an unscrupulous melancholy I had left Virgil’s bleak

bungalow without thought or consciousness and this is where the tide had taken me. 'I don’t

know this area, I don’t know this place. I know that whiskey though.' I ordered a double on

the rocks and placed myself on one of the scatty looking dark green leather bar

stools. Colour faded from my vision and my thoughts rang through me like murmured

condemnation.

Now sat, the tiger in my blood reeled and repressed itself in the dark corners of my

heart. A tide of tears gently lapped against forlorn memories as scotch slid down my throat.

My boy, my sweet Charlie. My eyes welcomed the saltiness that swelled and shone from my

face. They filled and they fell, a slow soundless drip, mere pennies in the bank of a blackened

soul. One tear for each memory. One tear for all the things my boy will never know. His face

smiled in my memory, swollen, blue lipped, eyes pert but rolled away.

The whiskey warmed my throat and belly but not my thoughts. Through one glass I

clawed at possibilities, at alternative endings at desperation. Through one glass I suffered,

through one I angered, through one I denied and through one I submitted. Until my heart and

head could take no more and my eyes cast out from myself and into my surroundings. The

glasses lined up in front of me like the mobile infantry, raising their empty flags on the battle

of sobriety. The place was darker than I first noticed. A few subdued lanterns placed in the

corners of the room, some tealights on the round oak tables and a few nestled behind dusty

bottles on mirrored shelves behind the bar. Oppressive moody colours of the room added to

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the darkness and provided a dank atmosphere for customers to wade through. Old men, all of

them, littered around the room, staring into a glass of liquid melancholy resting on ice in front

of them, each man lost in his memories, each man, it seemed, vacant to the present, taunted

by their past and chained to its misery. In their glasses they longed, they searched. For what?

I couldn’t tell, each man as solemn as the next, worshipping a deity that evaded them. One

man forlornly carved words into the table in front of him with a small pocket knife, the letters

large, capital and deep in indentation. ‘HOPE IS A WAKING DREAM’. My eyes hovered on

this for a while letting the words drift over me before the rest of the room presented itself.

Men, one table for each, one glass for each save for the dusty ruggedly dressed white haired

woman propped at the bar three stools down from me nursing two half full whiskey tumblers.

In the corner, a worn dark brown leather sofa, tattered and cracked, sat next to the entrance 3

steps from the door and two from the bar. The indentations in it suggested use of prolonged

periods of time. Next to it stood a peculiar looking coat stand, metal and tall with only a few

hooks on the top. There were no coats on it. As I took in my surroundings, a muffled effigy of

myself, my lolling eyes opened wide and the door to the bar did also.

The lacerations from torment could be seen in his eyes and were mirrored on his

face. In a raise of a hand and a signal to the barman the new entrant to the pub dropped his

torso onto the sofa and un-gloved his left hand. The hand was blackened and punctured,

though his hand was not what caught my surprise.

“His mouth was sown shut to keep the dishonest words from perforating others

innocence.” The bedraggled old hag at the end of the bar let the words out in an emotionless

sigh. The whiskey in front of her, the initial target but the comment aimed at me. I turned my

head to look at her as the words settled back to silence, and I gasped, a swift intake of breath.

She had no eyes. Just hollows where the pearly white of the sclera should shine. I looked

back down at my whisky quickly. Knowing to stare is rude, but more so because the hairs on

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the back of my neck had stiffened into attention and suddenly the bar did not feel so quiet, the

drum of my heart filling the silence. Not wanting to look again at the hideous hollow of her

features, my eyes instead darted back to the wretched figure that had walked through the

door. The old hag was right, his mouth was sown tight. Like a pair of shoelaces drawn with

strength to snugly house the foot, the brown elasticated string crusted through puncture holes

on each lip and zig zagged across the mouth like a leather boot. The lips had grown hard and

callous with the mutation, stuck together by the cement of putrid saliva. His jaw still moved

restlessly behind the tightly drawn covering, god knows what his teeth and mouth would be

like without air or hygienic cleansing. My shock at the beldam's words, at a sound being

made in the solemn bar was exasperated with some of my own

“What.. by.. who?” My choice question was not thought through and poured out of

me clumsily. I didn’t want to know, I should have kept quiet, offered the crone a nod of

recognition, finished my whiskey, taken the hand of my misery and left quietly. Curiosity

however is an emotion purely felt in the present, for the present, and because of that can

creep out of a person unknowingly. My eyes rested on the poor sown up soul intravenously

injecting the alcohol he had just bought for a battery and two pieces of silver cutlery. The

back of his hand showed the track marks of the Jackshots of past. Blackened veins protruded

from the holes. As he picked up the Jackbag and lifted it to the coat stand peg above his head

his eyes rolled round in satisfaction. I couldn’t pull myself away from the sight. I had heard

of these intravenous alcoholics but never believed I would lay my eyes on them. His

desperate state made it all the eerier. A woeful retreat from the present in the worshipping of

a habit. The old crone spoke, barely audible.

“Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, utters

another.” Her face suddenly raged with character, the forlorn furrows on her forehead angled

sharply downward and encouraged the malice to explode out of her face.

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 “TRAITORS, LIARS TO THEIR LORDS” The hag, in a flash, whipped up her glass

turned and hurled it at the now unconscious sown soul.

“WORDS EMPTY AS THE WIND ARE BETTER LEFT UNSAID!!” As swiftly as

she had erupted she subsided, head drawn towards the counter once more. Her angered state a

mere memory as her face regained its broken composure. Not a movement, not a stir, not a

word more did she speak, like a gargoyle blessed with nocturnal life returning to its

statuesque pose as the sun rises. I turned to see if any of the other burdened men in the bar

had noticed the commotion or at least had a reaction to the insanity of it all, but none had

moved, not even flinched. All still sucked in and shackled to their thousand yard stare at the

glass in front of them. A chill worked and needed its way down my spine, plucking at every

hair on the way down. The glass had struck the sown man in the face, in the mouth, blood

trickling as a gentle waterfall onto his chest was the only evidence that any such event had

occurred. He remained unconscious, limitless in the dreams provided by the alcohol. The

shock I felt from the situation drained from me into my whiskey removing the melancholy

that usually took center stage, my heart hammered harder, fingers flushed white at a reactive

grip on the glass and I stared down into its contents once again. ‘What the fuck!?’ I mouthed

to the glass, careful not to make a sound so as to disturb the old blind crone’s statue. Sweat

began to perforate my skin and grow in small droplets around my hairline and I squeezed my

eyes closed. Still I remained for what seemed like an eternity, blinded, mute, deafened by the

silence. Charlie, my boy, drifted through my solace. I wrenched open my eyes. The barman

came out from the back and stood in front of me.

“You alright?” Came a muttered query from behind the bar. I dared not look at him,

nor any other soul in this strange place. Instead, head down I muttered back.

“Yeah, I’m fine” The words were not a part of me, they were an auto-response

answering machine, ones that I had learnt over the years could placate any curiosity of misery

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and I knew it would do me no good to show weakness in a world of opportunists. I stared into

my glass. To the barman my response sufficed and he went about his work. Loosening my

grip, I downed the whiskey, one glass for the shock, placed it back on the bar and turned to

leave. But as I swung round, movement from the end of the bar jolted my stomach and I

froze. Staring back at me through hollowed eyes was the white haired hag, expression turned

cold, anger scarring her cheeks to her forehead and in her shaking fist she held high the

daggered shards of a broken whiskey tumbler.

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