Man of Ruin Read online

  Feeling marginally better, I took a last glance at the awful destruction I’d wreaked on my toilet. Happy to never see that godforsaken little room ever again, I swung the door shut, chucked on my jacket and headed out the front door.

  *****

  Outside in the chilly air of the autumn morning, I hurried down the road in the direction of Martin’s. It was abnormal and unpleasant for me to be up this early on a Saturday, and it reminded me of those godawful shifts at Tesco’s I used to do.

  With Tesco’s popping into my mind, and since it was on the way anyway and I had no cash on me, I went to the local branch to use the ATM. Glancing inside as I took my notes from the machine, seeing all those well-stocked rows of munch, I thought I should probably get something for Martin to sweeten the bitter pill to come. I felt sure it was going to be a stressful time for him.

  Good old me, thinking of others when I was the one with the chemical hose for a willy! But it was a good idea, so I went in and stocked up with a few cans of pop and some crisps and chocolate bars and things. For Martin, mostly.

  *****

  I buzzed Martin up at his block of flats, only about a ten-minute walk from the Tesco’s. I stood there shivering in the breeze, waiting for him to answer, vaguely wondering what I would say and what the hell I would do the next time I needed to relieve myself.

  “Hello?” his voice cluttered through the buzzer.

  “It’s me, you twat,” I said. “Did you think I was joking about coming round?”

  “Oh yeah, come up, Dave.”

  Perhaps he really had thought it was all a bad dream, the other night.

  If only.

  He let me in, looking bleary-eyed, hardly having got out of bed, it seemed.

  “Alright, mate,” I said. “Thanks for letting me buzz by.”

  “No worries,” he said.

  “I really do have a problem, mate,” I said, chucking my jacket onto the floor. “A big one.”

  “Cup of tea?” he said, picking up the jacket, barely looking at me.

  “Go on then,” I said, handing him a can of Coke and a chocolate bar from my bag of goodies.

  He took them and immediately put them on the side table, leading me to the little kitchen.

  “Brian and Josh still asleep?” I said, asking after his flatmates.

  “Yeah, think they had a pretty late one too.”

  He sighed and yawned, putting a hand in his dressing gown pocket and taking out his phone. He spent a lot of his time in this way, eyes glued to Twitter or Facebook or whatever. It didn’t matter what the real live conversation happened to be. Wound me up no end.

  “So—” I started to say.

  “Last night,” he said, glancing at me briefly.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Pretty messed up.”

  “Wasn’t it, yeah?”

  “Do you remember?”

  “Well, yeah, mostly. You?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I was far from sure if we were remembering the same thing. Still, I didn’t want to go through it all in detail—the bloody thing gave me a headache—so I tried a different tack.

  “So I woke up this morning. One of the worst hangovers in a long time.”

  “Yeah?” He gave a little laugh, still mostly looking at his phone. “Me too.”

  We always woke up with terrible hangovers on a Saturday, so those words intended to break the ice quickly froze over. I stood there, silently wondering what I should say now.

  “What are you doing here so early, Davey?”

  His tone was not unsympathetic, but a little distant.

  “I just had to get out of my place,” I said. “Caused some damage, you see.”

  “Oh,” he said in that non-committal way of his.

  “Yeah,” I said. “In my toilet. Look, mate, you do remember last night, don’t you?”

  He sighed and looked at his feet in those awful slippers his mum always bought him, his hands in his pockets again, no doubt his fingers wriggling all over that bloody phone in there.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said, gulping, his voice suddenly as faint as that of a mouse. “I was hoping it was one of those drunk-dreams.”

  “Nah, mate,” I said. “I mean, yeah, I was hoping that too. But it wasn’t. Not at all.”

  “You mean you . . .” He nodded down to my nether regions.

  “Yes, mate,” I said, trying to get him to look me in the eye.

  “It’s unbelievable,” he said, still all hushed. “Are you sure?”

  “You think I’d wake you up this early for no reason?”

  “No, but—”

  “Don’t want a demonstration, do you?”

  “No—”

  “It’s real. It’s realer than real. It’s ridiculous.”

  We both were looking down at our feet now. Undoubtedly the strangest conversation we’d ever had.

  “What now then?” he said, still looking down.

  “I dunno.”

  “Do you need the loo?” he said.

  “Not right now.”

  But I would soon. And then, indeed, what would I do?

  “Cool,” he said.

  Apparently relieved by that, he pulled out his phone again and went back to the swiping and the biting of his lip. I let him do that. Phone swiping wasn’t something I did so much myself. The news always bored me, and Facebook was for show-offs. What else was a phone for, apart from shitty games and the occasional porn sesh? Nope, if I was nervous or bored or glum, I usually just munched my way out of it.

  For a while I sat there on a stool in Martin’s kitchen, wondering why on earth this was happening to me, what the hell my next move should be, and why I’d wanted to involve Martin in the first place. The problem was, there seemed no obvious answer to any of these questions. The immediate problem of where to wee and how to get through the morning seemed to be the most pressing issue, yet even that was an impossible dilemma.

  “Oh dear,” said Martin, looking at his phone, obviously trying to suppress a grin.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “The Dog and Whistle. It’s in the news.”

  “Give it here,” I said, grabbing the device from him, my heart pumping.

  It was on Twitter and the story was being posted by a local news site, the Crawley Observer.

  Pub toilet destroyed by mystery vandals.

  Clicking through to their website, I read the full story, all two paragraphs of it. An absence of the words “piss” or “acid” coupled with an insistence on referring to the vandals as a “group” confirmed to me that they had, as yet, no idea what actually happened. That was a relief, at least.

  I handed Martin back his phone.

  Then mine began to ring, buzzing in my pocket and giving me a shock. Martin looked at me with a similar fear. It was as if any minute now we expected the police to come bursting in yelling “gotcha!” and slapping handcuffs on me and taking photos of my knob for evidence. Silly bugger, Dave, I told myself. You’ve done nothing illegal! Was it my fault my piss had gone toxic? And how the bloody hell did that happen anyway?

  I pulled out the phone and didn’t recognise the caller. Could that actually be the police? I thought for a moment and realised I had to answer it either way.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Dave Smith?” said a gruff, middle-aged male voice.

  That was my name, but for some reason, I didn’t answer.

  “The tenant of flat 5A?”

  “Yeah?” I said, enunciating the word like a big, cocky question mark.

  “There’s been some damage in the building. Pretty major, actually,” said the very fussy-sounding voice, “and it seems to have started in the vicinity of your toilet.”

  “No, really?” I said, trying to sound surprised.

  “Yes,” he said, enunciating his word like a finger in my face. “Where are you? We’ve been knocking on your door.” He hesitated, then added, with zero interest, “Are you okay?”

  �
��I’m fine,” I said. “I stayed at a mate’s last night.”

  When not face to face, lying comes naturally to me. I have a lot of practice in my day job selling worthless phone plan upgrades to strangers via the telephone.

  “Right, well can you come round and let us in?” he said, barely hiding his impatience. “I’ve got the plumbers here and we need to sort this out. I live in flat 4B, you see, beneath you. It’s most inconvenient.”

  Now I really had to think fast. I had lied about last night. Should I return to the flat? What if they suspected something? How many lies would I have to spin? Lies upon lies. And most disconcertingly, what if I needed to pee again? This thought in particular kept coming back to bite me. I felt the room spinning and my cholesterol-lined heart pumping itself faster and faster in my flabby chest, the sugars of the morning rushing to my head.

  “I can’t do that. Sorry,” I blurted. “I’m not in town. My mate lives in Guildford. I’m away for the weekend.”

  Martin was shaking his head, mouthing the word “Guildford.”

  The old bastard from 4B was getting all whiny and whingy now. Just talking to him reminded me of our previous encounters, usually late at night when returning from a bender, or me accidentally getting in his way when he lugged his shopping back from Asda.

  “Can’t the landlord let you in?” I said, cutting him off. “I’m sure they’ve got a spare key.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” he said with obvious irritation.

  “Please let me know what you find,” I said, trying to sound concerned.

  And the cheeky bugger got there first and put the phone down on me.

  I didn’t mind the rudeness though. He was the opposite of a pleasure to speak to.

  Martin made some tea and toast and gave me a mug and we just sort of hovered around in his little kitchen, drinking tea and munching toast, not knowing what to do or even what to think. The hangover didn’t help. Plus, I wasn’t sure he really believed what was going on. I know I barely did. It’s pretty hard to pull together any sort of plan when you don’t even fully believe what you are experiencing is not some kind of nightmare you may wake from at any second.

  “Well then,” he said, chugging the last of his tea, looking at me uncertainly. “You just gonna hang out in my kitchen till it blows over?”

  “I—” I started to say, but I was beginning to feel very alone. I wanted Martin to help me, to share in my predicament, but he kept on finding ways to throw it back onto me. I suppose I was the one with the problem, but still, what are mates for?

  “I think I just need to keep my head down for a while,” I said. “Perhaps things’ll go back to normal.”

  I looked down at the zone of my crotch and shook my head.

  “Actually,” I said. “We’ll have another chance to test it now. I need a piss.”

  “Now?” he said, his eyes widening.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I can hold for a while. Let’s go out. I don’t wanna ruin your bog.”

  “Right,” he said, visibly relieved.

  *****

  We nipped out together, rushing over to Hope Park, only a five-minute skip from his place. It was one of those smaller sort of pathetic half-parks with just a little hilly green and a small field with goal posts and a few clumps of trees here and there, enough to provide a basic space for a footy game and maybe a few basic hideaways for kids who don’t want to be seen for a little while.

  “So . . .” said Martin, looking around, hands deep in his parka jacket pockets, his floppy hair blowing in the chilly breeze. “Where you wanna go?”

  “Over there’ll do,” I said, pointing up the slope. “In the trees.”

  We headed into one of those small gatherings of trees just mentioned.

  Among the trees it was damp and cold and there were bits of rubbish strewn on the ground everywhere, crisp packets and stubbed-out fags and bottles and that. It already smelled a bit of wee. Dirty buggers, I thought. No reason at all not to pee here.

  At first, it was an amazing sight to behold. The crazy, radiant green hue of my stuff, all the packets and plastics sort of wrinkling in on themselves, into nothing, as if they had been chucked in a fire. They gave out this unhealthy yellowy-brown gas that to me stank a bit like those really pungent mushrooms they serve in poncy restaurants.

  “Blimey,” said Martin.

  “I know,” I said.

  I kept on weeing and the ground just seemed to dissolve, to fizz away. The earth was cut in great lines that just sort of seeped down forever. I spread the wee liberally over the area in front of me, and soon I was looking at this roundish hole just digging itself ever deeper to reveal stones and worms and even one half of a pair of old boots, which also just kind of sank in on themselves and melted away as soon as they were touched by my nasty stuff.

  It was a biggish pee I needed this time, what with all that Coca-Cola and tea, so I had to keep on going for long enough that things became a little complicated. As the hole got deeper, I realised that I had hit onto the roots of a nearby tree. I could also see that splashes were flicking onto the trunk, splattering it with corrosive lines, sort of like scratches. As the roots themselves became degraded underneath, melting into a pulpy and bubbly brown wooden liquid, I realised that I was killing this lovely old tree that had done nothing to me except exist in my current wee spot.

  More worryingly, losing its roots soon caused it to sway like a drunkard. I moved my line of emerald liquid over a tad, but then, stupid idiot that I am, I hit directly upon the trunk of another poor tree. The effect was instantaneous and devastating. It was as if I’d sliced it with a magic axe!

  “Shit!” cried Martin.

  The smell of rotten and burning wood filled the air, and I watched as the whole big thing tottered over and fell, crashing down, smashing through nearby trees, ripping branches off their trunks, shaking out the squawking birds and chittering squirrels and I’m sure many other creepy crawlies. Martin and I jumped back on opposite sides of the falling lug as it fell straight down between us with a heavy thud.

  Oddly, it managed to almost entirely cover that big old hole I’d made. For a split second, I wasn’t sure if that was lucky or not. Perhaps a good sign?

  Then Martin started screaming and I decided that it probably wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 3

  MARTIN WAS ON THE GROUND, moaning, his voice going up to pitches I thought only available to little girls.

  “Are you alright, mate?” I called.

  “I think I’ve broken my foot!” he whined.

  I zipped up and scampered over the fallen trunk. Sure enough, there was Martin, on the ground, one leg caught under a large branch.

  “It hurts like buggery, mate,” he said. “It’s definitely broken.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry!”

  I really was.

  “That’s alright, mate. It wasn’t your fault.”

  He laughed to himself and looked up at me with mischievous eyes. “Your pee really is something though, isn’t it? Christ, mate! Davey! That colour! You brought down a bloody tree!”

  He laughed but I hardly knew what to say. Despite his injury, he was excited by it. It was fun for him somehow. Funny, even. It only made me sick though.

  “You do realise what this means,” he said.

  I didn’t want to know.

  “This makes you some kind of a . . .” He searched for the word. “Some kind of . . . superhero!”

  “What are you on?” I cried. “I’m a freak. That’s all.”

  “No,” he said. “Well, yeah. But you’ve got super wee! Monster Davey shoots acid from his—”

  Jeez, he was going completely over the top.

  “That’s enough, mate!”

  He laughed to himself, hard.

  Too hard though, for the laughter vibrated to his broken limb and he winced painfully, grabbing his leg. Then I heard the sound of that little girl crying again.

  *****

  My predicament was complicated considerab
ly by the falling of that tree onto Martin’s foot. Not only did I have to deal with my wee and the issues it presented for the day ahead, but I now also had to make sure Martin got the medical attention he needed in such a way that I did not get into trouble myself while I was at it. Plus, Martin, having seen what my wee could do, was almost delirious. I started to wonder if the tree had hit him on the head and not just on the foot. Or perhaps his brain was in his feet—he was always a football-mad sort of a lad.

  I called an ambulance, careful to explain things in the most general of terms. At the same time, Martin managed to call James and tell him everything that had happened, giggling and wincing his way through the conversation.

  “Come on, mate,” he said when I gave him a dirty look. “I had to tell him. We had a footy game planned for today. Plus, they were all there last night. They saw everything, same as me!”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Mate! Don’t be so weird about the whole thing. It’s amazing, is what it is. Amazing! He thought so too.”

  “Just don’t go blabbing to these doctors, alright? Unless you want them thinking you’re bonkers.”

  I could see the cogs and wheels turning in his brain as he considered this. I’m sure we would have continued to reason that one out for some time, but then two medics carrying a stretcher burst into the trees.

  “Hello,” one of them said to Martin, ignoring me. “You alright?”

  “Tree fell on him,” I said, trying to sound inconspicuous.

  “It’s my foot,” said Martin, pointing to it.

  The medics looked at each other and at the tree and at me and Martin, and I could see them wondering what in the hell had really gone on. But they shrugged it off, examining the foot. When one of them touched it, Martin winced in pain.

  “It’s broken alright,” said the medic. “We’ll take you in now.”

  One of them lifted the thick branch that had fallen on Martin’s leg, while the other pulled him out from under. They then both lifted him onto the stretcher.

  One of them looked at me. “Do you want to accompany your friend?”

  I nodded. “Yes, please.”