Lozium

I cracked the Stella and I toasted him. It would’ve been his 50th, but he didn’t live that long. Drinking since sixteen had burned his oesophagus until a cancer grew right there in his throat.

Yeah, I mean, Eric had been dead a long time. But since it was his birthday that day, and I couldn’t forget that, you know? – well, since it was his birthday I kept thinking about just how dead he was. He was very dead, two-years dead. Everybody would be dead one day. I couldn’t get over that and death circled around in my head until I realised that I was anxious about something.

The Chancellor announced the Autumn budget and declared war on cigarettes. I thought of my colleagues – the chefs at the restaurant smoking their cheaper Polish ones. They reminded me of Eric sometimes, working shitty hours for shitty pay before getting home too late to tell their sleeping wives and girlfriends that they loved them.

I rolled a joint and lit it with the tealight, listened to songs Eric had recommended to me. It was nice to sit through reminders of him, to hear the soundtrack he lived his life to, and before it made me feel suicidal, it made me feel kind of alive. I remember this one time, about a year after Eric died, a girl I was seeing asked me after we’d had sex, what it was like to feel suicidal.

‘I don’t feel suicidal right now,’ I’d replied. I hadn’t wanted to talk about it, distracted by my climax.

She didn’t mention it again, she didn’t have time to. I called it off a week later. That girl always wore Led Zeppelin t-shirts, even though she never listened to any of their music. It drove me mad, and Eric would have considered it nothing short of blasphemy.

I thought about Eric’s face, as I sat with AC/DC playing in the background. I was in the kitchen, hoping it might hotbox, still drinking the Stella. Alcohol was always good, even when it tasted bad. Back when I was a kid and Eric was alive and lived with us (those were the good days, we just didn’t know that), I had hated the way his drinking could swing out of control. It was like a bad equation; Eric plus alcohol plus mum’s temper and the result was an all-nighter of slagging him off until we were too tired to, and eventually going to bed to sleep off the anger. But I got older and I learned how easy it is to drink too much and fuck up.

 

I thought about Eric’s face, diamond shaped and tanned despite his Scottish birth. His beard, usually he had stubble but when he had a shave his blue eyes gleamed – they really did. My mum and him – we used to say in school that people ‘suited’ if they looked like they went together – well, mum and Eric suited.

I could hear Vicky arguing with her boyfriend in the next flat. I’d taken to watching television in the lounge before going to sleep, and I hadn’t heard it for a while. I honed in on the music, even though I couldn’t always make out the words. Eventually Vicky stopped shouting and I figured they’d either made up, or gone to sleep off their anger. I smoked another joint, listened to AC/DC’s catalogue on Spotify, remembering things about Eric that made me smile, until I fell asleep at the kitchen table, like he would have.