Sin City Read Free

and I hate this hospital. I’ve tried to kick the habit, but I started sweating, shaking, and I sucked so many fruit-drops I put on half a stone. Fruit-drops don’t do much for you – not like nicotine. I smoke Players No. 6 because I love my fix. That rhymes. Perhaps I should do it in poetry. At least it would be different. Fix, kicks, six.
    Six used to be my lucky lucky number until it let me down. It was September 6th they caught me. I’d noticed the first dead leaves, just that morning on my way to the supermarket, even picked one up, held it limp and faded in my hand. Yet it was summer still for all the normal world – girls in flimsy dresses, the ice-cream man in shirt-sleeves dishing out his Soft-Whip, the smell of rotting peaches. I didn’t have a summer, not at all, not this year. I was crying in the shop, sniffling up and down the aisles without a Kleenex. It was Kleenex I took first – a mini-pack. I meant to pay, honestly. It was just that I had to use them straight away, to wipe my eyes. The other things I didn’t even want. I don’t know why I did it. I still feel frightened if I think about it – not just the police-station and the court and the psychiatrist, but the fact it was me sitting on that bench with a great burly policewoman beside me in a room with khaki walls and a “WANTED” poster just above my head – a smiling rapist. Imagine smiling in your “WANTED” photograph.
    All I took was a packet of Kraft cheese slices and a small swiss roll. The swiss roll was past its “sell by” date, and marked down to half price. If I’d really meant to steal, then why take cut-price things, instead of caviare or gin or something? I love swiss rolls – unrolling them and scraping out the filling, eating it first with a spoon. I never did with that one. They caught me at the door. We had swiss roll at school every Tuesday dinner. Cold with tepid custard. I was Somebody at school – even did my A levels. Then my father died, just two weeks afterwards. Molière and Hamlet, then a funeral.
    I smoke Players No.6 because my father died. That’s true, in fact. He smoked himself, Rothman’s Kingsize. We also shared noses and the same colour hair. (I’m nothing like my mother.) I’d been accepted by Southampton and he was so thrilled with me, so proud. His child at university! His nose and hair and mouth at university. They never went, in fact. I turned down Exeter as well. And Keele. I smoke Players No.6 as a substitute for Keele. I smoke Players No.6 because I loved my father best in all the world and he went and died of cancer, killed the summer. Died of Rothman’s Kingsize. The doctor said perhaps I want to die as well, subconsciously. With Dr Bates, everything’s subconsciously. I smoke Players No.6 because they’ll kill me in the end, help me join my father. Want a ciggie, Dad?
    God! It’s hot in here. Really sweaty hot. They could use it as a sauna if it wasn’t for the boiler and those great fat lumbering pipes. It’s even got the slatted wooden benches. I hide here every morning, use it as a bolt-hole. The library was hopeless. They wouldn’t let me smoke there, and Miss Barratt kept tiptoeing up with books, dropping them on my desk like a dog with an old slipper. Next, I tried the flower-room which at least smelt better than the ward, but those stiff bouquets in cellophane reminded me of death again, and someone always found me anyway. Bathrooms are all right for half an hour, but after that, they always flush you out, make you clean the bath when you haven’t even used it. This boiler-room is perfect, if you can stand the killing heat. It’s down some steep stone steps, so you feel extra safe, and can use the slats to write on, or lie flat out and doze.
    I just can’t stand that ward. People wouldn’t believe it if they saw the wrecks they keep there. Some of them have been