Martin JP Green

A picture framer and semi pro banjo player finds a reason to be radical. Read Chapter One for free.

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Chapter One

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It must be all of twenty years ago, now I think about it. I can’t fathom where those years went, any more than I can begin to explain 

that point in my life at which everything seemed to be crumbling into irreparable decay and yet when, out of nowhere, things started to
solidify and even make some sort of sense.

 

In the midst of mindless routines and a proportionate and progressive loss of focus a light suddenly went on. Most mindless was the drinking. I still do that, but in a more disciplined way, a sort of palliative process rather than the all-out self-assault that applied as I neared the end of my thirties. Why did I do it? I was reasonably well educated, experienced enough to know better, and yet Monday morning after Monday morning I found myself suicidally hungover.

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So why do it? Like so many other things in my life it was a routine, one which started off as a tactic to cling on to the fleeting remnants of the weekend but which, like most routines, ending up just being what I did. Sunday night offered the last chance to stick two fingers up at the week ahead. Isobel hadn’t helped over the years. Isobel and I were a ‘thing’, except we weren’t much of a thing by then and only got together to remind ourselves of all the good reasons why she’d moved out of my cosy little cottage on the outskirts of town.

Mind you, we got together a fair amount considering. It was handy for the sex as much as anything else. We sort of knew what to do and in what order. It was another routine, another pre-ordained pattern of behaviour, another way to avoid thinking or making an effort. Routines provided a prefabricated structure to hang my shapeless existence on. Sometimes they even fooled me into thinking it had actually got a shape.

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Isobel was as bad as me in many ways, certainly when it came to boozing, and she smoked too, which got under my skin a bit sometimes, that is until I got so pissed I’d start bumming fags off her which got right under hers.
‘Why don’t you buy your own, for Christ’s sake?’
‘I don’t smoke!’ I would state with exasperating illogicality, inhaling deeply and making the most of the transitory dizziness.

Isobel and I hadn’t hit it off one Sunday night which meant the occasional routine end of the weekend tumble had never materialised. Actually, for me at least, this had been a relief. I’d not been ‘up to it’ on a couple of occasions round about that time. A cooling off period
had been agreed – not because of that but a difference of opinion. Certain haunts would be avoided by her, certain by me, all by mutual consent and all long ago established: another routine.

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To read more, download the whole of Chapter One for free.

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