My left eye opened
involuntarily and I tried to focus as the light bombarded the pupil with
colours and shapes. Slowly my other senses also awoke and I began to
recognise smells, sounds and visual objects. My mind also recognised,
acknowledged and understood the pounding in my brain that felt like a
300 lb gorilla trying to play the bongos with sledgehammers.
I closed my eye and tried to
fall into unconsciousness.
I failed.
Gradually my body began to
ache as my muscles either cramped up or failed to respond at all. With
an effort as monumental as any of Samsons seven tasks I managed to move
my head from where it was resting upon the sticky wooden desk to an
almost upright position. I tried again with the eyes, only this time
opening them both at once. Once I have managed to stop them spinning I
attempted to get both eyes looking in the same direction. I managed it
just about.
My nose resumed operations
although it was instantaneously overloaded as it smelt the overpowering
smell of drunkenness that drifted around my body like a cloud on a
mountain top.
My stomach made a rude noise
and began to move its contents around in a way most likely to facilitate
a reappearance of the meal eaten last night.
My memory quickly reminded
both my brain and my stomach that last meal I had eaten had been a very
heavy liquid lunch.
I managed to fall to my
knees with my head over the wastebasket before my stomach evicted its
contents in an un stoppable motion that left my eyes watering, my nose
running and my throat bleeding. My head only just managed to stay
connected to my neck as I retched until I not only saw stars but whole
galaxies spinning around my head.
I leaned back against the
desk and closed my eyes, waiting for the cosmic show around my head to
disperse.
Time passed and so did wind.
With my eyes closed, my nose
shutdown for repairs and my head pounding only slightly less, my ears
became the focal point of my senses. I could hear my rasping breathing,
the occasional gurgle and bubble from the waste paper basket and the
small hand of the office clock journeying around the face. Tic,
tick-tock, tic, tick-tock. If nothing else could be said about the
office clock, at least it had rhythm.
As I became fully awake I
realised several things. I had been drinking. I was still drunk. And I
was experiencing a hangover while still drunk. To experience a hangover
while still being technically drunk is not an easy thing to achieve.
Obviously I had achieved it, otherwise I would not be in the state I
was.
To try and stop thinking
about this I opened my eyes and felt the room spinning. I closed them
for a second only to open them again and realise that the room wasn't
spinning, and surprisingly neither was my head. It was the overhead fan
that was rotation with a wobble that, on a woman, would have drawn wolf
whistles from builders and sailors.
My clothes felt too tight
yet I felt too weak to loosen them. I also felt unable to make my legs
work in a workable fashion so I sat there, a sad state of manhood,
unable to stand, unable to think and unable to keep the contents of my
stomach down. All in all, a normal way to start the day.
I must have drifted back off
to sleep for I awoke with a start. Nearly a minute passed before I
realised that the banging was not the gorilla in my head (who had now
grown to the size of a rhino) but someone knocking on the door of the
office. I tried to remember if I had locked the door when I had stumbled
my way in, but having failed to remember how I managed to get to the
office, locking doors was a non starter from the off.
The banging stopped and I
tried to listen to hear the door being opened. Not hearing anything I
crawled around the desk to look at the door, as if that would make a
difference.
My eyes worked their way
along the floor to the office door, which was shut. I collapsed on the
floor onto my back and stared at the ceiling trying to remember when I
had last felt this bad. I was sure it was sometime last week but with my
body and mind functioning as badly as they were, it was no surprise to
find my memory working not working too well either.
After lying there for what
seemed forever, I made a determined effort to stand up. I made it, even
if I had to lean against my desk to do it. My clothes were a mess, my
head was a mess, my desk was a mess. It looked like it was going to be a
messy day.
Momentarily forgetting what
city I was in, I looked out the window to see what weather would be
affecting my life today. It was foggy, as normal. Since moving to this
city I had come to accept that every morning, no matter what season, it
would start foggy, and continue to be foggy until around mid-day where
it began to rain, and rain, and rain. Unless it was winter, in which
case it would snow, and snow, and snow. Evenings during the summer would
feature electrical storms of the kind that must have inspired Mary
Shelley. Any other season and it would be a mixture of rain and fog. The
only sun ever seen here was on the cover of travel brochures.
Mentally dragging myself
away from the weather, I stumbled towards the en-suite bathroom which
had been one of the major selling points when I had rented the office.
Above the toilet was a decades supply of humours calendars about cats.
The previous tenant had obviously liked felines way too much to be
healthy, but the one advantage I had found was that a decades supply of
calendars makes a wonderful head rest when you are leaning against the
wall as you relieve yourself. I stood there so long I felt the April cat
had been stapled to my head.
Agreeably empty of bladder,
I stumbled and tripped my way across my office to the small closet that
I kept stocked with clothes in case I ever had had to work overnight on
a difficult case. In the three years I had been a private detective and
had used this office, I had not once worked past five in the afternoon.
This did not stop me from storing clean suits and shirts though, as
experience had taught me already that some days, waking up in the office
is the only way to go.
I found a fairly decent dark
suit, along with a hand made dark red shirt and hung them on the closet
door. I made sure that my office door was locked, and after emptying and
washing out the waste paper basket, I stripped and gave myself a though
washing at the washroom sink. I swallowed several headache tablets and
drank enough water to have to relieve myself again, but I began to feel
halfway normal.
Feeling a little fresher
than before I quickly dressed and found a matching fedora which I
planted on my head at a suitably rakish angle.
After opening the windows to
try and rid the office of the stink of my stomach, I hung up the suit I
had worn last night on a coat hanger and left the office, carefully
locking it after me.
The elevator was,
predictably, out of order so I trudged down the three flights of stairs
to the street below. After dropping off my suit at the cleaners I
decided to risk some breakfast, so I made my way over to the all day
diner opposite the train station. After gruffly ordering a large cooked
breakfast I settled down to stare at the world outside the window from
the rim of the coffee cup. I drank as I tried to work out how the hell I
had ended up in this poor excuse for a city
