Bright Spark by Gavin Smith Page B

and
crept over his windowsill drew new sparks from it. He sank further into the
armchair and pulled the hood fully over his head.
           He was
wearing all his layers and had puffed his way through another twenty quid’s
worth of mediocre draw but he couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t bring the roll-up
to his lips without it zigzagging like a bluebottle. The carpet was strewn with
lager tins, some half full and leaking, some crushed and brimming with fag
ends. He’d no idea how many he’d sunk tonight.
    He’d
wanted to get so wrecked that all the memories piling up in his head would just
dissolve into fog. But where he’d wanted emptiness, he’d found fear and hatred
and longing without form. If he let himself get sober, they’d resolve
themselves into pictures and sounds to loop through his mind again and again.
He knew he couldn’t win, but he could make sure he didn’t care.
           He had
seen his face in the bathroom mirror and didn’t want to see it again. Knowing
what it looked like just made him feel the pain in all its hues. Purples,
blacks and greens stained and bloated the left side of his face around the eye,
its white stained red. If he closed his good eye, it was like looking out from
inside a cherry-red letterbox. 
           He was
glad the flat was empty. He knew it was somehow important to be alone today.
The place was in his name anyway.  Even though Ali Bongo brought in money and a
variety of pharmaceuticals, he had some very bad habits and would bring the
filth back with him sooner or later. He wasn’t magical enough to make handcuffs
disappear for long. With another year on probation, Firth didn’t need uniformed
visitors.
           He
didn’t even know if Ali Bongo had called in that week. The mail had been piled
against the radiator by the opening of the door, a paper snowdrift. There would
be the usual rubbish of interest to neither of them: junk mail and final
demands for the previous half dozen occupiers; new bills he never intended to
pay; other people’s pre-approved credit card applications begging to be abused
if only he had the energy or the nous.
    There
would also be official looking missives from the probation service and the
benefits agency that he really should look at. By now, Tesco might have written
to enquire why he no longer saw fit to come and push trolleys for minimum wage.
His solicitor, fit bitch but way up herself, might have tried to tell him again
that he had to stand up in court against the screw if he wanted to see a penny
of compo.    
           His
hands had moved back to his face of their own accord, wanting to probe the
bruising but not daring to. He pursed his lips, tasting neither nicotine nor
heat. The roll-up lay on the arm of the sofa, its fire dead. The tartan fabric
boasted a dozen faded scars where butts that he’d dropped while sleepy or
stoned had failed to ignite the fire retardant material. The housing
association took such good care of their properties.
    He’d
have to try harder if he wanted to go the way of his old mum, comatose on vodka
and stout, number thirty-eight of her forty a day habit dropping down the seam
of the charity shop sofa and burning her alive in the front room of that
two-up, two-down while she rolled and roared and puked. He’d been out,
prowling, not up to mischief for once, not on a school night in his first week
at the big school, just wanting to be away from her and swallowed up by the
cool, quiet darkness.
    Blown
home by the breeze, he’d stood alongside the gawping neighbours for minutes,
beyond the cordon and the fire engines, expecting the silly, useless cow to
show herself. Then he was noticed and the neighbours put up a cordon of
whispering and shuffling around him. A female hand or two almost reached out
for him but were stung into retreat by hissing male whispers.
    It
all made what his dad did to himself seem like pure, cold logic. It taught him
that what he’d done to other