Not for Human Consumption

Craig Watson

Description

This story will not just grab you. It will get you by the throat and chuck you down the staircase.An authentic portrayal of life on the streets. A struggle for survival. Triumph over adversity and prejudice, against incredible oddsLiving in a brutal and savage world with minds destroyed by psychosis and addiction. You could be killed or maimed for the price of a drink.But even in the cruellest of places you can find love, hope and friendship. Danny was that beacon of light in Magda's dark and violent existence of criminals and misfits, who slept on the cold hard pavements at night.Could he save her from the gates of insanity or death? Perhaps she could only save herself.

Informations

• Publié par: The Conrad Press
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839782572
• Langue: English

Extrait

Not for Human Consumption
Craig Watson


Not for Human Consumption
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com 
 [e-mail]
ISBN 978-1-839782-57-2
Copyright © Craig Watson, 2021
The moral right of Craig Watson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


I would like to thank my editor Jemma Gurr for her superb assistance with the creation of this book and for her editorial contributions.


1
I t was a bitter dawn. Bereft of laughter. Bereft of joy. Bereft of spirit.
The freezing mist was rolling in again, drifting through the shadows and curling through the air over parked cars, street signs, and benches, creating strange ghost-like apparitions.
A beautiful russet fox in its thick winter coat caught in the glow of a streetlamp crouched low, shrouded in mist unperturbed. Transfixed, it seemed to yawn exposing its sharp fanged teeth as a gust of wind ruffled the hair on its back before disappearing down the subway.
Padding through the underpass it had to run the gauntlet past junkies and drunks on both sides of the tunnel. Men and women with addled brains. Collapsed veins. Abscesses about to burst. Mentally and physically damaged and deranged. Schizoids. Minds warped by psychosis, trapped in an insane Punch and Judy sideshow whose cries and moans echoed down the gloomy tunnel like a tormented spirit.
A man sitting on a blanket drank from a can as he looked at the fox hands shaking. You could only wonder how much he was aware of anything, as he rolled his bloodshot eyes that had witnessed so much pain, loss, and affliction.
There was a new arrival sitting on an upturned crate outside a white battered tent. He had a towel over his head and was sniffing from an aerosol can. He inhaled the spray and it took its numbing effect.
They were all on a long dark road, nameless and without end, and saw many a day through a thick mist of chaos marooned down here on the fringes of society.
Things never looked bleaker for Magda. Pregnant and addicted to drugs and alcohol, it seemed the world had forgotten about her and left her to rot like the rubbish at her feet.
Cheeks ruddy and eyes dilating, they shouted across the subway and glared at each other psychotically. Dirt and cuts itched against their emaciated limbs as they curled up into tight balls, shivering and slowly self-destructing in the cold morning air. Drenched in the slag of weather forecasts, trapped in a world of continuous insomnia as others slept, and sheltered inside their tents, unaware of the destruction of their bodies slowly prising apart in their sleep. Not really sleeping, but lazy and crippled from their anaesthetic, curled into their tight balls coiling the ugliness of their wounds.
Every fibre of Harry’s being was screaming for mercy and begging for forgiveness. He sobbed, barely able to speak, gasping for breath and shaking apart. Perspiration was seeping from every pore, only he was frozen. Jolts charged through his poisoned body as he lay cowering. Fear gripped him as the voices inside his head grew louder.
Billy sat dribbling from his mouth, his eyeballs sucked up to the top of his head. Two women in business suits stood to the side some distance away from him, chatting and rubbishing him over their plastic cups of hot coffee, unblemished and well-nourished.
The industrial-strength detergents could do nothing to mask the stench down here as people slopped along the urine and rain-soaked floor, staring down to the end of the dark passage which followed that fox to where the cold light of dawn shone through the other side. The walls were daubed with the obscene etchings of sick, the roof was leaking, and shouts echoed between the constant drip dripping of the water and feet splashing to the puddles on the floor. The stripped lighting along the defaced cream tiled walls kept flickering on and off were a moth fluttered. A creature of beauty with soft delicate wings of green and purple in a dark world surrounded by dirt and filth.
Men and women lay curled up in blankets amongst the squalor. Men with dead eyes burning into your conscience and sad desperate eyes staring into your soul. The old Latvian was curled up like a mongrel on the concrete floor with matted hair and ripped clothes riddled with fleas. Blood was splattered over his face, with most of his teeth kicked out from his past adventures. He was slowly dying an ugly death.
Hideous-looking creatures with mangled features and mangled limbs. Grubby and twisted with a curvature of the spine and bent out of shape by life’s pliers. Suffering from a hopeless condition of mind body and spirit, which so many pursued to the gates of insanity or death. Few here managed to escape from the twilight zone of madmen and even madder women.
Joyce slumped against the wall, invisible to the constant flow of human traffic pushing and shoving and running as fast as they could to get out of the place. She was slurring and her words rambled along, incoherent and nonsensical. As she sat on a pile of cardboard with a screaming baby in her arms, millions of shopping bags, fast food wrappers, and cartons, washed over the concrete floor towards her like a great plastic tidal surge.
The baby was shared and passed around like a parcel by others in a grotesque game of cat and mouse to pull on the heartstrings of caring but gullible passers-by. She made a fortune.
The day was breaking as the fox ran through the deluge of flying debris to reach the light at the end of the tunnel. Passing the once beautiful ginger-haired girl with the lesions on her face and away from the flow of people and away from the lost souls sitting on their blankets and away from the hundred yards of sleep like a small community and emerged from the darkness and into the light.


2
D anny saw the blood dripping to the floor from his cut temple. He felt the squirming inside his stomach expand as they went inside him, and his insides ached and rocked. He felt it stab. He felt it shoot out stinging like acid. It became hard, there ceased to be flesh. That thing inside his body, an instrument of torture. Like the stale heart inside his mouth, he tried to dislodge it with his mind, but he couldn’t.
They carried on and his heart burst. One kept looking at him, eyes wide as saucers, mouth open, and hair flapping across his face as the other moved inside again. Nausea crept against Danny’s lungs, adrenalin drooling into his brain he struggled to break free from their hold as they sunk themselves deeper inside him.
They left him. The door slammed and Danny watched a twenty-pound note gently float to the floor.
Danny’s life had become a war zone. He had become damaged by the violence inflicted upon him. All feeling flooded from within him. Panic filled his heart and the punchbag that he had become groaned.
The day always began with the shakes. Sickness and fear. Paranoia, dry retches, dizziness, difficulty breathing, Sore eyes, dry mouth, banging head, aching limbs, raging hunger, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, the shits, chills, projectile vomiting, chronic diarrhoea, and stomach cramps, all of which only a fix would fix.
Danny could feel the bile rising from the pit of his stomach. He dragged himself up off the floor crawled into a cubicle bent over the edge of a cracked and blocked toilet bowl full to the rim with diarrhoea gagged and shook before letting go at both ends.
Blackout.
Sometime later, he regained consciousness.
Danny managed to stagger outside and onto the street. It was another soulless day, cast underneath a leaden sky.
Danny felt ashamed. His clothes were rags full of excrement urine and vomit, his body was bloodied and bruised, his face full of bruises and bumps, cuts, and scratches. Emerging from the old toilet block, the daylight stung his eyes. His head was fizzing, and everything was blurred and distorted like looking through a fairground mirror.
Yesterday’s snow now formed streams of dirty brown slush on the pavement, which seeped through his split soled boots, held together with gorilla tape and dampening his socks.
Coming out of the toilet was a trial once more. You had to run the gauntlet of drunks and smackheads gathered outside their tents, viciously demanding money and cigarettes.
The bitter north wind whipped around their canvas tents, crying and moaning like a tormented spirit as it howled through their ramshackle encampment outside the old toilet block. Danny saw some people sitting on abandoned broken furniture, some on the ground, and some standing around a makeshift oil drum fire, like a small post-apocalyptic community.
Danny sat on the damp grass broke, broken, cold, and dying. Dying for a fix. His legs had gone stiff and the alcohol poisoning cramps had set in. The muscles in his legs spasming, sending shock waves of pain to his brain, rendering him immobile and useless on the wet earth, gritting his teeth until the pain began to wane, and ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea. It took a herculean effort to sit upright and he began rubbing his muscles to get the circulation back.
The noise from the traffic on the ring road, which whizzed relentlessly around the small park, seemed deafening driving into his head like the pneumatic drills on the road works. The traffic exhaust fumes that hung in the air were choking.
Danny reached into his sock, took out his pink inhaler, shook it, and tried to take a puff. But to his dismay, it had run out of spray. Instead, he had to resort to coughing up heaps of phlegm.
Blac