Fiction: Walking These Backstreets

By Bradford Middleton

Jack remembers what it felt like to live, he’d done that, hell he’d done plenty of that, enough for several lifetimes in fact, and this, well whatever the hell it was it was most definitely not living.  This existence, this futile, pointless nothing, has somehow caught him off guard as something most unexpected and, in all honesty, something he’d never had to deal with before and he knows that somehow it has got to be this town, this god-damn town. Hell he’d only moved here six months before but somehow it had already exhausted him despite there being, apparently, absolutely nothing to do except drink, drug, read books, listen to music and sleep.  Now whilst these might be grand worthy things to enjoy the drink here is crazy expensive, the drugs offer him nothing thrilling whilst the books sit on a shelf all read and the albums all listened but it shouldn’t be that hard for this town to deliver and everyday the search goes on.

He’ll leave the rooming house he rents a space in and head into town hoping that today will be that day, that rare beautiful day.  A day like the one he had in New York City in 2000 when he stumbled upon the legendary St Marks bookstore and spent enough to build up a debt he’ll never ever repay.  Hell after six months of endlessly stalking these new streets he’d even take a day like one of those youthful jaunts to Soho, London where he learnt to smell out the record and bookshops as he slowly worked out why he always felt so different to everyone else at college.

Those days, hell even New York City had been years before, those trips to Soho something from the last century, and this town, well to put it bluntly, this madhouse by the sea is neither of those places no matter how cool the hipsters are convinced it is.  It ain’t even close as those places celebrated special minds and they simply made Jack feel alive.  If anything this place made Jack feel closer to death than at any point in his entire life which had included a few calls from the man himself which Jack had ignored but those times were behind him now.  

Now he’ll get by on the drink and the ubiquitous weed that has somehow got him this far and which this town, as long as he’s got the money, always seems to have plenty of and not scared to share.  He’ll get by on getting high a little, getting drunk a little and just living, walking these streets looking… but today as Jack walks from his rooming house he doesn’t know.  He knows whatever it is he’s searching for won’t be on a main road, it’ll be down some side road, some hidden alleyway and that’s exactly where he heads.  Walking along the most beautiful street in town he looks out over the sea and he momentarily lets his mind drift, he lets it consider just what that must be like, to just imagining.  Imagine waking every morning and seeing that first thing.  God, he thinks to himself, what he’d do for somewhere with a view like that!

But today, well, he’ll walk on down into the decaying heart of the town, pass the vagrants out begging change near the town’s central clock-tower and then off deep into the labyrinth of the alleyways and twittens.  Walking pass the first coffee-shop Jack spies a beauty wearing a Misfits t-shirt and, almost on instinct as if he were still only 23 and not the 53 reality and his passport would suggest, then he remembers kids these days wear any band shirt.  What a postmodern hell our world has become he thinks when what you look like counts for so much more than what you know.  Hell, thirty-odd years ago he was hanging out with those god-damn Misfits, sure they were telling him off for his drinking and drugging but what the hell did they know!

He walks on and counts one record shop gone since he landed here and then onto Bond where he finds another with a sign announcing their imminent demise and the arrival of a organic tea supplier and Jack knows he’s just got to get in.  Three albums later he is out the door wishing the old owner ‘good luck’ with his life now this chapter is closing and as he walks on he spies the locked door of his favourite bookshop and another god-damn notice.

‘Shut due to Ill Health’ it states simply and rather ominously and Jack knows death is stalking this town and taking with him everything that could, just about, keep Jack entertained without too much help from the bottle or the smoke but maybe, just maybe, in this town that just ain’t going to happen.  Not for Jack, not for anyone looking to push this life as hard as they possibly can, and as he walks on back to his room he knows he might just need to start looking for somewhere, anywhere else.

Bradford Middleton lives in Brighton, England. Recent stories of his have appeared at Commuter Lit, Mystery Tribune, Workers Write: Tales from the Bar as well as right here at A Thin Slice of Anxiety.