‘Amen.’
She put it on his tongue and he swallowed. I could see his face tensing in the thrill of anticipation, the forerunner to the actual effects of the drug.
‘Body of Christ, Cocker.’
‘Body of Christ.’
‘You’re supposed to say “Amen”, not “Body of Christ”.’
‘Amen.’
Cocker swallowed his pill and washed it down with a bottle of water we’d bought in a 24-hour Spar, along with more cigarettes, chewing gum for our gurning jaws and a needless surplus of skins.
When Jen said ‘Body of Christ’ to me, she put the pill on her tongue. I took it from her with mine, swallowed it, and then kissed her, though in an asexual kind of way.
‘You may go in peace to love and serve the Lord,’ said Jen.
‘Thanks be to God,’ said Rez.
‘Thanks be to fuck,’ said Cocker.
We all sat down on the bench and drank some wine, and there was silence for a moment; a full, vibrant silence. Drugs, I thought, are fucking wonderful. Contrary to popular opinion. I thought of writing the phrase down, then decided it was better not to write anything down, nor even try to remember it.
‘Lads and ladies,’ said Cocker, standing up and taking a theatrical swig on the wine bottle. ‘Here we are tonight, us four. Here we are for evermore.’ He threw his arms out as if to embrace the sky. ‘Oh holy fucking Jesus Christ almighty, I swear to God this is UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!’
We lay down on the grass in a circle looking up at the sky. The world was starting, very faintly, to brighten, a galactic purple radiance seeping into the sky above the rooftops.
We lay there, speaking occasionally, quietly, as the sky slowly became infused with dawn light, pale at first but galloping towards brilliance.
‘Lads,’ I said. ‘Lads and ladies, or one lady I should say, but listen, this is the best night of my life. I mean that. I couldn’t imagine a better night, and better people to be here with than youse.’ Usually this kind of talk would have been instantly ridiculed, but tonight there was no question of that. We all felt it: the ecstasy, the city at dawn, the cool grass beneath our bodies. We lay there and watched, listened, breathed. A gust passed through the gardens, cool, making my skin tingle.
A few moments later, Rez spoke. There was pain in his voice as it floated free of him, out into the universe.
‘This is all we have left,’ he said.
I was going to say, what do you mean? I was going to contest him, not in an argumentative way, but only to try and show him that there was more, that things may have been bad but they weren’t that bad — even when he was high he thought that way. I was going to tell him that yeah, the world was fucked up beyond belief, that the times we were living in were atrocious, and maybe, as he put it, nothing was real any more, reality was a thing of the past. Maybe all of that was true, but that only meant there was nothing to hold us back, nothing left to lose, only sheer giddy freedom to do whatever the fuck we liked, to hell with everyone else.
But I didn’t say anything. I watched what looked like a satellite tracing a lonely arc across the brightening city sky, but maybe I was hallucinating. It was hard to tell.
25 | Rez
Why I am Not Real and Happiness is Impossible in the Modern Age. To be read after my demise — by Richard Tooley
Section 146: Forgetting Considered as Metaphysical Annihilation
Consider the infinitely and profoundly troubling nature of our fundamental existential plight. No matter how intense, unique, beautiful or interesting your experience, it will be wiped away so fully that there will be no evidence it ever existed at all. This is a fundamental truth. I never forget it for a moment. It’s like when you go to a party and say something funny and clever. You feel good — but as the night wears on and people get stoned and wasted, your clever remark gets lost, sort of muddied out. People forget who said it, or what exactly was said. By the following morning, no one can remember it, except maybe one or two, but even their memories are already fading; and anyway you can’t even be sure they remembered at all, unless you call them up and ask. But that would be too embarrassing — you would be considered a weirdo.
All humans are profoundly shocked to realize that everything vanishes: their loves, hates, passions, thoughts. Also how good they looked, and how unique their personalities were (or seemed to be — that in itself is a major question). Imagine if The Clash had played all that music but there was no way to record it. People would whisper about how amazing it had been but no one else would really get it and the ones who’d heard it would even begin to doubt their own memories — was it really as great as it seemed? Until all memories are washed away, like sandcastles in the tide.
Yes, such is our human condition.
26 | Matthew
When the wine was almost finished we left the Iveagh Gardens and walked through the early-morning streets. It wasn’t cold, but there was a freshness in the air, a coolness that made us feel purer than we would have done, coated as we were in mingled smoke and sweat, reeking of drink.
All was quiet as we passed Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. We walked down Grafton Street where only a drunken tramp stirred outside HMV, lying on the paving stones. I wondered if it were possible for me to ever end up like that. I had to look away or the sight of him would have brought me down.
Jen suggested we go into Bewley’s for cups of sugary tea. It seemed a good idea but then Cocker said, ‘Why don’t we go to an early house?’ and it was settled.
The pub was on the quays. The four of us stepped from the bright morning into the wilful gloom of surly old-Dublin workers and resolute alcoholics. We felt self-conscious. There were maybe six people drinking there, all of them male, all greyed and dusty with life. We ordered pints of Guinness and sat down quietly in a corner, our movements jittery and our faces bright with ecstasy-wonder.
We drank our pints, smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices; disjointed, keen conversations that bubbled over now and then into affectionate laughter. The feeling of being there together was so good it was almost painful — I wanted things to stay exactly that way, that one moment forever, but everything was always slipping away, nothing was fixed. I beamed at my friends, love and affection for them pulsing out of me. I wanted to express it and tried a few times, but settled for simply smiling, laughing, watching them.
The old men and other drinkers didn’t bother us, bar the odd funny look. Mostly they played darts and left us alone, and when one white-haired old man was passing our table on the way back from the toilets, he leaned in and made a friendly joke in a gruff, heavily accented voice. We laughed and nodded to him.
On the third pint the plunge came; the sudden, shattering emotional drop following the high that was so perfect you sometimes forgot you were high at all. It was like being pushed into icy water on a bitter-cold day, a horrible shock, all the grief and betrayals of a lifetime condensed into one instant — a feeling of sheer, desolating loneliness. It was as if the visible world vanished and you found yourself stranded on some cold dead moon, lashed by winds and darkness.
Anguish breaking out on my face, my hand reached over for Jen’s. She turned to me slowly, gazing at me from across a gulf, locked into her own incommunicable grief. I smiled weakly at her and she tried to do the same; hers was a frail and frightened smile. I saw that we were both utterly alone and could never be otherwise. Rez had gone quiet, retreating from the front of his face into some sunless, barren place deep within himself. I realized it was beyond me to imagine how bad things got for him, but now I had some sense of it, the depth of his loneliness.