Stupid

I used to love the song 'Sweet Home Alabama', now I cant stand to hear the first fuckin' chord. It reminds me of a night I'd rather forget. I heard it on the radio today and it all came back.

#

It was a Friday night, five years ago. I fancied a couple of beers, so I went to the local. It must have been, half past eight – nine o’clock, something like that. It wasn’t busy, a few in, not many. He was in, my brother Steve, standing playing the fruit machine. I bought two pints, and took them over to where he was. I knew instantly, the bastard was on something.

I could see it his eyes. Black fuckin' quartz that is how I would describe them, just black soul-less quartz.

He drank his beer as if it was water. He was playing pool, feeding the fruit machine, and the jukebox, all at the same fuckin' time. He was there, but at the same time, he wasn’t.

[This band, they ARE the berries! Fancy another drink big man? I’ll be back in a jiffy! Did you see the football today?]

Small talk, just trivial fuckin' nonsense, and he went on and on, non-fuckin'-stop. He wasn’t talking to me, was he fuck, he was just talking, and, it was doing my head in. He sounded like a fuckin' machine gun for Gods sake.

He was back on drugs despite the promise he made to me, and his Mother about being, a reformed man. I could tell: Smack, Ecstasy, coke or Speed, whatever, it didn’t matter, there all the same to me, bad fuckin' news.

Who the fuck did he think he was, mister invisible? I can assure you he wasn’t, and neither was the fact he was flying as high as a kite.

He was acting like a dog dying from thirst, constantly licking his fuckin' lips, searching for salt. Dehydration brought on by his kidneys screaming out for help, and drinking beer like a fuckin' fish probably made it worse. It is another sure fire sign of some cunt high on drugs. I told him to calm down, 'take your fuckin' time,' I said, but he just laughed. [What do you know big brother?]

#

He even started dancing around the pool table with Mary any-chance-‘o’-a-fag-Corigan, the scheme bike. She’s nothing but a fuckin' smelly whore, bloated and scabbied through drink. She’s been used, and abused by nearly every bastard who is desperate enough. The idiot couldn't give a fuckin' monkey’s, he was oblivious to any embarrassment surrounding him, he was in his own little fucked up world.

‘Mary’s alright,’ he said grinning.

‘Sweet Home Alabama’ started up. Him and Mary fuckin' danced away like two bulls in a china shop, and annoyed every-cunt in the place.

I just shook my head: what else could I do?

I left before some-cunt punched the idiots fuckin' face in. It seemed to me it was only a matter of time the way he was carrying on. It was eleven o’clock, something like that.

Hindsight it’s a wonderful thing, what if this, what if that?

Stupid, stupid, idiot, what a fuckin' idiot.

#

Next thing I knew, the phone rang in the middle of the night. It was the Police. [Your brother is in intensive care]. It was half past five in the morning, and twenty minutes later, I was at local hospital along with a hundred other fuckin' social misfits crying out for help, or methadone, or fuckin' both.

Drunks and junkies with slashed faces, and bottled heads covered in blood soaked household towels. Scum of the fuckin' earth terrifying law-abiding decent people.

Concerned parents clung to sick children wrapped up in cartoon blankets. Mothers and Fathers thinking, was it a good idea bringing their sick children to such a fucked up place?

It’s not night porters they need, it’s fuckin' armed security guards who are allowed to shoot the bastards instead of trying to calm them down.

#

I asked at the desk where he was.

‘Intensive care, room twelve,’ said the receptionist. She had a ‘I’ve-seen-it-all-before’ look. So would I if I had to deal with that fuckin' lot every fuckin' weekend.

The intensive care unit was whiter than white, a scary place, sterile, and deathly silent. It's like the fuckin' place people go before they go to the morgue, a half-way house, and somehow, it's how I’d imagine purgatory would be like.

In a dimly lit room he was lying in bed, covers neatly folded down to his waist, and there were fuckin' tubes protruding everywhere. Machines bleeped away, and nurses busied around doing this'n'that.

His brain was all but dead, cabbaged, and there was fuckin' no chance of a recovery. A sombre bleary-eyed doctor just shook his head when I asked what his chances were. Though to be truthful, I didn’t need to fuckin' ask. It was obvious enough.

The doctor sounded like he was reading from a medical journal when he told me about the multiple injuries, internal bleeding, and irreversible brain damage. Just about every bone in his body is broken, and some, he said, were no more than mush.

I knew what he meant. A decision had to be made.

Mother, she was too fuckin' old for that shite, I’d left her at home. The woman was in no fuckin' fit state to make a decision like that.

There never was a Father, not since he died when I was five, and Steve was only two.

No, it was all down to big fuckin' brother to make any decision, mister sensible, mister fuckin' reliable, me.

#

The stupid, stupid junkie bastard, what on earth was he fuckin' thinking about?

A bus, it was a big red fuckin' bus for God sake. Why would anyone run out in front of a fuckin' bus? I mean its not as if you could say, ‘hey, I didn’t see it,’ they’re not the most inconspicuous objects in the world; are they?

I’ll tell you one thing, there is fuck all in this world to prepare anyone to cope with situations like that. How could I tell the doctors to switch the fuckin' life support off?

I mean, after all that was said'n'done it was still my wee brother lying there. I’m not God, I’m just ordinary fuckin' Joe, the man on the street, a fuckin' layman.

#

I remember looking at him, Mr Selfish, and his fuckin' angelic face below the mask helping him breathe. Ha, fuckin' angelic. It was funny, because, his face must have been the only bit of him that wasn’t fuckin' bruised.

He always was a selfish bastard, he never thought about any-cunt bar, me-me-me, all his days. He would have stolen the sugar right out of your fuckin' tea; so he would.

Even right up until the last, the selfish bastard was having a laugh at us all, especially me, his big fuckin' brother. Oh, how he would have loved to see me squirm in that hospital, he was that spiteful.

#

‘Well wee man,’ I said to him, ‘this is your last fuckin' laugh, and I hope to fuck it’s been worth it.’

I resigned to facts. He was gone, and there was fuck all I, or anyone could do about it. I couldn’t at the time decide whether it was good riddance; a kind of relief that there would be no more heartbreaking. I just remember feeling fuckin' numb, without any tears or anger.

I walked out of that depressing room to where a nurse sat at a desk in the corridor doing paperwork. She smiled as best she could, letting me know it was the right thing to do. I smiled back thinking, don’t I fuckin' know it.

I signed what papers I had sign, and I left without looking back.