Storymania - Death Of A Friend: Chapter 1 by Rowan Davies

Death Of A Friend: Chapter 1
Rowan Davies

Eric paused for a minute before he made the long cold walk from the train station at the south end of Main Street to his house, very close to the other end. It was a November evening and the early darkness had come with a still kind of chill that silently froze commuters on their trips home and marked its territory in the morning with intrusive clumps of ground frost.
The transition from autumn to winter had not been as gradual or as poetic as nature usually allowed. Of recent years England had been switching from one season to the next with all the subtlety of an atom bomb, and although the winters that followed were never nuclear, they were, without argument, very wet and very cold.
This evening though was relatively dry in its absolute bitterness. Fog had rolled in from the west coast the night before and duly forced its suffocating hold upon the entire city throughout the day.
Eric, having just arrived by train from Kirkstall, the town in which his mother lived thirty miles away, hated the fog. It made him claustrophobic and often more than a little wheezy.
He stood at the entrance of the station, soaking in the intimate blasts of hot air that the overhead heater was throwing down his back and clutching the strap of his clothes holdall tightly for fear his fingers might snap like icicles if he moved them at all. It was at least five hundred yards to his house and he could see less than fifty of them for the fog.
Physically, Eric was not something to behold. The corduroy trousers and oversized fleece jacket that hung loosely about his figure only accentuated how spindly he was beneath it all and although not entirely unattractive, he did himself little favours in terms of caring for how he looked. His chin was unshaven and his face grey and gaunt. For a man whose eyes told of countless nights without sleep, wherever he was in life he seemed as if he had just rolled out of bed to be there.
Eric was not fond of physical activities and never had been.
He breathed in deeply and stuck his hands into his trouser pockets, hunching his shoulders and striding across the adjacent car park as fast as he could manage, wincing at all the hateful abuse his body instantly began throwing at his brain.
Past the car park and two minutes more along the road, Eric continued in his pace. The traffic along Main Street crawled by him so slowly that he briefly considered throwing his holdall onto the next passing car and jogging back to his house alongside it. It would have warmed him up, but then just as surely brought on his wheezing too. Damn fog.
Eric searched in the distance for the newsstand that he usually bought his evening paper from. It soon emerged at the side of the pavement, an old lady and a yellow paper-cart gliding out of the swirling mist like some peculiar spectre. She looked at least seventy, bundled up in a reddish tartan blanket and peaked cap, leaning back into a cheap plastic chair. She didn�t move an inch as he stopped at the stand, and only when he asked her to pass him a copy of the Coalbridge Evening News did she reach to the pile on her left.
�Thank you.� He paid his money and she said nothing. Her eyes seemed fixed on some point deep within him. Eric shivered, not entirely because of the cold, and moved on. He had to get home.
Stopping at the stand had made his legs become stiff and weighty, slowing his pace but inadvertently providing a distraction as he attempted to get some life back into them for the rest of the walk.
Soon enough his road came into view.

Eric�s house was of Victorian build and the terrace it was part of stood prominently against the background of a largely disused industrial estate. The road it stood on, Parker Road, was named for the building standing opposite: Parker�s Steel and Building Goods, a warehouse that despite having stood for the most part of two centuries had been derelict since the early sixties. Eric had not lived long enough to know this firsthand but had been told by the elderly lady next door to him, who was prone to saying things that did not particularly interest him.
The old woman, Mrs Greenshaw, had once told him at great length how her husband had found work there in the fifties, a short time before he died and left her to bring up their daughter alone. Eric couldn�t understand why she had chosen to live in the same depressing house for so long. He often saw her in the front garden at weekends pruning the straggly rose bush that grew up the blackened brickwork like some thorny cancer and wondered why her daughter never visited. He never pitied her though. The judgemental tone of her voice and cinnamon breath made him dislike her greatly and now he was never polite enough to stop and talk, averting his eyes whenever he saw her stalking the garden with shears in hand.

Once inside his house, Eric headed directly for the bathroom, slamming the front door and sprinting up the stairs. The cold had diverted his attention from the fact that he was about to piss himself and once above the bowl managed to unzip and extract his penis with only seconds to spare. It was always the same. He could walk the mile back from his local, the Ugly Duckling, after a heavy night in the complete bliss of inebriation and only when his house came into view would he be overwhelmed with the desire to urinate. He never understood it and only a couple of times had he failed to reach the toilet in time.
As he relieved himself, Eric planned out the next half hour in his head. First things first, as well as kicking the house�s central heating system into action he would need a smoke to put some warmth back into his lungs. Then he would check the evening paper for the article he had written. After both these needs had been satisfied he would put his coat and scarf on and head for the pub.

Eric found the lounge precisely as he had left it. The offensively beige walls contained an even more offensive mess. Spread over the room was a month�s worth of newspapers, dirtied crockery and underwear. Along the far wall an old brown sofa drooped in resignation. The clothes sprawled across it were meant for the washing machine but had been there settled for so long now that they were probably unsalvageable.
Last Friday�s takeaway was now the focal point of the room. It lingered on the coffee table, a collection of noodles and gravy-brown residue that had expanded and crusted over the course of the weekend. The smell was sweet and sickening. Eric ignored it.
His indifference to these living conditions meant that he would only clean up when he saw fit and since nobody else had visited the house very recently, he had done very little to change its appearance of squalor.
His attention turned to locating some cigarettes and any form of incendiary device. After minimum effort he was awarded with a packet of Malboro and a matchbox.
Eric grinned as he lit up.
The armchair opposite the television was relatively un-cluttered. After taking a long, fulfilling drag he swiped a pile of crumbs from the seat-cushion and flopped into it with the Evening News. He flicked through it, scanning the pages briefly as he went. His story would be somewhere near the middle.
Although it wasn�t unusual for him to revel in the glory of his own work, today was special. He sat up straight as he saw the headline and spread the pages onto the coffee table.
Third bridge death this year. This was it. He didn�t need to read the thing but just seeing it on the page grabbed at something in his gut. It confirmed the absurdity that he had been feeling since his mother had surprised him with a greater knowledge of what had happened. There was no picture and the column hung awkwardly between a giant ad for life insurance and the edge of the page. At no more than two hundred words it contained only the basic elements of a tragedy: that of a young man who had committed suicide unexpectedly.

In the early eighteenth century the original Coal Bridge had facilitated the transportation of coal from the local mines to the surrounding area and returned in exchange a wealth of goods and materials. It not only provided the small northern settlement with a worthy name but quickly turned Coalbridge into a thriving industrial town.
On the considerable income this had generated for the community, the bridge was destroyed and rebuilt, larger and grander. Glorious gothic arches spanned the treacherous Hatch Gulley, the stonework emerging from the valley edges as if they had been there an eternity. Gargoyles ran the length of the bridge, topping each pillar with a different demonic face, some contorted in laughter and others screaming, wide-mouthed and all teeth.
It instantly became a local treasure, reaching out over the town�s impassable boundaries and framing the river below with an elegance that had since fallen far from Coalbridge�s grasp.
When the river Hatch was dammed several miles upstream in the nineteen-fifties the ground below developed into a tangled mass of fern-life and fallen debris as the bridge fell into disrepair. The construction of modern motorways meant it was no longer a viable throughway and health and safety regulations forced its closure.
Since rebuilt and reopened to the public the bridge now served as a hotspot for country walkers and manic-depressives alike.
That it was the third jump in a year was not at all surprising and was a simple fact of practicality. Suicidal people weren�t inexplicably drawn to that particular bridge; it was just a convenient place where somebody could jump in the assurance that when they hit the ground seventy feet below they would die instantly.

Eric sat back and thought about what it would take to make that leap over the wall. Quite a lot he suspected, but then just as probably, nothing at all. Either way he needed a drink. He aimed the last of his cigarette at the takeaway remnants on the table, half expecting them to squeal in pain.