Billy No-Mates by Max Dickins

Author:Max Dickins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

7

Wild Men

There is always a moment, in the seconds between emerging from sleep and having full consciousness of your own body, when you aren’t quite sure if you have a hangover or not. You wait, bated, for the full data to come in. You scan: mouth, head, eyes, body. Clinging to the blissful thought that somehow you may have escaped your rightful penance. As I’ve got older, I’ve learned not to trust the exit poll. Often, at some point in the night, my hangover leaves my body and hides somewhere. It hides in the fridge, it conceals itself in a bathroom cabinet, it climbs into the bread bin and waits – silent, expanding and intensifying like resting dough – only to rush my body and possess it once more some two or three hours after I thought I was free. This hangover, I swiftly ascertain, is not one of those.

My mouth is so dry a snake has laid its eggs in it. My brain is flaming like a Christmas pudding. My eyes feel like someone has taken them out and played ping-pong with them, using paving stones for bats. Even my hair aches.

I press my hand to my chest and try to decipher the violence erupting in my heart. The Jägerbombs, I think, I had five Jägerbombs. It feels like Mike Tyson is trying to punch his way out of a caravan. It’s at this point that I remember where I am, which makes things infinitely worse. I am in a coffin-sized bunk on a sailing boat which is lurching up and down on the swell of the sea. Outside I hear the rheumatic creaking of the pontoon it is lashed to. The garish morning light floods the galley. If I turn to my left, I will smack my head on the salty reinforced glass of a port hole. If I turn to my right, I will fall from my bunk five foot onto the hard wooden floor. I have to remain perfectly still, air-frying in my hangover, lost in its fantasia.

There is a bunk below mine with another man in it, snoring. I say ‘another man’ because I have forgotten his name – the stag is the only man on this ‘do’ that I have met before. All six of us are stowed somewhere onboard, layered above and beneath one another: we are essentially sleeping on a floating human lasagne. No one else is awake yet. I get my phone out and take a photo of my face, to ascertain the damage. I don’t so much have bags under my eyes as hammocks with cattle sleeping in them. Disgusted, I try to piece together the night before.

It was at dinner that it all started going downhill. The stag ordered himself a glass of rosé.

‘You’re not drinking lady petrol!’ roared Harry, the best man, captain of our vessel and an actual British Army officer.* ‘Or in your case, should I say bitch diesel! Right, that’s a fine: you’ll be punished later.

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