The Stornoway Way by Kevin Macneil

Author:Kevin Macneil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-03-12T05:00:00+00:00

Martin Monkeynut

Some fleeting years ago, Eilidh and I got stupendously drunk and I woke up with one of those ominous feelings: something is lurking just on the other side of my memory’s perimeter, swift and irreversible as an electric shock. I know it, I can sense it coming closer.

I’m lying on my living-room floor, fully clothed, smelling too much like me and not enough like deodorant. My head is blitzkrieged. I get up and will myself towards the kitchen with a self-conscious clamber. Even a slow mouthful of water sends my head spinning out of control like a drunken rumour.

Surveying the rooms, I detect a powerful stench of puke.

I now remember Eilidh had thrown up a few times. I’d nursed her through that, stroking her hair like a kitten, cos I know how these things help, the soft details make all the difference.

(The more I think of it the more I hate people who say that people bring hangovers upon themselves. Trying to live here in Lewis as a teetotaller would drive anyone to the drink. And anyway, Lewis hypocrisy gives me the dry boaks.)

Co-dhiù, there was fuck all unusual in this – it was just a boring night at home in Lewis, no money to go to the pubs, so the evening dissolved in the companionable decanting of a domestic litre bottle of chicken and a few cans of Special. Simple.

But…

?

Think, man, think.

Right – I remember Eilidh had revived somewhat, maybe about two in the morning, after her third-time-lucky puke and we’d begun a giggly game of Vomit Euphemisms:

Chunder.

Pray to the porcelain god.

Chuck up.

Reverse feed.

Do a technicolour yawn.

Barf.

Call Huey.

Release the multicoloured hostages.

Make an Irish pizza.

Gabble on the great white telephone.

Drive the porcelain bus.

Launch your lunch.

Revise the menu.

We had written them down in handwriting that looked more and more like the sgròbings* in the dirt a hen from Garryvard might make. We’d had an argument over Feed the seagulls, which I reckoned only applies to ferry-pukes. The list was long and sloped off into an infinite illegibility.

We’d then stumbled into a discussion of the various places where we had succumbed to the mighty barf-monster. Fuck yeah, it became a Top Ten of – Liquid Laughs, that was another one. Eilidh’s favourite place had been outside the Colosseum. Probably thousands of people were sick at the Colosseum back in its bloody heyday, when you think abo—

Oh oh.

Oh Lord, no.

Now it’s coming back, the memory, the thing that should not be, like a tide of puke itself… Ah, fuck…

!

Eilidh always gets excited about foreign countries – actually, about any fucking place that isn’t Lewis. Hadn’t she switched the computer on, got out the credit card and…

I look over to the chair in which Eilidh had last been slumped. Two pieces of paper with what looks like – but Christ, surely can’t be – Dep and Arr times noted down in as-neatly-as-I-can-in-this-condition scribbles on unpeeled whisky label. Glasgow – Fiumicino.

Fiumicino, is that in…?

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