The Almost Freedom of Fred Mode by Jeff Warrington

Author:Jeff Warrington [Jeff Warrington]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910792124
Publisher: Melrose Books
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Fred was deteriorating by the day, physically and mentally. His appearance was a portrait of this deterioration. Jobseeker X had remarked recently that he looked like a man who lived in a hedge. Fred had just laughed at this comment, dismissing it as just another of X’s personal remarks until he realised there was no humour intended by X. Indeed there’d been a note of concern, and coming from Jobseeker X this had disturbed Fred; Christ, coming from him, things must be bad.

His hands shook so badly that what is ordinarily the simple act of shaving became a laborious struggle seldom attempted. He couldn’t grow a ‘proper’ beard, he just looked like someone who needed a shave. Of course, when he’d got enough Chekhov down him his hands were up to the job, but by that time apathy had completely taken over so he rarely bothered. For days he would shumble about not without vanity, or at least a self-consciousness about what he looked like, but with listlessness in spades. He needed a haircut certainly, he needed a shave certainly. But even more certainly he needed more than a cosmetic papering over the cracks that were beginning to become wider fissures in his consciousness. Denial had for a long time held these ruptures sutured together. The stitches were coming apart.

He couldn’t shave because his nervous system was buggered and he couldn’t go and get a haircut because what was left of that precious denial would be drained if he sat in front of a big unforgiving mirror while some Sweeney Todd talked about things in life that Fred had just about lost all interest in; the sorts of things barbers talked about, just about anything and everything. Fred was in grim physical shape for sure, but no less important, if a recovery from this affliction of addiction was ever to materialise, was the arrest of his spiritual degeneration. No shave or haircut could stop this downward spiral. If Fred had one foot in the grave of his physical being then his spiritual grave had in it both. He used to be an avid reader, now he just stared at the telly, or more accurately at the space above it. He used to listen to music, now he preferred silence. Apart from the psychological cacophony of his dawn chorus and the accompanying choreography of dry-retching down Rodin’s chair, what really pissed him off the most was the sight of hope disappearing over the horizon. He didn’t want to die, he wanted to live. His problem was that he didn’t know how to do the latter before the inevitability of the former.

Knowing how to die, in his estimation, was easy. All he had to do was carry on with the way he lived and accelerate the process of the inevitable. But before the inevitable came knocking on his door with a scythe and not a lupine brass knocker, a knock he would not have any choice but to answer, he wanted to make the most of the meantime.

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