Three Hundred Hours by Roderick Craig Low

Author:Roderick Craig Low
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary fiction, journey, personal journey, relationships, Scotland, suspense
ISBN: 9781782346029
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Second Tuesday

David Grant awakens again. He knows it is not long since he went to sleep, the drift into unconsciousness a promising betrayal from which he emerges too easily. Once again he looks at his watch and sees that it is just after twelve-thirty on Tuesday morning - an early night for many in Dublin. The streets are full of pedestrians; the red traffic lights have gathered small herds of impatient cars and taxis, exhaust rising like empty speech bubbles in the cool air; there are still a few buses around, not to mention the trams on the Luas with their rhythmic warning bells and sharp hooters for those who do not heed the ringing. The clubbers are clubbing, some even still arriving at narrow doors to basements and darkened spaces far back from the street, going through the humiliating rigmarole of drugs and weapons checks.

‘We don’t entertain weapons here at all, you know that,’ says the man on the door, not particularly tall, but square and mean, the kind you bounce off if you walk into them by accident. ‘The only drugs allowed inside the club are the ones we provide. Tell you what, seeing as you are a regular, if you want these back, talk to Conor inside. You know Conor. He knows you. You never know, he might even give you a discount. Fancy getting caught with them on you! You should know by now, I always check the back pockets of lads’ jeans.’

David Grant is awake for one reason and one reason only. He needs to vomit. He is not just feeling like it this time; it is the real McCoy, the upcoming technicolor yawn. So he hurriedly exits his bed, hurtles across the room and throws up down the toilet pan. In fact, he is in such a rush that he performs this rite in the dark, kneeling on the floor, heaving and spitting and wiping his mouth with a handful of ill-torn toilet paper and flushing before he turns the light on. This is just as well, as there is an unmistakeable trace of blood in amongst the half-digested food. He cannot taste it as the ratio of blood to regurgitate is not high but, if he’d had the light on, it would have given him just one more thing to worry about. Thinking about it, no matter how projectile or violent vomiting is, blood is rarely one of the ingredients. So, he might have had cause to be anxious had he known.

‘Oh shit,’ he exclaims, an understandable expletive but grossly inaccurate. It was almost everything but shit. Ever since he was young, being sick, physically sick, has been one of the things he is least courageous about. For years he would scream for his mother and then it was for one or other of his two wives. Between wives, a period of nearly seven years, he was never physically sick at all which might be significant. It is as though, without an audience, he never felt the need.

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