A complete introduction to finding soul

He strode down the hill, making his way through groups of people scattered across the pavement. His red eyes glistened in the sunlight as he wearily scratched his arm. Nonchalantly glancing over to the tube station, he watched as abstract strangers wandered, slept and begged, too lost in their own misfortune to realise the beautiful fragility of those around them.

His black hair fell scruffily over his tired, childish face. His hands were worn and calloused, his fingernails dirty and broken. His leather jacket showed signs of wear – matching his ripped jeans and broken shoes. A dry hoarse cough echoed through his body, sending waves of pain through his chest. Whilst ironically a sovereign smouldered away, gripped in his left hand.

Hearing the roar of traffic around him, smelling the sickly chemical smell of toxic fumes, feeling the icy cold pinch at his thin pale body Pete felt numb to the world and the selfishness that surrounded him. His eyes saw but couldn’t comprehend, perhaps because – like us all – he didn’t want to. The light seemed vague and boring, despite all that was happening around him and peter bowled along, perhaps only vaguely aware of what awaited him.

As he climbed the crumbling concrete steps nervousness hit him sharply in the face. He took one last long drag on his cigarette and viciously exhaled the smoke high into the air. He watched as it faded into the hungry morning air. He stood in the cold for a minute appreciating the icy breeze in its efforts to awaken him, to show him the real world, the life that existed beneath the concrete and steel and petrol fumes. The real creatures of this earth – the ones we don’t notice – the ones who survive silently, who compliment rather then consume.

Upon entering, Pete noticed that it was darker then usual, and that a certain nostalgic peace resided there he had not felt before. Stumbling across the littered room he reached the other side to pick up a nourishment shake from the floor, opening it and drinking half way down. Then, dropping it onto the floor, he picked up his guitar and began to strum loosely away at a tune, as the cold milk ran lazily from the can and settled in a messy puddle, almost in time to the disjointed chords of his song.

A door opened and Carl stepped in sleepily.

‘Alright’ Pete murmured.

‘Yeah sure, hey if Catrina drops in today tell her I’m at work yeah?

Pete laughed ‘sure mate’.

Carl and Catrina, Catrina owns Carl. Carl can’t afford Catrina.

Carl grabbed the nourishment from the floor and drank what was left of it, stepping to avoid the huge lake where Pete had dropped it, just a few cold moments before. Carl lit a cigarette lazily, then left the room hastily, as if he had just remembered some laborious task, leaving behind him lavish whorls of grey-silver smoke which danced, suspended in mid-air, before expiring quickly like all of the most beautiful things.

Pete sighed, turning round to notice a girl in the corner of the room. He sat in silence without ever looking up, cigarette listlessly between her lips, stained a kind of smudged fuchsia where lipstick had once clung comfortably to her lips. He stared at her for a moment. Her dark hair was up on its ends – static against the wall – whilst the shaved green stubble on the left side of her head contrasted its discomfort so greatly. Her thin pale hands were wrapped delicately around her feet, like some sick abandoned doll left for the world’s taking. She finally looked up, as if awoken from some nightmare, and stared through his pale tattered flesh and into his soul.

‘Hey’ he said, confused.

She simply stared back.

He studied her face, only for a moment, before returning to his guitar, tuning it gently.

 

* * * * * * * * * *

Pete was woken sharply by the silence that surrounded him. The sun beat through the sheet hanging limply over the window – creating a marbled effect on the deeply shadowed ceiling above.

He reached into his pocket, without sitting up, to pull out a lighter and reaching under the ragged armchair he pulled out a discarded, half consumed cigarette. He watched it burn slowly towards his face, scratching his neck slowly, feeling weeks and months of London grime that had built up on his skin now coming loose.

He imagined himself as a discarded skin cell. First, trapped under his own finger nail, then falling to the floor to be stamped on, walked around,

gaining freedom… freedom

darting around the streets causing itches and fogs and smogs before eventually… being digested. ‘Yeah’ he giggled.

He sat up and glanced across the room to see the girl still in the corner, and he wondered if he was imagining her. Getting up he staggered into the next room rubbing his back, in his haste knocking over his guitar. The hollow sound echoed sharply through the house, its deep booming chord bursting the silence.

Peter could not help but feel that it held some significance – an omen perhaps.

* * * * * * * * * *

The chord still churning in his mind, Peter felt a slight sense of discomfort. He desperately wanted to know who that girl was and believed, though only through optimism, that Carl would know.

This room, not unlike the other also contained a window swathed in a large sheet, which rippled in the wind that teased its corners. Pete marvelled at its personality, as he imagined it to have caused all forms of chaos (and refreshment, perhaps even pleasure) as it drifted down Mare Street. Teasing women’s hair, slipstreaming the dirty punks on the Roman Road corner and ruffling the tasselled scarves of the fashion students as they stumbled to lectures up the road through their WKD induced squalor, pausing only to adjust a buckle or consume a Marlboro Light.

Pete laughed as it finally rested, after one last blast of mischief upon his childish, dirty face.

He had never noticed before – beyond his own Special Brew haze – that the rooms were actually decorated. An Art-Deco style patterned border on painted plaster, a kind of tribute to by-gone era’s of morality and, Pete fancied, great morbid dramas. Dispelled daughters, disowned sons, sluttish maids and worldly gentlemen. How had he not noticed before that the place absolutely reeked of society? And now… well, here it lay. Damp and cracked, home to all types of creature lost to Chemi-Know (the medicated state of mind, and the streetcore wisdom this is in league with). He could not help but feel a kind of unity with the old house. As if his own better days were tired and… retired.

* * * * * * * * * *

Pete thought he could hear the echo of human sounds from the next room. He called out but no one answered and so he stepped bravely through venturing past the darkness and over to the gloomy window.

Glancing round Pete could make out stacked boxes, protruding from behind which were the feet pf several (it was impossible to guess how many) people’s feet. All lain in a Chemi-Know stupor. Their laboured breathing and blank faces u

rged Pete to sit for a moment, becoming part of their resting world. As he breathed the heavy air and his eyes drank in the darkness he felt crushed by the insignificance of his own existence. They lay so alone in a dark, damp, gloomy room whilst people wandered carelessly to and fro just beyond the walls, oblivious to another persons’ being. How could one person be driving along in a bright red Ford Escort, singing to the radio and thinking about summer – whilst another lay helplessly in a Chemi-know heap behind rat infested boxes, singing to the voices in their head and thinking about sweet death…

Existence: what does it really mean?

* * * * * * * * * *

‘Are you ok?’ Carl tapped sharply on his friends shoulder.

Awaking with a start Pete found himself overcome. H e grabbed Carl’s arm and embraced his friend like a child – as Carl’s face showed worry and concern for his friend – he feared the outcome of all of this. Carl stared down at the dirty, dry scalp of his friend. He saw the darkened contours of his neck. Pale and thin, his T-Shirt clad shoulders leading to scarred and abused arms and wrists. The wrists. They always showed the sign of health and age. A person’s wrist can reveal all. Moments later Pete was returned to himself. And he began to mutter on, something about the wind.

Finally he stopped mid-mutter.

Paused.

Continuing:

‘Do you know her?’

‘What? Who?’

‘That girl. Downstairs.’

Carl sighed ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’.

Pete looked into his friends face. Honesty and concern stared back, leading Pete to his conclusion. Pete stood up quickly, swinging Carl out of control, and sped off downstairs.

As Carl leaned against the wall, and thoughtfully lit a cigarette, he listened to the hollow sounds of his friends foot steps echoing away.

Downstairs the room was spinning. Pete stood in the doorway jealously scanning the room for her. His legs were shaking beneath his as he surveyed the old grey sofa, the three legged table propped up against the wall, the worn rug – caked in years of mud and grease – wallowing beneath the feet of many beautiful strangers.

She was gone.

She had left no trail of clues behind her. No signs of any presence. No signs of where she had gone. Curiously Pete stumbled to where she had sat, or crouched, before. Staring. Nothing.

He fell, disturbed, into the place she had left behind and his thin pale hands wrapped around his even thinner feet. He sat in silence, cigarette burning listlessly between his lips, his dark hair static against the wall.

He thought about the rooms he had visited and the ambient clinical corridors between them. He thought about Carl and how he doubtless stood in the same place he had left him smoking, delicately, against the wall.

He thought about the girl. Mostly. And where she was now. Wandering, no doubt, along Mare Street glancing into the hollows which contained various garages and work shops, watching the buses muse past stopping to release and gain their steady flow of passengers, and rubbing the bruise on her half shaven head where she had first fallen against the dirty wall, where Pete now sat, or crouched.

He imagined her dirty, yellowing fingernails, her bruised and stick-like legs, her scabbed and scarred pale arms. Her wrists.

Soft and thin. Pale and responsive. The exit of the soul is the wrists.

Looking now at his own, Pete considered:

‘How long ago did I lose my own?’