1.
I had been there a while, in the cave, waiting to die.
I thought it would have happened already. The lack of pills, food, contact. After some time, I came to realise that I wasn’t done. Something somewhere wanted more of me, to squeeze a final drop, that last taste of lager that you knew would come, if you only held the glass for long enough.
I was there for weeks, I think, but it could have been months, or even a year. I don’t know what I ate, but it must have been something, because my weight stayed stable. Perhaps I lost fat and my bones grew bigger. Maybe it was all the moving, to avoid the tide, to move up, to hang. And the Sheepman came, sparsely at first. He was an agent of order, I’m sure of it - the men who decided what to do with me.
I was peaceful there, without doors and people. To me, of course, there were others, but I knew they weren’t there, and if I was lost, the Sheepman would remind me - they aren’t in the rock, they are ended, in a land where dust is air and blood and sand are one.
When the Sheepman stopped coming, it was time to go, and when I found Him, off the edge of a cliff, I wondered how he had lasted so long. The road was the same, after all, to him, to anyone, and yet he had managed, until this day.
I felt no shame for the sheep. He was shrouded in a grave of human relic: a packet of food, the lost page of a paper, something polystyrene, something oily. It was in that paper, though I had to blink to make sure, that I saw my own face. Could it be that they missed me? That they wanted to forgive? Or was this someone else wearing the same face? It was the order calling me back. For me and this man were the same. We shared a fear of doors.
2
I emerged in a place called Maybole, where people were grey and slow, though I couldn’t keep up with them.
I stared.
They stared back.
I sighed at the world, but the paper reminded me. I took it, damp with sheep blood, and started to walk. I went through Alloway, Ayr, met the big road. I stopped, raised my thumb, felt the wind in my hair, watched it flap my loose clothes. It caught the paper too, my face upon it. I held tight.
It took a while, but I was picked. They asked where I was going, but I could only point – the face on the page. They examined, looked nervous. Were they scared of the face? I looked at the dead man. I’d seen worse.
The couple were dread-locked, in multi-coloured clothed, and as they drove and sang, I re-learned. I was slower, not able to talk, but I had something over them.
I was alone. I was brutal.
I was brought to a place, wandered the streets. I’d grown up here. There were signs on the lamps: ‘People Make Glasgow.’
I stood there a while, in the city.
People Make Glasgow.
It was dark, but I could see someone: haggard with broken skin, rotting clothes… and sprouting, coming up…from a…can…of Tennants?
“What do you want?” I called, raised my fist.
They mirrored me.
I gasped.
How could they have the same page? There! In the hand!
I realised. It was me, this wino, and when I re-opened the page, it was no longer me.
There were others. They paid no attention to my altercation with the poster.
I looked up again. That sign.
People Make Glasgow.
I scrunched the page, re-attuned, walked. I reached a big road, stuck that thumb in the air. I was accepted, belatedly.
He was rougher, but it didn’t bother me. More brutal than a hippie, that was a fact, but to be tougher than this one, that’s what really got me going.
‘I deliver bread,’ he said. ‘Where are ye off tae?’
I croaked at him, ‘Edinburgh,’ lifted the page, showed the face. ‘It’s me brother.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘He’s deed.’
‘Aye’, he said, without sadness, and drove.
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