ELECTRIC BLUE continued... 2
Rapidly, the whole thing began to unravel. He was doing this because he was sick of life; sex was a large part of life (the largest, in the most obvious way); ergo, someone who had never had sex had not fully experienced life, and so could not claim with any certainty that 'Life' was something with which he was thoroughly sick.
Sighing, as if inconvenienced and nothing more, Paul took the rope from his neck and stepped off the chair. If he went through with it now, it would be for the wrong reasons, for self-pity. Those girls had been on the train for a reason; the cosmos had shifted and put them there, and made them so loud and strident that he had been unable to shut them out, and so they had stuck in his mind only to resurface at the exact moment to derail his plans. Well thank you very much.
Andy had left a number of things behind him when he left, which he had never come back to claim. Some clothes, a couple of books, a half empty bottle of aftershave. How strange that this man had been sharing Paul's space for so long, and he knew so little about him.
After his shower, Paul slapped a good handful of the aftershave around his face, combed his hair, and tried on one of the shirts Andy had forgotten to take with him. It was electric blue, with an iridescent shimmer like a dragonfly's thorax. Paul posed under the light, glimmering.
In the kitchen, he took down the rope and put it away in the cupboard under the sink, along with the razor and the paracetamol. He changed the sheets on his bed. It was dark outside by four o'clock.
There was a pub on the street that led down to Byres Road, but it looked quiet. It was a concrete bunker of a place, where you could imagine Hitler staging his last Wagnerian moments. Further on, hidden behind a playground on the other side of the road, there was a bar in a converted church that he had heard people at work talking about, when he still went into work.
Inside, he was pleased to see that it was busy. The men and women at the bar were older than he was expecting, in their mid-thirties perhaps, and were dressed as if their salaries weren't calculated by the hour.
He bought a pint of beer and stood at the bar, staring into the mirror on the other side at everyone's reflections. He was trying to make eye contact, but whenever anyone looked at him, he looked away. All the women seemed to be with someone. How likely was it that a single girl would come in here on her own and stand at the bar, staring into the mirror, until he caught her eye? Fairly unlikely.
By the time he finished his drink the bar was almost empty. It was only just after six. He presumed these things went in waves, and that he had clashed with the remains of the post-work crowd. The evening crowd might not be here for a couple of hours.
In the bathroom, while he stood at the urinal having a piss, Paul read the graffiti on the porcelein tiles.
12 INCHES, FOR YOUR PLEASURE.
There was a mobile number after it. Twelve inches seemed excessively large, not to mention unlikely, and was easily double what Paul could muster. Zipping up, staring at the number, he visualised what it would be like to have a solid foot of flesh inserted into your body, and wondered why anyone would find it remotely pleasurable.
He walked up to Byres Road and strolled from the Great Western Road end to Partick, twice, looking in the doors and windows of pubs, cafes and bars. Most places seemed quiet, and Paul began to feel overdressed in Andy's electric blue shirt. It wasn't even the weekend. He felt predatory and desperate, and stopped to have another drink in a bar next door to a bank.
Taking his drink over to a table in the corner, Paul eavesdropped on a conversation two girls were having at the table next to him. He was shielded from their view by the plate leaves and mottled trunk of a potted rubber plant. The girls were students, from what he could gather. They were talking about an English tutor who, if he obviously fancied you, tended to send the more difficult questions in your direction.
"He's overcompensating," one of the girls said. "Feeling guilty."
"Or maybe," the other said, "he just gets a boner watching you blush."
Paul designed an elaborate scenario where he would finish his drink, head up towards the bar and, as he passed their table, check the girls' glasses and offer to buy them a refill. As the scenario unfolded, they would warm to him and make a wordless understanding as to which one would accompany him back to his place.
Although he had never tried to pick up girls before, Paul didn't feel nervous. Shopping for a suicide kit tended to put things in perspective.
He tossed back what was left of his pint and carried the empty glass to the bar. Casually, he glanced in the girls' direction. Both of them were already looking at him, coincidence having turned their eyes towards the bar at the same time as Paul happened to be passing.
Paul leavened his smile with a frown, but the two girls each raised an eyebrow at the other and hid smirks behind open palms. It was winter, but on the ceiling an electric fan made a lazy turn, dispersing a disc of cool air that settled around his shoulders like a shawl.
In three different pubs around Byres Road and Ashton Lane Paul had much the same reaction. Occasionally he would get as far as a few opening words, an abbreviated introduction and an offer to buy her a drink, before the girl would either smile politely and excuse herself, or simply nod her head and turn away.
Was it the shirt? He didn't feel that desperate; virginity was just a condition he wanted to cure as quickly and as painlessly as possible.
He was drunk by now. He hadn't eaten for two days, so he filled himself on pub crisps and peanuts. He had never really gone drinking as a student, and rarely spent money on alcohol. Once, when Andy had been living with him, he had found a bottle of vodka hidden in the toilet cistern. His first thought was, "That explains why it doesn't flush properly." The bottle had displaced enough liquid in the tank to make the flush more feeble than he remembered it being in the past, and in the morning he was always being confronted with the remains of Andy's last visit to the bathroom floating in the bowl. Paul didn't know if he should give the bottle back to Andy and ask him to store it somewhere less inconvenient, like the fridge, and in the end he just replaced it in the cistern.
A walk, he decided, would clear his head and kill time before the evening crowd turned up. He headed back down towards Partick and then along in the direction of the Kelvingrove Museum. The University was illuminated on its hill, a formidable facade of mock-gothic spires and battlements back lit and as sinister as a vampire's castle. How he had managed after a four-year degree to come out the other side with no sexual experience and no friends ... It was statistically improbable, and although he blamed nothing apart from his own nature, Paul began to feel the first intimations of a sense of disgust and frustration that was quite different to the feeling that had sent him on a train into town to collect the instruments of his suicide. The scale of the waste was suddenly revealed to him; it was as if he had spent the last few months just examining a corner of it, before his perspective pulled back far enough so that he could see it in its entirety.