Skunk
confesses to his Jesus the reasons for the severity of that day’s drinking.
Skunk:
Oh God, how drunk do I have to be?
How drunk do I have to be? I can’t
sleep tonight. I have, last night I had a dream of uh, on my journey home, the
plane crashing. I was in a, a a s, a sort of holding space for people who were, who had problems with flying,
and it’s been with me all day, this whole plane crash, the whole idea of aeroplanes, I find it... I don’t
know what to do.
His
voice he tries to soothe with whiskey, the words come rough upon his
throat.
Skunk:
It’s... Whenever I read about a, a plane crash or an air disaster or whatever,
even if it’s only a few people, it affects me more in itself than than, than say oh Jesus, fff- five, fifty thousand
people dying of famine or, in a warzone or or or or oh God because it, these things are abstract, they don’t, I don’t know, but I think it’s a common thing to
to, not maybe not for me, it’s a
common thing to get on an aeroplane and you know... You know what these people
have been through to a degree. You know they’ve, they’ve arrived early at the
airport and they’ve queued and registered and... checked their luggage, their
bags, and then they’ve killed time, they’re, they’ve maybe had a drink in the
bar, or gone through all the shops a dozen times, newsagents and chemists and
things, just, not even buying a thing, not buying a thing just, looking at stuff because it’s there to
be seen, and then they queue to get on the plane ehm...
He
bends over to retrieve the skinny walking stick abandoned alongside the bed,
thumbing its knotted surface as he continues to croak out the prayer,.
Skunk:
And having their luggage, their hand luggage checked and finding their seat,
and all this happened and depending on when when, when they’re when they’re
hell
There’s
a brittle rattling as the stick slips his fingers, is back upon the floor.
Skunk:
They could have been on the plane five minutes they could have been on the
plane five hours, but either way they only get just a couple of minutes to
assimilate the fact that... It’s it’s, I mean it’s not like they, you know,
like cancer, some, something that
just eats you away for months, maybe years even, these people only get ehm like
snaps
fingers
Skunk:
and then they, they have to appreciate they’re going to die, in just that time,
and there’s no, there’s no, it’s not a goodbye situation, they’re just smashed
out of existence, and that, maybe that’s what makes it worse, that, you, even I
could, these are just normal people, there’s nothing special to them, it’s just
they were overtaken by some mechanism, or something.
Pause.
Skunk:
Jesus.
Pause.
Skunk:
I want to go home, and I don’t want to go home.
He
wonders what he just said, if he even said it at all, and so
Skunk:
I want to go home, and I don’t want to go home.
He
finds he is now running the ball of his thumb across the frayed hem of the
pocket in which he keeps his keys, and he watches this, fascinated.
Skunk:
I’ve had these trousers for four years.
