The Man Who Couldn't

As one door closes, another one shuts.

"Daryl, mate, can you help me?”

“Help you do what? I’m a bit busy, mate.”

Daryl, who in this and many other instances defined ‘busy’ as ripping B-loads of weed and staring through daytime telly, knew he would help his friend, but in this and many other instances, he felt the need to pretend he was busy.

“I just need you to come over. Please mate.”

“OK, I’ll be as quick as I can,” said Daryl, who set about going as quick as he could not, because while he continued to stare through daytime telly, he knew there was something else he should be doing, just not quite what.

Puzzled, he took a few seconds away from staring through daytime telly, turned his head a good ten degrees to the right, and frowned because he knew he’d forgotten something he shouldn’t have forgotten, like he had in many other instances in the gloopy blur of his adult life. His mobile rang, that might be something to do with what he had to do.

“Where are you, Daryl?”

“In the car, about ten minutes away,” said Daryl, who thought it a good idea to bounce up and down on his sofa to give his voice a slight wobble as if he were in fact in the car. However, realising daytime telly was rattling on in the background, he considered reaching for the remote control to press mute. But he got distracted as he considered how doing two simple things at once was made complicated by their ‘at onceness’.

He remembered his mum asking him to rub one hand in circles on his belly, whilst tapping his head with the other, which he immediately tried, unsure whether it was tapping your head and rubbing circles on your belly, or tapping your belly and rubbing circles on your head. So he tried both, but in a matter of seconds, he forgot why and stopped, having achieved neither.

“You sound like you’re at home.” Daryl heard from the phone in his lap that he remembered was mid call.

“That’s the car radio, mate,” said Daryl, who awarded himself ten points for quick thinking, knowing it wasn’t his strong point.

“Please hurry up, mate. I can’t do it.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, mate,” said Daryl, who, arguably was, just not in his car, or having anything to do with what was required of him.

Some twenty minutes later, he’d pulled some jeans and a jacket over his pyjamas, and stood in the middle of his room, having uncomfortable thoughts about his life. He ripped a final B-load, ripped another final B-load, then another, and then left his house and walked the few metres to his car. He stopped, knowing he’d forgotten something, and stood there for a while, trying to remember what. Ping! He remembered. He turned around, and went back to his house, where he’d left his car keys, which were attached to his house keys, which were in his house.

Predictably, this happened quite often to Daryl, meaning after a quick left and right survey of the road to check for any prying eyes of the unemployed curtain-fiddlers up and down the street (which although just made him look suspicious, did make him feel better, which is Always Wonderful®) he lifted up the never used recycling bin, had a flash-thought concerning how much money he could make recycling unused recycling bins, and pulled out his carpet bolster, a tool used mainly by carpet fitters, but occasionally by thieves because the housing industry thought it was a good idea to fit plastic, sorry, ‘UPVC’ doors, and UPVC, sorry, ‘plastic’ bends when you insert something like a carpet bolster in between the door and frame, and once bent enough, and has had a screwdriver driven up the gap, opens the door.

He dumped the tools on his armchair; he was in a hurry, after all. He rubbed his hands up and down the sofa, since it was both the center and periphery of his life, and soon found his keys. Knowing his friend had now been waiting a good half hour, he immediately set about ripping another B-load, and poured half a pack of Skittles into his mouth before he had even exhaled the smoke, hoping against all the odds that he might exhale a rainbow, but instead, he felt a rogue Skittle touch his epiglottis, causing him to cough like no one should ever cough, and, in a way, he did exhale a rainbow, a faded one, as the few moments resting in his saliva had removed the majority of the previously vivid, intense colour from the Skittles. His phone rang.

“Where the fuck are you? It’s been like an hour! What’s that noise? Are you okay?”

“I ummin, I ummin rie naw,” gasped Daryl between breaths, and whilst wiping away a vivid, intense rainbow of chemicals that were running down his chin.

Driving along the streets of his youth brought back many memories, and wistfully, he smiled, failing to actually recall any. ‘Ah, nostalgia', he thought, ‘you can’t beat it,’ and then also failed to nostalgize in any significant way. After about ten minutes, he was at his destination, and parked the front half of his car on the pavement, because he saw Clint Eastwood do it in a film once, and his dad said, “That’s how a real man drives,” which was also the last thing he ever said to Daryl. Because it was bedtime, and by morning he’d left Daryl, his two sisters, and his mum, without a whisper, never to be seen again.

“How long did that take? Did you get abducted or something?”

“I’m a busy man, I’ve got places to see, people to be. Anyway, I’m here now, what’s the problem?”

“I can’t do it,” he said, not taking his eyes off the ground in front of his door.

“What you need is a nice smoke to sort you out. I’ve got some here. A nice bit too,” said Daryl.

“It’s always ‘a nice bit’ according to you. It’s just weed, mate.”

“Wrong! This is very special. You can taste the caryophyllene terpenes from the rich soil of the Bekka Valley in this landrace. Over 99% of Lebanese weed is made into hashish, it’s so rare to actually get the weed,”

“Grow up. Fucking ‘landrace’, ‘turpines’…”

“Terpenes.” said Daryl

“Bekka fucking Valley, you dumb bastard. Do you know the geezers name who watered the plants as well?”

"Actually, I do, Razza Shawi, legendary horticulturalist who learned from his father who learned from his …”

“Razzo fucking Shwartzi, fucking hell, you are so gone, mate. Why are you taking your jeans off?”

“I’ve got a shot pipe and the weed, but it’s in my pyjama pocket, and my pyjamas …”

“…are under your jeans, because that’s not lazy and stay-high stoner 101 at all.”

“Haha, I’ve got my pyjama top on too,” said Daryl, as he unzipped his coat to reveal his pyjama top. “I told you I was going as fast as I could.”

“Things get lost around the back,” said Daryl, contorting his upper body somewhat while trying to find the lighter.

“Give me the jacket. Take the fucking thing off and give it here, I’ll find the lighter.”

Daryl, after untangling himself from himself, slipped off the jacket and tossed it over.

“It’s literally just in the pocket.”

“Chuck it over then,” said Daryl, who caught the lighter by slapping it between both hands like a child learning to catch. He had a flash-thought that Clint Eastwood wouldn’t do that, but fuck it.

Daryl tore off a bit of weed, and after giving it a sniff and looking like he was having an orgasm, loaded up his pipe. He hovered the lighter above the bowl and took a hit, making the same show that all stay-highs make that they’re experiencing something the uninitiated won’t or can’t because they’ve wasted their lives not smoking weed all day every day. His glassy, black-ringed eyes instantly became more glassy and black-ringed. “Beautiful,” he said, which was strange for someone who suddenly looked quite frightened of being outside.

“Fucking crackheads!” shouted the bemuscled man who lived next door and who was walking down his path with the kind of angry gusto of a man who was about to walk up to Daryl and knock him out where he stood.

In seconds, he was right up in Daryl’s face, who, had it not been for the fact his jeans were around his ankles, would have run off a long while ago. I say ‘run’, but, you know.

I’ve got two girls in there, one 16 and the other 18. It was at this point that he noticed Daryl was in his pyjamas, which kind of stopped him in his tracks somewhat.

“What, prostitutes?” said Daryl, actually thinking the neighbour was proffering the services of two young women, just in what seemed to be a bizarrely aggressive manner, which he blamed on the horticultural skills of Razza Shawi, the bloke he invented just minutes ago to add a bit of seasoning to his weed heritage nonsense.

“Cunt!” said our man next door as he headbutted Daryl, breaking his nose and dropping him where he stood.

“Do you want some?” he scowled at our man in the doorway, as if he’d learned to talk in Spittlestown.

“What, prostitutes?” he asked

“They’re my fucking daughters!’ he said, making his way towards the doorway, where our man stood. He lifted his finger and said, “You’re actually alright, but I can’t be doing with crackheads like him around here in their fucking jim-jams, smoking crack at fucking eleven o’clock in the morning. Call the police, and I’ll cut your fucking ears off,” he said as he walked back down the path, then up his own, and into his house.

“Are you OK?” he asked, but Daryl didn’t respond. He quickly skipped over to Daryl and dragged him off the hard concrete path and onto the grass. He sat down, and pulled Daryl’s upper body off the damp grass, cradling him in his arms.

“Daryl, are you OK?” He asked again, wiping the blood away from Daryl’s face and pinching the top of his nose to stop any more blood from coming out.

“I’m alright. Fuck me, that hurt, though,” said Daryl.

“Prostitutes, haha.”

“I honestly thought that’s what he meant,” said Daryl, “Here, have a tug on this,” he said, handing over the shot pipe and lighter.

“Yep, that is actually a nice bit,” he said, “I’ll give you that.”

“Anyway,” asked Daryl, “what couldn’t you do? What was so urgent that you demanded my assistance with the fear of a schoolgirl having her first redder?”

“Charming,” said Linda, as she walked up the path, looking briefly at the scene in her garden: her husband cradling a bloodied pyjama wearing Daryl in his arms before entering her house and slamming the door.

“I couldn’t leave the house. I got dressed; I had to get a few things in town, but after I opened the door, I just got stuck there. I couldn’t go back inside, but I couldn’t go out either. I’ve been standing there for about three hours.”

“Well, I guess my work here is done,” said Daryl

“Yeah… ha… I guess it is.”

“What if you can’t get back in?” asked Daryl

“Er... I s’pose I could borrow your pyjamas and spend the night out here.”

Daryl points to a kind of off-white sack-like thing that was partially buried in the bushes that separated the garden from the neighbours on the other side.

“That’ll make a nice pillow,” says Daryl

“It is a pillow.”

‘Why’s it in your front garden?”

“I threw it out of the bedroom window last night. Well, ‘threw’ makes it sound more dramatic than it was. It was more like a gentle toss.”

“Why?'“

“No idea.”

“Turned out nice then,” said Daryl

“Yep.”

Chris Dangerfield

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