Hunter Gatherer

He had to tell her what he thought. It was wrong what she had done and he couldn’t settle his mind until he had got rid of this niggle. She was wrong.

In the street, black men stood with cans of beer in their hands. They weren’t too frightening. The w****s were attractive. Dirty sin always attracted him. He wondered if he would come back this same way later. He walked into the shop.

“You’re crazy. What the hell are you doing here? I don’t care if you’re wrong or right.”

“Why can’t you just accept that you’re wrong?”

“It doesn’t  matter anymore anyway. I don’t want to talk with you. I’m not going to f*****g agree with you.”

Jason was starting to feel a rage. These feelings had only really started a few months ago when he was out drinking vodka. He believed it was the vodka. He woke with the vodka hangover and this new potential. It was like his hands became knives, or like knives wanted to burst out of his wrists, like they were inside of him.

He remained composed. He stood with head low, looking at a rusting can he could see through the glass door, kicked and flattened over by the drain. "Why the f**k does everyone kick us down and flatten us?" he thought. He went outside to stamp on the already beaten down can.

“F*****g can.”

The streets were beautiful at this time of night. Most people had gone home already. Some lock-in drinking was going on inside already closed bars. Police officers drove around smiling with their partners, flirting in male and female duos, having affairs.

Jason decided to walk to the river. He was pissed off. He could feel venom inside his throat and he wanted to spit on the ground. He swallowed the phlegm and his anger.

He wondered what homeless men and women did on a night like this. It had been a little drizzly earlier, but now it was dry.  The drip from gutters and shop awnings added sound to the night, just like the occasional car screeching as it accelerated, carrying young drinkers back to warm apartments and ambience.

“F*****g wankers,”  Jason said angrily, as he noticed a dog that was lying in an alleyway, eyeing him. It calmed him down, the mangled white fur and hopeful eyes.

Down by the river he walked up to the bunch of homeless guys with hats on under the bridge. They had a little fire going and looked like hunter-gatherers, and like dogs on the streets of a third-world country they needed each other’s company, even though they were competing for food and shelter.

They eyed Jason a little suspiciously but soon detected his dejection and offered him a swig from a brown glass bottle.

“Why the heck not?” he thought. He took the bottle and looking the ginger-bearded man in the eyes took a swig. It burnt his throat and soothed his inner sense of victimhood and vindictiveness. He sat with the men and after half an hour he started to feel calm and all Zen-like again; like he had last time he’d sat by the river drunk. There was a kind of pleasure in drunken dejection and feeling downtrodden. It made one feel connected with the earth. It seemed almost like a primeval emotion and the more he drank the more that thought consumed him and he thought of all the "Paleo" men and women before him, sitting by rivers, drunk.

“Drunk?” he questioned, mumbling.  “Did cavemen and women drink?”

The men under the bridge grunted a response. Maybe yes, maybe no. Jason wasn’t sure.

“Oh well,” he thought, and he laughed. He didn’t feel cold or angry.

In the morning, he watched a runner passing and one of the men wandering off without saying a word. Another was rubbing his eyes. A third was lying dead still. He was fat and red-cheeked. He looked like a good man.

Getting up, stretching, and wandering -- it seemed like a good life, especially as it was a mild morning and the sun was beginning to climb the sky.

“The best people are the ones willing to die…  the ones willing to be crazy? What was it?” Jason tried to think up a good quote close enough to something he’d heard before. But it was too early. 

He followed the duffle-coated man, who was shuffling in sweat-stinking trousers and coffee-stained shirt. The guy was round and fat. Rounded belly. Rounded arse. Breasts like Marilyn Monroe pressed to the wall. Jason had to go slowly. He didn’t want to catch up with the hunter-gatherer of last night. He only wanted to know what he did.

“You can come with me if you like. Do you have a few pounds for a coffee and bun?” The man was glum but trying to put on a face of friendliness.

“What’s your name?”

“Bill. I’m an architect.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“So, where are you getting coffee?”

“Station.”

They sat on the ground at the entrance to the station, waiting for enough coins to get a coffee from the nearby stand.

“You’re an architect?”

“Yes. It was my dream from when I was a child.”

“So you reached your dream?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Don’t go prying. I’ve been up and I’ve been down. Now I’m down. Don’t ask too many questions. There’s something magical about the streets but I wouldn’t choose it if I could pull myself back up.”

“Can’t you?”

Jason momentarily looked into Bill’s eyes and he saw them stir. Then Bill became cold behind the glare and his body became rigid as he stared off across the street, into the traffic.

They both said nothing for a while. Jason fell asleep, with his head propped up against the red brick wall. Then he stirred when a taxi honked its horn, and he became aware that he was sitting with a homeless man with hundreds of people walking by, busy in business and work attire. He became self conscious. He got up.

“Right. I better go.”

The man, Bill, looked at him and then back at the ground. For Jason it was a drag of a walk back along by the river and then up through the streets to his empty flat. He wasn’t going to go into work today. He sat on the bed and thoughts of Alison came back to him. He cried a cry of slightly moist eyes with racking sorrow and pain in his head and rib-cage. It would have been better if torrents had flowed.

 

He remembered his Dad telling him to always be a man. Be someone. Who was he now? 

As he lay on his bed his anger found vent in the memory of what that young female Taekwondo teacher had taught him years ago. He was a kid and afraid to look her in the eye.

"Always get in the first punch," she'd said. "When they lock eyes on you hit them. Bham!" She'd demonstrated with a controlled punch to the empty space in front of her. 

He'd glanced in her eyes and quickly looked away, slightly embarrassed by her beauty. But now, eight years later, he thought he might take her words on board. 

What was it that preacher had said in one of his stories? "Once they fix on you, hit them." He'd laughed an ungodly laugh.  "And make sure that first punch is a hard one." 

Jason had always shrugged off such nonsense. He wasn't a fighter. But for the first time in his life he'd begun feeling these new sensations in his body. This whole thing with Alison was dominating his life now. 

He got up. Found the vodka in the cupboard. Poured a half cup. Splashed in some orange juice to the brim. 

"There you go," he said to himself and he got back on the bed. He couldn't get rid of those fighting thoughts. "She'll be at the club later," he said quietly.