Murphy McManus
August 17, 11:34am
Deer Island
Everything felt hazy when he woke up, with bright sunlight glaring in his eyes and the thick taste of blood in his mouth. It was like a vignette, as if someone had blurred the edges of his senses and left him with only the distant feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn't be. Lying quite still and staring up at the ceaseless blue of the sky, he came slowly to the realisation that he was in a considerable amount of pain. It started out as only an awareness of some vague and unimportant ache pulsing in his head, but it gradually deepened to a fierce ache that burned like dull embers in all of his muscles. He knew that it would flare from cinders into an inferno if he tried to move, so he stayed flat on his back instead, and waited with surprising patience for the rest of his watered-down senses to return to him.
It was hearing that came to him first; the soothing rush of the surf racing up on to dry land, the urgent cries of countless gulls somewhere outside his immediate peripheries. This was followed swiftly by his sense of smell, which picked up first on the sharp aroma of seaweed and then on the sourness of vomit.
How much did I drink last night?
When he noticed that his stomach was churning, he tried to groan. The sound that he produced was closer to a dry mewl than anything else, but it bought all his feeling back in an overwhelming rush and he twisted on to his side as dry retches wrung his stomach. His vision went grey for a long moment after he spat out a pitiful trickle of bile and saliva, and then it cleared into black starbursts that finally gave way to the excruciating clarity that always came with his hangovers.
Wiping a hand hurriedly across his mouth, he felt crusted blood and vomit and groaned again. This time the sound was a little stronger, if not any healthier, lending him the motivation to sit up and hunch over his bent knees. He pressed the balls of his hands into his temples in a futile attempt to force out the barbed lances of unadulterated agony twisting there, and heaved the kind of sigh that can only ever be expelled by the lungs of an Irishman after a night spent drinking far more than is healthy.
After a long moment, he looked up to inspect his wider surroundings, and was struck immediately by a bizarre sense of I don't think we're in Kansas any more, Toto; for a second he feared he'd wandered clean out of Boston. He felt fluttery panic rise up in his chest, and then realised where he was and forced his mounting fear right back down into the pit of his stomach, where it sloshed around unpleasantly with the rest of his gorge. Deer Island… he was on Deer Island.
A cool breeze blew in, urgently reminding him that he was sat shirtless, in jeans that were stiff with dried seawater. Staring out across the vast blue-greyness of the Atlantic, he slowly pieced together a fragmented recollection of how he'd wound up here.
