A/N: This may turn into a series of 4 one-shots, each focusing around a different member of the band. But for now it's just this :P and I did some research on Stoke-on-Trent (where Murdoc was born) and, obviously, since I have never been there, I've taken certain liberties in creating it. So...yes.
Every Planet We Reach is Dead
Murdoc- White Light
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White light, long, slender beams — hesitant, and dim, filter through the window. Break my slumber as they wander through old, wooden shades, yanked down forever to a retarded angle, because one more rip of that pulley might just break the whole thing off.
Gentle rays of light prod through the darkness, as if to see if anything were living inside this ramshackle room, and I squint, the soft glow hurting my eyes. But they too recede, leaving me again alone, having reminded me of that, at least, and I try to shut my eyes once more, but it's useless.
I can hear dimly the siren, the one that heralds pain and grief, off in the distance, like on the very edge of hearing, and in my head, in some far foggy part that I won't understand, I'm thankful it's not coming for me. The blinking reds of nighttime lights invade my room, but they too are soft and far away, and my breath seems to coincide with their pulse of on-and-off, on-and-off; just as slow, just as predictable.
If I could move I'd shove my pillow up into the window grate, in between the space where the bloody shades bunch up and the windowsill begins, and block out the annoying burst of headlights and shadows that filter past and cross my face, keeping me from falling asleep every chance I finally get calm enough. God I hate Hannibal for taking the room that faces away from the street.
I grunt, sitting up, my body protesting wildly, like it does on the morning of a heavy hangover, my muscles refusing to stretch, and my lungs contracting without air, in order to stop me. I hold my side, (it hurts the most), and sit up enough to shove my pillow down to the end of the bed with my foot, and I kick it, hoping to lodge it up against the wall. I miss. It falls on the floor. I sigh. Bloody pillow.
The lights change. Everything in this bloody city smells like iron. I can almost see the black smoke piling up into the sky, grey, from the mills that hulk on every side of it, like walls to keep everything inside, all quiet— but I know that's stupid since it's night, and obviously you can't see smoke at night. Only fire.
But it's a heavy smell, like it makes your lungs feel heavy when you breathe... Mum says this whole place is a death trap. I can smell it in my room. I hate that smell.
Police sirens echo in the distance, and I almost laugh for the poor sucker on the wrong end of the fender, but my guts hurt when I breathe, and the laugh comes out a strangled wheeze, and it's annoying that I sound that way. Makes me seem weak and old. I'll never be weak.
I groan, my eyes traveling as far as they can to the side without me having to move my pounding head, to see if by some miracle I had left a glass of water on the floor. No. Should have known better than to expect a miracle.
My throat's dry, and I cough, wince — my rib cage indignant with pain, and I grab the bedpost, loose and squeaky, to drag myself upright with one arm, so I don't suffocate by my own body. The metal-barred headboard is old, like almost everything in this brownstone sty, and cringes from my adolescent weight as I clutch it for support.
The tick-tick-tick of the clock on the other side of my room invades my mind like the counter on a bomb, every tick-tick second one more closer to explosion. The air coming in and out of my body sounds like a door, grinding against the ground as it swings open and shut. City lights play like a kaleidoscope across my bed, barely reaching my face, but the way they change from white to red, white to red, white to red, is sickening. It makes me fucking nauseous, and I decide to try and roll over, plunk my body someplace for a little uneasy rest.
Suddenly though, I freeze, the pain falling behind an instinctual dread. I can hear my heart beat. Tick-tick, tick-tick. There's blood on my tongue, (I suck it off), there's a fly on the ceiling, (bloody fly I want to kill it).
But I'm still quiet. It's the footsteps I hear. In the hallway. Hannibal. Coming home bloody late as usual. Mostly he's drunk, breaks into my room (the lock has become scrap) and slams me up against the wall, tells me I better not let Jacob know he came in this late, I say alri' alri' I won't, just put me down. Usually I get a few blows to the gut. But you get used to it.
This time though, it's different. It's a fear that tingles down every piece of my body and it makes me bloody sick. The bruises this time, which snake my body with sickening clarity, the little cuts and nicks, the sharp slice above my eyebrow where my brother split the skin, and the dark black circle under my eye, which has faded, but still remains swollen enough for people on the streets to quietly stare, are all ok. They're fine, because the scrape on my back, the pain in my arm, my headache— are all from Dad.
When he pushed me, he said it was because I didn't fight my brother back. That maybe I'd learn to defend myself, be useful, stop wearing all the black, stop being this, stop talking this way, get a job. He said maybe it would do me some good. Hannibal agreed. Afterwards I came up into my room.
So here I am. That's why I'm so sodding quiet, because when Hannibal is drunk, he a bloody prick of a drunk, and I don't feel like dealing with my useless cow of a brother. He'll think it's alright to come and give me a couple — though Dad has been known to deal him a few, too.
The shadow of his lanky body passes underneath the door, and I hold my breath. He stops for a moment, and I'm ready to jump up at any second, despite my sore and hurting limbs, but the shadow eventually disappears, and my aching chest allows a sigh of relief.
I lay still for a couple more minutes, my tongue flicking out to lick at the blood crusted on the side of my lip, where it split.
I hate them both. But Dad hasn't kicked me out yet, Mum says, (I'm a fuck-up of a son).
Mum says, Mum says— I don't know why I keep saying that. I just must not be used to it yet. Mum said, Mum said. She can only said now. – I'm supposed to take her things down to the pawn shop tomorrow, and try to sell it all off, easy money, Dad says, easy money. All the trash bags in my room, the reds from the window glinting off their shiny black sides, are filled with her junk.
The one Sabbath poster on my wall glistens back at me in black and white, old Geezer and his brown mop-hair making this fucking weird face with his bass in his hands. I tried to grow my hair out like that. It didn't work.
Hannibal tries to tear it down all the time. He hates metal. Kicked my arse once for liking it more than punk. I like it even more now though, the fucker.
I hum Wheels of Confusion and it helps me to sleep.
...
I don't really feel anything, as I carry her old clothes, I don't even worry that one of the kids from the gangs might spot me, or any of Hannibal's friends, seeing me carry my dead mother's underwear and dresses and shit in the open street. Everything is grey and smells like smoke and iron and brimstone anyways.
The sidewalks are dirty, and my sneakers scrape the ground as I haul the bags up over my shoulders, a lollipop concentrated into the side of my mouth to look like a cigarette from far away. I refuse to smoke while I carry this down, 'cos Mum would always rail at us about how everything in the house stenches of smoke— especially her clothes. None of us minded it, but she would complain, and push us outside whenever she caught us clouding up our rooms. Mum favored bottles over sticks, as they say.
I didn't get to see her body. Her boss called at dinner time, a few days from the last time any of us had seen her, and said she blew her brains out in the back room. Said it would cost us to clean up.
I remember I was pissed a little while, 'cos, I figured, if she had to kill herself, she could've at least done it a little neater. She could of thought of us a little, and remembered that we're short on cash, as usual, and jumped from the river bridge like most people. She wasn't thinking of us at all, but I guess that's the point.
So it was a closed casket, and before we left for the cemetery I came down wearing the itchy maroon sweater (I only wear black) that I got as my present three Christmases ago, it still fit because it had originally been so much bigger than me. Mum was convinced I looked so handsome in it. A regular Warren Beatty or some shit. Dad sneered when he saw it on me. Said, That you're supposed to wear black at a burial. I turned around, went upstairs, and didn't go.
...
I'd never seen a dead body before. Sure you see them on TV, in movies, but I'd never seen a real dead body. I still wonder what it looked like.
The pawn place is this little battered-in half-arse shop down a dirty alleyway, on the border of the dodgy end of the district, a crooked sign hangs over the dirty glass window that says 'Pawn' with a backwards 'A'. Homeless chaps line the street, a couple of whores smile at me, I grimace. When I finally managed to pry open the door, my arms hurt from carrying all the weight, and I drop the bags right at the doorway, not bothering to bring them any further inside.
The guy behind the counter, a big fat, greasy lard of a man, eyes me and I glare back at him. He doesn't say anything, but comes over, his heavy weight shifting from foot to foot, and begins pawing through all my mother's stuff. It turns my stomach, but I don't move, my hands in my pocket, and watch him silently.
My eyes wander from him though, flicking across the darkened shop, coming up over a pair of shoes, a doll, other objects that eerily offer their ownership, supposedly free from guilt.
But I see something glint, something that catches the side of my eye, and my gaze returns to the bag of my mother's things, now all strewn across the floor, and it's so strange because everything is grey.
Shifting the lollipop to the other side of my mouth, I pay a sidelong glance to the fat shopkeeper, turned the other way, and slowly reach a hand down to move away some clothes and things, to sift through the pile, my fingers brush up against something cold, and quickly I pull it up, so as to not attract attention, and bury my hand in my sleeve.
Squinting at ol' pig-face, I bring my eyes to my hands, when I know he's not pointing his snout in my direction, and my eyes widen slightly when I see the object in my palm. It's a gold cross, a necklace, that emerges from beneath my sleeve.
Suddenly, as I recall Mum, I can see it interwoven in every memory, as if it had been the thing to remember – and I just never knew it. I can so keenly recall its gold glint clenched in between her fingers, after a spit with Dad, or after work, as she sat at the shoddy kitchen table, her black dark hair falling all into her eyes so I couldn't see them even if I tried, as I walked by to get a drink, or to find something to eat, — I never tried.
She never took it off, and somewhere inside me something snaps, small and imperceptive, like one cog in an entire factory finally rusting off, but I wrap the chain around it, and shove it into my pocket before the greasy pawn broker can see it.
He waddles over to me, and slaps some cash into my hands, I don't even bother to fight it, say that all this stuff is worth more. I just shove it in my pocket, and leave.
...
My room looks little different during the day. It's small, plaster falling away from the ceiling, cracks in the corners of the walls. My bed shoved up into the side by the door, one blanket thrown over it, the grey view from the window obstructed by the curled-up shades. Some rain drips down the glass, (it's always bloody raining), and I sigh, bringing my eyes back to the pendant in my hands.
Dad didn't bury it with her. I recall her fists tight over it, every night as I passed my parent's room, as she closed her eyes and prayed some stupid prayer, some stupid prayer that never worked. Mum was like that.
I prayed before. But I stopped. It never works.
I tried again after Mum died, 'cos I didn't understand. I didn't get why she did it. I thought there must be some higher answer, some white light at the end of the tunnel, like in all those stupid movies with their fucking happy endings.
But you don't need prayers. You figure it out yourself, eventually.
Mum killed herself because she hated her life. She was a stripper whose husband let her whore for money. He would yell at her. She would yell back. They'd fight.
She hated to look at my brother because he was so much like my father, and she hated to look at me because I came so much later, after she decided she didn't want anymore kids. But it was the sixties.
I remember the way she used to look at me when I was little, though, like I might grow up and change it all, fix it, or some shit. I couldn't. But she was always a little crazy anyways.
She would grab my shoulders and cry over me, say she was sorry. (She was always a little burnt). She would rant and rant, until her eyes got big and scary looking, until I had to take her up to bed and wait until she fell asleep, sit there until her breath, heavy with the stench of alcohol, finally got quiet. Then I'd take the bottle, and lock myself in my room.
I'd try and stay awake until Dad got home— he was a grave digger as a side job, (he used to tell me stories of coffins opened up, animals burrowed in the wood, the way mud sticks to you six feet deep – we've always been a little morbid). He dug Mum's grave, actually. Funny, that.
Night falls outside, and the glint from the cross hits my eye again, and I look down to it. I flip it, over and over in my hands, until it's no longer a cross, but just a blur of gold, and my lungs start to hurt again. And as I look at it, I'm so sorry she doesn't have it, I'm so sorry Jacob snatched it from her neck, and it hurts to know that, even though she was never the greatest, that somewhere, in some dirty cemetery, her body is without it.
I don't know why, but I start to cry, and at first they're random, stubborn tears which I try to hold away, — but soon even I can't push them back, and it's like a well of grief has overflowed inside of me, the dim red lights outside my window pulsing underneath my eyelids. It all means nothing. That's the answer.
And for some reason, that makes so much sense, that it quiets me. There's nothing else. No wrong in pain if it makes you feel (my bruises), no use for guilt (the pawn shop), no use for sadness (Mum is gone), or questions or answers or redemption or confusion.
It quiets me and I feel — for the first time in my life,— better. I swallow, and my heartbeat is shallow, and I can no longer hear the tick-tick-tick of my clock across the room.
I look at my mother's stupid cross. I take the chain, and I flip over the holy pendant (so much it did for her), so now it's upside-down. I put it over my neck, and the white lights from the window fade away as I turn my face from the window. The reversed symbol somehow is a comfort to me, and the sharp edge of the metal bites my hand, causing blood to seep from my palm and cover the cross — but I don't mind it, don't care, it feels good. Pain is so easy to understand.
But I'll never pray for her, I've tried it, and there's no white light anymore.
It's all turned red and black. And it's just better, so much easier. No blinding lights, just cool calm darkness, here, facing away from the window.
And the next day, when I come downstairs, my father is sitting at the table, (I'm not afraid of him anymore) and looks up to me, my brother (I hate him) is glaring from the counter. They see the symbol 'round my neck.
And it feels so much better, now that the feelings don't matter anymore.
"Fuck it," I say, and leave to get some speed.