Monstrous City

“Shall we go cow tipping tonight?” Ed said.
Ed said. That always cracks me up. It’s my second favourite, after ‘I once knew a guy called Guy”.
Priceless.
My dad favours alliteration. Jenny Jones, Robert Redford, William Wallace – that type of thing. Top of his ‘A’ list is Roy Rodgers. Something about the way it tips off the tongue.
Still, as much as he loves those alliterated names, they don’t hold a candle to his all time favourite: John Wayne. Dad would be John Wayne if he could, dodgy slurred delivery and all. Well, you gotta love the Duke. At least you do if you grew up in our house.
“Oi, ignorant! I’m speaking to you”.
Ed’s elbow landed in my ribs.
“Aw! What?”
Ed tutted like I’d robbed an O.A.P or something, then spelled it out for me, nice and slow. In that moment, I felt for deaf people and the elderly the world over.
“Shall. We. Go. Cow. Tippin’. To. Night?”
“I’m up for it”, Jamie said, nodding to illustrate his decision. “Nothing else happening”.
Story of my life: nothing else happening and reduced to cow tipping with the village idiots.
“Whatever”, I mumbled.
“Good. Meet at the park at seven”, Ed said.
Ed said!
Gets me every time.

I went home and did the usual: let myself in, trudged to the kitchen, grabbed some food from the fridge, made a monster sandwich, trudged up the stairs to my room, slumped on the bed, ate the sandwich and had a little debate with myself. In my head.
What was I doing with my life? Nothing. What was I doing about doing nothing with my life? Nothing. What should I be doing? I didn’t know. Did I want to be doing anything about it? I didn’t think so. Why didn’t I want to do anything about it? Because I…because…
The last question was getting harder to answer because the answer was hard to take.
I started thinking about killing myself around three weeks ago. The thought just popped into my head one day, right in the middle of a dose of double maths.
“You could always kill yourself”, the thought went, “and then you wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore”.
The fact that the thought was there at all, inside my head, surprised me. I didn’t think I was the type to harbour suicidal tendencies, to be honest, and when such a tendency came out of hiding and started whispering in my ear, it kind of threw me.
Three weeks later, the thought was still knocking around in my head, like a rogue pinball. What I couldn’t figure out was if I was seriously thinking about it, like for real, or if I was seriously thinking about it like the time I seriously thought about taking a summer job overseas and spent the entire holidays sat in front of the TV…still thinking about it.
My life was pretty redundant, so what was the point of keeping the life support switched on? I was a just a burden to the planet; a drain on its natural resources. It would be kinder to switch off the machine and conserve the energy.
I put this argument to myself and waited for the inner voice in my head to pipe up with a fantastic, heart-stopping, life-changing, Quincy style rhetoric, starting with the words ‘yes, but…’
It must have been The Voice’s day off. Again.
I dared myself to get on with it, if I was serious, and stop jerking around. I’d worked hard at becoming this useless and pathetic. I didn’t want help, I didn’t want guidance, sympathy, a shoulder to cry on or a heartstring to tug. I wanted out – so why hadn’t I done anything about it?
Finishing my sandwich, I shrugged. Apathy, the curse of a generation.
With a noisy sigh, I got up and got ready for a fun-filled evening of pushing over sleeping cows. Pulling on an old Metallica ‘Ride the Lightening’ T-Shirt over my head, I hoped that I wouldn’t come back as a cow in the next life.
I hoped I wouldn’t come back at all.

It was dark by the time we reached the end of the lane.
“I stepped in cow shit”, Ed said.
Jamie groaned. “Jesus Ed! Already? We, like, just left the lane. Do you attract the stuff, or what?”
“Yeah, Ed”. I said. “You’re like a shit magnet”.
Ed sniggered.
“Shhhhhh. You’ll wake the cows”.
That did it.
Jamie burst out laughing, clamped a hand over his mouth and blew a huge globule of snot out of one nostril. Ed slapped his thighs and hooted with laughter.
Nearby, a cow shuffled its feet and let out a low ‘moo’. On cue, we fell silent. Cow tipping, you see, is a fine art (well, not really, but you have to have some delusions of grandeur. We were masters at cow tipping, therefore it was a fine art. Like nano surgery).
You see why I’m looking down the barrel of a gun here.
We ran, we pushed, we tipped over the poor, unsuspecting cow. We laughed, we rolled around on the floor. It was hilarious.
Not as funny as the fact that I was dead on the inside, but close none-the-less.

It rained on the way home. By the time I parted company with Ed and Jamie, I was soaked to the skin and couldn’t see my hand in front of my face it was so dark.
Anything or anyone foolish enough to be outdoors was battered senseless by a keen and cruel wind cold enough to freeze a man at ten paces. Not universally recognised as being the sharpest tool in the box, as the cow tipping incident clearly demonstrates, I chose not to take shelter from the elements, but to casually make my way home.
It was an impossible task. My clothes were stuck fast to my skin. There was chafing. It wasn’t pretty.
I glanced down at my sodden T-shirt and shook my head. Fat drops of water flew from the ends of my rain-soaked hair and were swallowed in the deluge.
Ride the lightening my arse. More like choke on the rain, stub your toe in the pitch black, fall flat on your face in a pool of watery cow’s piss and die of pneumonia.
I left the lane and turned into King’s road, sending up a quick prayer of thanks to a God I wasn’t sure even existed for the blessed arrival of street lighting.