FicWad

Chapter One: Who Really Cares
Posted 4.11.2012, 5:44pm

Time no longer existed. He couldn’t distinguish seconds from minutes any more, or hours from days. Months may have passed, years even. There was no way of telling. Whitewash walls cut him off from the rest of the world. They constricted him some days and he would wake in a panic, the air barely able to squeeze through his airways and into his lungs. On other days the room felt too big, an expanse that he alone inhabited. Everything in the room was clinical. The only suggestion colour was the blanket that lay on his bed, tucked neatly into the gap between the mattress and the bedframe. It was a putrid pink colour. Perhaps they had thought it would liven the place up a little. Perhaps it was a nicety, thrown in to make the room seem more homely. Or perhaps it was simply there to drive him mad.

Gerard couldn’t really remember much. His memories were only beginning to crawl out from where they had been hiding in the dark recesses of him mind. He couldn’t really remember how he’d come to be here. But he knew why he was here. They’d told him. It was one of the leading drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres in the world. He was here because he needed help. He was here because he’d failed. Sometimes he would talk to the doctor that came in to check on him, asking him when he would be allowed to leave. There was never an answer. He wasn’t sure how regularly he visited, but he knew that it was the same man each time. He had a deep voice and a clip board. Most of the time he came alone, but there had been a time that another man had accompanied him. A younger guy, maybe in his early twenties. Unlike the regular doctor, he had been friendly. He’d crack jokes and ask Gerard questions. Apparently he’d been an apprentice. He was learning how to be a doctor, he would say, and then he would raise his eyebrows at Gerard and tilt his head towards the regular doctor and say loudly that he wanted to help people get better. Sometimes the regular doctor would turn to the young guy and glare and mutter something about respect for superiors. Other times he would stand and march to the door, holding it open and gesturing for his apprentice to leave the room. Gerard knew that the junior doctor wouldn’t be there forever, but seeing as he had no concept of time anymore he couldn’t judge how long it would be until he would leave. He simply hoped that it wouldn’t be soon. Then the day finally arrived when the regular doctor had entered alone and said that the young man was finished. Bob. His name had been Bob. Gerard hadn’t known it until he left. But now there was an aching feeling in his chest and he felt alone. In the time he had been here he had gained a single ally, and now he was gone.

Then there had been time that was punctuated by nothing but endless cycles of sleep, occasional meals, and counting the number of footsteps that he could hear from the corridor. Sometimes it would help him to sleep. At one point he reached over seventy-two thousand three-hundred and ninety-four. He didn’t know what time was any more. He didn’t know that he’d been awake for four and a half days. He didn’t know that he’d been trapped in the godforsaken clinic for just over three years. He didn’t know that his last three birthdays had passed by without him realising. But most importantly he didn’t know that just metres away from his room, on the other side of thick walls, stood a glass office. And inside that glass office his best friend stood over Doctor Kasey PhD, hurling legal jargon and threatening to sue if Gerard was not released immediately.

He found out soon enough. The regular doctor marched into the room and threw a bundle onto the bed, turned sharply on his heel and exited the room. Gerard stood and clumsily unfolded the clothes. A dark waistcoat, a white shirt, black pants. This is what he had worn before, when the regulation white overalls hadn’t been enforced, he remembered. There was something different about them though. It took him a while to figure it out. As he began to button the shirt it hit him: the smell. Where there had once been nasty odour of alcohol coupled with vomit there was now a subtle lavender scent. Washing powder. He slipped the waistcoat on and waited. The doctor returned and lead him out of the room that he hadn’t left in years, and into the corridor, and then finally to the glass office. And there Gerard saw the wild curls that spiralled down to the collar of a crisp, professional-looking suit. Ray Toro glanced up and saw Gerard. He couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he saw the lips form the words ‘Hey Gee,’ and then suddenly they were no longer metres apart. Instead Gerard stood clinging to the man he hadn’t seen in years, crushed into a bear hug that brought with it both a feeling of comfort and a hoard of memories that may have been best forgotten.

He answered the phone. Not because he wanted to, but because he had very little control over his own actions. The smoke wafted from his mouth and the drugs seemed to pump through his veins. Everything was distorted, a little off-centred. It took a while for him to mash his thumb against the answer button. He took another swig from the bottle before mumbling into the phone, “Hmm…’ello?”. He had a smile plastered across his face. There was nothing to be happy about, but he couldn’t help it. Whatever he was smoking was forcing him to. His facial muscles ached. The voice on the other end of the line came through. Mikey. “Gee, Gee I need to talk to...” There was a strangled gasp from the receiver and them a muffled sobbing. Mikey tried again. “Gee, she’s…she’s…” Once again he couldn’t finish whatever it was that he was saying. Instead there was the sobbing again. “Mikey. You ‘kay?” A deep breath. His brother seemed to have regained enough control over himself to speak. “Gerard, I need your help. It’s-“ But before he could finished Gerard cut him off. “Hang on Mikey-Way,” he giggled, “I’ll be back in a sec.” In his drug-fuelled euphoria he couldn’t quite grasp the fact that his brother needed him desperately. All he could understand was that there was something making its way up through his stomach and into his throat. He staggered to the toilet and fell to his knees, his hands resting on the seat. Vomit escaped from his mouth. Some of it managed to land in the bowl, but most of it ended up all over Gerard’s hands and clothes. From outside the door Mikey’s voice filled the air, “Gee? Gee? I need you. Please. She’s gone. I need you. She’s dead, Gee…” But Gerard couldn’t know. He wouldn’t. Not until years later. By this stage he was already passed out on the floor, reeking of vomit. His mouth was frozen in a smile and a blue bruise was beginning to creep across the side of his forehead where he had smacked it against the cool white tiles.