Longshore Drift

by Dan

Trogg just leaned forward as if he were sitting on the edge of a swimming pool and flopped.

A falling man makes almost no sound but Trogg’s quick descent seemed to fill the air between the balcony of the 4 story London house and it’s basement. The low dull thud at the end was anti-climactic.

What do you do when you are off your face on acid and a bloke, the one you bought to the party, does this?

Dave Stanmore, nowadays known as Stan, ran down the stairs and out of the door.

He didn’t check on Trogg but instead went to his bedsit. But here, when he opened the fridge Trogg’s face grinned out from a mouldy lump of liverpate, and, when turning the light on, it leered at him from a lampshade.

He grabbed his pushbike from the hall and cycled Eastwards through long, quiet streets where Trogg couldn’t follow and lived a dozen strange, slow dreams.

Eventually, he came to a dark Industrial wasteland area by some water where he could cycle no more. He left his bike and crawled through reeds to a small, rotting, wooden jetty, climbed onto this and sat down, shivering and wet.

It was mid-June 1983. He was 32. He was the father of a little girl called Summer but nothing else he’d done since his blissful student days at Aberystwyth had gone right.

He’d arrived in London, been dropped by his uni friends, and quickly become stranded in a world of boring work, endless tube-train travel and unsatisfying dates that occasionally resulted in one-night stands.

On one of these he’d got Lorraine pregnant. Her furious, bald, gym teacher of a dad bristling at his door convinced him to do the honourable thing. An honourable thing that couldn’t last and set them both back.

When Lorraine kicked him out he’d gone on a spree in Soho, searching for his old confidence, but the losing feeling stuck to him like the dirty London air. He’d met Trogg earlier this evening, they’ed taken the acid together and gone on to this party hosted by some kid whose parents were away. They’ed been there twenty minutes when it happened.

On his jetty, Stan ate some cola cubes fished from his wet pocket and hoped that he was still hallucinating. He fell asleep listening to the comforting rhythm of lapping ripples.

An hour later he awoke and realised his hope was in vain.

It took months for the police to decide not to charge him with murder or manslaughter. After that and Trogg’s depressing funeral in Hereford, Stan just sort of gave up on respectable life. People said that the acid trip had wrecked his brain but actually, he just ran out of faith in the idea that he had a place in society,

He began a new life as a beachcomber, moving along the coastline like longshore drift. The sea air made him happier than he had been in London. Here he was buoyed by hope of childhood seaside holidays and student glory years, sustained by the rhythm and poetry of the tides.

The only effort he maintained thereafter was an irregular but determined contact with his daughter, Summer, with whom he stayed in touch for the rest of his life.

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