Depression Era Brighton 1: The Dream

I fell out of bed with a thump. It was three thirteen and the floor was rough and cold. I tried to lift my hands to catch myself before I hit it, but they caught on a pair of jeans, meaning I landed heavily on the backs of my hands and forearms. My dream had begun in some crumbling cottage in a made-up county; all my friends lived there together and we all had damp, unkempt rooms. Flashes from the dream badgered me as I rolled over on the bedroom floor at three thirteen am with my eyes burning and my head throbbing. I saw a woman with black hair and a ledge I had to cross over and over. This is a format of a particular kind of dream I often have - where I seem to have no choice but to risk traversing a precarious mountain ledge or high wire or high dive, over and over again until I finally slip and wake-up unpleasantly cold and heading for the carpet. Other times I feel myself landing on the mattress as though my body had become weightless in the dream and consciousness had brought gravity flooding back into my very cells. This time I had to cross a thin ledge with no hand grips to get to a room where I could be alone and at peace, but I always forgot something so, when I got there, I had to go back. Every time I returned I would have something else to carry - a pen, a laptop, my guitar - eventually I'd have to carry an armchair or a bed across and would lose my balance, tumbling to my impending death. My wife tells me I grind my teeth in my sleep. I thought about just staying there, on my back on the floor, with the warmth of my jeans covering my chest and a fishnet petticoat cushioning my heels - I felt quite comfortable. Cold, yes, but comfortable. I thought I felt a carpet bug brushing my ear but it didn't bother me. Three thirteen turned to three fourteen and I shivered, got to one knee and swayed drunkenly. Of course I was drunk. Not happily drunk, though earlier I had been; no, dirty drunk on lambrini. I used to drink whisky and beer and straight whisky and cider and quadruple whisky and I'd get up at six am and work a hard, hazy shift. Lambrini is a dirty drunk - cheap and harmless until you pass the threshold to the world of phantoms and wild scenery and precarious ledges over unfathomable drops - during dreams, it turns your head to charcoal and decapitates your will. It suits me to get out of bed early and go for a run, but I drink lambrini and sleep 'til ten and don't dress all day. That is unless the phone rings and I go to some 'job' where I help able bodied people eat dinner. I pick up bottles of wine and pour them drinks as if they were incapable of such a geometrically challenging task; I offer little rolls of bread and little cups of tea and little pallets of chocolates but, much the worst of all, I 'pull down for dessert'. Can you imagine what this can possibly entail? How such a task has become pro-forma at large-scale, upper-echelon catering events escapes me: just who was the progenitor of the practice is a question that brings to mind idle, rich, obnoxious sons of swindling bankers whose obese forms are an insult to every sentient being who has ever wanted for comfort, food or security. I find it humiliating in the extreme and demeaning to all concerned: actually, yes, you've probably guessed it. The waiter, when tasked with 'pulling-down', is to lean over the shoulder of the guest, crotch against back, and 'pull down' the dessert fork and dessert spoon from their station at the peak of the place setting to their ready positions under hands, left and right. I don't even know which side the spoon and fork should be and have been corrected by guests more than once. Having swapped fork and spoon over, one wonders why they waited for me to 'pull' them 'down' in the first place. 'Pull'! Young girls used to crawl miles through coal mines 'pulling' carts laden with their father's and brother's excavations. They would tread over rough shale and through unthinkable darknesses and would be killed by cave-ins and gas-leaks and fires and when at the end of the day they emerged coughing and heaving with their skin blackened and their lips bursting red they might be paid enough to feed themselves sufficiently to have the energy to do it again the next day. Christ, this catering is no work for a man! This is depression era Brighton and I'm doing better than some, I know, but I'm paying for it with my dignity and the dignity of those others who still can spare the cash for a banquet and a waiter who will force his crotch into their backs and, forced smile dimly visible, incorrectly orientate their fork and spoon for them. I rolled back into bed with no particular time in mind other the last one I saw. This is depression era Brighton town in the year two thousand and nine and I'll drink lambrini, 'pull down for dessert' and dream of precarious ledges and the inevitable fall over and over before the clock's meaningless face.