The days were surely getting darker as winter approached. The quiet house, once always the center of craziness, the air ripe with stench of stale cigarettes in overflowing ashtrays and beer cans turned into ashtrays and the stark Band-Aid smell of his own army of spoons singed with his lighters from 'cooking' over the years, now it all felt so quiet, too quiet. His own footfalls echoed a bit too loud. Prufrock measured his life with coffee spoons; Jacko had measured his with spoonfuls of bubbling smack. And now this, a damp room with a small fire and a solitary Bombay Sapphire to keep him company.
He knew winter was approaching and fast, sometimes the inconvenient obviousness of a bit of blood in the spittle he had trouble controlling these days, the bouts of coughing that turn into retching too frequently. Things that would have shocked the boys of yesterday -- 'really? Jacko put orange juice in his vodka? you're fucking with me!" -- now too commonplace. On some level instinct might have been kicking in, that basic thing as animal as ever inside of all things that draw breath, the thing within that makes a mortally wounded deer try to flee even though it can smell and feel and see its life jetting red across the cold snow, even as it hears the hunter reloading and the dread crunch of his approaching boots. But his mind fought back with the insane logic he'd been gifted with, not near as many years on the earth as should have been offered up to him in the well-heeled neighborhoods of his London youth, yet fuller than most twice his age.
So now he felt obligated, not to anyone but himself really, to try and relive those years by writing to himself as much as he could remember. It was a way to pass the time until he drifted off and did not come back from sleep, pen in hand, the ever-present gin by his side. A way to not feel so alone. Maybe a way to push the worry out of his brain and convince him he had done right in this world.
His boys still checked on him most often, all of them well grown now and most good and decent people, something he liked to think was his doing. A sort of father in a sense most people would have considered fucked up at the least, dozens of them he had a hand in raising and only one ended up in prison. Several found their way to Uni, in fact, when the chances of them making it there without Jacko were near impossible.
Focus, he tells himself,
pen to paper. How it began.
How it really began. His hands shake and he begins to write in that disorderly scrawl brought on by years of decadence.
December 1963. The time that became known as 'the Big Freeze.'
It was a chilly day. Hardly understating it, either, and Jackson Lloyd, a boy of 13 months from 14, wandered through the small square going back and forth between shivering to death and staring in amazement at all the snow. The news went on and on over the radio about how the winter of '63 was colder and snowier than ever before. He was on holiday, not by his own choice, but because he was supposed to care about his ailing grandmother, a woman he barely knew beyond a hunched black shadow that creaked on about the Blitz and listened to radio only, even though there was a perfectly sound television gathering dust in the kitchen.
Jackson was not allowed to watch television, however, only when he snuck downstairs in his underwear in the middle of the night, thankful the old bat slept like a rock while worried what he was supposed to do if she didn't wake up. He gave up his nightly ritual after a few days because the programmes about London made him homesick, made him miss his best friend Ben too much and made him need to tell Ben the truth.
His boots crunched under the snow. Finally, he would be allowed escape from days of ringing ears from blaring old music and choked lungs from the Dunhills she chain-smoked as if they might be out of style. He was getting himself back to London any way possible, because New Year's was just half two days off, and he wanted to spend it with Ben and finally come out with things that in hindsight he should have known better than to speak aloud.
His mum of course was none too pleased to have Jackson show up unexpectedly, but he played her quite well with coughing and claiming Grandma's cigarettes were making him ill. A pat on the back and an unemotional brush of his disorderly damp black hair, and now to find Ben and hope his words didn't stick in his throat.
Ben was the sort of boy Jackson looked up to, eighteen months older yet so much more worldly. Jackson envied his best friend for ski trips to Austria and summers in Nice, to be sure, but more to the point he knew that he loved him. The boy thought nothing of letting Jackson curl up with him at sleepover, and those nights Jackson would watch his friend sleep, sometimes dare to be brave enough to brush the long ginger hair out of his eyes or even brave enough on a few occasions to kiss him in his sleep, feel his full lips and catch a taste of his breath slipping into his mouth, always seeming to taste like oranges. Those nights were something of pain and desire he didn't quite understand himself, and now he wondered if Ben might know how Jackson felt.
Ben was immodest in ways that at first embarrassed Jackson, carrying on conversation right in the bath with him whilst fully naked, but then Jackson began to find himself liking this, trying to not be too obvious where his eyes would wander, adopting his friend's habits and himself daring to bathe in front of him fully naked. That required every bit of courage Jackson had, because his own parts where considerably smaller than his friend's, all he could do was discreetly bite his tongue to avoid getting a hard-on at being naked in front of Ben, every bit of his brain fighting his urge to ask Ben to jump in with him. And giving in far too often to mortal sin when alone in his room thinking about Ben. In his mind he saw how tonight would go, simply come right out and tell Ben everything he felt, and then Ben would kiss him, a grownup kiss flowered with oranges and love and they'd share the warm beer stolen from a cupboard Ben's parents thought was securely locked. He thought about discovery, their theft discovered, and then the truth of their true friendship would be out there for all and it would all be fine, munching on Victorian sponge loaded with strawberries. Yes, Ben and him would be together forever, friends and everything else.
And it was time, them alone that evening. He stammered a few words that managed to get the point across nonetheless.
'You fucking queer,' hissed Ben. 'You bent bastard!'
Jackson stepped back in shock, the only small relief was they were alone in the house so no one else could see this betrayal. He couldn't understand anything suddenly, but Ben wasn't finished.
'When I look at you, you...you....tosser, it's like I just crawled into my warm bed to find my dog shat and pissed and puked all in my covers, and I just run to puke myself trying to get the stink off me. Then I trip over my dog's dead body, fall on the loo and break half my teeth. You wanker!'
With a solid shove that nearly sent Jackson flying. Green eyes glared at him with so much hate he couldn't say or understand anything, just sit there on the floor opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish knocked out of its bowl, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Then came the kick, right in his cock, hard and sharp like soccer cleats, the fear and sickness rising in his mouth like spoilt milk realizing that was the only way Ben would ever touch him down there. Fear growing strong as a glass nearly struck him in the head before disintegrating on the fireplace hearth into a thousand pieces. Because clearly now Ben might well kill him.
Jackson was no small boy. In a normal schoolyard fight, a half stone more than Ben and four inches taller, Jackson could have thrashed him. But this was no normal fight, because everything he had hoped for would never happen, and now if Ben killed him that might be for the best. Everyone would know Jackson's secrets, every boy in school, every parent, everyone.
Even nearly fifty years on, he can't remember exactly what happened next. One minute he was choking up a broken tooth and spitting out blood, the very next he had a fire iron in his left hand and swung. Hard. Cricket was his sport to begin with, a game his left-hand swing made him a constant deadly surprise at, and even someone he'd known for almost half his life failed to see it coming from that direction. The iron connected with a vicious crack against Ben's skull, so hard it bent. And it was not like in the movies, no, Ben stumbled around for a few seconds as if drunk, blood coming out of his ears, his eyes, his mouth.
'You...cunt...' said Ben, spitting blood out with every word, before he fell straight onto a glass table that exploded into shards so big some went straight through him.
Jackson remembers sitting up, struggling to his feet, dropping the crumpled fire iron, now tears blocking everything, trying to wake Ben up, those eyes simply staring straight up blank, now his own clothes completely drenched in blood, so much blood it stunk like rust.
'Ben?! Ben?!' his own words seeming like they never came from his mouth.
Rough hands ripping him away from the boy he loved first and most, the boy he'd just killed.
He was only half-aware of Ben's pops trying to bring his son back to life, the boy's mum screaming 'what have you done, Jackson?!'
He stumbled backwards and without a second thought or a hesitation, he ran straight at the window, so fast he crashed right through it, a hundred pieces of splintered wood and glass ripping into him, but not so fast he made it as far as landing on the iron spikes of the fence he was aiming for. His head smacked hard against the bars and then there was just a snowy gray sky and the sting of his own blood crawling into his eyes, the cold, the chill as his blood and Ben's mixed in the snow and his clothes. Tears and pain.
Days later, awake in hospital, Jackson learned that with his family money and the barristers it bought, there was no sin he could not escape the full measure of consequences for, at least not in the real world. But the prison of his mind was now locked tight forever. He didn't speak for weeks, for no reason other than he felt so much pain all he could manage was to cry every moment whilst awake. The grownups assumed that it was his wounds and took a small bit of pity, and until this day Jackson never told a soul the real reason that from that horrible New Year's Eve forward a smile never cracked his lips without the help of the smack or the booze or the boys, all three in generous quantities. But from that day forth Jackson was dead, a boy's corpse living inside the man everyone would forever know as Jacko.