Free Half Plus Seven by Dan Tyte

right. I’d give myself palpitations over palpitations, losing sight of whether they had existed in the first place or were my Frankenstein. She knew she’d hit the bullseye.
    â€˜Well, look, don’t worry yourself about it. It won’t kill you. You’ll live until you’re grey and old.’ If it meant I’d look like George Clooney, I’d take that now.
    â€˜You work in some kind of office, yes?’ I didn’t show agreement.
    â€˜Some kind of fancy office, yes? Well don’t let those people take advantage of you. Value your ideas and don’t let the fat cats get rich off your blood. Money will come, money will go. You’ve got to hang on in there.’
    Gina started to waffle a bit after that; something about a mysterious stranger and a girl, but by then my mind was wandering back to the earlier talk about my ticker.
    â€˜You can do great things. You will do great things. You’ve just got to hang on in there. Hang on in there.’ Sure, hang on in there. I wasn’t going to die of heart disease. Repeat, I wasn’t going to die of heart disease. This was a fucking revelation. Bullshit, likely, but my kind of bullshit.

Chapter 8
    When I wasn’t spending my lunchtimes visiting mystics, I had another regular appointment. While colleagues Skyped distant friends and relatives, shopped for educational toys for their children or went and worked out with Brian from Human Resources, I’d go and sit on the bench right outside our office and drink cheap cider and fortified wine with the local pissheads. The beauty of the plan was in its audacity. Most problem drinkers hid their shameful secret from sight, sipping on the odd bottle of gin from their bottom drawer when no one was looking, or slipping into the stationery cupboard for a quench of a quart hidden in with the box files. Not me. My raging alcoholism would remain latent, at least in its delivery, thanks to my woods for the trees approach to the mid-day blues. I’d leave my desk with a kit-bag under the purely aspirational auspices of jogging in the park. I’d ride the seven floors down to the ground and exit our building, always being careful not to get in step with an errand-running or lunch-grabbing colleague, before taking a sharp left to an alleyway which was filled with large industrial bins, used by the kitchens of the mostly Asian restaurants that backed onto the narrow path. There, among the leftover bones, hidden from the main thoroughfare, I’d change out of my luxury merino wool suit into paint-splattered jogging bottoms, a charity shop woolly knit and, the piece de resistance, the chaser to my pint, a full face balaclava. They never suspected a thing.
    My fellow winos and wasters – it was no good kidding myself I was a tourist – assumed the balaclava hid some third degree burns picked up in the Iraq war. I did nothing to dispel this myth, regaling them with tales from my days with Royal Welsh 2nd Squadron out in Basra. Maybe I planted the seed from which this crooked tree grew, but a good PR man was never going to leave his fingerprints on the sapling. They particularly liked the one I told about the grenade that was lobbed into my armour-plated vehicle. Sometimes I caught it in my mouth before spitting it out and throwing it out of the window. Other times my hard but fair lesbian co-driver and I jumped out of the door and took cover under the body of a dead insurgent, while the car blew up like something out of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. They didn’t notice the details changed every time we talked. I think they wanted to believe. Either that or they were too smashed to register. The way I told them, I often kidded myself I’d done a tour of duty.
    It’s fair to say that these guys killed me. Not literally, although some of them looked as if they could be the catalyst for my grisly end. It was my emotions they killed. Why were they out here while I was (barely)