Free The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts Page A

life. My thirteen-year-old life, back when I was young, and reading Shoot! and 2000 AD on a Saturday morning, and eating Blackjacks and Fruit Salad chews, and cycling my Chopper through the park. It wasn’t easy to get a good look at the ghost. Thirteen, I’d guess. Something like that. That’s the way with ghosts, though, isn’t it? Usually he would be in the corner of my bedroom. Or I might see him standing just outside the tepee of light cast by a street lamp. Or in a crowd, and I would feel him more than see him. Sometimes I got a better look. He didn’t look anything like me.
    The ghost-boy’s appearance marked the point from which the sine wave would begin its inexorable downslide. For a full year the nightmares would increase in vividness and regularity. Back in the blackness and the cold, the southern lights casting an intermittent neon corpse-glow upon me, and the terrors, the terrors, the terrors, gathering all around me. Through a second year the night terrors would get inexorably worse. By year three I was barely able to function. I kept a bottle of gin on my bedside table. I moved to gin (I laugh at myself to write this, but it’s true) because in my sodden mind I told myself the juniper berry element counted as fruit, a glimpse of health, in a way that wasn’t true of my previous favourite tipple, vodka. I also drank a good deal of red wine. My teeth turned blue. My hands shook. This was my morning routine: I would wake, my face crusty with tears shed in the night, a sense of grasping, swallowing horror around me. Then I would take a swig of gin, and grimace, and cough, and take another. The discomfort of the firewater going down my parched throat was part of the routine, as much as was the slow blurring of the edges of my fear. But mostly it was the habit. Once I took my third glug – always three sips in the morning – I would have the sense of a painful but necessary ablution completed. Then: shower. Brushing my teeth. Breakfast cereal. Brushing my teeth again. Getting dressed, and a third brush of the teeth. I told myself I needed to brush my teeth thrice to disguise the fact that I started the day with alcohol, lest my employer get wind and fire me. The truth is: I had become wedded to the OCD routineness of it all.
    My work at the university, substandard for years, finally dipped below the level where the authorities could continue turning their collective blind eye. I was issued with a first formal warning, and booked into training sessions designed to help me, which I either attended drunk, or skipped. I was issued with a second formal warning. My head of department took me aside, after a departmental board, and urged me to join Alcoholics Anonymous. I was distracted by the ghost of the scarred-face boy, walking down the corridor away from us both, visible over her shoulder. If he wasn’t somehow me then why was his face scarred?
    The third formal warning was tantamount to dismissal.
    Unable to land another university job I retrained as a school science teacher. I told myself this was a stopgap, and I would continue applying for university work, but three years into schoolwork it started to dawn on me that I wasn’t ever going to get back into tertiary education. This was depressing, and the depression was made more acute when I lost my teaching job. I’m not writing this narrative in order to give an account of my time as a schoolteacher, so I won’t dwell on this, except to say that I was suspended rather than being sacked. I got three months’ pay, and then the pay stopped, although my suspension carried on, for being drunk in the classroom. I had managed to modify my behaviour to the point where I would not go to work drunk in the morning. But by lunchtime I was usually in a state (maintaining discipline amongst bored and hostile teenagers disinclined to learn any physics, whilst the ghost-boy wandered through the rows of desks) that only several glasses of wine could remedy. After