Chapter 1 - Stopping the Rot
It was easy to see, and feel, the bleak decay of poverty and low expectations.
He sat, staring, at the passing garbage. The river, only forty yards away, always visible from his default well-worn chair. The debris of his youth in his eyes mirrored by the debris from his hometown really, floated mindlessly by, giving the river a sense of poverty. His top floor council flat offered the ideal viewing platform to see the daily decay he felt in his gut. The river, pushing onwards into the estuary, with its relentless collection of garbage confirmed his own bleak thoughts.
Today, a small surprise, a shopping trolley. They normally sink as soon as the spirited youth, or the lost drunk, pushed them into the river. You could often see the trolley collection, when the river ran low, only half a mile from his flat in the Chapel Hole. He caught that thought, Chapel Hole, and he remembered the stories told during his days as an alter boy in the nearby Chapel. The sinners went there when they had had enough. The black, deep, bend in the river the perfect supporting act for the stories of sin. This trolley though, was fighting to stay afloat, snagged on a large broken branch. The stream of thoughts broken by the irritating clip coming from the endless sequence of YouTube clips.
Pushing the remote, the clip flicked to the next one, he smiled as the TV settled into a less irritating conflagration of stuff. One irritant gone his mind drifted back to the trolley - he smiled at it's wilful avoidance of its fate at the bottom of the river. It passed, the trolley almost like the centre piece, bottles, plastic bags, a trainer, it's adornments. Decay was not far away. It was right in front of his eyes - every single day.
It had him, this decay, and he knew it. Four decades he had fought to escape this place. An angry Scottish teenager, scorned for his scholarship attendance at a private school, one of many angry young lost souls in the Big Smoke. Alone, but powered by anger, he had not hesitated to board the train for London - determined to do whatever was needed to escape from the life he had known. Escape from the white lips of anger, escape from the threat and the beatings, escape from newspaper for toilet paper, escape from hopelessness, escape to matter, escape to make a difference. To change the fucking world. Escape the place - he blamed for his life. Not knowing, in his angry youth, that he was taking himself with him - tarnished and warped by the batterings and the bruises, visible and emotional.
The decades passed quickly enough.
He flicked another reel - his mind briefly focusing on the Godfather clip. He could see the passion for life in the eyes of Al Pacino and the decay of life in Marlon Brando. They seemed to connect with his memory of his angry youth and his current failed, and failing, state. His eyes flicking back to the passing river. A flicker of regret in his eyes as he realised the trolley had passed. Why he had wanted to watch the trolley disappear rather than be surprised by its absence he pondered briefly. Pushing his finger into the well-worn remote and another movie reel came on.
His Father, funeral yesterday, would have taken some joy in his decay. The low-level jealousy of his success had always been there. Even as his success faded, three decades of anger eventually taking its toll on his mind and body, he felt the glee in his father's words.
"You belong here." He had said it simply enough.
It was the look in his eyes though. The look that said, 'who did you think you were'. It punched him then, and it punched him now, it's truth adding weight to the emotional gut punch. He had got above his station - and people just did not like that. His Father least of all. The river, it's jetsam sometimes a good distraction from his thoughts. YouTube with its easy dopamine pleasing scenes his main diet of pain relief.
