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Tom woke late on the second day of Detox after maybe ten minor awakenings and forced sleepings. It had been the drip drip drip of the defrosting freezer. The noises too loud, waiting for the next impact of a drop of water. This heightened sense was usually day three, not two. Day three—when the simplest of things became an ordeal. The co-ordination between hand and eye. The surreal impossibility of a teabag and the addition of milk and sugar. Questions of how tea bags came to exist. The colonisation of India. Those little perforated holes.

The fearful first steps out of bed, expecting the muscle pain, finding it but not the slippers. Day two was the day of body as stranger. Of knocking things over like a gangly teenager who’d grown an inch in the night. Was facing your flat like a stranger. Was this pulsing head pain that interpreted each encounter with an object in terms of the agony it might cause. Day two. Day of confrontation with a world that is not drunk. Nine per cent of the population of Edinburgh were alcohol dependent. Thirty per cent of the population of working age adults in the Gorbals in Glasgow were on invalidity or incapacity benefits. One thousand three hundred manufacturing job losses in the last three months.

The facts didn’t help as the Rice Krispies were poured. Fourteen painful steps with the bowl into the living room as the noise of cereal was too much. The 12 Steps. You must ask the higher power in your life, whether God, Buddha, Vishnu or Mohammed… ask the higher power for help. Eat the Rice-fucking-Krispies. Place your faith in the deities Snap, Crackle and Pop.

Funny how humour gets you through a bowl of cereal. Ye nonbeliever. Ye man who once went to an AA meeting and had to leave because you couldn’t withhold the laughter. Ye who went on a three-day bender afterwards. Any ye may delude yourself, little man, false prophet, ye who believes only in yourself and that only on a good day. Wash the breakfast dish ye of little faith.

Fuck YOU! He was shouting at the Fairy Liquid bottle.

It is day two, remind yourself that. Days in the desert when Satan comes to tempt you with an empire of slaves, whores, horses, for the sands to burst forth in flower, for the world to be made in your likeness if you would just take that sup from his cup.

‘Begone, foul fiend!’ Tom shouted at the kitchen units. ‘I did ye with Domestos—did ye not know it kills 99% of all known germs? Away with ye!’

He was anxious then that the neighbours might have heard. My God, but ye had to be wary of day two. The day a couple of years ago at the AA meeting when that fifty-year old man at the lectern had started ranting and groping at his own crotch.

‘This is where Satan lives. Five years and I have not given into his many temptations.’

And Tom had noticed that the guy had a very impressive bulge where he was grabbing. It might have been the guy’s wallet, but my god, thought Tom, if Satan could give you a dick like that then all hail Satan. He’d sat there at the back reading the signs on the walls. The 12 Steps. All Christian dogma with petty disclaimers. There was no sub-clause there for men burdened with great endowment. He had thought it his moral responsibility as an atheist to go up to the guy when it was tea and biscuits time and explain the basic tenets of Nietzschean philosophy. The coming of the Overman. But the talk was interminable and the promise of stewed tea, soggy tuna sandwiches and equally limp handshakes had been too much.

He was still in the kitchen. The aching joints, like it was alcohol that had kept them lubricated. Drink water, force it down. One glass. Go on, get it down you. Two. The freezer was not quite so terrifying now. In fact a metaphor for the Detox process. It would be defrosted when he was dry. Both dry together. Drip drip drip. The towel on the floor was soaked and a large puddle around it in every direction, but the snowy impenetrable wastelands within had much diminished and the things in there seemed to be assuming human proportions. He removed the frozen prawns and the oven-ready chips that must have been in there from before he bought the thing second hand. Put them all in the bin. The noise of chips in a bin seemed not quite right. A delay, like a long distance call.

Day two—when everything went out of sync.                      

But he was doing fine. The muscle pain, yes, but not the migraine. The sweats would come back again but he’d left most of them on the sheets last night. No, he was feeling remarkably good for day two. And the walls could do with a coat of paint. Take your time, he told himself, lighting a fag to try to work out the plan for the day.

Suddenly it was the bathroom and making it this time to the sink. The sickness could come at any moment, he knew this, as he washed it away. The pain throbbing in his temples now. A second retch. Nothing. It was only 11.00 a.m. on Saturday. He wouldn’t be clear till 9 a.m. Monday and then the hardest part would start. The body not so sick but the mind still dependent. These little lies you told yourself minute after minute in the dry wasteland of the future that was one day at a time. Just one drink to celebrate how you’d been dry.

Great idea. He was dressing now. Fuck, why not? A day dry. Well done, Tom. His girlfriend in America, Meg, wouldn’t know. And it was an old family trait the drinking, nothing to be ashamed of.

Drip drip drip. So dry.

The keys in the lock. Future projected sound of the keys he’d have cut for her when she arrived. Mia casa sua casa.

But he’d lied to her, told her he was in the Highlands with his son, Sean. If he had a drink the first thing he’d do would be to call her and confess. Or have to make up a counter lie. Trip cancelled. No, he must remain true to her, or at least, to that first lie.

Back inside. Pacing. The dust in the living room. He’d finish off painting the kitchen alcove, write her an email.

Sleep now, sleep. Sleep, baby, sleep as he used to sing to Sean. The little lamb is on the green, with woolly fleece so soft and clean. This song his mother had sung to him, it sounded now like some advert from the fifties. A lullaby selling biological washing powder.

Maybe he had got the words wrong.

Detox—Morning Three

The mobile had rung. Two thirty a.m. it said. So he was on day three now. It must have been her. He was not ready yet. Still night. He drank his water from the bedside table. Leaning over was painful. Shoulder, arm, wrist, spine. Every muscle competing. The bare duvet was soaked with sweat. He shivered as he pulled it off. Still wearing jeans and T-shirt. 

Fuck, it was day three but night two and there was no way now he could sleep.

It was her that had rung. Eight thirty p.m. her time. Should he just call her now? No, remind yourself. You lied to her. One more day and you will be clean. This is for her. If you speak there’ll be that one thing that touches you that upsets you or is left unresolved that will have you going out looking for that drink.

Day three—the day when the liver starts to repair itself and the mind quietens. When the body is free enough from alcohol to attempt a drive, to the country maybe, in full confidence that if stopped the breathalyser will be below the mark.

He located his slippers, the shivering was back. Day three after the twenty pints of water and the fifteen tablets of Milk Thistle. Day three, when you had to get out of your flat to let your thoughts fly up to the sky, not bounce back off the walls.

Tom dresses. He will walk, outside. Night and he walks the backstreets, coat wrapped tight round himself. Away from people and pubs and clubs. He needs architecture not people. Three a.m. He walks east to Marchmont. Past the squalor to the villas and townhouses. In his mind he is preparing a tour of the city for Meg, all the best parts of the city. The highlights of the Edinburgh Festival. 

Day three—the most dangerous day. When all of life was revealed to you with a lucidity even the sober did not possess. Entire societies laid bare. It was happening as he stared at 19^th century tobacco merchants’ mansions and the streets beyond built to house the workers. Histories of slavery and the wealth of nations carved in stone whispering their secrets to him. Three forty a.m. and Tom is only half a mile from home but he has come a different way. It is always like this: these solitary walks at first filled with so many ideas and the hope of catching that next revelatory thought. The moment always missed somehow. Laughing at yourself for thinking a walk could teach you anything.

Ftttuh ftuuh ftuuuh.

Tom turns to find the source of the noise. Like someone running from muggers. Trainers on wet ground. His eyes find an abandoned school playground, passed in the car many times. Here as long as he could recall. Never a kid playing football on it. At night the junkies huddled in dark corners with flash of fire under tin-foil. Biro pens to suck up the fumes.  

Ftttuh ftuuh ftuuuh.

Tom has stopped now and is staring, eyes adjusting to the dark. The noise, the football pitch. Sound of feet running over wet gravel. He sees him now. Maybe forty, head shaven, wearing a T-shirt, shorts, trainers. Sprinting is the word. A shadow sprinting at three forty-seven a.m. Tom stops beneath a tree. Makes sure he can’t be seen watching.

The man’s T-shirt is grey, his trainers worn. He sprints the pitch in nine seconds like all hell was chasing him, then stops, breathes. Tom, transfixed, will not light a cigarette now because it might alert the running man to his presence.

Look at him. My God. Sprinting from one end to another. No wrist-watch Tom can see. Measuring his own time with his breath. The sounds from the street beyond of drunken clubbers heading home and the man has started on his next length. Tom focuses on his face now, what little he can see—a face so focused it could be anger. The feet pumping. A man racing himself.

It has to mean something. Things don’t just happen. The feet pounding the abandoned gravel where children were once meant to play. At three fifty a.m. It must mean something, otherwise it is terrifying.

Things going out of sync. The man stopped and Tom hears screaming in a street. The man is running again—a plane overhead.

It does not stop when he gets home. He cannot sleep. Watching his feet as he paces, and from a flat down the road—rave music. Boiling the kettle to make breakfast but it is only four a.m. and outside a man is shouting, ‘Johnnie, JOHNNIE!’

Sleep impossible, but possible with pills. Twice the dosage of valerian, one drowsy-making anti-histamine, a sniff of lavender and a difficult book. To just sleep. He grabs a pillow and puts it between his knees and one behind his back, goes into foetal posture, feeling the soft pressure all around him, tucking the duvet round his feet, making his ‘parcel’ as Meg calls it. Twenty-five days till she will come. One day at a time.

Sweet Jesus.

How strange time felt now. Not like the month before when they’d been learning how to cope with the distance. Now that it was closing there was something new. He turned off the bedside lamp as if it would help him stop the thoughts but they only became more clear in the darkness. He and Meg had not really connected recently. Were moving in different directions. Him to their future, making plans for her tour of his city. And she—drifting into their past. He hadn’t noticed the exact point of the transition. He closed his eyes to try to sleep.

Maybe twenty minutes trying to calm the thousand thoughts. Maybe a couple of pages of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy might bore him to sleep. He’d been re-reading the same two pages on Heidegger for the past four months. This one line—‘Live your life backwards as if from the point of death.’ Running the line over in his head, it gradually slowing. To sleep now. To live your life backwards.

The sound of high heels on the floor from the ceiling above.

His mobile said it was four forty-two a.m. The noise that sounded like furniture being moved that he knew was the bashing of a bed headboard against the wall. The rhythm would get faster and soon there would be the moans. The neighbours always fucked at this time on a Sunday morning. Sure enough she started moaning, or maybe it was the sound of her baby crying. It would last no more than six minutes. He’d timed them before with the clock on his mobile. Sometimes she shouted when she came. Usually Tom had a wank listening to them, and tried to time his rhythm with their thrusts and moans. He had once, about a year ago, managed to come just as his neighbours did. And he’d lain there laughing to himself trying to picture the scene—a cross-section of the building. This couple in post-coital cuddle above and him twelve feet below staring up at the ceiling as his dick spasmed soft against his gut.

Tom stared up at the white ceiling and the sex sounds didn’t match what he saw. The swirly Artex plaster painted white. The round white paper Ikea lampshade that never quite sat right. The plastic thing that the wires were tucked into. The little hole between it and the ceiling, where the noises came from.

The rhythm accelerating. The moaning almost pornographic, a good night by the usual standards, but he did not feel like wanking. Not at all. The whole scene struck him now as rather pathetic. They always fucked once a week at exactly the same time. Just after the clubs shut on a Saturday night. She worked in a Tesco and he was a brickie. He’d met them a dozen or so times on the stairs as they carried the baby buggy up. Not just moans. There were words tonight.

‘Oh God, it’s good, God-God-GOD!’

Willing it to end. When it was done there would be a minute or so then he would hear her heels again. She must fuck with heels on. Probably suspenders and stockings too. They must have stripped pine flooring, not carpet.

She came. A loud long guttural groan. Then the silence.

Loneliness was just one word amongst thousands that flew through his head in the next minute. And there were sixty minutes in an hour and twenty-four hours in a day. The pillow between his knees, the one behind his back, the one he hugged with his arms. The water by the bed, the basin just in case he was sick again. Swallowing back the salt saliva, clenching his eyes tight shut—get to sleep now, hurry up, before the shivers come.

The shout from the street.

’JOHNNIE. Wake up, ya cunt!’

New You

The waking not so bad. Jolly bloody promising in fact. Morning day three. Today she will call. He’s six hours ahead. Middle of her night. Big plans. To get fit for her. Join a gym. OK to drive now. Gyms were, as always, miles from anywhere—a secret policy to exclude those who couldn’t afford cars no doubt. Fifteen miles after checking the location on a website— an Enterprise Park. It looking just like he’d imagined as he parked the car. Concrete object that had not an architect but an accountant with a slide ruler. How many bodies can we squeeze into a given space? A logo as big as the building. THE NEW YOU—pictures of tight asses, bleached blondes grinning as they did weights and dives. Above the front door, a window of cyclists, pedalling like hell—going nowhere. American-style-hard-bodies. Trying to fight his scepticism. Walking through the doors that opened for him as if they had been waiting. The NEW YOU, the poster said again at reception. The girl behind the desk like the one in the ad. Do this for Meg. Make yourself well.

‘I’d like to sign up for the new me.’

‘The New You,’ she corrected.

‘The new… you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He took a beat as the confusion circled him and the rage started. He ran the required words over in his head, ‘I’d like to be a New You.’ Yes, he would love to have been her for a day, to lie back and fondle those pert breasts and run his hands over those taught trimmed abs. But grammatically, existentially, it seemed wrong. The usual diatribe against the stupidity of marketing words brewing. Stay, he told himself, get a membership, whoever the who you are. She was asking for his credit card details without even facing him.

‘I’ll just page Terry to show you round the New You’s facilities.’

See—even the girl was getting confused now. No matter how many people were trying to be a new You, there was no such word as Yous. The communal plural of you was us or them, not yous. Unless you came from Glasgow—‘So youz comin’ oot furra pint?’ Or was it that all the little sub-you’s were aspiring towards the condition of becoming a unique and singular You, that in their unified conformity to solitary perfection they would become a new transcendent universal? An as yet unuttered neologism. The Yous. Each alone fighting who they’d been to become a collective possessive noun, a monument to grammatical and philosophical absurdity. And at the end of this process, they would welcome the new members, all voices as one—‘Hi, we’re the New Yous, who are you?’

Waiting for Terry and his introductory tour. The sounds blasting out of some all-girl pop band singing about booties and grinding and the sight of the sixty people sweating their old selves out on the bikes and rowing machines and abdominators to his left, and the ultra-chic, ultra-expensive fitness gear on the rack to his right with a picture of a smiling perfect twenty-year-old blonde wearing the branded name of the gym.

That was it. He shouted, ‘Cancel the transaction.’ Got his card back and stormed out past the 100 or so fat, old, ugly struggling singular you’s.

Nature was a thing for old people, hillwalkers, tourists and romantics, but it was on his way back from the Enterprise Park, and the only option left.

He parked the car in a lay-by. Had to breathe for a second. Swearing at himself for his lack of guts, at his gut. To be afraid of fitness.

One more try.

Arthur’s Seat was on the way home. Great big lump of mountain-like granite at the foot of the city. Nature would cure him. Another mile then he parked. Locked the car door and started up the gravel path and there were trees and the air was clean and as he climbed Edinburgh became a shadow in the fog. He would take Meg here, it wasn’t the epic Scottish Highlands but it was at least a high bit in the middle of the lowlands.

Progressing along the path and he was buoyant, bouncing on his feet. She would love this. The Scots pines he was passing—a hundred years older than her country. The thistles that looked like product-placement for Scottishness, that had made her laugh when he’d mentioned them to her.

‘Trust the Scots to find a national flower that’s got thorns.’

To have her voice beside him as he joked about the indigenous fauna, the thick-wooled orange dreadlocked highland cows, that were not like the usual industrial milk machines, not beef for the slaughter, but were put in places such as this so tourists could take photos. Scottish-celebrity cows. Oh, it made him laugh thinking of her by his side, as he deconstructed this unnatural bit of nature.

‘And the kilt too. Another fallacy—invented by the Victorian English gentry, so they could go in fancy-dress when touring Scotland. This cute little mini-skirt version of the plaid.’

‘The plaid?’

‘Three metres of raw cloth the Scots wore as their only garment—wrapped it round themselves to sleep in the hills and glens as they tended their livestock. Banned in 1748 by the English.’

‘Stop, stop, you’re destroying my dreams!’

Bracken and ferns. A family approaching on the path. A kid in a stroller screaming for sweeties. Behind them, another family with a five year old, shouting ‘Bored – bored!’ Tom left the path and headed into the long grass. Had to be alone with Meg in his mind. But still the sounds and sight of them a hundred yards away. The Nike sportswear. The Next chinos. The baby dressed in Baby Gap.

Over a fence and off the path. Through the ferns. Alone at last. A field of real cows and sheep. Eating grass. Lives lived head down in the same field. Just like the local humans. God, fuck. He’d come here to get away and it was just the same. The cows, the thistles, caricatures of themselves. Living eating munching clichés. If she wanted to see the real Scotland then it would be a five-six-hour drive north through the silent Highlands to meet his now silent father in the nursing home. Seven hours it would take. Nine hours to get to her in New York if he flew direct. Shit! He’d lied to her about the Highlands. He’d have to make up some stories before they spoke.

His every pore screaming, weeping, wanting Meg, the touch of a woman. Sick with need for a drink. Meg and her days.

Day three dry.

God, he had to get the hell out of nature. A mile to the car. The 12 Steps. Step 4—make an honest inventory of the problems/habits that you need to change. The first thing that needed changing was the whole fucking 12 Steps. The belief that belief in a higher power could save you.

Why this now? The joggers. Why this hatred now? Look at them, so fucking happy to be in nature. These so-called Scots with their weekend hills and glens and their American trainers, and ‘Lovely days’ and ‘Hellos.’ Didn’t they know he was on day three now. Fuck their passing smiles. The skies had to weep right now and drown this world in blood and sweat and cum and Smirnoff with a slice of lemon in a pre-chilled hi-ball glass with crushed ice.

Keep walking. Get back to the car. Meg’ll want to come here with you. Feet on the path. One, two, three. God in fucking hell he needed a drink. The salt on the edge of a marguerita glass. The perfection of a pint of Guinness. The clean cut of a shot of tequila.

Fuck, another one jogging by. What’s with the smile? Like you’re one of them now, even though you are shivering in an old raincoat. He’d come here tomorrow just to show them, half a bottle in the car park then stagger, Smirnoff in hand along their jogging path, making lewd suggestions and crashing into them.

‘FUCK YOU!’ He’d shout. ‘All of youz,’ in his best proletarian accent. ‘The folk in the housing schemes—think aboot them!’

And they’d make a detour around him worrying about what had come to their lovely country park. Such riff-raff.

‘Naw, naw,’ he would shout swinging his vodka bottle. ‘It kills me so it does.  Did ye know, serious, why folks in the schemes are so sick and alkies the lot o’ them. Ah’ll fucking tell ye!’

Joggers waiting to get past him now. The voice screaming in his head.

‘Ah’ll fucking tell ye. There’s schemes on the outskirts whir it’s a three-mile walk to the nearest vegetable. No, for real, and you jog around and say these people would have a better attitude towards life if they had better nutrition—their poor children are deprived of vitamins and essential omegas. But did ye know? Did ye fucking know? The 70s. The socialist social-planner that stuck them on the edge of everything, beside a motorway, going fucking nowhere!’

Three fat bourgeois in their two hundred pound hiking boots speeding past him. Looking over their shoulders as if they could hear his inner mind.

‘No, Listen! It’s true. I work for the Government, I’ve got facts.’

The rest of his diatribe running as he walked the silent path ranting secretly to himself. ‘Right …so if they want to buy a fucking tomato, a fucking carrot, I’m serious, the only thing within a mile is McDonalds. If they need to buy the essential ingredient to make a, let’s say—a fucking Caesar salad, it’s a two-mile drive and well hey, they don’t have a car, so it’s a walk along the motorway. I’ve seen them, I have—an anorexic junkie mum walking her kid by the side of the motorway in search of sustenance. This is town planning, right? I’m talking Sighthill and East Pilton and on the fucking motorway, right, there’s these big fucking posters from the Scottish Parliament telling these people they should eat more fucking vegetables….IT MAKES ME WEEP.  IT MAKES ME FUCKING…’

He was actually shouting now.

Stop! It’s just day three, just the alcohol screaming.

Day three was the day you stopped in your tracks in the middle of some field. The day you remembered that you still cared for all of the suffering masses who you couldn’t save and the reason why you first started drinking was because you cared. Day three—the day when you realised you’d wasted ten years and the future would be the same if you didn’t do something radical to save yourself. Now.

It started with running the last mile to the car. A detour through the bracken, just to get away from people. No one around. Lungs, heart, these things somehow still functioning. Keeping on. And somehow it had become funny. This hilarious image of himself. A solitary silhouette in an empty landscape in a worn-out suit jacket and trainers. Laughing at how good it felt to be actually running. No one around. Breath and feet on gravel. Ten eleven twelve. No earphones. No solitary pursuit of a better body. Just running. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty three. Something the lungs did, some ridiculous long forgotten pleasure in just being a body. Thirty, thirty-one, two, three. Something about bracken and ferns and heather and wee birds in trees twittering. Not a soul around. Laughing at himself, shouting out.

‘A fuckin’ tree.’

‘Fuckin’ clump of grass.’

This was what wilderness meant.  The wildness within, chasing it.

Fuckin wee birds, wee fuckin’ leaves.

Yes, he would have to get some proper trainers if he was to do this again. He’d have to find places more remote so there would be no possible encounter with people. This is what a body is for. Yes. Forty-nine, fifty.

‘Fuckin thistles!’

Back at his car, out of breath and this nature thing wasn’t so bad. The run had pushed the last of the alcohol out of his system and this kind of high was new. Tonight was the night. The first communication in three endless days and nights. He’d ring Meg at the agreed time and tell her of this ridiculous newfound joy. He’d buy trainers tomorrow. Jogging suit. The whole shebang. He’d drive here every day before work and do a mile or more. Only two and a half weeks till she arrived, he’d work off the gut, stay dry for her. She’d find him fresh faced and rosy cheeked. Yes, yes, yes, I can change. Telling the weeds by the side of the car – yes – this is the new fucking me.

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BIO

Ewan Morrison is an award-winning novelist, scriptwriter, and essayist. His fiction focuses on the modern family, cults, idealism, and extremism. He has won the Saltire Society Literary Prize, the Scottish Book of the Year (SMIT) Fiction Prize, and the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for Writer of the Year.

Morrison’s film American Blackout reached 45 million viewers, while his novel Nina X is being adapted into a feature film. His work has been nominated for BAFTAs and other international awards.

Morrison’s 2021 thriller How to Survive Everything is being adapted as a TV series by the production company who made Nine Perfect Strangers and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. His ninth book, For Emma, will be published by Leamington Books on 25th March 2025 and can be pre-ordered here: https://leamingtonbooks.com/for-emma