The trees growing through your lungs are making you cough. Sometimes when you wake up it feels like your body is drowning itself. Comically you cluck and flutter as the briers entwine and draw blood before you can heave forth the rattling thorns. You fall back, wiping your sweat away as you are released for a moment more. Smiling. You fool. Unaware or not a care.

We went to The Swan, and now I’m sitting here in the corner next to a group of your ‘friends’ watching you talk and gesture madly. We were in the hospital today. But you won’t tell them that. You won’t tell them they’re killing you. I have your pills in my bag. I sit feeling angry with every moment of the display and I thank God Timothy can't see this. Your cheeks flutter like blood-soaked apricots, or a caricature of Father Christmas, as you laugh and repeat that story you love, the one with the dog and the pint of Beamish, with swirling enthusiasm. But I see nothing jolly there. It’s a sad picture of an overweight sweating fool sucking repeatedly like a baby. Those yellow lips bare the indent slightly left of centre where that floppy cigarette always sits; takes its place, like the stalk of an apple, as a part of your face. Needing the laughs and glowing eyes of those witnesses to your spectacle, you’re as blind to their picture of you as you are to yourself. Enjoyment is theirs but, you know, it’s only as a carnival fascination with the creature before them. I sit there embarrassed with my gin and tonic, but I can’t help thinking that the years we’ve been together mean nothing if you leave me now. I told you. I told you so many times. But, like you were wrapped up in one of those stories, you carried on… energetically swimming through life oblivious to the currents that had hold of you already.

So it’s your heart now then. I was right, yes I was. And our friends all know it. You’d never realise, you still continue to say how, ‘hell at least I enjoy my life’. And you say ‘what have I done?!’ What a cheek! When I look back all the years I spent slaving my hands to the bone, scrubbing and cooking, bringing your drinks too; looking after you! I could’ve drunk myself, like I wasn’t a lady. But instead I chose a good and simple life. Skin and bone I know I am, but I lived my life right, and you don’t care. And now what’s left for me? I sit back and watch you die?! My life’s nearly over and this is how you repay me. You're an embarrassment.

Aren’t I the real victim here?

Daily, I’ve been tending the briers, just the way you ask.

They grow more densely every day but still I look out across them searching for a way to pass and find that thing of beauty my hazy memories hint was once there. I can no longer see it. All I see is you blundering back from the bar with another round of drinks. You fall onto the chair and pause, leaning slightly forward, your fist pumping into your chest. As I hear that familiar crackle in your lungs, I wait for the bronchial seizures to grip and take a sip of my next G’n’T.

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 “…Honest and practical, that’s what it should say on my headstone. Always put shit about someone that bears no relationship with reality... No idea where that one came from. But then, the big bear with the cross does know what he’s talking about… that’s why you are meant to follow him. Even if he takes you into the depths of hell, because at least you get to have a beer on the way down… and it’s all about the journey… maybe there’s a better trip to take but who knows, coz you were born to follow the bear. Embrace it. He is your friend. He and his kin. Call me goldilocks, call me what you will, call me the bore on the phone, the whore you need when you are alone…”

So that’s it then? You said you had nothing left to do. And yet you called me expecting me to help?! I’m the one who’s always fucking you up… And you expect me to ‘be there’ for you? …say ‘there, there’… and make it all better or something else to sugar-coat the pill?! Well hell man, it won’t get any better than this… but the bear will always be there, and if you lag behind he’ll have morphed into another form but he’ll be there with an evil look in his eye, and barking in your head like a drill sergeant. Give him credit… those ‘aint just voices in your head mister… know your enemy… know your friend…

Something tells me you don’t know neither.

You are a pitiful sight today… I came round after I got off the phone with you, to find the door ajar and clothes spilling out into the hallway. The lights were on throughout the house but I found you sitting on the back step just staring into the dark with the wind whipping your T-shirt and boxers and an inch of fag-ash shivering threateningly towards your cup of black coffee. That grease in your hair didn’t come from a bottle. Or maybe it did. I see it standing there by your foot. Your flesh clings to cheekbone ridges like grannies old drapes. Fragile. But their skin has texture like withered limes, pale and dry, and at once its rind still glistening with oils. Oils that surely store more poison than should be contained in the essence of any living thing.

You’re not the prettiest sight. Total loser in fact. Know your enemy… know your friend… Timothy, you could never be either as you wither there in front of me.

I kicked you up to the bedroom and had a feel around. But when you asked me to stay over I knew you only wanted not to be alone, and I kinda liked the feeling of being needed, so I left. But then I always was something of a cunt.

Tears are a waste of energy. Especially when they’re directed at me. So he left you… so fucking what? So, you left him a few short months ago, but you don’t remember that now do you? Absence invites no remorse when you lost it all in the vacuum of your mind.

…Should’ve left you well alone… Well you can leave me out of it now. Unless you need a quick screw sometime. Always time for that.

But then your butts so fluffy I think I’m the one following the bear.

Never liked that.

Fuck this, give me strength!

Gotta get my bloody work done now. Giving myself hell about it all day and everything that provides a distraction I guiltily accept. To the point where the guilt takes over and all I’m left with is this uneasiness about what’s to follow… coz really my imagination ‘aint even that great and I end up struggling to think of new distractions. Probably the only reason I answered that call I open a document in word and suck on a bit of tuna caught in my tooth as I begin to type.

I can hear the commentator now… will he make it this time?

“David Bancroft, this proven contender of 35, has won or drawn in 8 dices with disaster in the last few months, and still he continues to risk everything in his game. It’s 11.30 at night and something tells me he’s tempting fate. Joe, what do you think?”

Joe pipes in there:

“Yes, now I think you’re right, this boy’s luck is nearly out. People are starting to suss his moves and that low backhand won’t save him again. Speed was what he needed and now he’s not on top form. I think the winning streak is coming to an end.”

Pathetic, and now he’s talking to himself. And typing garbage into his PC in the hope that inspiration strikes… or maybe he’s just talking about himself, to himself, in the third person so that some kind soul will drag him off to a nice clean room where he can watch TV all day and never stress about a deadline again. The craziest thing, is that he’s writing something else entirely different, he notices as he looks down at the page. Something random about bears. It makes no sense. He… I mean I, grab a glass of lucozade and hold down the delete button until the electronic guff and shit I’ve been typing disappears. Not nearly as satisfying as screwing up a sheet of paper and hurling it across the room. Why don’t people write anymore? I wonder if there was a dramatic down-surge in the ‘Bic’ biro stocks and shares when personal computers began their monopoly on our lives? Maybe that’s why mental illness has become so endemic. It’s not the fast-paced lifestyle, the competitive individualism, or the breakdown of the family; it’s the invention of the delete button taking away the one free act of aggression that was permitted to us.

Creative life is not what it used to be. I need a beer. I tear a few sheets from a notebook sat on the desk, screw them up with as much malice as I can muster and hurl them at the computer screen as I’m en route to the kitchen.

Not quite the same effect.

I’d give it all up. I’d return to embrace the soda-stream generation with its mulletted meanness for just one satisfying scrunch and hurl.

I settle for a ‘psst-fffff-slurp’ instead, and fall back on the sofa in defeat.

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A day or two later Timothy sits chewing on the plastic tube of his nicotine fix. He sits in a hospital waiting room in the centre of a row of angular wipe-clean chairs. Identical chairs exist in all hospital waiting rooms, coloured in depressing shades of grey, dusty mustard, dirty pink or brown. Their aging sponge is emerging from the broken seams, leaving tiny pieces of its disintegration on the floor and clinging to the edge of Timothy’s corduroy blazer. He’s been sitting for a while now. Looks at his watch again and compares the time with that on the clock above Reception; they match. He puts down the Top Gear magazine in his hand and scans through the pages of Home and Garden, staring through each of the pages he’s turning with his shaking hand. He sucks on the tube holding it with both hands and leans forward to steady himself on his elbows, letting the magazine drop to the floor. A moment later his mother’s form appears through the double doors in front of him, barely an apparition. She has no strength to move and stops there, swaying slightly and staring blankly at the magazine at his feet.

Timothy didn’t see his Dad on the way in; he got the call an hour ago, but he now braced himself to see him on the way out. He rises slowly and walks steadily towards his mother.

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A caramel cat walks into the sparse living room and rubs against the legs of its dozing owner. After a few minutes of inattention it begins to cry out with an impatient guttural ‘grr…ahouwww!’, waking him and receiving a belt from the back of his hand as he repositions himself on the armchair to curl on his side. It runs off to the kitchen to stare at the cupboard. After a few minutes of screechy cries David rises to trudge across the room and switch on the radio, glancing sideways at the cat and feeling vaguely satisfied in making it wait a few minutes more. It did wake him after all.

He is about to move into the kitchen when the mobile phone on the desk by the window begins to ring. The cat sees David move towards it and begins to get more frantic, positioning itself in feigned affection in front of his legs as he’s walking, and causing him to trip and scowl.

He grabs the phone and barks “Yes?”

A moments silence in the room is broken by David’s heavy sigh. He walks backwards three paces without looking and falls back onto the armchair rubbing his forehead. A smile, momentary, and ever so slight, moves his features as he exhales and the cat returns to sit at the cupboard.

“Shall I come round?”

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