Lost Weekend - a short story.

        Attenberg propped himself up on one elbow, squinted against the light, and surveyed the broken furniture, bottles and cans lying around him. He could smell old urine and gun smoke. He didn’t feel well. In fact, he felt awful. He recognised he was lying in the wreckage of his own living room and groaned and lay down again. Guilt and memory smashed their way to the front of his brain with their policeman’s boots. He saw a bullet sticking out of a wall. Hilcock. Professor Sven, bloody Hilcock. Christ, Hilcock and the others had been. This was bad. He heard a key turn in the front door. His wife’s key.

         “I hear Jean’s away?” That had been Friday: a telephone call. Her car was literally just reversing out of the driveway.

         “It’s Jane. How did you know?”

         “Me and the boys might pop over, say hello.”

         “Sven, no! You can’t, I’ve got work I’ve got…” He was already gone.

          Attenberg was a quiet, serious man, a mediocrity. An otherwise unnoticeable face in the crowd, he had somehow got caught up with Sven and the others at university and it had been the ruin of him. It seemed every time he had an essay deadline or an exam there would come a banging on the door, and there they would be, tumbling over the threshold. Jalacy, drunk and ebullient, waving his customary bottle of gin, Ashton, drinking and smoking God knows what, Big Tam with the rum and always Sven, laughing and laughing and laughing. He had no idea why they had latched onto him. They were the bigger boys, the in-crowd with the drink and

the access to drugs and girls. They knew where the parties were and Attenberg could no more resist than hold back the sea.

         The living room door had a shotgun blast hole in it, behind which the face of his wife appeared.

         “Listen,” he began.

His father had advised him to find a woman wo looked good when she was shouting at him.

         “All that smiling doesn’t last long in a marriage,” he’d said. This had seemed archaic thinking, even at the time, but perhaps it had sunk in on some level.

         They were bulletproof, of course, Sven & co., top grades all over the place, careers ahead of them; that sort always come up smelling of roses. It was as though they had alternate parallel existences where some part of them had the time to be able to knuckle down and put the miles in at their desks.

         It was all very jumbled, they had been high as kites when they arrived, all full of this trip they’d been on in the Welsh mountains and Iceland. Hilcock had been banging on about trying to catch a troll. He swore he’d actually chased one which had disappeared. The details were hazy, but there had been a child involved, bait, probably. Hilcock had got over excited telling the story and that was certainly when the shotgun had gone off.

         Ashton didn’t have a hair on his body, but wouldn’t say why, just kept fiddling with the ears of the deerstalker he was wearing. Big Tam had been holding up the Spain end of whatever had been going on and was on his feet, shouting about some incident pulling down fir trees and putting together flat packed furniture.

         Jalacy is an Oxford man and seemed to be keeping it together, but Attenberg remembered noticing he was the one handing out the bottles.

         This was the sort of thing they got up to now. They’d get away with it, of course, it would be written up in some journal and more funding would appear for the next jolly.
          Smelling of roses.

         “You’ve done nothing for the meeting, I suppose, have you?” Jane was furious, but she did look amazing. “I bet all this started as I closed the fucking door! Do you think I work my arse off just for you to run us into the fucking ground? Do you?”

         Never work with family, that had been the other gem. Good advice, really, but he hadn’t thought so at the time. If she would just stop talking long enough for him to gather his thoughts and explain. He couldn’t be held to account for what happened, not after the tequila. Oh Christ, the tequila, he thought as memories of terrible little vignettes flashed back to him. It was after the tequila that things had started to get nasty. They said it was tequila, but he didn’t recognise the language on the label. It had stunk of cactus, though. 
         Hilcock had some story about a UFO encounter in Wales that Attenberg had laughed at, although to be fair, no one else had  believed it either. Hilcock had phoned some mountain man to corroborate, but it was the middle of the night and he couldn’t get any sense out of him. It seemed like no time passed between that and the next scene, which was Hilcock beating in his locked bedroom door, just dressed in his underpants and waving a bottle and still going on about UFOs, in between laughing and laughing. Presumably it had been around then that the shooting had started in the bathroom

         Finally, Jane ran out of shouting and Attenberg had some space to explain properly, but when he mentioned Sven and the others she got upset.

         “No, No! Not this.”

         “They just appeared, I couldn’t stop them! How the Hell could I get anything done in the middle of this?” He indicated

The chaos of the lounge. Jane continued to shake her head.

         “Not this bullshit! No more!” She took her tablet from her bag and opened a browser. She thrust it in front of his face. Attenberg couldn’t look, he knew what was coming and his soul couldn’t bear the weight of it. He turned his face away.

         “We have security now. Cameras.”

The screen was divided into four scenes, each representing a room in their home. A tiny, dark figure could be seen running back and forth, appearing in one scene, then another, then back to the first, arms flailing. One tiny figure. Just one.

         “Look at it!” She wasn’t angry now, she was crying. She held out the tablet. One of the quarter scenes was filled with a grinning, desperate, hollow-eyed face, but Attenberg couldn’t look. He was curled on the floor and laughing and laughing and laughing.

                                                              AA