Books & Poetry

Last week, Mary O'Connor continued our London chain story. Here is the seventh chapter, written by Time Out reader James Brown. Thanks to everyone who contributed.


Chapter Seven by James Brown

Thorsten knew he wasn’t ready to get married. For a start, he kept thinking about the German girl on the plane, the way she looked at him as if he had the answer and was the problem both at the same time. Some people, they say, know when they are ready to get married. With Thorsten it was the opposite. He’d been fairly sure of it 20 hours before as he rang the number the bellman had given him and told them to send another prostitute round because the one he’d just fucked was so old she actually responded to ‘Grandma’. Okay, she responded by spitting on him and gathering her things and going, but Thorsten hadn’t been bothered. Send a younger one, all right?
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He stared across the debris of the hotel room – at the way the light seemed trapped in the huge crack across the window – and then rang someone in tears, and then blacked out. One by one they had filled his room, the drinkers and liggers and award-winners, chopped out his cocaine, shared a little of their own (which was something he rarely witnessed in London), and then they’d left as their bullshit slowed. In the end, as dawn came up and reminded him what a cunt he was, he’d sat there with a commercials director called Danny the Fly who was about to leave Sydney and the award he’d just been handed by Thorsten, not to mention the failed marriage and the kid he wasn’t allowed to see, to go off to a new life in America. A modern frontiersman, thought Thorsten, with a portfolio instead of a wagon. And Thorsten looked at Danny and wondered if he was staring at his own future. He liked Danny. He just didn’t like the life Danny was living. After the second chino-asian girl of indeterminate nationality left his room, Thorsten had thrown away all his mangled ties and socks and itinerary faxes and the identity badge and brochure for the awards evening with his name in it, and all the other useless shit he’d leave in the bag in his bedroom for too long, and came back to England.

But not before his brief inventory of shame. In the darkest moment he’d remembered threatening to hit the bloke in the bar with the glass ashtray, and trying to buy heroin by a fountain, and the lawyer’s girlfriend he’d fucked after buying coke from him. Thorsten was carrying his guilty hangover like an unwanted overdraft, as he strolled past the new duty-free boutique just by the doors and set foot back in London. The German girl was staring at him. Maybe he should have continued talking to her. She was coming back to find her sister. Beyond the barrier, cramped with Indians waiting for relatives, Thorsten saw Joe, his driver. He was holding a long black suit bag. In it, the prison clothes he’d dreaded. Thorsten wasn’t ready to marry. Joe didn’t know this. ‘Your wedding suit, sir,’ he said as he handed Thorsten the bag. And Thorsten realised it reminded him of a body bag.