3 July
My lips tingled as gusts of cold salty wind and water splashed against my face and ruffled my hair.
As the ferry made its wavering return from Alcatraz towards its dock at Pier 33, I couldn’t stop thinking about the five-by-eight-foot cells I’d just visited. Although it had been decommissioned as a prison back in 1963 and transformed into a major tourist attraction, it was still a haunting presence.
I sympathised with the thirty-six former inmates who’d attempted to escape its claustrophobia. Many had chosen death within the bay’s currents over spending the rest of their lives locked behind bars. I knew the anxiety of being trapped better than most, but so had my old friend Dougie, albeit for very different reasons.
More than twenty-five years had passed, but I’d never forgotten Dougie’s kiss or spoken of it with anyone else, not even Catherine. As we got older, his disguise had occasionally become transparent and I knew he’d retained feelings for me that went beyond friendship. It was small things, like his lingering glances when I spoke, or when he’d focus his attention on me at the pub instead of trying to woo girls like Roger and Steven did.
Yet his attention neither bothered me nor made me uncomfortable. Quite the opposite, in fact. I felt privileged to have two people in my life who helped to make up for my fractured family.
However, I worried for Dougie. Whether it was with a girl or a boy, I hoped he’d eventually find the happiness I had. I didn’t want to see him pained, or be the one to inflict it upon him. But our opposing natures meant it was inevitable.
‘I’m getting married,’ I blurted out on our way to meet Catherine and Paula at a disco in town. ‘I asked her last week.’
Dougie stared at me momentarily, then formed an instant, forced smile. ‘That’s brilliant!’ he shouted, leaning over to embrace me. ‘I’m really pleased for you both. She’s a smashing girl.’
‘I’d like you to be my best man,’ I replied, aware I might be adding insult to injury.
‘It’d be an honour, thank you. I’ll get the drinks in to celebrate.’ He sprinted to the bar, where mirrored tiles reflected him biting hard on his bottom lip. Then, quick as lightning, he flashed the same grin to the barmaid as he had to me.
Within three months, Dougie had proposed to Beth, a schoolteacher he met later that night, and the two became husband and wife a year after Catherine and I married.
Suddenly, the ferry’s engines began to labour and churn the bay’s water before docking.
As I navigated the wooden gangway back towards Fisherman’s Wharf, I wondered what had become of Beth. I hoped she’d found happiness with a man who truly loved her, and hadn’t been ruined by the man Dougie became.
11 November
Chemicals ricocheted around my artery walls as I wrung every last morsel of pleasure from my hedonistic lifestyle. But when I randomly caught sight of my reflection in the glass panel of a bookshop door, I did a double take, repulsed by a face and body that resembled mine, but which were more haunted and dishevelled than I remembered.
Now I finally accepted there’d been a correlation between Paula’s death more than eighteen months earlier and my hollowed cheeks and the dark crescents that circled my dimmed eyes. The gums above my top teeth were red raw, and my left cheek had developed a tiny, visible twitch that only pulsated when my engine was running low on stimulants.
I looked so much more than my thirty-six years, and double Darren’s twenty-seven. I had lost myself in the place where I’d gone to find me. The identity I’d assumed was consuming me. Yet that wasn’t enough to shame or coax me into re-evaluating my lifestyle choices. Instead, I walked away vowing to repair myself by eating more fruit and vegetables.
Besides, I had more pressing matters on my mind. In less than a year, since my arrival in San Francisco, I’d snorted and drunk my way through the remainder of the French publisher’s money, and was stealing from Mike the hostel owner to boost my reserves. There were plenty of rooms for me to check guests in and out of without including their names in the register. They remained anonymous to all but me and I’d pocket the cash.
Grateful contributions from a drug dealer I’d permitted to ply her trade with discretion around the building also helped to swell my coffers. Only she and I knew that the broken dispenser in the ladies’ toilets contained more than a hundred plastic tampon applicators packing half a gram of cocaine each.
Darren took gratification in being the centre of attention. He was boisterous; he was unpredictable; he inspired others to push themselves to explore; he was an expert purveyor of anecdotes, even if most of them were lies. He was the protagonist to my reactionary. And, most importantly, Darren was impervious to Simon’s darkness.
But what eventually demolished my prison of fakery was a man I’d never met, who’d come to find me.
2 December
Once a month, I led excursions down the Californian coast in a modified Greyhound bus that Mike had bought at an auction on a whim. For fifty dollars a time, hostellers climbed on-board the ‘Purple Turtle’ for a sightseeing tour through Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego, eventually stopping over the Mexican border, in Tijuana.
Mike had removed most of the bus’s seats and replaced them with mattresses, creating a portable hostel where guests could explore, sleep, and feel part of a mini-community on wheels.
With my bag packed, my only requirement was a hearty breakfast before I set off on my next guided tour.
‘Is anyone sitting there, mate?’ a British voice asked as I attacked a mountain of pancakes in the hostel’s busy dining area.
‘Help yourself,’ I replied, and looked up to find a shaggy-haired man in his late twenties I hadn’t checked in myself. His smile reminded me of someone. ‘Have you just arrived?’
He was ravenous as he tucked into his scrambled eggs and hash browns. ‘Yeah, about an hour ago. I’m bloody knackered. I landed in New York four weeks ago and have zigzagged my way across ever since.’
‘That’s good going. Why such a whistle-stop tour?’
‘I’m trying to find someone. You might be able to help, actually. Have you ever come across a bloke who calls himself Darren Glasper?’
A chill ran through me.
‘Darren Glasper?’ I repeated, making sure the amphetamines I’d just washed down with a pot of coffee weren’t making me hallucinate.
‘Yeah. It’s not his real name. He’s been pretending to be my brother.’
Suddenly I recognised him from the family photographs that had been pinned to the wall around Darren’s bed at the Routard in France. My first response was to want to throw my plate to one side and bolt, but his lack of hostility meant he didn’t know I was his man.
‘No, the name doesn’t ring any bells,’ I lied. ‘Why’s he been doing that?’