Carillon Magazine

20

Martin Treanor (Copenhagen)

I wake up three times a night.  I can’t even remember when it started but, needless to say I haven’t had a full night’s sleep for more than half of what I laughingly call a life.

It’s the same every night. I spend a fitful two hours fighting to force the tiredness through my fear and, when it finally comes, I fall down into that ocean of peace and senerity, and it’s as though the years of trepidation are being crested away forever, never to return.  Then, just as I’m basking in the tranquility, feeling the aches of my exhausted body and mind wash away, BANG, it fires in like a bullet in the head and I wake up for the first watch of the night and another session of dousing myself with pills, warm milk and whisky.

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!” What tortures he must have gone through, just to find the strength to sleep, so natural, but for Macbeth and me, that elusive grail, an ambiguous fortune. Maybe, like him, I should also be held in someway accountable for my own predicament, but to tell you the truth, I stopped all conjecture over that a long time ago.

Over the years I have had a go at them all, that Holy Trinity of, What, Why and When? And through my eternal hours of wakefulness, those questions rolled through my tangled brain like a tombola that only served to heighten my destitution.

The flavour of this month, and I believe there is one for every, is trying to understand why I was so cruelly abandoned, cast adrift by the very people I looked to for solace. I don’t know for certain, but I would like to attribute it to the fact that, many years ago, my aids to slumber turned me into a raving alcoholic. However, when I think about that too, even they have other Dipsos.

Unlike other people, I don’t work. I’m lucky enough to be relatively well off, although the bottle has put a large hole in that as well. But I’m not like the ordinary John; I’m self-sufficient, self-standing and, some say, self-absorbed. I like to think of myself as just a bit idiosyncratic. But I have good reason: it stares me in the face every day, everywhere I go. Twenty fags, twenty shopping days to Christmas, twenty steps to my flat, number twenty. That detestable number reels through my life, the harbinger, terrorising me like the death knell tolling my inevitable demise and, if truth be told, my only friend. Sometimes I say, “Bring it on,” and yes, I have tried a few times but it won’t let me. Mine is to watch and wait, hold vigil for my preordained end that I know is coming to me.

I say this as I sit here in my cotton dressing gown and know who I am....’Number Twenty’.

Issue 10