The Bar

The Bar

Kieran was a strange little man I once met. He sat hunched at a small bar in Thailand, throwing back jagerbomb after jagerbomb. I watched him for a while and feeling an odd connection with his heavy drinking (being something of a substance abuser myself) I decided to go and sit beside him.

I made my way cautiously towards him through the smoky clouds of the darkened bar. I had only arrived in the country a week before, and as such I was painfully aware of the risks involved in attempting to engage a drunken stranger in a bar. Especially without having even the most childlike grasp of the language.

15 years of the finest education the taxpayer's money can buy, and I can't even leave the country without resorting to Makaton

As I sat down on the stool to Kieran's left I saw him in all his glory for the first time. Dark, matted hair jutted out like cactus spines from his head. His face hung from his skull like a wet t-shirt on an impressionable freshman, and the rest of his body seemed to have followed suit. He was like a half-melted action figure, clinging on to the last threads of coherence that life had still failed to crush.

For a long while he carried on in his pattern. He eyed his prey with a mixture of anger and resignation. For a moment, he would pause. I was unsure if it was due to indecision or a passing flash of self-disgust. Then he would steel himself, grasp the glass and snap it up to his mouth, head tilted back like a pez dispenser. The dark liquid from the smaller inner glass mixed for a moment with the yellow of the chemically-saturated energy drink. And then it was gone, tucked away neatly into his pot-bellied frame.

"Would you like another?"

I was trying to seem as casual as possible. This did not seem like a man who you would like to disturb. His head turned towards me, and I saw deep into his soulless grey eyes. They spoke of a life filled with bad thoughts and worse decisions, chilling me to the core.

As though struck by an inspirational bolt of lightning, he snapped to life and started talking to me. He began with a strange incoherent mumbling. I could almost grasp what he said but the words seemed scrambled somehow. Then gradually, as I listened harder, I began to comprehend little phrases. At first I thought he was talking in riddles, but then I began to see the patterns in what he was trying to communicate to me.

He was telling me that there was a tiny little voice inside his head that kept telling him to do terrible things, to hurt himself, to drink more, to kill someone.

He said he kept trying to tell it "NO" but it began by screaming at him, telling him he was going crazy, increasing the volume of its taunts.

Then, after he had argued with it for long enough, it began to try to make deals with him, saying that if he did the things it wanted there would be quiet, it would stop talking for a while.

So he tried that, but it kept coming back, taunting him harder than before, actually mocking him for agreeing to do what it wanted.

The terror in his eyes was oddly fascinating to me. I wished I could help him, say something that would unhook his mind from this terrible cycle he had locked himself in. But I couldn't, no words could reach through his confusion.

So I stood up and left the bar, drowning in an overwhelming sense of sorrow at having failed what I over the years since have come to realise was a test.