Fallen

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This is part of a much longer back-story and is written totally from Dan’s POV. It’s written around certain themes that include fate, jumping and falling as well as how we repeat certain behaviours, whether consciously or unconsciously.

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Chapter One

Contents

Chapter One

Author’s Notes: The editorial scene was inspired by a bag of Norwegian sweets that were given to me. Jelly babies with breasts do exist.

Something brushed against Dan’s left cheek and drew him towards consciousness. As Dan wearily opened his eyelids, a sharp pain pierced through his temple, causing him to wince. Feeling as though his head was underwater, Dan’s brain undulated as he fought to make sense of his surroundings.

Work with the familiarities, Ashcroft.

The throb in Dan’s forehead, left leg and right arm suggested that he was still alive. He vaguely registered that he was lying in a hospital bed. His sister’s voice echoed around his mind. Dan blinked again and tried to distinguish two dark shapes that flanked his bed. Was that… Claire and… Nathan Barley?

Drowsiness gripped him and his senses reeled. A muffled voice spoke from his left, indistinguishable: “Sign here. Anything you can manage…” A pen was thrust towards him and Dan’s hand shook as he clumsily moved it across a clipboard, scrawling an approximation of his signature. He thought he should sign it—it could be important.

Suddenly, several more human forms surrounded the bed, their blurred faces slowly becoming recognisable—Rufus, Toby, Jonatton, Ned, Sasha and Pingu, along with Barley and Claire, who he could see clearly now. She gently held his right hand and gazed pitifully at him.

Everyone except…

Dan panicked and his mind screamed back at him: “Where is he? Why isn’t he here? SOMEBODY TELL ME!” He tried to speak but his mouth felt dry and he couldn’t move his jaw. His stomach lurched and he tried to get up but his body felt leaden.

As another surge of medication numbed his overwrought brain into submission, Dan’s rapid breathing gradually slowed and he slumped back against the bed. As he slipped back towards unconsciousness and the world became distant, Dan told himself that it hadn’t seemed that far to fall.

It didn’t seem that far to fall. It didn’t seem… that… far…

Dan slouched wearily along Curtain Road, puffing thoughtfully on a burning Marlboro Light and turning a rhetorical question over and over in his mind:

How the hell did I reach this point in my life?

He decided to walk to his destination in order to clear his head, shrugging his coat tightly against the bitter winter wind and silently cursing the gods for landing him with the shitty end of the stick yet again. He tried not to think too much about the night ahead of him: another over-hyped opening of an achingly-hip-for-ten-minutes cyber-techno-asylum full of head-splitting, ear-shredding, nerve-snapping, repetitive, palpitation-inducing beats in a suffocating room of brain-mashing strobe lights, weak beer and throat-ripping dry ice. Bloody marvellous.

As Dan turned the corner of Pitfield Street and walked the last hundred yards towards the nightclub, he pondered the events that had taken place that very afternoon at a gathering of office gibbons that was laughably termed a sugaRAPE editorial meeting.

Half-listening without interest to the blithering twazzocks surrounding the table, Dan had sat, resting his head in his hands, silently praying for a shot-gun or at least a particularly virulent strain of plague that would attack his colleagues and leave him uninfected. A sharp pain pounded repeatedly at his left temple, like a particularly mischievous and vicious spider monkey with a toffee hammer. He leant forward on to his elbows and massaged his forehead with his fingertips, attempting to rid himself of the throbbing headache.

Suddenly Dan realised that the bleating and honking noises that passed for discussion had stopped. Frowning, he glanced upwards in the hope that his prayers for a moronocide had been answered. All eyes were turned on him, expectantly.

“What?” he snapped, irritable at becoming the focus of their attentions.

Rufus held a packet of sweets out towards him at arm’s length and shook the bag, his face like an excitable puppy: “Pick a jelly bitch, Ashcroft!”

On a recent trip to Norway, their recently appointed and ridiculously-punctuated editor, Jonatton Yeah? had developed a taste for a particular brand of jelly babies that were female in shape, something that highly amused Ned, who was busily bending the sweets into sexual positions, making bad puns and suggesting they photograph it for the magazine’s cover image. Yeah? was at this moment sharing the jelly-ladies with the rest of the staff and, on Rufus’ childish suggestion, had impulsively agreed a rule that any decision on magazine content and who would cover the article would be made depending on the colour of the jelly extracted from the packet.

Apparently it was now Dan’s turn to make an editorial decision via his choice of confectionery. He ground his back teeth together, staring at the bag held out before him.

Just… oh, what’s the bloody point anymore?

Dan sighed heavily and straightened up in his seat, reluctantly reaching two grubby fingers into the packet. He tugged out a green sweet, placing it in the palm of his hand and glared at it, as if expecting it to tell him just what the fuck had gone wrong with his life. Ned and Rufus whooped and gave one another a high five, congratulating Dan on his choice. Dan threw them a quizzical look.

“I think we’ll make it the cover feature?” Yeah? exclaimed, triumphantly biting off the head of a red jelly-lady and smiling smugly at Dan before returning to his office.

Dan remained at the table as the sugaRAPE donkeys dispersed, his brow furrowed. As the sugar-covered sweet grinned back at him, he realised that his short-term future—or whatever assignment it was he’d just been lumbered with—had just been decided by a green piece of jelly with tits.

How the hell did I reach this point in my life?

Adrenalatte was like hell on earth… only somehow much worse.

There was a fleeting revival of cyber-techno around Hoxditch that sugaRAPE felt the need to capture and present to its readership, even though the trend would probably be over and done with in the next two and half days, the Idiots quickly moving on to pillage another clubbing movement. Flashing his press pass at the security staff, Dan exhaled loudly and grabbed the door handle of the club, bracing himself for a vicious aural and visual onslaught.

A thick wall of dry ice cemented by flashes of strobe lights blinded Dan to distance and direction. Jostled by disembodied elbows and tripping over huge, random platform-booted feet, he stumbled into a pitch-black corner of the club and shrank back against the wall, attempting to orientate himself with his surroundings. The industrial thudding of the deafening beats attacked all rational thought, giving Dan a mild panic attack. He began to wonder if he had the ability to piece together something coherent from this mash-up of brain-hemorrhaging proportions.

If he didn’t badly need the money on this article, he’d walk out of the club right now. Yet, for reasons Dan hadn’t yet been able to fathom, he always needed money. Money and Dan Ashcroft were passing acquaintances that never seemed to share more than a nod of acknowledgement. Poverty, which usually brought along its’ close friend, Instability, would frequently impose themselves on Dan’s life, remaining for indefinite periods. One thing was certain: since effectively becoming homeless, sleeping at his desk or on the office floor lent Dan’s state of mind no favours and it certainly didn’t enable him to deal adequately with the perpetual berk-circus at sugaRAPE.