Blinded By The Light. Sherry Ashworth

       1. From The Preface, Rendall’s Book of Prayers

       The pain and struggle ceased. I was travelling without effort, moving towards the Light. Where there had been terror, there was now beauty, and peace beyond all understanding. An angel swathed in brightness stood by a table. On it was the Book. White pages, whiter words, thousands upon thousands of them. In essence they said, be free, be pure, do not despair of Perfection. The Book remained inscribed in my head and heart. My purpose was clear.

      Didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I was pissed off, to tell you the truth. I’d been on my own since two o’clock when Phil had to go to band practice and left me in the middle of campus.

      “Great seeing you, Joe,” he’d said, thumping me in the ribs. I thumped him back even harder. We grinned at each other.

      “The sixty or sixty-one’ll take you near the station,” he’d said. “Come up again. Any time, like.”

      “Sure,” I said. I thought, I might, but then again, I might not. I slung my overnight bag over my shoulders and set out for the bus stop.

      Hell, it wasn’t Phil’s fault. If all had gone according to plan I wouldn’t have been in Birmingham, or even in England for that matter. I would have been in a village in Kenya digging, or teaching kids, or doing some other GAP voluntary work. But just after my A2s, my throat swelled up like a balloon. I lay in bed for weeks – glandular fever.

      At first I was too ill to care. Life was just Mum changing damp sheets, pain, nightmarish dreams. Then I was as weak as a baby. When Tasha came to see me she looked taken aback. I date the end of our relationship from that moment. But who could blame her? I was hardly sex on legs. I couldn’t even struggle on to my legs for that matter. Tasha shoved some flowers down by my bed, pecked me on the cheek, and stressed a bit about her forthcoming results.

      But it was OK in the end. She got her place at Oxford, went up in October and was mesmerised by the whole experience. She sent me a couple of emails about the college and how cool it was, the amazing people she’d met, the course being harder than she thought, more about the amazing people and parties, and then there was the email which started, I don’t know how to tell you this… You can guess the rest.

      To tell you the truth, I wasn’t really gutted. I saw it coming. But put together with the fact that I had to cancel the overseas stuff because I still wasn’t a hundred per cent, and all my mates were off at uni, and I was living at home, it was a bit of a bummer. OK, I was gutted. Tasha and I had been going out for ten months, which was a long time for me. And I liked having a girlfriend. The weird thing is, even when you’re close to your mates, as I was – as I am – you don’t talk to them in the same way as you do a girl. You say stuff to her you wouldn’t say to anyone else. You do things, too, but that’s another story.

      But please don’t get the impression I was a loser. That’s never been the case, which was why being at a loose end that November was getting me down. I wasn’t used to it. As soon as I was well, I got myself some work – nights in a pub pulling pints and lugging crates around, and weekends in Electric Avenue selling geeks the latest PC, PlayStation and Dreamcast games. So I wasn’t short of cash. Or invitations. Dave, Rich and Phil all asked me to stay, and I took Phil up on it. So I spent two nights on his floor, both times in a drunken stupor. It was good, kind of.

      But like I said, he had to go to band practice, and I made my own way back to Birmingham New Street.

      Nowhere is more depressing than a railway station on a Sunday afternoon. There’s a kind of sour, dusty smell. People look fed up; they stand around eating junk food and swigging Coke. Their luggage makes them look like refugees. But you can’t help feeling that where they’re going to might be worse than where they’re coming from. You feel yourself becoming more trashy by the minute, sidling up to the newsstand and reading all the tabloid headlines about scandalous celebrity love lives – as if I gave a toss about which plastic bimbo went to bed with which braindead footballer. I’m tempted to buy the paper anyway – something to read, innit? But then again, I’m almost out of cash and I might want a coffee on the train.

      I feel myself getting depressed and I don’t like it. It’s not me. I’ve had this a few times since the glandular fever, a sort of heaviness washing over me. I fight it by walking up and down the platform, reading the ads for frothy paperbacks for women with boring lives. I look down the line to see if the train’s coming. Gotta keep moving. The train should be here any minute now. And sure enough there’s a dot in the distance that grows into the front of an engine and, yes, it gets bigger and is arriving at my platform.

      So I’m moving through the carriages to find my reserved seat, taking involuntary snapshots of people’s faces: Chinese guy reading a paper, couple of chubby pensioners with sandwiches in plastic bags, good-looking girl staring sullenly out of the window, fat bloke asleep with his mouth hanging open. I finally reach my seat and discover I’m on my own; mine is the window seat and the other three seats are empty, having only reservation tickets sitting on the top of them like shrunken hats. I get my Walkman and phone out of my bag and settle down. I glance at my mobile and want someone to text me. And with a jolt and a lurch the train moves forward.

      I reckon it’ll take about two hours to get to Manchester, more if there’s works on the line, which there usually are. The guard announces all the stops, and then another voice takes over to talk about the buffet. When I was a kid I used to like train journeys, but this one feels like another form of waiting, which is all I ever seem to be doing at the moment. Waiting for texts, for phone calls, for next year when I start uni, for something – anything – to happen. Even when I go out to try to make something happen, nothing happens. Or I drink too much and forget what happened. I feel that slide into depression

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