Edited: 12-03-07

Through a sienna brown nicotine haze, the family converge for ritualised post-funeral alcoholism. In a pub called The Nelson I find myself conjoined with them, confined by a decor of reverence to the notorious old sailor. Paintings, prints and graven idols pepper the walls like war medals hung on a veterans chest. Electrified candles project through a backdrop of newly aged panelling; an illusion varnished with the integrity of a bland costume drama.

A warm pint of mild rests unconsumed on the flashing games machine; Mack’s drink of choice, and a replicated customary routine. The ceremony dictates: that a drink is bought for the person who died. A commendable tradition, except for the method of inevitable disposal. Beer is either drunk or thrown away; entering the drains in one of two ways. It will never evaporate into the spirit world. Its passage will be via an undistinguished send off; tipped down the sink at the evenings end, or swallowed by a drunk willing to take a kicking for his thirst.

I buy my own drink; the thought of something mild makes me want to slip into a coma. I drain a triple vodka and cover its tracks with the acceptable public face of cold generic lager. Something warm like love, burns a chemical contentment into my oesophagus lining.

A sip of Mack's ale was my first experience of the joys of alcohol. Mack and ‘Fat Jen’; his never loving wife, were baby-sitting the jibes of my brother and me. We had built up a wall of double 'pester power' until he relented; to let us taste from one of the holy cans he possessed. Adults forever raved about this spectacular nectar; this fluid of dreams and I anticipated the flavours of a beautiful cola. The flat bitter mouthful tasted of dead virtue and anticlimax. We pretended we liked it, and as numb adults the pretence is the closest thing we have to pleasure. I lounge at the bar, drowning in pretence and a consistent awareness of the filth adhering to the bottom of my shoe. I had stepped in a loathsome something while meddling around the freezer, though the moment never seemed quite right for probing at my sole. Any old bar-room charmer can scan his shoes for dog shit and pick it out with a swizzle stick, but digging out lumps of skin and the like can attract attention with handcuffs, in the wrong kind of way.

I head off to the lavatory; seeking the seclusion of an all enveloping cubicle. I stride a nervous, spastic and encumbering shuffle; keeping my soiled foot low and parallel to the ground. It’s a ludicrous and fabricated gait, but a falsified limp is common around here; like a counterfeit queue at the benefit office. I journey to the 'gents' and discover the traditional pub-standard feculence . Toddling old men list over porcelain glazed urinals; pissing at tab ends, pubic hairs and soap-like disinfectant cubes. Magnolia painted walls share nicotine stains and spattered waste; an artist's canvas for phone number scribbles and penis ‘Pictionary’. The sounds and smells of vomiting inform me of the already inhabited cubicle. I will have to think of something else.

I parallel shuffle back to the smoky lounge area where my family are gabbling over the sounds of a jukebox. ‘Hits’ from the sixties are playing out reminiscences; a triggering soundtrack for a past dated life. I take a seat somewhere out of the way, but my ass has barely kissed wood before a voice interrupts my solitude.

"When are YOU gunna have kids then eh? When are you gunna make your mam a grandma?"

She circumvents the traditional ‘hello’ and dives straight in with a dagger of a greeting. “When?”, she says... “when?”, as if shitting out children is an inevitable ambition. I imagine the collision of her mouth with a bar-room ashtray and the screaming commotion it would cause. I imagine her tongue lolling out between red and splintered teeth. I imagine that is no way to treat a cousin.

This cousin is one of two explicitly ugly sisters: Tina, a Jehovah’s Witness and Lisa, an illicit substance abuser. In true dramatic style, the sisters despise each other and never manifest in the same place together. They are a Ying and Yang, a plus and minus; two sides of hackneyed and metaphorical coin. The lottery has been drawn, the currency tossed and the Jehovah’s Witness has failed to appear. But joy upon joy, the addict is here and I feel like I have discovered a dog turd in the lucky dip.

Lisa spreads herself between her most recent man and her latest litter of slavering children. Two slugs of pink and stink sit lashed in pushchairs encumbered with the typical paraphernalia of baby consumerism. It has been four years since they took her first born slug away; when the law objected to the Afghan brown she was sticking in her arm. Somewhere in the world, a happy child is mercifully oblivious to the origin of its genes. This unashamed source of forgotten DNA appears twenty years older than her time given age, and thirty years older than her image in my memory. She is haggard and drawn with eyes like ragged exit wounds. The once pretty young girl has exchanged youth and vivacity for cheap fake love from a disposable needle. I watch her old body move as she loads a fresh plastic bottle into one of the kids faces. It grabs on tight and sucks it hard. I start to wonder if she ever breast fed and got her babies high.

She takes a drink from a long rum and black and opens her mouth to speak some more evil. In the depths of her face, her saliva and tongue bare the bloody red stains of her chosen liquor. I study my hands near the untouched ashtray, and look back to her mouth with its berry red teeth. Someone in the room stubs out a cigarette and coughs ash into the oxygen.

"You can't wait forever. The clock's ticking!"

She takes a cliché from a well stacked shelf and dusts it off like an ancient spell book. Her stale incantation projects an evil and awakens a thought that I try to kill off right away. I turn an eye to the clock on the wall and hear it tapping a rhythm to Herman's Hermits. Somewhere, elsewhere, an inappropriate joke spawns a brood of nervous laughter. I mute the sound with my fingers in my ears and hear the stifled punch of my wasted heartbeats. My breath rasps in and out, in and out like a saw on a yew tree.

Lisa exists as a walking convention; conforming to the principles of her small-town surroundings. I know her babies would never get high; those uncreative ‘witches tits’ expel nothing more than dry spider silk. She reminds me why I avoid talking to relatives; she reminds me of who I am and where I came from. I fantasise for moment about being adopted and never knowing the truth. Somewhere I smile inside and compose myself with a mindless comeback.

"Perhaps... I could buy the ones that you didn't want?"

I think the sentence through, but swallow it all back without speaking it out. Although I want to hurt her I refuse to provoke an argument or any kind of real conversation. I mumble a series of syllables hidden on a laboured breath, and glance at random naval items scattered on the wall. The words of Lisa slide out of existence as I concentrate my mind on an antiquated picture. On the deck of a ship, a monkey lies dead and tied by the 'hands' to a rough wooden board. Men in tall mercurous hats and stiff flaking collars point at their find with an ensemble of fingers. Below the image, a label presents a revealing inscription: "Beagle Re-enactment Society 1893".

Having children is surely an uncomplicated process; it’s animalistic nature of the earliest kind, from the division of amoeba to the dropping of a celebrity love-child. The mammalian recipe consists of just two distinct sexes, a few sweaty moments and the rest is a biology class. It requires no learned skills or higher brain functions; Socrates and Einstein where not noted for their masterful fucking technique. We flatter ourselves that we are different in kind to the council estate dogs, fucking for fun in the children's playground. I remember a dog ignoring its food and eating its faeces. I remember a dog at war with its own leg. I remember a dog licking sick off a pavement on a New Year's Day. These feeble-minded animals manage to reproduce themselves with virulent regularity - just like human, just like dog.

At the back of the lounge a swarm of hungry man-dogs savage a buffet of quiche and sausage rolls. In gatherings such as these, it is impressive to behave in the ways of the internal animal; to 'give in' to primal urges and simple unconscious reflexes. They eat sugar, drink desire, smoke, fuck and fight for pleasure; because with very little investment, chemical rewards can be gained from the brain. From beneath a fold of paper tablecloth a little black poodle emerges to wander a snack littered floor. It sniffs at the ground licking up fragments of crisps and peanuts freshly fallen from gibbering mouths. The arrival of the poodle causes me wonder if thinking about dogs has somehow conjured the animal into existence. Maybe if I hadn't been thinking about dogs then I just wouldn't have noticed it. Maybe I'm just thinking too much.

"What are ya upta these days?"

I believed my barrier method had snubbed her out but a slip of attention brings Lisa's interrogations back like a dose of the herpes. The gossip of family had spread an outbreak of answers but she asks her questions anyway just to pick at a sore. She wears a black stretch T-shirt that flattens her breasts into sagging flaps of skin; multiplying the side-effects of her 'alternative' lifestyle. Printed Celtic knots embellish her bony shoulders; mimicking the coiled and scabrous veins that are buried underneath. I think about her question and wonder, who the fuck wears a T-shirt to a funeral? I tell her I am doing 'nothing much'; giving her the feed line so she can get on with her real point.

"You avn't really done much since leaving school 'ave ya?"

She licks her tongue round the sharpened words and savours their bitter ugly flavour. A stifled smile puts a crack in her face that exposes the pleasure she now has in herself. She uses 'school' as a universal term for any educational establishment with no care for its level or status; when you are making a dig it all means the same. If I had spent my years pulling cabbages from the mud I wouldn't be a target for this insulting tone. Boston's people are bound by soil, destined to earn pocket change for their blood and reproduce like playground dogs. The only escape is the exit that death provides; when they pay out to burn you and eat cold pre-packaged quiche.

Behind the cobbled track of her spine, her generic 'man' whispers furtive reminders of my attempts to join the police. A moment passes... a silence disguised as the end of it all. The minute decays like ill-formed smoke rings, like cigarettes in a soured beer glass; as always, nothing is ever good enough to last.

"Your joining the 'enemy'? Fuckin' 'ell! What do ya wanna go and do that for?"

Her disappointment is true and down to the bone; to view me as anything other than useless subverts a growing and popular trend. I imagine her as a 50's sci-fi robot made of grey metal boxes with headlamps for eyes. A monotone voice of distortion and steel delivers a phrase in an infinite loop;

"does not compute, does not compute, does not compute..."

She overloads on confusion; unable to cope with the diversion away from the deprecation of me. Like the milk in her breasts and the mucus in her cunt; her speech has dried to a flaking crust of conversation. I relieve her disappointment and confess that I have failed, and my failure was at the medical stage. Somehow, the idea of me being physically, medically, genetically inept returns contentment to her ghost-like face. Once again I am the lowest in status; I am the weak and subordinate ape; I am the herbivore in the food chain.

"What ya fail the medical for?"

She digs deeper still, hoping to find the 'coup de grâce'; the last merciful blow to finish the quarry. With a casual turn she fakes disinterest, a veil of pretence; disguising her desire for scandalous dirt. A fresh new cigarette glows in her mouth as she inverts her cheeks into hollow black pits. The hiss of her breath dives into the darkness and swims in the void of her inflating chest. I don't bother with a reply; there is something so 'wrong place, wrong time' about the whole of this subject. A post-funeral piss-up is a bad choice of function to reveal how you once hated your life and wanted to die. For that I much prefer a christening.

This party is painful, like a naked flame under a blistering hand; it hurts yes, but the game continues until the smell makes you wretch. I pick at a plate of traditional party fare; of cholesterol rolls and artery blockages on sticks that all taste like sawdust to me. I dream of floating out of the window and surrounding myself with silent empty space. I shed my sight and taste the saccharin clouds, feel the disturbed and kissing air bend against my skin. But my progress is abrasive against the forces of gravity; acceleration and speed are hampered from impeding drag. I look south to the earth and see a charred feminine corpse hanging from my leg by a double ended noose. Engraved in its chest are two words of reminding: "The Forsaken".

I remember the matter attached to my shoe and scan the room for curious eyes. A shaved chimp in hire-suit is speaking out loud; a distraction for the family in awe of the novelty. The chimp consumes attention like celebratory champagne and gets drunk on the fruits of its muttering labour. The spectators binge on their own empathetic emotions; savouring the speech, licking up the words and snorting sentences like crudely cut lines of substandard coke. I ignore the show and seize the diversionary moment to prod at my shoe with a cocktail stick.

In the cleated sole of overlapping vales, a rubber stream is dammed near the crevice of the heel. I poke the stick into the grey-white mass and feel it hit something hard, something... something bone. With a twist of the stick I flick it down and out onto a waiting bed of serviette sheets. The item now disturbed brings a subtle aroma of ripe decomposition. The all pervading smog of cigarettes, spilt beer and once-a-year cologne conceal the crime; permeating the smells with a publicly acceptable incense.

I poke and stab at the tiny slug of flesh and make myself feel sick from my own debased actions. Knotted inside the torn rippled skin, a glint of white metal shines alien within the organic compound. I take another stick and tweeze the shine from the slithery mass. These 'remains', I discard and throw to the mouth of the little black poodle. The 'treasure', I keep and steal away in my suit jacket pocket.

The smell doesn't seem to bother the dog as it eats up the pieces like choice cuts of meat. Raised on the dead bodies of horses, slopped into cans and served up as 'doggy chum'; nothing compares to the original flavour of a real 'best friend'. This is the taste of canine betrayal, a taste of murder - and the little dog sits there; looking at me as if asking for more.

I abandon the dog with its secret desire and move towards the door with the intention of leaving. The outstretched hands of familiar strangers yearn to be shaken in contracts of symbolic nicety. I sign them off with prepared excuses and aim my steps at the nearing exit. A forgotten cousin attempts the beginnings of something close to conversation; she is getting married, divorced, pregnant, sterilised or something or other. I am far from interested and closer to leaving this ceremonial charade. I feign a smile, nod, sigh and hug the girl but I'm mentally out the door, trying to physically follow.

At the 'way out' I stop and feel something akin to the sweetness of success. I inhale freedom, walk without worry; untied from the restrictions of formal occasion. I return a glance through the open door and look back at the space where I used to be; the place, the people. There is meaning here, a symbolic and resonating allegory. For one last time I look behind, back inside... and walk away from the mess of it all. Now the dog is vomiting on the carpet. It seems it doesn't have a taste for the finger buffet.