The Guy Who Had All The Time In The World (4/8) By Joe Hakim

(1/8), (2/8), (3/8), (4/8), (5/8), (6/8), (7/8), (8/8).

As I'm passing Hull Royal, I make a fuckin' great discovery. There's a milk float in the car park, and I go over and check it out. The little battery powered engine still works, so I unload all the milk, and then I climb on board, point it towards the town centre and I'm off again. It's slow as fuck, but hey, who needs to rush? As I pass the old bus station, I see the huge crane, the massive diggers and trucks, the mounds of sand and gravel, the portable cabins and toilets; all waiting patiently amongst the rubble to finish a job that will never be finished. Everything around me has been frozen in time, caught in a state of arrested development.

All the plans and schemes to rebuild and reinvigorate Hull were abandoned when everyone vanished, so I'll have to be content to live my half built life in a half-built city.

So there I am walking around Dixons with a set of clippers, picking up anything and everything that I could possibly want and loading it onto my little milk float. My heart thuds in my chest and I feel like I did when I was a little kid unwrapping my Christmas presents. I'm like some sort of bionic magpie, obsessed with flashy new gadgets and technology. Before long I've completely filled the back of the milk float with TVs, DVD players, computers mobile phones, I-Pods - the lot. After the shopping spree, I decide to go to Victoria Dock and break into a flat. I get a really nice one overlooking the river, tidy as fuck.

I have to kick the door in to gain access, which takes me about thirty minutes, but it's worth the aggro.

It's a fuckin' sound pad. I stick some tunes on and crack open a beer, but I can't settle. I chop out a couple of lines and stand on the balcony looking across the water, which is now deep violet because of the reflection of the sky. It looks like the sea from an alien world and it's perfectly still. I can't even feel the slightest breeze. The silence begins to freak me out, the paranoia rising up my neck like the onset of some kinda terrible nerve condition. I put another CD on and turn it up loud enough to make the double glazing rattle in an attempt to blast the feelings out of my head.

The feeling from the joints I smoked on the way up here has faded, leaving only the heebie-jeebies, so I start pacing up and down the laminate floor, wondering if I should do the rest of the coke I have in my pocket.

I decide not to. At this point in time it would only make me worse. It would start the dreaded internal dialogue, it'd be like: what am I thinking, what am I doing here with this loud music blasting out in someone else's flat, what if they come back... I reel between a stupid fuzzy, 'look at all this stuff it's fuckin' mine' euphoria and a 'what the fuck is going on, where is everyone?' based anxiety. I look out the window at the bleach river again, and then I vomit over the side of the balcony. The slapping of the puke hitting the ground echoes around the estate like a clap of thunder. I decide to go home, to my own flat, where I feel safer.

Continued...Next Page (5/8)

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