Watcher

“They’re out there, mate. I’ve seen them.” The man says, pressed up against the glass of the muck-smeared window. Outside the bus, the world streaks past, oblivious to the state of the passengers within.

This is a familiar sight late at night. Public transport is teeming with those who’ve cracked the code; people who know the reality of the world.

“What do you mean out there?” The dishevelled man who sat opposite him replied. Before now, he’d been a regular in this realm, but it’d been a while since he’d rode the buses. It felt alien, yet at the same time, so familiar.

“Billy, mate, you’ve a lot to learn.”

He did. When you plunge into this world, you meet all sorts of characters with all sorts of outlooks. You never know the direction a simple chat with a stranger can take.

Billy was a tourist. Not to country, but to culture. His work had been stressing him, pushing him to the very edge of his limits. Billy, he was a pressure cooker — just waiting for one slip-up to cause his lid to blow. And last week’s meeting with the boss was just that.

“William,” his boss had said, after inviting him into his office, the chintzy, all-glass inner sanctum of upper management, “we need to have a chat.”

And that’s how Billy found himself riding the late-night bus through a town that took on a whole different persona with the absence of light. An absence that was mirrored deep inside Billy.

It, too, was how Billy found himself strung out on uppers riding with his equally strung out compadre who was all too happy to lecture him on the ways of the world. His compadre was an enigma, going only by the mysterious name of “Watcher.”

Watcher, in reality, was the typical junkie found in every town and every city in good old Great Britain. The soiled tracksuit stained with the accumulation of several last night’s worth of dinner, the missing teeth, and the outlook on the world irreversibly altered by years of brain-melting chemical stimulants.

“Like I said,” Watcher says to Billy, “if you know where to look, you’ll see them too.”

Billy didn’t say a word. He was too preoccupied with the dull throbbing in his head and the minor spasms rippling through his body, brought on by the delightful Class As dancing a tango in his bloodstream.

It was a familiar feeling, this. Being strung out on the Number Nineteen bus going nowhere. For years, he’d been a model student of NA — Narcotics Anonymous. It was a front though, he knew that. He was sure his sponsors knew it too. The insatiable burn for chemical stimulation had been smouldering at the back of his brain since the intervention on his thirtieth birthday. Like a scab that wouldn’t heal, the desire for stimulants was an ever-present friend.

“It’s time for a change, lad,” his father had told him. The intervention was held in the Dog & Duck pub, his family sat around a table doing their very best to not meet his eyes as he looked around the room for answers. The irony of them all nursing pints of bitter wasn’t lost on him.

But despite this, it has been the tears in the old man’s eyes that’d done it. Once and for all, Billy told himself, he would make the change that would stop the slow march to a life in the gutter.

But getting back on track was the easy bit. Fine, you tell yourself, I’ll stop today. And you do, too. But the burning desire to breathe the powder back into your system is something that just never goes away. No matter how many weights you lift. No matter how often you run and run and run until your toes are nothing but bloody stumps pooling in your shoes. Every thought of every minute of every day goes right back to the old friend Charlie.

Sitting in the office across from his shit-eating, tie-stained cunt of a boss was the breaking point. The scales had been irreversibly tipped. He’d gone from just-about-surviving addict in recovery to no-longer-surviving addict diving headfirst into a relapse and week-long bender. With one fell swoop, Billy had lost his job and lost his sobriety. It goes like that sometimes.

He found himself scoring a bump, and then another, then a few more, and then some eckies for good measure, in some of the town’s seedier locales. The sorts of places you go only on a mission, a shopping trip for things you won’t find in your local branch of Tesco.

“You want to read some David Icke,” Watcher told him, staring through the steamed-up bus window, on the lookout for attackers. This pulled Billy from his thoughts.

“David Icke?” he replied.

“Yeah mate,” Watcher replies, attention moved to playing with the threadbare drawstrings of his hoodie, “Nobody knows this shit better than him. Studied it, he has.”

Billy makes a mental note to look into Icke, see what he’s about. A mental note that’s drifted from his addled mind no sooner than it’s recorded.

They rode in silence for a moment, both of them engrossed in their own worlds, only the sound of the road running beneath the bus cutting through the silence.

“Lizards,” Watcher says, eyes fixed back on the world passing in a blur outside, his rancid breath near burning a hole in the glass. In the reflection, Billy caught a glimpse of Watcher’s broken-down teeth.

“Huh?” he replied.

“Lizards, mate.” Watched says, turning to look at Billy head-on, “They run the place.”

Billy was starting to spiral. Lizards? What was he going on about? What was happening?

As though sensing his trepidation, Watcher continued: “Lizards. Everywhere you look, there’s a lizard in human skin. The King? Lizard. Obama? Lizard. You can bet your arse that prick up there,” he motions to the bus driver, so stars back in the rearview mirror, “is one too. They all are. They’re all at it.”

Billy nods his head. He doesn’t know what it is — the coke, the stress, or what — but Watcher is making a lot of sense. Now that he thinks about it, his boss had some lizard-like tendencies. The way he sticks his shrivelled tongue out when he’s thinking (catching flies), how he spends hours topping up his blotchy tan in that seedy salon (warming up), and how he’s always in a new, albeit ruffled, suit (shedding skins).

“This lot,” Watcher says, looking out the window, eying the stragglers of the night shambling along the cracked pavements, “are the only ones you can trust. Lizards, they need heat. Only come out in the day.”

“What about the driver?” Billy asks, eyes wider than dinner plates.

“Ever wonder why these things are so hot?”

He was right. There was nothing quite like the heat of public transport at night. Watch a bus drive past, or a train speed by, and you’ll see the heat steaming up the windows, obscuring those riding within.

The bus rolls to a stop, and the two of them lurch forward in unison. A bell rings from up front, and the doors swing open.

“This is me,” Billy says. His stop had arrived. Reluctantly, he clambers up and walks to the front.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” was all Watcher said in reply. A dire warning. After all, they’re everywhere.

Billy steps down from the bus, just as the doors slam shut behind him, the metallic clang ringing through his skull like a ricocheting bullet. As the bus pulls away, he turns to look at the man he’d been conversing with.

Watcher is there, eyes fixed on the outside world, his purple tracksuit glowing beneath a passing streetlight as the bus rolls on.

It’s time for a change, lad. His father’s voice echoes through Billy’s mind. He was right. A momentary lapse, a bender, plunged into a world so familiar, yet so alien. In that moment, he’d made the same choice he made nine years ago — he would give the stuff up again.

But he could be sure, when that looming relapse tackles him once more, the Watcher will still be there. Maybe not the same man, maybe not the same town, maybe not the same bus. But there, regardless.

One thing you can guarantee: there’s no shortage of Watchers, those who have cracked the code, those who can see through the filters of the world.