Free sample of Jon Lymon novel: Last Night at The Stairways

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When you’re a teenager at war with yourself, the first casualty isn’t the truth. It’s your mother.

She’s the one on the front line, witnessing first-hand your self-doubt turn to self-hate. She’ll see you off your food and on your bed for hours on end, staring out of the window, wishing you were someone else somewhere else. She’ll see your tears and you’ll swear her to secrecy with a ‘Please don’t tell Dad.’ And she won’t. Not at first. She’ll keep it to herself. Until the self-hate turns to self-harm. That’s when she’ll draft in your father, if you’re lucky enough to have one around. His opening salvo will be warning shots along the battle lines of, ‘Get your act together, son, or else…’

And you either get your act together, or else you find yourself standing in a doorway about to take the biggest risk of your short life.

Lloyd Parker found himself standing in that doorway, intense heat radiating through him as it pumped up the stairwell down which the footsteps were fading fast, their owners accepting their fate while Lloyd paused on the top step, questioning his.

‘This is it,’ the man standing next to him spluttered, the whites of his eyes totally red, the veins in his forehead and neck throbbing in four-four time, gums leaking blood over his teeth, causing him to spit spots of red onto Lloyd’s multi-stained white shirt when he spoke.

Lloyd didn’t bother wiping them off. What was the point? He knew there was worse waiting for him at the bottom of the stairway.

1

Alcohol didn’t need to audition to secure a major role at Lloyd’s eighteenth birthday, but calls had gone out to see if people were willing to chip in for some speed, Es, a bit of gear, ‘that sort of shit’. Lloyd was exempt. It was his night, and any extra incentives would be his for free whether he wanted them or not.

How many of these incentives actually found their way into his bloodstream was just one of the questions Lloyd struggled to answer as he stumbled home afterwards. He couldn’t remember much about the night, and nothing about how many substances he’d voluntarily imbibed or been forced to. He also couldn’t remember buying the kebab that had stained his fingers chilli sauce red.

The red marks across each of his palms were also a cause for consternation, although he felt no pain from them, numbed by the sheer weight of impurities flowing through him. And was it sambuca or something else that was making his torso feel so hot?

But most worrying of all, he couldn’t work out why he was walking home alone. The plan had been to spend his first night of official manhood in the loving arms of his girlfriend, Sophia, sharing his single bed in his parents’ house.

Where was she? He couldn’t remember saying goodbye to her, or his best friend Will, who should have been walking with them to his parents’ place just a few roads from Lloyd’s.

This had to be an initiation, Lloyd concluded. His friends were testing him, seeing if he was ready to be regarded as a man. He was eighteen now. He no longer had to follow the set path that was the education system. It was time to go his own way, and go it alone, and this was his first test. They’d all be waiting outside his house, applauding him as he stumbled into Roots Walk. Sophia would run up and plant a tonguey kiss on him. Or better still, she’d be waiting in his bedroom, naked under the duvet (shit, he’d forgotten to change the cover to one less childish). Fuck, no matter. The lights would be off, her clothes soon following them. And Lloyd would prove himself a man.

He walked in auto-pilot delirium, fairly convinced these thoughts of him in bed with a naked Sophia should be giving him more of an erection than he was experiencing. He was slightly less convinced that he was heading in the sort of direction that would enable him to reach his parents’ semi before daybreak.

His thoughts meandered as wildly as his legs and feet. Alcohol had a tendency to exacerbate his self-loathing, and already on the trip home he’d berated himself for his failures. No job, no future, no girl he had any chance of holding onto (Sophia was way out of his league, he was just thankful she was being slow to realise it).

Above all, Lloyd was doubting his decision to turn his back on university. It was a big risk he’d taken, one that had prompted a permanent emptiness to take up residence in his gut. Nothing but nothing was on the horizon, nothing save unemployment, insecurity and invisibility. At least university would have provided a three-year buffer between him and all this nothing.

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