A Life To Waste (7 page)

“Well, you see, the thing is, I
erm”

Dave’s voice was quick and
jittery, it almost sounded like he was on some kind of drug like
speed or ecstasy.

“the thing is, erm, I’m
struggling to sleep, I, erm, I need some, you know, some sleeping
pills, you know so I can sleep.”

Doctor Spring sat back and
looked at Dave, his initial thoughts were that Dave
had
been
taking some form of drugs, all Dave’s mannerisms seemed to suggest
that. But his pupils were not dilated, and although he was jittery,
he didn’t show any other signs of drug addiction, besides the
nervousness. The doctor suspected that maybe Dave likes to drink a
lot and added to this sleep deprivation were symptoms of alcohol
withdrawal.

“Can I ask, have you been taking
any recreational drugs?”

“No” Dave answered without
hesitation.

The only drug he had now a days
was weed and he hadn’t smoked anything in over a week. He hadn’t
touched any drink either, he had thought about it. He thought that
booze and weed might have helped him sleep but he felt too ill to
touch either. He had been feeling too ill from the lack of
sleep.

“Ok and how much do you
drink?”

“Not much, just a few cans every
other night” This time Dave lied.

He knew were this was leading
and he didn’t want to be signed up to some alcoholic twelve step
programme, he just wanted something to help him sleep. If he wanted
to deal with any alcohol or drug problems he would do that in his
own time when he wasn’t so tired.

“Listen Doc the thing is, I erm,
the problem is, erm, I have been having these dreams”

Dave proceeded in his jittery
nervous voice to explain his dreams to the doctor. He told him
about the police coming to the house, he told him that there was a
murder investigation ongoing in relation to his next door
neighbour. He told him how he was too scared to sleep and the
longer it went on the worse it got, the very brief spells of sleep
he did have were filled with even worse nightmares because he had
built them up himself by trying not to sleep. It was a vicious
cycle and he couldn’t see any way of stopping it.

“So you see doc, that’s, that’s
why I need those, erm, those sleeping pills, so I can have a kip
and erm, I can start getting over all these crazy thoughts and
nightmares, I just need erm, just one full nights sleep. You know,
even with nightmares, at least if its, you know more than ten
minutes, that’ll fix me right up you know.”

Doctor Spring could see that
Dave was genuinely desperate to sleep. He had read in the paper
about the investigation for the missing local girl so he knew that
Dave wasn’t making the story up. He gave Dave a lecture as to how
these sleeping pills are addictive and usually not recommended. In
the end he decided to give Dave a prescription for the pills. He
explained that he would only issue one weeks worth of pills due to
the risk of addiction.

Doctor Spring said “So let’s see
how you do with them, any problems then come back and see me.”

“I, I will do.” Dave said,
genuinely thankful “thanks, thank you!”

Dave grabbed his prescription
from the chemist inside the doctors office then went straight home.
He washed two pills down with a glass of water and went to lie on
his bed.

“oh god I hope these work” he
thought “I hope they don’t make these dreams worse though, oh
actually I don’t even care about them anymore, I just hope they
make me sleep.”

After half an hour of these
repeated thoughts, Dave fell asleep.

Chapter 10

“Go on Dave you can do it!” Phil
shouted.

Dave looked over to see his
coach cheering him on, he looked at the runners either side of him.
They looked nervous.

“On your marks”

Dave walked to his starting
point, he had a quick glance at the crowd, he saw his mum and dad.
He couldn’t hear what they were saying, he tried reading their
lips, he still couldn’t make it out, he just assumed it was “good
luck”. He didn’t need luck, he had this in the bag, he had been
training harder for this race than any other. This was the big one,
this is the one that Phil said would set him up for life, this one
had all the big scouts watching, he just needed to win this race
and he would be set. He recognised a couple of the guys he was
racing, he had raced them earlier in the year and destroyed them.
He knew they didn’t stand a chance, especially with all the
additional training that he had been doing.

“Get set”

He crouched down waiting for his
moment, waiting for that all important “bang”, that one moment that
would set him free. He was ready, he knew the second he heard it
that he would be sprinting down that track faster than he ever had
before, he was going to be running like
The Flash
, he was
going to run so fast that people would get whip lash turning their
head to see him flying past them. This was the moment he had been
waiting for, for so long. This was
his
time, this would be
the point that all the training would pay off. This was his
defining moment.

BANG!

He was off, he was sprinting
down the track like a cheetah chasing its prey. He was running
faster than he had ever run in his life. He knew there was no
chance anyone was catching him.

“This is it!” he thought “I’m
winning! I’m going to win, I’m going to the Olympics!”

As he was hurtling down the
track Dave looked at the crowd, Coach Phil was standing next to his
mum and dad, they looked like they were moving in slow motion, all
three of them looked the happiest they had ever been. Phil’s face
was shining, he had a smile from ear to ear. Dave’s parents were
hugging each other jumping up and down for joy, he could hear them
now.

“Go on Son! You’re winning!
You’re doing it!”

Dave looked straight ahead to
the fast approaching finish line. Claire was standing at the finish
line calling his name.

“Come on Dave! Nearly there!
You’re going to win! Go Dave go!”

He started to run even faster,
he could feel the wind blowing against his face, his cheeks
flapping like an astronaut feeling the G-Force from a rocket
launch. He was the fastest man alive, he was going to be famous. He
crossed the finish line and ran straight into Claire’s arms, he
picked her up and cheered for joy.

“I did it! I won!”

He rubbed his nose against hers,
he tilted his head to the side to kiss her. He woke up.

“Uh what?” Dave sat up confused.
“it was a dream” he sighed.

He looked around the room, he
could see daylight peering through the window, that meant he slept
all through the night.

“Brilliant! Those sleeping pills
worked a treat!” He said to himself “and I feel bloody brilliant
after that sleep!”

Dave hopped out of bed and
walked to the bedroom door, for the first time in as long as he
could remember he had woken up happy. He walked with a spring in
his step, he was borderline skipping he felt so good.

He opened his bedroom door, his
jaw dropped. His face twisted in shock, he looked down to see that
he was standing in blood. He looked back up, the room was red, the
walls were painted with blood.

He screamed “Mum!”

Chapter 11

Dave ran through the house
looking for his mum. He could feel his feet sinking into the blood
that had been soaked into the carpet. Everywhere he looked he could
see red, it was all over the walls, all over the furniture, all
over every door. What the hell happened, how could he have slept
through all this? The place was trashed, how could he not hear a
thing last night?

He ran to his mum’s room, it was
empty. All that remained was the aftermath of what ever happened
last night. Her TV was on the floor, broken. What little personal
items she had were scattered around the room. Her bed was red, it
had what looked to be a puddle of blood in the middle of it, so
much that the bed and sunken a little bit in the centre. Dave left
his mum’s room to check everywhere else in the house. She was
nowhere to be seen. Whatever or whoever had made all this mess had
taken her with it. Or what was left of her, how could she even
still be alive in she had lost so much blood? Dave dropped to his
knees, struggling to breath in a state of shock and fear. He was
shaking, he vomited on the floor, then he began to cry.

A couple of hours had past, Dave
had been taken from the house to the police station. They had
checked him out first in the back of an ambulance to make sure that
he had no wounds. He explained that nothing happened to him, he
woke up and it was already over. Whatever took his mum didn’t touch
him. Regardless of Dave’s explanation, the paramedics checked him
over anyway.

“Hello again Dave” Said Officer
Stephens as he sat down.

Officer Sidekick trainee wasn’t
with him this time, there was someone else, he didn’t introduce
himself or say anything, he just sat there to be, watching. Dave
chose to ignore him, he assumed that this guy just
had
to be
there for some legal reason or something like that.

“Hi” Dave mumbled.

“So how are you feeling?”
Officer Stephens asked.

“I’ve been better.” Dave
answered.

“Yeah I’ll bet” This almost
sounded sarcastic to Dave. “So” Officer Stephens continued “Would
you care to tell me what happened last night?”

“I, I don’t know” Dave said, his
voice quivering as he spoke.

“Come on Dave, how could you not
know, you were there weren’t you? The house can’t end up like that
without you noticing!”

“No, I was asleep”

“Asleep! You expect me to
believe that you slept right through while someone trashed your
house and did
whatever
they did in there last night!”

“YES!” Dave shouted back “I
hadn’t slept in weeks! I took some sleeping pills last night, I
slept right through till morning, I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Right ok so let’s say you
did
sleep right through from these sleeping pills, where did
you get them from might I ask?”

“I got them from the doctor, I
haven’t been able to sleep since, you know, what happened to Lisa,
so the doc gave me pills.”

Officer Stephens jumped at this
“No! We still don’t know what happened to Lisa do we! All we know
is that now your mother is off to join her wherever she has run off
too! And the only person who seems to know anything is you
Dave!”

“No I don’t I didn’t hear
anything I”

“this time, you didn’t hear
anything this time” Officer Stephens interrupted “ you heard the
screaming the first time remember.”

“yes, I mean, I didn’t hear
anything this time. The sleeping pills must have knocked me
out.”

Dave knew this guy didn’t
believe him, he knew that he was going to be the number one suspect
for his mums murder.

The questioning carried on for a
long time, Dave didn’t have much to answer as he genuinely had
slept through what ever had happened last night. A few of the
questions got repeated almost as though the police were trying to
catch him out. To see if his answer this time was different from
the last. Unfortunately Dave couldn’t be any help at all to the
police. His answers never changed, they were a compilation of “I
don’t know” and “I’m not sure”. Then he was left with the old
clichés of “ok well we’ll be in touch soon for more questioning”
and “Make sure to don’t go anywhere as we will want to get hold of
you.” Dave had no intention of going anywhere, he had nowhere to
go, he had no friends, or relatives that he knew of, besides his
dad who it hadn’t seen in years, it was just him and his mum.

Dave was put up in a hotel room
for a couple of days, obviously he couldn’t stay at the house in
the state it was in, apart from what it would do to his mental
state, the CSI team needed access back and forth while they
collected evidence. He received a few more visits from Officer
Stephens and his various friends to ask him more questions. They
were pretty much the same things he had already been asked prior to
these visits, his answer was still the same. “I don’t know”.

Apparently a “cleaner” had been
appointed by the police to go and sort Dave’s house. This guys job
was to go and clean up all the blood and mess that was left in the
house so it would be suitable for Dave to move back in. Dave had
seen a film about this named
Cleaner
, it had starred
Samuel L Jackson
as the cleaner. This had made Dave chuckle,
he imagined
Jackson
at his house cleaning up, how cool would
that be.

His laughter quickly faded when
he thought about exactly what it was that he would be cleaning.
They said on the film they use Listerine to help clean it as it
acted as a de-coagulant to the blood. He wondered if this was
actually true.

Officer Stephens paid another
visit to Dave, the CSI team had gathered all the evidence they
needed, there was something strange though. Something they needed
to check with Dave.