Read One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night for Free Online Page B

and the coach driver, both looking lost. If you look pathetic enough, I might stop and offer you a lift home, but I’ll need to see some
big
puppy‐
dog eyes.’
    Ally leaned over and gave her a kiss, then opened the car door. ‘I will
not
be the only one there,’ he told her, climbing out. ‘Because there were two crucial words near the bottom of the invite that you have obviously failed to take into account.’
    ‘And what might they have been?’
    ‘Free drink. I’ll see you tomorrow, baby.’
    Ally closed the door and began walking towards the car park. Annette caught up with him in the Audi a few seconds later, the electric window sliding down as he turned to see her.
    ‘Remember,’ she called out. ‘Ghastly and traumatic.’
    ‘I’ll do my best.’
----

■ 09:50 ■ glasgow airport ■ lost soul in transit ■
    The trickiest thing about not killing yourself is knowing that if one day you decide it was a mistake, then you’ll always be able to rectify it. Opting against suicide may be a choice
for
life, but it’s not for
life
. It’s kind of like parole after a murder stretch: you’re walking around free but you’ll always be serving the sentence, knowing one screw‐
up is all it takes to send you back down. And therein hangs the burden. The worry that one bad day could be all it takes to put the pills back in your hand, like one drink could be all it takes to send the alcoholic spiralling down Bender Avenue once again.
    If so, Matthew Black had reason to fear. He was on his way to a school reunion. How bad could a bad day get?
    He was also an alcoholic, whatever that meant. He’d read it in the
Daily Record
.
    Not that he should be dissing the tabloids, right enough, given the crucial role they’d played in coaxing him back from the brink. Because, when he was a bawhair’s breadth from the precipice and leaning teeteringly forwards, before he’d embraced all the life‐
reaffirmation shite and cried himself through to that beckoning dawn, those much‐
maligned newspapers had given him a reason to go on. When there seemed nothing else to cling to, the thought of those sanctimonious bastards enjoying that told‐
you‐
so moment as they gleefully reported his senseless, tragic death, resurrected some nuance of self he’d so long ago buried.
    People seldom appreciated just how vital and positive raw hatred could be.
    He eyed the conveyor belt patiently, waiting for his wee black sports bag to trundle modestly into view, thinking how old habits were hellish hard to shake. These days, people would apparently prefer to risk hernias and coronaries heaving monolithic baggage about departure terminals and on‐
board aircraft than stand around a carousel for five minutes at the other end. He kept picturing Atlas at a check‐
in desk: ‘Can I take this on as hand‐
luggage?’ Five minutes at the end of an hours‐
long flight – how big a fucking hurry would you need to be in?
    Matt usually travelled light. One wee sports bag light. And the old habit he hadn’t shaken was of checking the scrawny thing into the cargo hold, even though it was hardly much of an encumbrance. This was a throwback to a more colourful period in the Matt Black life history, and was based on the international aviation protocols stating that once a passenger’s bag is onboard, the plane is not allowed to take off without him, just in case he’s checked a bomb on and buggered off. In practice this meant he could go and get obliviously wrecked in the airport bars without fear of missing his plane, as the ground staff invariably reasoned that it was easier to make a few angry PA announcements or even send their most stern‐
faced and matronly stewardess to retrieve him than to unload the entire cargo hold and root through all the bags until they found his.
    A plooky adolescent male eyed him shyly as he picked up the holdall, or holdnov’rymuch might be more like it, bearing as it did only most of his worldly belongings. He