Chapter 43 - Josh - One Helluva Hangover
A dark, small-town mystery steeped in folklore. THE STUDY OF QUIET THINGS is a serialised fiction drama shared one chapter at a time.
This is a serialised fiction. If you haven’t read the previous chapters, you’ll find them here in order, so you can dive right in.
The one thing worse than a hangover is the crippling embarrassment and anxiety that comes with it. The what did I do’s, the what did I say’s—and the only thing worse than not knowing is having evidence to show you what a complete and utter tosser you have been.
This is what Josh is thinking as he watches back the footage he recorded the night before at the Westfield Sanatorium. Far from confirming his drunken memory of ghostly spirits and disembodied voices, the video acts only to highlight just how wrapped up in the moment Josh had become - how much he wanted to believe there was something there. And this self-told lie makes him no better than his director trying to fabricate the truth by smashing glass on set to create a jump scare.
The truth.
Josh laughs. How can anyone ever truly understand the truth, the real truth—absolute reality? Because all our perceptions are tainted by our own experiences, he muses, which colours what we see with our own history. He thinks of that old saying, there are three sides to the truth: what you see, what I see, and what really happened. But if we are all biased, who can witness the absolute?
One thing he knows for sure, listening to himself hyperventilate and nearly piss his pants as he sprints from the sanatorium only to trip up and pass out on the ground, is that last night he was a class A wanker. Thank God the cabby did swing back around after his drop-off to find Josh as a passed out mess on the ground. All he can hope now is that the cabbie didn’t recognise him, or if he did, that he didn’t record or take any photos to sell to the press. Those trashy magazines lining the checkout aisles in the supermarkets would love the scoop of Home Today’s Hottest Man October Edition as a drunken charlatan fallen from grace.
Isn’t that how showbiz works? Because from what he’s seen, there is only one thing that gives people more pleasure than watching someone’s meteoric journey to fame and celebrity status, and that’s watching the same celebrity tumble from the very pedestal they placed them upon.
Josh pours himself a pint of water from the tap and downs it, hoping to rid himself of the alcohol induced headache. It’s just a hangover, he thinks to himself, trying not to hear Doctor Holly Anne’s warning the day before, ‘The headaches. Have they started again? Let me know if they do, okay? We both know what the headaches can signal.’
He belches beneath his breath, thumps his chest, and pardon me’s - despite nobody around to witness it, before flopping on the couch in a kind of dying swan pose. He needs to shape up, he has a prime time interview this evening and needs to get himself to London by early evening.
The joy.
The couch is delightfully soft, and Josh wonders if a little nap might be on the cards, despite only rising from slumber less than an hour ago. It’s while he lies there - thoughts swirling and dancing as they are wont to do when sleep grapples at the edges of consciousness, he realises two things.
One, is that last night strengthened Holly-Anne’s hypothesis, with the type of clarity only the morning after the night before can bring. Josh realises that no matter how real he thought that voice was, he has irrefutable evidence proving nobody (or nothing) was there at all. There was no voice. It was all in his head.
And two, he is furious with his old friend, Kai, for getting in touch with him and stirring up all these old thoughts. He’s thinking about that night. The night Josh last saw him, and he swears to himself, as he nods off to sleep, that if he ever sees that old bugger again, he’ll deck him.
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