Debaser

Chapter 4

Anthony Drake (no middle name), was born in a burgeoning Scottish new town, in the winter of nineteen-seventy, the second son of a welder father and an over-protective mother. He received a rudimentary education at the local comprehensive school, choosing to leave at the age of sixteen. After an irresolvable quarrel with his father, over his disappointing grades and refusal to continue with schooling, Drake left home to embark upon a succession of pointless and low paid jobs, each ending in redundancy or dismissal. An increasing fascination with the town’s underworld – a world of drug misuse and hard drinking – led to a brief spell in prison, at the age of twenty, for Actual Bodily Harm. On his release, vowing to change his ways, he set himself up in business as a window cleaner, but his inherent lack of discipline and acumen doomed the enterprise to failure almost before it had begun.
 Drake’s bitterness, augmented by the factory work he was forced to take as a result of his failure, effected a resumption of his old habits, and he began to seek in music – which he would later describe as ‘about the only fuckin thing that makes life here worth livin’ – affirmation of his erratic existence. Once again drifting from job to job, brimming with the fury of the unjustly oppressed and bemoaning the lack of opportunity in his home town, Drake turned his thoughts to foreign travel. And with this in mind he gave up his current job, having saved a small amount of money, and moved in, just for a week or two until the details were finalised, with William Wilson, a friend of a friend.

 Wilson, of whom what little is known scarcely merits recounting, led an ordinary life notable only for its lack of events. Two years older than Drake he possessed little of his fiery passion. After leaving school at seventeen he took up an apprenticeship with a local electronics firm, where he remained, more or less contentedly, for over ten years. His position within the firm, which he never sought to advance, afforded him those of the mod cons he deemed necessary for a relatively comfortable existence, an existence that he seldom troubled to question. At the time of drake’s arrival, however, he was, through no fault of his own, unemployed, a state of affairs he bore with customary lack of concern, resolving to live off his savings until necessity once again prompted him to action. In short, Wilson was a young man who had worn out many a good pair of shoes on the path of least resistance.

 By the summer of ninety-seven, when the events herein related occur, Wilson had reluctantly allowed Drake’s initial week or two to stretch to a little under six months. Their co-existence was a prolonged battle of wills.
 Drake scorned Wilson’s anything-for-a-quiet-life attitude as that of a coward masquerading as indifference.
 Wilson in turn viewed Drake’s angry defiance of convention as nothing more than the tantrums of a spoiled child.
 Drake was the obstreperous houseguest.
 Wilson the long-suffering host.
 Drake bored Wilson.
 Wilson irritated Drake.
 Separate, it is extremely doubtful whether Drake or Wilson would ever have been brought to the world’s attention, but together their unparalleled infamy, like that of Wilson’s namesake before them, was indeed bruited to the uttermost regions of the globe; though not so much by the indignant winds as by the whirling tempest of the media:

KIDNAPPED! BEATEN! RAPED! KILLED! EATEN!
THE TRAGIC FATE OF OUR MOST BELOVED CELEBRITY

FINE YOUNG CANNIBALS!
THUGS DEVOUR SUPERSTAR RYAN

DRUG FRENZY LEADS TO FACE-OFF!
HERO COP TELLS HIS STORY. EXCLUSIVE

Thanks for taking the time to check out these chapters. If you wish to read a bit further, or even download the completed novel for free, please click the Smashwords link on my home page. Any comments - good, bad or indifferent - will be very gratefully recieved. Thanks again. Max.