I was shocked to say the least.

The strait jacket had been a parting gift from the hospital. Because of my supposedly unwarranted tension that morning, they decided I needed some help in calming down. Being trussed up tighter than a turkey eagerly awaiting Christmas lunch isn't as attractive a proposition as it might at first sound. Saying that, I'm sure there are those who would, and do, pay very good money for such a 'pleasure'. I, for one, am not amongst them, I have to say. Naturally, Dr. Connors didn't realise I'd be vacating my cell that lunch time. I somehow neglected to inform his good self of my intentions. I doubted he would be too happy.

But then again.

If he had, then maybe he'd have plumped for something a little more fashionable. Straps and belts are something of a fashion necessity nowadays, but there is a little thing called overkill. I didn't think the flames that would be dining on me would mind though, so I didn't mention it. I was pleased the good doctor had decided against medication and had restricted his treatment to just the jacket. Being pleased about one of his decisions didn't sit particularly comfortably at my table, but I needed to be at the very least lucid. I worried that any amount of drugs, even though I'd often requested their administration in the past, would prevent me from doing the diddly-doo. So, yes, I was pleased, relieved and not at all peeved that I hadn't had a breakfast of needle on toast, washed down with a cold glass of Risperdal.

As far as I was concerned, I was interred at Insanity Central purely of my own accord. It was for the safety of everyone else, not for myself. The medication was there to numb me. It was meant to blot out that damned coin, erasing the possibility of me taking another bite out of population's pie. I didn't need it because I was psychotic. I wasn't. Nor was I half a dozen different people all squashed into this one body, each vying for control of the only mouth. I was normal, in a completely abnormal kind of way, of course. But Dr. Connors didn't know that. Even if he knew it on some level, he couldn't believe it. I was talking crazy dude! Rambling-a-ho worse than Bender Benny down in Room 101.

There wasn't actually a Room 101. That was just a cell a little smaller than the rest, with a little extra padding, where they put you if they wanted to forget you. 'In need of extra support' was how they'd put it, but it essentially meant the same thing. Bender Benny was crazy. He really was. Nuttier than Dr. Connors thought I was. Bender Benny's mind was bent so far round on itself, it could tickle his tonsils if it so wished. Don't ask me to tell you just what was wrong with him. Dr. Connors is the expert in matters of the mind.

Hah, I made a funny! Dr. Connors was an ex-spurt. That's about as far as I'd go. Trust me to voluntarily put myself in the care of someone who needed treatment more than his own patients! To be honest, I should have known, really. That kind of thing just seemed to happen to me. Fate's fickle finger always ended up picking me out of its nose and flicking me flat splat on the dirty pavement. When Life played Spin the Bottle, that old empty beer bottle always ended up settling on me.

Bender Benny was a danger to himself, apparently. He mumbled constantly in fractured sentences that only ever made a weird kind of sense when you half heard them. I'd never seen him become violent. He'd never so much as raised his voice or his fist. He simply sat there in the so-called common room, chained to the tubular steel chairs which were in turn bolted to the floor. After five minutes of his nonsensical mutterings he was returned to 101 before he made the other residents nervous. Every three or four hours, sometimes it was as much as six or seven, he'd appear again, head slumped, shoulders hunched, mouth twitching an ever constant stream of nothing. But he was a danger. Apparently.

As I was nice and sane and crispy, Risperdal, Valium, paracetomol and vitamin C were far more than I needed, but Dr. Connors, as he would, disagreed. Maybe he had shares in a pharmaceutical company. Perhaps he was on commission. A couple of quid for every pill popped and every tonic taken. Nice little earner. He certainly believed that preventing, or downright suffocating, a problem was better than a cure. So a daily dose was an essential part of everyone's diet. What doesn't kill you, it seemed, makes you number. Not a number, like 3487, just more numb. Something like that anyway.

For some reason, this time, he'd forgotten to top up my levels. Sometimes I felt the patients, residents, grunts, whatever we were, were like cars. You had to keep up our levels of oil and water and olanzapine to keep us running smoothly. Otherwise we'd break down and need towing back to the garage to be worked on. It was as unpleasant as it sounded. Perhaps this time he'd met his monthly quota and had earned a nice fat bonus into the bargain, because the strait jacket was all I seemed to warrant. Strange how I could be happy to be wrapped up and buckled down like some reject from escapology school.

Maybe I am crazy?

Or maybe Bender Benny was the only sane one amongst us, and we were the manifestation, or infestation, of his ramblings? What if we were all in his head and this was simply a story what he wrote, guv'nor.

And maybe the moon really is made of cheese and Wallace and Gromit's day out really was as grand as it seemed.

The first thing I thought of - the first question that came to me - was how my strait jacket had managed to not be securely fastened around my torso and was, instead, on the verge of floating away on a whim and a tide. And how come it was so neatly folded, straps tucked in, arms carefully creased across the top. OK, so that was two questions, but my first instinct was not to ask why I wasn't a cloud of ash floating about on the thermal updrafts of my favourite hydrogen-sulphide furnace. Nor was it "Where the hell am I?"

That would have been a good one for Houdini. How to escape a locked room whilst wearing the prerequisite strait jacket, in less than one second, removing yourself and the jacket with both arms tied behind your back, one eye closed and whilst singing God Save the Queen. Granted I was doing none of the latter, but it would still have been a good one for Houdini.

I stared at the jacket for a long moment. It bobbed on the waves, threatening to let itself be washed away if I didn't quickly rescue it. I thought about picking it up because it seemed part of me. It linked me to who I was. And that's why I left it. It linked me to who I was. I nudged it with my toe, helping it on its way. The breakers broke and the waves took it. I watched its colour darken as the fabric soaked up the water enough to weigh it down and drag it under. As it sank, the arms drifted off the top, either waving to me or beseeching me to save it. I waved back.

Bye.

I watched my cosy little strait jacket, arms flailing, disappear beneath the surface. It struck me that I could easily have used this watery grave for my own benefit. Rather than turning myself into the Sunday roast, I could quite happily have become shark bait - brunch for Moby Dick while he was waiting for Roy Scheider to stick a gas cylinder down his throat. The bottom of the deep blue sea was a definite alternative to a smelly old furnace. If the weight of tonnes of briny water slapped right on top of my head didn't kill me, the distinct lack of gills surely would have.

Hello Hindsight, and goodbye.

Finally my brain seemed to click into gear and I realised I was actually still alive. I hadn't drowned, nor had I been flame-grilled for that extra succulent taste. No sesame seed bun wrapped me up and Flipper wasn't likely to happen by and tell me Little Johnny had fallen down a cliff. I was still a one and only, walking, talking, living freak. I wasn't happy about that at all.

Turning, I looked around at the beach. The sea was one thing - I had always loved to listen to its whispering heartbeat as it danced its perpetual waltz with Sweet Sister Moon. The beach was quite another kettle of haddock, chips, scraps and lashings of salt and vinegar if you please. No, no mushy peas thanks. The thing was with sand, it was sandy. It got into all your nooks and crannies if you so much as sneezed at it in the wrong way. When I was younger - young enough to not question wonder and not to care about ordinary - I thought nothing of building sandcastles, kicking footballs, rolling around and mucking in. The sand would poor out of my trainers, my socks would shake and my jean's backside would brush clean. So simple. I reached a point, though, when I realised not all the sand left my trainers, and no matter how hard I shook my socks I'd still end up with sand between my toes. I'm not sure how old I was when that happened. I grew up, I think. How sad is that?

If you're ever contemplating growing up, don't. Take my word for it. Boring! That's my word. What difference does it make if your toes are sandy, or if you've a speck of muck under your fingernails? It really doesn't matter a flying fig. Not that I'm sure whether or not figs can fly. So don't do it. Stay a kid for as long as you possibly can. You hear about men hitting 45 years old and falling under the spell of the Wicked Witch of the Mid-Life Crisis. They buy flash sports cars and try and cop off with young pert-breasted blondes to recapture their youth. Personally I never owned a flash sports car, and I preferred redheads, so I didn't really have that youth to recapture. I always figured that a man's mid-life crisis was just an excuse. Not for anything in particular, just an excuse generally. A bit like PMT is an excuse for a woman to tear a man's balls off. As women don't have balls, a man doesn't have anything to aim at, so we're not that fussy. I'm still a long way off of 45, and don't have the money for a sports car, so I'll stick to trying to be a kid again. I'll continue to attempt to ignore sand, and to try to run between raindrops and see if I can jump in a puddle right up to my muddle.

But facing that beach right then, having realised I was still breathing, I was repulsed. I hated every single grain of sand and every tiny shell. It was personal. The beach was to blame. The water around my ankles had joined in for good measure. They'd clubbed together to abduct me, taking the piss and rubbing my nose in the fact that I could still feel the sun on my face. I could hear seagulls laughing somewhere off in the distance and I wanted to shoot them, one by one.

Let's see them laugh then!

I'm not normally the sort of person to get angry. I get down, maybe moody, pissed off and peeved, but not really angry. I don't fall into helpless rages, tearing through a room like a tornado, or a poltergeist who's had one too many coffees that day. That's not me. I'm fairly chilled, not tending to get worked up about things over which I have no control.

Perhaps that's hard to believe seeing as I committed myself to a lunatic asylum and then tried to toast my tootsies in a flame that Zippo or Clipper would have been proud of. The thing was, I didn't see it - the disasters, the death - as something out of my control. At first it was just a matter of ridding myself of that damned coin. Once I realised the coin was simply a focus and it wasn't going anywhere if it didn't want to, I'd hoped the heady mix of drugs, padded cell and strait jacket would do the job for me. I always thought there would be some way to stop it all. In the end, there could be only one, as the Kurgen once informed a young Highlander.

The Kurgen. Big, bad, mean-mother-hubbard. If ever there was a guy, immortal or not, who had a terminal case of PMT, Kurgeyboy was he. Anger was his middle name, or it would be if he'd had a last one.

So. My one chance to end it all - the pain and suffering and death - and I'd ballsed it up.

I was angry. Angry to be alive. Angry at the sea and the sand and the shells and the laughing seagulls. Angry at the fact that I could even be angry! One of the gulls landed a short distance away and peered at me gloating. "Ha! Got you!"

My anger switched up a notch. I realised my fists and my teeth were battling it out to see which could clench the tightest. The gull continued to mock me with its gaze, telling me what a sorry excuse for a suicide victim I was. A breeze picked up a few grains of sand and tossed them casually in my face. I could feel them scratching my eyes and working their way into my mouth. The sea seemed to surge around my ankles. I felt it wet my crotch and spray my fists as it joined in with the ridicule. The breeze became a wind that ruffled my hair the way a patronising uncle might his nephew.

I cried out then. Whether it was in anger, frustration or desperation I'm not sure. Probably it was all three mashed together like emotional bubble and squeak - except I had bubbled, but this was no squeak.

"AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

My throat was sore. My breath was gone. My anger had vanished. I felt empty. Lifeless. Dead.

That word again.

I shut my mouth and opened my eyes, not realising I'd closed them. The gull had gone, no doubt scared off by my shout. The sea had gone too, though obviously not frightened by me - I was no King Canute. I looked back to see the tide sweeping towards me, a stampede of angry looked white froth. If you don't think froth can look angry, maybe you'd like to kiss a pissed off Rottweiler. This froth was ticked off and it wanted a piece of me. Not wanting to become any wetter than I already was I ran backwards a few feet further onto the sand. The water crashed into a dip where I'd been standing, splashing me as if to say "I'll get you some way."

I wiped the salty water from my face wondering at the sudden tide. Had the waltz become a tango? Were the sea and the moon having a brief lover's spat?

I turned once more to face the land, stepping backwards slightly as I moved. I felt something crunch under my heel and looked down.

A wing, or rather the remains of one.

I crouched for a better look, not really wanting to but not being able to help myself. The crunch had been the small piece of bone still attached to the tattered and bloody section of feathers. Small pieces of gore were slimed across the wing, sand sticking to them like icing sugar sprinkled on a cake.

I vomited. Twice. The first was at the sight of the shredded wing. The second was either because of the smell of the first, or because the wing was now covered in my own puke, making the scene, somehow, more horrific.

Spitting a few times to clear my mouth, I stood again. Without looking back, I started to walk away. Without thinking about the what or the why, and certainly not the how, I walked away. I was sorry for the gull, but I didn't genuflect or say a prayer. I didn't look around for the remainder of the remains, if there were any. The thought of a burial, even one as simple as kicking sand over the wing, didn't enter my head.

I walked away and whistled a happy tune. Tra-la-la. No. I didn't. I just walked. I didn't look at my surroundings, sing a song, or even think. I just walked.

* * * *