Competition 3447 invited you to outdo Kingsley Amis in detailing a hang-over from hell, but in the style of another writer. Obviously writing about hangovers is an ancient tradition, and the conundrum was that excess was demanded but an excess of excess threatened to be unpleasant reading. I was sorry not to have room for John O’Byrne’s and Janine Beacham’s Dickensian hangovers; Ralph Goldswain’s and Brian Murdoch’s Shakespearean ones, Simon Godziek’s Raymond Chandler (‘My eyes feel like they’ve been peeled, and there’s something bigger than my head inside my head’), Roger Rengold’s Somerset Maugham, Elizabeth Kay’s Hemingway, and many others besides. The £25 John Lewis vouchers go to those below.
Before he even opened his eyes, Bond knew it was professional, not for show. Kidneys, headache, nausea? Rabbit punches; electrodes, possibly. Pain everywhere: but nothing visible. They’d stripped him and thrown him on the bed. He’d curled into a ball, for protection. He flexed his fingers – numb, but none missing. Had he talked? Is that why they stopped? Then why not just kill him last night? No: whatever the pain now, more was coming. Just give them what they want, he thought. All those missions – for what? This. Now. He opened one eye – Caribbean sun. He tried to move and groaned with pain. And then he heard the cabin door open. Footsteps. He braced for the first blow. But not a punch: a stroke. Slender fingers, manicured nails. He squinted: long blonde hair, bikini (barely). A foreign accent – Russian? ‘Shaken and stirred I’d say, James. Lightweight.’ She kissed him. ‘Coffee?’
Richard Warren (with apologies to Ian Fleming)
I went mad on the mead with hard men of Hrothgar. There was singing of boast-songs and spouting of verse. There was bashing of bog-trolls and barfing in bushes. When I woke, wattle-headed, I wished I had not. The morning was messy and it mauled like a bear. My brain was a bruise – had it brawled with a dragon? My tongue felt like tar entwined in a thistle. My stomach sloshed stormy with slurry and bile. There streamed from my strides the dark stench of disaster – was some creature encrusted in the crack of my arse? I tried standing but staggered then stumbled and hurled, and pebble-dashed the pillars with a paint job of puke-spray. I drowsed through the daylight, dripping with troll-sweat, and swore off the swallowing of that swill men call mead. But with night came renewal, and I knocked back more drink.
Matt Quinn (The anonymous author of Beowulf)
When Pooh Bear awoke, his first thought was of honey. This turned out to be a very bad thought and he hummed a little instead, but that was worse, and so he tried to get up, but there was a wall where his bedroom ought to have been. After a while he realised that the wall was his front door, which was open, and that although his feet had got home, his head had not as it was on his doormat.
Much later, Piglet arrived and politely wiped his feet on Pooh’s head. Then he fell over.
‘What happened, yesterday, Piglet?’
‘We found out what Christopher Robin does in the evenings.’
After that, they went for a walk in a big circle, which was all they could do.
‘Perhaps we will meet a Wild Woozle, and be in Very Great Danger,’ said Piglet.
‘I hope we do,’ said Pooh.
Nick Syrett (A.A. Milne)
And in his veins, his dark, brooding veins, there was ash. And the dark, unfathomable taste of the burnt offering, of the cruel, obliterating force. He was being burned, that was it, he was being immolated, his whole soul and being were being invaded by black creatures, their skins sloughing off, giving themselves to impotence, raging against the fecundity of the tongue. And he was being whipped, whipped to extinction, in a black wilderness of blackness, of black blood. He was being lashed into nothingness, into death. Very well, he would go no further. Very well, he would reach Pisgah, but would go no further. What was this weight, this black, dark weight? It crushed his soul into dust. He became a wretch, a wretch in gloom, sightless, alien. His lips were blind, too, frothing like the mouth of a dead sheep. And he must suffocate, too, after such ale.
Bill Greenwell (D.H. Lawrence)
The drink had been very sweet and foamy and creamy, but, when Edmund awoke, he began to feel that he had taken far too much of it. Have you ever had the feeling of having done something you wish you hadn’t? Edmund did. He felt as though he had eaten too many ices, drunk three bottles of fizzy pop and boarded the biggest and fastest ride at the fairground, except that this ride did not stop. The moonlight shining on the Witch’s frozen garden pierced his eyes like shards of ice and he felt deathly cold, yet bathed in sweat. He seemed to have lost a rugger match against the school First XV.He knew what Peter would say and he hated him for it. He hated himself. His mouth tasted disgusting. His soul tasted worse. He was a disgrace. Edmund wished heartily to be turned to stone.
Frank Upton (C.S. Lewis)
The morning assembled itself like a derelict housing estate inside my skull. Each thought arrived pre‑damaged, its wiring exposed, shorting against nerve endings slick with chemical debris. Light from the window pressed down with laboratory precision, interrogating the raw surfaces of memory. My body had become an unreliable machine: valves misfiring, fluids sloshing in the wrong chambers, the tongue an obsolete interface coated in metallic grit.
Time lost its civic order. Minutes stalled, then accelerated, as if governed by a faulty traffic system. The previous night felt less like indulgence than an unauthorised experiment conducted on myself. Lying there, I sensed that the hangover was not a punishment but a message – an inner landscape revealing the violence implicit in routine pleasures, and the quiet apocalypse hidden in a glass.
I considered hair of the dog. Unfortunately, I had eaten the dog yesterday.
Mark Edwards (J.G. Ballard)
No. 3450: One way
You are invited to submit a short story using words of only one syllable. Please email entries of up to 150 words to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 May.
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