When he regained consciousness, grim reality hit hard - he was buried alive. Inside the coffin there was nothing to see or hear, the darkest place imaginable with not a sound except his breathing, which grew deeper and deeper with each new breath of despair.
He sensed by touch the coarse synthetic fabric padding around the sides of the cheap pine coffin with a similar lined cushion under his head. Underneath, he could feel the rigid wooden bottom of the box, also covered but not padded, obviously not finished off with the comfort of a "live" corpse in mind. His breathing became faster, his palms began to sweat, he reached for the lid. He pushed with both hands and then his eyes widened to the fullest extent of panic. The lid wouldn't budge, not even a fraction, not even enough for the grains of the pine to creak or crack. Although he imagined the lid was bolted down, there was obviously a greater weight above it, the weight of earth, perhaps. He couldn't deny that, his mind wouldn't dispel the thought that he was indeed buried underground. He tried to think that maybe he was only sealed in a coffin, buried underground was a fact that he just couldn't cogitate, he had to believe in the better option, if he wanted to stay alive then he had to have hope.
His natural instinct was to scream and squirm and scrape, an adrenalin rush fired his body into a spasm of panic but he fought it, he fought body with mind and irrational with rational. Time was not on his side, time for him was contingent on oxygen, a finite commodity dwindling with every breath and with every expelled breath an emission of poisonous carbon dioxide. He had to regulate his breathing, he had to control his terror.
Suddenly the chill hit him. Once the initial shock of his surroundings had been suspended, he shivered involuntarily, just like he panicked. Now he had even more reason to panic - cold equals underground. Nothing hurts quite like reality, when reality bites.
In the most adverse of situations there is an inherent will among all living creatures to survive, to continue to live and breathe. Although this instinct has a breaking point, a stage when dying becomes alluring, the time to die is a once-off encounter from which there's no return.
His desire to live was strong, he would struggle with his impending death far longer than others, to the bitter end - and that end would come after a long, slow and bitter battle. As he lay there for what was to be his last minute, he began to think about the circumstances which lead to his approaching death. If he could escape into his memory temporarily it would be an escape of sorts, he closed his eyes, unseeing eyes, darkness became darkness.
"Splat" was how he was known to all, it was a nickname of course, his parents, although they had a good sense of humour, would never have christened a child "Splat". No, they had the good sense to christen him "Vladimir" instead, a name which would have haunted and taunted him for the rest of his life if it wasn't for a fateful accident he had at the age of six.
Vladimir O'Connor, being an avid climber and explorer at the time, decided one day to venture from chair to table to ironing board to windowsill to the ground four storeys below - quite an achievement considering he landed unhurt. When the concrete broke his fall below, one of the older boys (an avid comic reader) playing football nearby cried "Splat!", and, as nicknames stick, the name "Splat" stuck to young Vladimir: he became known as Splat O'Connor.
Splat became another sorry inheritor of inner city poverty. Upon leaving school he didn't have a chance, he finished second level education shortly after he had started. It didn't really matter if he had to complete the exams, he knew university or even any kind of a career wasn't for him or his kind, he had a life of few options ahead of him.
One option was heroin, though it seemed more like an inevitability. His three older brothers and two sisters were already at various stages of addiction, how could he avoid following in their footsteps? He was no better than they, and they were all he had to look up to. At first, in his mid-teens, he was determined to avoid the drug, not an easy thing to do given where he lived, junkies and dealers littered the stairs and squats in his building.
He brushed passed them morning and evening as he came and went from a casual construction job he tried to hold down in the city centre. After three weeks of backbreaking work, the cowboy building firm went bankrupt leaving him unpaid and with nothing to show for his time. If only he had made just enough money to buy a ticket away from the place and out of the country, that would have saved him, his future might have been different - better. He graduated from smoking to injecting heroin in a matter of weeks, his shooting partners dismissed the smoking of the drug in much the same way as serious stout drinkers would dismiss the addition of blackcurrant to their sacred beverage. Smoking heroin was also a shameful waste of the opiate, injecting gave more hits for the money. This money didn't come easy at first, Splat had to hone his skills as a petty thief to pay for his ever-increasing addiction, shoplifting, bag-snatching, smash-and-grabbing, that sort of thing. Easy, fast and fruitful thievery, with money being the all-important prize.
Of course, things would have been good - or at least better - if he had stuck to this form of money-making rather than graduating to becoming a heroin dealer himself. We can all make mistakes though, errors of judgement that can alter our lives from the time we make that decision on. The decision to get involved in drugs in the first place was probably the worst decision Splat ever made. Not even jumping from that window all those years ago seemed that bad a decision in comparison.
As he climbed the deadly ladder of heroin dealing, he became - as all heroin dealers do - greedy, he could see the potential to make a lot of money, far more than was necessary to fund his own habit. He started to dream of things he could buy with the fruits of his dirty dealing: flash cars, fancy jewellery, even an exclusive address, in fact the things that all drug dealers seem to long for. He was no different, he had the same tastes, the same desires.
Unfortunately, there were other small-time pushers in Splat's neighbourhood who had the same ambitions: an obvious conflict existed. These people were also lured by the money, they too were addicts, but to be "dealing addicts" gave them a sort of ambition, a way forward, something to lift them up and out of the daily routine of getting their fixes.
If only Splat had discovered his business acumen before he discovered heroin, he could have been buying and selling some other quantity, he could even have been one of the "suits" that he used to hurl abuse down on from the building site. He could have had the wife and 2.4 children living in suburbia among neighbours that he'd never have to talk to - the privilege, he thought, of living in a new suburban housing development among people who had nothing in common except the means of paying for these planned, boring, claustrophobic houses.
One day, standing outside a designated office building - a common ploy while waiting to collect a batch of heroin which was to arrive by bicycle courier - Splat decided to buy a newspaper, or, to be more exact, a tabloid paper. As he stood waiting for the delivery, he read about Bill Gates and how he had become a billionaire through what was loosely described as "monopoly". The word was actually explained in the paper as "exclusive possession of trade". Splat thought about this for a while. He hadn't done much thinking up until that point but now he pondered on whether he could have a monopoly in his area.
After all, there were only two other dealers there. If they weren't there he could have "exclusive possession of the trade". Anyway, their source - a prominent business man and ex-politician - was from well outside the city, why should he be making money there? Splat's supplier was at least from the city, albeit from the rich leafy, "golden mile" part of the city. When the bicycle courier showed up, they exchanged parcels in a hidden doorway and Splat walked briskly away with purpose in his stride. That night he was going to take exclusive possession of the trade.
A few hefty construction workers he knew were glad to oblige Splat, especially when there was a fair amount of money involved. What difference did it make to them whose legs and arms they broke as long as they were getting well paid for it? And when Splat told them that they were drug dealers' arms and legs, it lent "job satisfaction" to their task and they became vigilantes - they had always wanted to play Charles Bronsons.
In the back of a Ford transit van that night, in the middle of a work-in-progress housing estate, the sound of breaking bones and piercing screams was muffled by the high revving of the van's engine. One of the dealers was knocked unconscious by a blow to the back of the head with a shovel, while they held the other down to break his limbs with a sledgehammer. The two bloody and broken bodies were rolled out through the back doors of the van as it drove up a side street beside the city hospital. An hour later, they were discovered.
Splat did achieve his monopoly in the days and weeks after that. He had the exclusive trade of heroin in his locality, and his supplier on the other side of the city was pleased with this initiative. There wasn't any special bonus or golden handshake, just the reward of extra profit.
Splat never got around to enjoying this extra profit though, indeed it never crossed his mind to spend all this money at all. It seemed that he enjoyed making money just for the sake of it. He had become addicted to the much stronger lure of easy money and heroin almost slipped his mind. He never banked on the other out-of-town drug supplier to show up with his gun-wielding friends that night and break down his door. All he felt was a syringe needle in the back of his neck and the next thing he knew, he woke up in the coffin.
There was nothing he could do to get out of the coffin, there was no way out, the only hope was for help from the outside.
He had to hope for someone to come and let him out. He had to keep his head together until then. No point in trying to push and kick his way out, that could only lead to panic and panic would kill him. He'd heard the stories of old coffins being opened and fingernail scratch marks being found inside the coffin lid - he didn't want to think of such things, he couldn't afford to let his mind wander away to thoughts like that. Those thoughts could take over, he had to fight for his mind, he had to escape again with his mind.
It was a time when he was very young, Splat and his brothers were playing while their mother was out visiting a neighbour. It was a happy time, as happy as he could remember. There was a mock Persian rug stretched as far as possible across the bare wooden floor, it was a wrestling game and the older brothers let Splat - "the baby" - win every time until he became exhausted by his efforts and just lay flat with arms and legs spread on the rug. He was perspiring and breathing heavily but he was smiling and he giggled with delight.
As he lay there, contented, suddenly the brothers sprang into action with an idea they somehow hatched through telepathy. They rolled Splat quickly and neatly up into the rug until he couldn't be seen and only a muffled cry for release emerged. Then they sat on their prisoner and pretended to watch TV. Splat lay there, unable to move a muscle for several minutes before falling asleep. Somehow, rolled up in that cocoon he felt warm, safe and secure - as though he was back in the womb.
He dreamt he was floating, drifting in a sea of softness, wrapped up in cotton wool - a similar feeling to the one he had when high on heroin. It was all just a dream, a cold turkey hallucination: the coffin, buried alive, all that - his mind was just toying with him, he was back rolled up in the rug again, he was young and happy and the evils of the world were far away, his brothers were there, he was laughing, wrapped up nice and tight, "as snug as a bug in a rug" as his mother used to say. Soon his brothers would roll him out again and he'd go spinning across the bare floor to wild laughter and applause.
He didn't want to wake up, though, he wanted the dream to last, the nightmare inside the coffin had vanished and he wanted to stay rolled up nice and quiet and calm with only the scent of the rug stimulating his senses. He never wanted to leave his carefree youth again - an existence free from drugs, violence and coffin nightmares. He couldn't stop the waking though, he couldn't delay it, it was inevitable. As much as he wanted to stay wrapped up in his graceful dream, he couldn't, the dream's end was approaching. He would soon fall out the other side and into his feather-soft bed again, the next new day in reality was just around the corner. He wished for a life inside a dream . . . but nothing hurts quite like reality, when reality bites.
He opened his eyes to darkness, his ears heard nothing, it felt cold, he lay, not in his soft bed but on hard wood. Suddenly, there was an eruption of terror, he kicked, punched, every muscle and bone, every moving part of his body sprang into action, he roared like a scared warrior going into battle and death, he fought hard and for as long as he could. Sadly, this was one fight he just couldn't win, because he was, after all, fighting himself. Death approached all the more quickly, the coffin finally held what it was designed for: a corpse.
Months later, while an earth mover was in the process of digging out the foundations for another new housing development, they came across Splat O'Connor's coffin. When they opened it, they found blood-stained fingernail scratch marks inside the lid. Splat's body was identified by the single tattoo on his left arm: "Heroin Kills - Die Slowly".