Cold Turkey

By Carole Johnstone

“I saw him Mr Munroe.” A sly look lit up Jimmy’s blinking eyes. “He’s always chasing you.”
Raym’s hand froze in front of his chest, creeping back up towards his throat again. “What?”
“In a funny square van.” The kid blinked, blinked, blinked. He wooshed his hands either side of his body like he was starting a drag race, and Raym flinched again. “It’s got black tails – really, really looong ones, like party streamers!”

All Raym wants to do is give up smoking. So why is his entire life falling apart? Why are new mistakes and old terrors conspiring against him? Why is he being plagued by the very worst spectre from his childhood? And why does giving up suddenly – horrifyingly – feel much, much more like giving in?

This 38,500-word novella has already picked up rave reviews:

“Carole has written out of her skin for this novella. How can reading something so dark and insidiously uneasy offer the reader so much pleasure? Cold Turkey is a hammer and Carole Johnstone will cave your skull in with it. Brilliant”
—Johnny Mains

“Carole Johnstone has the canny knack of making the real seem strange and the weird commonplace. In Cold Turkey, addiction and compulsion spirals downwards into imagined and real nightmares. Top Hat, a creation to rival King’s Pennywise, rides through the urban Scottish landscape that Johnstone has created with an absolute sense of place. Her laugh out loud humour balances her harshness and puts you off-guard before delivering the final blow; if you get in bed with the devil, he’s going to fuck you over at some point”
—Priya Sharma

“Cold Turkey is rich with nightmarish invention. Johnstone has created a very distinctive villain with the sinister top-hatted tally-van man, yet knows when to hold him back to let other horrors take centre stage. There’s an addictive quality to the well-paced prose that makes reading Johnstone’s stories a habit you’ll never want to kick, and this one’s so good it’s probably bad for you”
—Ray Cluley

At the British Fantasy Convention, held in York in September 2014, Carole's 2013 short story 'Signs of the Times' won the British Fantasy Award for best short story. This story has now been added to the Cold Turkey ebook free of charge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jul 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311661746

Carole Johnstone

Carole Johnstone’s short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has been published by PS Publishing, ChiZine Publications, Night Shade Books, TTA Press, Apex Book Company, and Morrigan Books among many others. Her work has been reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series and Salt Publishing’s Best British Fantasy 2013 and 2014. Carole's short story 'Signs of the Times' from 2013 won the British Fantasy Award for best short story of the year. Her debut short story collection, The Bright Day is Done, is available from Gray Friar Press, and she has another novella in print, Frenzy, which was published by Eternal Press/Damnation Books. She is presently at work on her second novel while seeking fame and fortune with the first. Originally from Lanarkshire, Scotland, Carole now lives in north Essex.

Book preview

The day that Raym gave up smoking proved to be the third worst day of his life, although forewarned should have been forearmed: the first had been a soggy, wet weekend in Gloucester, when his father had bellowed through a bad connection that his mother was dead; and the second had been the day those bellows had finally stopped, pushing out a last breath of stale, wet air into a hospital room full of the stale, wet air of still lingering others.

His mother’s death had been quick, not wholly unexpected, but certainly sooner than it should have been. While Raym had still been at college, she’d succumbed to both emphysema and COAD; after she died, his most enduring memory of her was a bony-ridged, flannelette shuffle, hunched over with the effort of pulling along an oxygen trolley on wheels. He’d hated that bloody trolley.

His father had been different. He hadn’t worn his addiction – or its attendant consequences – like a cross to stoically bear. Sometimes, when Raym had driven his mother to the chest clinic, she’d even worn them like a badge of honour: coughing that hard, viscid cough, spitting into her tissues, turning up the hiss of her oxygen, all with a thin, triumphant smile. Not that Raym’s father had been ashamed either. Any doctor brave enough to suggest that his cancer had anything at all to do with his forty to sixty-a-day habit (depending on the weather or the football results; rainy days and home defeats at Fir Park always necessitated an extra pack) soon discovered what he’d meant by: And I don’t want tae hear any ae yer spiel boy, none ae yer smarty-arsed patter, else there’ll be hell tae pay, and I’ll no’ be the one payin’ it. Hell was always paid in long scrawly letters of complaint to consultants and directors, patient groups and even newspapers, or in sneaky escapes from the ward that inevitably ended in several irate phone calls to Raym and hours long searches for his AWOL father and his smokes.

Raym had read somewhere that the offspring of habitually heavy smokers invariably did not indulge, but this had been far from the case for him. Raym had popped that particular cherry at the ripe old age of eight during a Hogmanay party on the estate. Income support might rarely have stretched as far as second hand cars or bargain breaks in Fuengirola, but it had comfortably kept the average Muirside family in Stella and Superkings. Looking back (as he did more and more, especially following the deaths of his parents), Raym was pretty certain that that first fag had come from his father himself; proof, were it needed, that his introduction to the demon weed had likely been the very first milestone in his parents’ ambitions.

Throughout secondary school and then uni, Raym had carved out his own individual niche: swapping his parents’ Imperials for King Size Regals, more easy in the company of cider and black and chilli nuts. It was only when he graduated at twenty-two (two months after his mother had choked one too many times on her own contrary breath while he’d been cosying up to the beautiful Wendy and pretending to enjoy a walking holiday in the Forest of Dean) that Raym had downgraded into the realms of what his dad deemed slate-roof smokin’. Regal Mild to Menthols to Silk Cut, and then finally to Ultra Lights that felt so close to inhaling fresh air that Raym almost felt liberated from that whispering cricket perched upon his shoulder. Almost.

Two weeks after his father had died – parchment thin and incoherent – Raym had succumbed to a chest infection that had him questioning why anyone would be so stupid as to take something as fundamental as breathing for granted. From then on, Raym had obsessed over every cold, every chest twinge, every out of breath moment on a hill or set of steep stairs. He veered between common sense and mindless addiction, trying out just about every government-sanctioned scheme going with an initially indomitable enthusiasm that was then thwarted at every turn. None of them worked. Not gums or lozenges, inhalers or GP-funded patches; not counselling, hypnosis or those prescription-only pills that it was rumoured had actually killed a few people (and he’d harboured high hopes for them). Despite everything, Raym had not really wanted to give up. And that was that. Despite the guilt, the growing appetite for social apartheid, and the ever more colourful threats on cigarette packs (these he felt vindicated by though, they were a little like shaking a stick at a dog just to hear it bark), despite even his parents and the bloody sense that he’d been born with even if they had not, Raym had just not really wanted to give up.

And then, all of a sudden, he had. In reality, it was probably not quite as abrupt as that. Certainly, he had long been trying and failing to ignore the niggling worry that detracted somewhat from his previous enjoyment of a smoke. A niggle that had really caught on after he turned thirty. Sometimes, most often when he was hungover and the back of his throat felt sandpapered raw, that niggle grew into something that felt a lot like fear and a little more like panic, and at those times the grimace that bared its teeth at him in the bathroom mirror looked a lot like his mother’s thin triumphant smile. But it was only when he returned to Glengower and his old primary school that his mindset changed for the proverbial better, and he finally chose that right-hand fork in the road: that dark and muddy path well-trodden, overhung with cruel branches and dark skies and very deep troughs either side.

Kids didn’t understand grief because they didn’t understand death. Or rather, they didn’t understand what it could do to the still living. Raym had been only three weeks into his new job, when one ten-year-old – a little mean-eyed critter named Jonathan Thomas, God crucify his parents – had asked where Raym’s mum and dad lived. Adhering to Glengower Primary’s teaching protocol, which was fiercely (and unofficially) Protestant, Raym had given Heaven as his parents’ address, feeling a little ridiculous doing it, but doing it all the same. The kid had looked at him with the kind of expression that Raym might have used on a badly housetrained puppy: half pity, half exasperation.

How’d they die, Mister Munroe?

Never you mind, Jonathan.

The kid had gotten out of Raym the reason for their untimely deaths in less than two minutes. Mainly because Raym had begun to worry that he might otherwise have to slap that bloody look off the kid’s face.

The whole class had been in thrall by then, blinking half-awake stares, pleased to be distracted from their sums. Jonathan Thomas had looked up at his teacher with stupefied confusion. And there had been nothing adult at all about that look; it was only guileless and bewildered.

They shouldnae have smoked then, Mister Munroe, should they have?

Quite so.

Nonetheless, by the time ten thirty came around, and the kids ran screaming and jostling out into the playground, things for Raym were looking – and feeling – very bleak indeed. He headed for the staff room only because his classroom and its inanely cheerful pictures and banners were beginning to make him feel homicidal. Under no circumstances could he go outside, because that was precisely where he wanted to go. He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and pushed open the green glossed door.

At first no one said anything at all. Jeremy Kyle was on the box as Raym slunk towards the kitchenette and helped himself to a giant mug of coffee and the largest doughnut he could find. Mamie Coulter sidled up alongside him, giving off a pungent waft of Samsara mixed with camomile and birch bile tea or some such shit that left Raym gagging for a smoke over his doughnut more than ever.

Not heading out for your usual breath of fresh air, Mr Munroe?

He managed a grumpy no before spilling the first third of his coffee over both his wrist and shirt cuff. Fuck’s sake!

Dearie me! She stepped backwards as if Raym had slapped her, her lips vanishing.

Raym tried to feign an apology, but managed that about as successfully as he was managing anything else, and she went on frowning at him in that insufferably puffed-up way. Mamie Coulter might have liked to imagine that she was Miss Jean Brodie, but in the real world she taught five year olds who knew more swear words than she did, even if she had served significantly more time on the same council estate.

Given up again, is it, Raymondo?

Look, I’m just not having a cigarette today, okay Clive?

The junior principal tapped the side of his nose and nodded solemnly. I’ve read that book too, Sir.

Raym tried and failed not to be pissed off. He suspected that Clive’s endless chumminess stemmed from a need to be as down with the kids as he imagined Raym was. Raym was pretty certain he was wasting his time. From Primary Four onwards, no kid in the school escaped a beating without demonstrating a passion for rebellion, grindie and Blue Ocean. Raym only barely made the grade because almost every other teacher had a good decade on him. And because he chain-smoked every chance he got. Did chain-smoke.

Taking a pew alongside Clive if only because every other seat was already taken, Raym picked up and tried to read the Glengower Gazette; the Sheriff Court round-up was usually good for a laugh at least, particularly if he recognised old schoolmates. But today was a day where no diversion was going to be good enough. He was fast realising that there was a whole other raft of disadvantages to giving up the demon weed, not least the prospect of having to while away every break in a stuffy cramped room with colleagues and daytime TV for company.

"What the hell’s the world coming to, Raymond, eh? Happy slapping and bloody Sponge Bob Square Pants, Kerry Katona advertising private pensions. And you’ll never believe this: I catch a kid in class this morning, taking photos of the lino – you know, where it’s all worn away to shit along the skirting near the door? I ask him what he’s doing, and he tells me that he plans – plans, if you can believe that – to trip over it, break a leg and then phone one of those no win no fee places. He’s ten!"

Raym persisted with the pretence of reading the paper, while an errant spring poked him hard in the backside. Alongside him, the couch cushions lurched and shifted, sloshing his coffee.

Gi’e it a rest, will ye, Paterson? Swallowed inside a battered leather armchair, Lachlan stabbed an angry finger at Clive, but kept his eye on the flickering Goodmans. Before becoming the caretaker in ’98, Lachlan had served twenty years with the Scots Guards in Malaya, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and the Gulf, followed by a mysterious five year stretch in foreign securities. Even though he smoked probably more than Raym had ever done, he suspected that there would be little or no sympathy from that quarter either.

What about the result on Saturday, Raym? Alistair Stewart grinned. Two own goals in the last four minutes – a blind kid with no arms couldn’t even do that on purpose, eh?

I believe you just described the entire first team, Ally, Clive said.

Raym went on ignoring them all, although he’d only managed to get past the first