The Road To Perdition

What might happen if you let students - an intemperate bunch at best by all accounts - to throw a party behind the students union bar. Nostalgia about what might have happened afterwards

"Where does this road go?"

"It doesn’t go anywhere – it’s stationary."

"Stationery!" I said in mock surprise, at an attempt of surreal humour. "You mean it’s made of paper? It’ll collapse into the Bristol Channel!"

"It’s stood here for years," said Tariq. "Solid as a rock." All night he’d adopted this insouciant tone. At first it had seemed hilarious. Then funny. Then slightly amusing. Now, in the grey morning, it was getting just a tad irritating. This may have been in inverse proportion to how sober I was. "What’s to stop a big gust of wind blowing us off this bridge and into the water, dozens of feet –"

" – hundreds of feet – " He corrected.

" – hundreds of feet below?"

"Well, there’s that railing there."

"Then what?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Absolutely nothing."

"Would the authorities come and rescue us?" I pressed the point.

"God, no."

"Why not?"

"Well… if they’d seen us here at all, they’d have come and arrested us for trespass."

"But that’s still no reason not to rescue us."

"It is, if you think about it," Tariq reasoned, reasonably. "You see, if they’d not seen us to arrest us, they’d can’t have seen us to rescue us, can they? Besides…"

"Besides – what?"

"Besides, the fall would kill you, and even if it didn’t, you would drown in the current. If the hypothermia didn’t get you first. So it’d hardly be worth their bother."

I digested this. We’d been walking for about half an hour on the path-and-cycle-way that ran alongside the elevated approach to the Severn Bridge. This, Tariq had informed me, was a cantilevered path. I looked up ‘cantilever’ much later, and it said: "A cantilever is a beam anchored at one end and projecting into space." I could aver that this was true. The path was "temporarily closed for safety reasons" with a small barrier but we’d scrambled over that. We were now barely out over the water and hadn’t even reached the huge concrete structure, the size of a large block of flats, into which the suspension cables were anchored. There was absolutely no cover of any kind and we would have been clearly visible for miles to anyone who’d cared to look.

"Well I’d hate to put them out, if they’re so busy not seeing trespassers and all. I mean we’re hardly hidden from view." Even to myself I was beginning to sound a little grumpy.

"No, but we are a long way off. That’s probably why they haven’t seen us." Tariq still seemed as chipper as ever. "That and the fact that no-one in his right mind normally crosses on foot."

"Tariq, exactly why are we crossing the Bristol Channel by suspension bridge on foot at nine o’clock in the morning."

"Ah. You do you remember last night?"

"Which bits?"

"The later bits."

"The bar-staff party."

"And afterwards?"

"Nope." I strained to recall something. Something that might have been important, the sort of thing that explained why I was here now doing this thing. "Not really. Little bits. The bar closed. We tidied up in twenty minutes and that left us forty minutes in which to cram an entire party evening’s drinking, before the Students’ Union building shut and we all got slung out. We started drinking and… I don’t think I remember anything after that."

"The people all lying around on the grass?"

"Not really. Were they drunk?"

"It was hard to tell. They were all unconscious." Tariq seemed remarkably unconcerned about this, much as he was about everything else.

"Don’t you think they might have been drunk before they became unconscious?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. Let’s face it, everyone was drunk. In fact, every thing was drunk by the time we were thrown out."

"Why weren’t we unconscious?"

"Must have been down to our robust constitutions," Tariq grinned. "Anyway, that’s when I suggested that we go down to Keele motorway services and hitch a ride with the first truck-driver who’d give us a lift."

"You did what?" I’m not sure how much I was surprised, feigning outrage, or genuinely outraged. "Why couldn’t I have just been unconscious like everybody else?

"You said you thought it was a good idea."

"I said that? Why didn’t you disagree with me?"

"I thought it was a good idea, too. After all, it had been my idea. So that’s what we did. You insisted on going back to your room first for some reason, then we set off."

"You can’t just hitch-hike away from a hangover."

"Oh no? Look at you now? Up, fresh as a daisy, out in the bracing open air. Imagine all those others – just waking up with their heads throbbing. Have you got a hangover?"

He had a point. But so did I. "No – but I’m nearly getting my tits blown off in this ‘bracing air’!"

"So it wasn’t such a bad idea."

"But… but how? What happened?"

"We got a lift to Aust Services back there and the driver said he was having a stop-over, so we said we’d walk."

"But why are we crossing the River Severn bridge on a pathway closed to the public?" I persisted.

"Because it’s there!"

"But we don’t have to be!"

"And to get to the other side, of course."

"Of course. How silly of me."

"Because, on the other side is where my uncle lives. He owns a pub in Caerleon. The Red Lion. Or the White Lion, I’m not sure which. But I’m sure we’ll find it. And he can give us a lift back to Keele."

I was starting to worry that this was actually making some kind of sense, when it shouldn’t. "Tariq, don’t take this personally, but you’re, sort of, of a dusky Asian hue and you’re from Bolton. How come you’ve got an uncle who owns a pub in south Wales?"

"What’s wrong with that? I’m a good barman back at the Students’ Union, aren’t I? Serving booze to white folks runs in our family."

"I suppose you’ve got a point. How far is it to Caerleon?"

"Oo… only a few minutes’ walk. We’ll soon be there."

"Tariq, we’ve been walking for hours and we’re not even half way across and I can barely see land in either direction."

"It’s just a trick of perspective. The bridge is only a couple of miles long – at most – including the approach sections.

"Then – how far to Caerleon?"

"Not far. Only about 15 miles."

"Only!…"

"There’s two things to keep in mind. Firstly, don’t look down."

I looked down. We appeared to be walking on thin steel plate. Well, it looked like steel plate. Its apparent thinness was revealed because at frequent if irregular intervals there were holes right through the metal, for no readily apparent reason, about the diameter of a ten pence piece, revealing the steel to about the thickness of a ten pence piece. Clearly visible below that, about as far down as a ten storey building, curling, twisting brown waves, like a pit of vipers, wriggled, waiting with waning patience for their prey to fall amongst them.

"What was the second thing?" I croaked.

"We’ll be alright, just so long as we don’t hit a spot of bad weather."



We reached about half-way across the bridge, and became the centre of a sphere of air, sky and water, with just a puny piece of engineering to indicate Man’s existence. At that point, some weather – a spot, bad – blew in from the general direction of America, and it seemed to be in a hurry. The metal at our feet was matched by the metal sky overhead, and the metal water below disappeared from view as we became entombed in a racing ball of cloud. Every step we took seemed to turn us sideways. To have jumped up, losing contact with the armour-like decking, would have been suicidal.

Then the rain came in. To call it rain was a bit of a liberty, insofar as the only resemblance this phenomenon had to rain was that it was wet. Horizontal spears of water daggered into us, making us yelp. But this was just the beginning. We started to realise we might be in serious trouble when it became unwise even to lift one foot off the slicked surface, and we attempted a cross-country skiing movement. Progress went from slow to slower. Then, as the bullet rods and hydro-tracer puckered and cratered my denim jacket, making it dark as though stained with blood, we fell to our knees. As an afterthought, we decided to lie down altogether and time froze – as, indeed, did we – until the venom of the elements subsided once more. Eventually, the wind lessened, we got to our feet and we plodded on in what was to me a bubble of misery.

Long after we were no longer over the waters of the Bristol Channel, the road continued in an elevated arc round to the west parallel to the bum of Wales. Hours seemed to drag past. Eventually road met land, and we were able to get off the motorway and walk on the grass embankment alongside. Caerleon, whatever it was like, still did not hove into view. I was not sure how it would appear but I was imagining something like Valhalla. The morning grew old and tired.

At long last, we crossed under the motorway to get on its northern side and approached a motley collection of buildings. This was Caerleon. This was Caerleon? It was, probably, quite a pleasant village – it even had some Roman remains somewhere, to which some human remains were in danger of being added – mine – but it was hard to appreciate under the circumstances. Its one merit was that it contained a public house where we could find shelter, rest, food and, most importantly, transport to take us back to the home whence we’d so pointlessly come.

It took some time for Tariq to identify the correct pub. It turned out that Caerleon, with a population of just two thousand souls, had twelve of the establishments. The one we wanted was in fact called The Black Bull – Tariq had been close, apart from an appalling lack of awareness of colour and zoology.

The only thing was, we were too early and the place was still shut.

We had nowhere left to go.

All we could do was wait for his relatives to wake, open up, let us in and take us back to the little student residence blocks we called home.

"Drink has driven me to this," I exhaled, and, exhausted, slid to the ground, where fatigue enveloped me like a foggy pall, and I sank from the conscious world.



When I finally saw my room again, many, many hours later, several things argued for my attention. Firstly, not only was the door unlocked, but it was slightly open. Secondly, the light was left on. Thirdly, an empty vodka bottle was embedded, neck first, into the wall plaster. It came back to me. I had taken this bottle back to my room "for later," but having got there, I had drained the last of its contents then flamboyantly thrown it at the wall, as if completing some dramatic toast. To my befuddled amazement, it hadn’t shattered and I hadn’t the heart to attempt to heap further injury upon it.

And that was how, for me, the one and only Keele University Students’ Union bar-staff party ended.

The End