Mychandra
J.W. Carey
Copyright 2016 J.W. Carey
Cover by J.W. Carey
Mychandra
J.W. Carey
Content
Mychandra
Day One
I
II
III
Day Two
IV
V
VI
Day Three
VII
VIII
IX
Day Four
X
XI
XII
Day Five
XIII
XIV
XV
Contact
Day One
I
I’d been dreaming of a girl called Victoria.
I didn’t know what she sounded like; I didn’t know the colour of her hair, the scent of her skin, the feel of her fingertips holding onto mine. I didn’t know how tall she was, how her eyebrows arched when she laughed, how she had a habit of picking at the skin on her lip – whether she drank tea, or coffee, or water, or vodka like a fish.
I had no idea how she rolled her tongue around her speech, no clue as to how she cut her nails, how she swung her feet when she moved. I didn’t know whether she was married or a virgin, whether she was an artist or a slave or an advertiser or some rain-sodden creature, watching the smoke from her cigarette filter out into the wet night and living for that moment, above all else.
At that moment; with the scarred wooden table top against one knee and beneath my fingers like art translated into brail, with the recycled wine bottles filled with dried pasta and potpourri – all except the one on my table, which was filled with rice – with the full-length mirror leaning against the divider beside me, I swear I saw her.
She appeared like a flash, with angel wings spreading out into the room, great and white and so large that they turned the large room claustrophobic. I could have stared at her forever, had she been anything but an illusion! Somewhere else in the world she might have existed; living, breathing, enjoying the sunlight even as I was; she might have been leaning out of a high window in Venice; she might have been serving greasy hamburgers to truckers in Oklahoma; she might have been lost in Russia with some illicit French literature in hand, shivering and waiting for a knock on the door.
I could have laughed at myself – if she existed, if she existed at all, she would be lying in bed with the covers still pulled about her face. She would have been checking her phone to see how many times her latest selfie had been retweeted, or staring at the ceiling of her living room and thinking of nothing, enjoying the emptiness as it rebounded from the interior walls of her skull, as it peered out through the windows of her mind and recoiled in revulsion.
I heard a loud, jovial voice from the other room and smiled. I heard someone mention my name and, a few heartbeats later, Bernard walked into the room. He moved with the same easy confidence as ever, the same rolling shoulders flowing down into slim hips and strong legs. He opened his arms wide, like he was running towards his young son after coming home from the war.
‘It’s a hell of a nice place you picked here,’ he said loudly, unashamedly – almost as if he wanted the waitress to hear, ‘hella nice place.’ Despite myself, I grinned again – everything he said was incredible; he only had to say that his was a nice place and, suddenly, it was. He was Apollo, come to earth; the son of man come eating and drinking.
He pulled up a chair and sat across from me, resting his arms on the table.
‘How’s it going man?’ My voice, compared to his, was subhuman. Where he spoke like an orator, I was some muttering thing in the crowd, the last man left to be won over by his easy charm and his confidence and when he said “I come here not to praise Caesar, but to bury him” and plunged dagger blades into a wax mannequin, I was the first on my feet and shouting for the death of the senate.
‘It’s a mess out there, have you seen it?’ I nodded. ‘You know, I half expected to see you out there, with your fist clenched above your head.’ He laughed and, again, I smiled with him. Once he’d mentioned it, I could hear them. More than that, when I closed my eyes, I could see them. The twin lines of officers in high-visibility jackets, like traffic cones on steroids; the gleaming flesh above t-shirts with football teams and brand new buttoned-down shirts bought especially for this day; the ragged and orderly mob opposing them.
‘Here, I got a picture of one that I think you’ll like.’ Bernard placed his phone on the table in front of me and flicked his finger right a few times. ‘There, that one.’
Like a gambler revealing his royal flush, he moved his hand away and I leaned forward. It was a picture of a dark-haired lad, dressed all in black, triumphantly holding a cardboard sign above his head. In black marker pen someone had written ‘Love pies, hate racism’.
Behind him, the main courtyard of Wigan, with its half-walls blocking out the seating area, sat in all its blank, canvas-less majesty. There wasn’t a background, not really, just a single two-dimensional block of shifting colour. It looked like had had already doctored it, like he had edited the image onto a blank background to be inserted anywhere across the country.
‘Good, isn’t it? There are a few more signs like that around, and there are some pretty funny ones. Let me tell you, you Wiganers really do have a sense of humour.’
‘Yeah; we’re great, aren’t we?’ We were quiet for a few seconds, until Bernard smiled again.
‘Have you ordered a drink yet?’
‘No, I thought I’d wait for you; I didn’t know if you’d want to grab something to eat while you’re here or what you’d fancy.’
‘Good man.’ he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a dog-eared leather wallet. He was almost immaculate in dress, but I had never seen him with a different wallet than that one – it was his solitary affectation; I suspected he was secretly a sentimentalist.
He walked down to the bar to order our food – I had only asked for a bowl of chips and a Guinness whilst he had opted for a full English and a cup of black coffee; we used to joke that Guinness was a meal by itself. The thought made me a little sad, and I wondered where the years had gone.
In his absence, I took notepad out from my bag and tapped my pen against it restlessly. I was ill, I knew that, and Bernard knew it as well. I had decided to start documenting my degradation a few days before, when it became obvious to me that there was no easy cure. I briefly scanned through the few sentences I had written and, with a firm grip on my pen, I struck them out in a few black lines which carried over into the next page.
The urge to document was, and is, an illness that plagues mankind. From half-written travel diaries left on beaches and trains and left to gestate and wait to be completed, to journals (of which I had once had several) which were scarred with line after line of rhythm less, rhyme less poetry. I had seen them, as a student; seen the dry memoirs of dull adventurers and imperialists to the history books and the leather-bound archives which have all the dynamism of tombs and are proud to state that this, this, is the history of a species. That this is the sum of man and all they ever were.
My notes were nothing anyway – I knew what they said, even after I’d scribbled them out. I didn’t feel guilty about it, not in the slightest, and I understood how people could burn books and cheer.
‘If I had to equate it,’ they read, pretentiously, ‘it would be as a medical, pedestrian version of Sartre’s Nausea; perhaps a less-circumstantial sense of that bloody absurdity. It was something else; something beyond mere emotion, something beyond spontaneous hatred; it was...’
I shook my head – they were gone, those notes. I had created them and I had destroyed them and now they were nothing; gone, vanished and unrea
dable thanks to a few simple lines. How easily abandoned knowledge could be; fact that could be wiped away as easily as a waiter cleaning a spilled drink from a table top, preparing a blank canvas for the next customers to grow fat on.
‘No,’ I told myself, silently, though my lips moved as though to shape the words, ‘no rage; no hate.’
I thought of a word, and wrote it down in fluid capitals, so different to my angular, coarse handwriting – the whole thing seemed like one letter, one sound stretched out into a language all of its own.
When Bernard returned with my Guinness, I caught the fleeting hint of a disapproving glance – I told myself I must have been mistaken; Bernard wasn’t disapproving – by that, I mean he never disapproved of anything. As though a side effect of his unquestionable health, he was undeniably, unflinchingly positive – about everything; he always had been. As though he senses my thoughts, and was suddenly consumed by a desire to disenchant me, the habitual brightness faded from his eyes. He