told myself that everyone was dying, the no one was living because we were all in a state of dying; I told myself that it was a temporary, transitionary state, like an entire life spent in the weekdays, looking forward to the freedom of a Saturday and the hangover of a Sunday, and instead we all died, late on a Friday afternoon.
I felt drunk, and I almost stumbled as I stepped through the stairway door, as I moved up the stairs that led to my room, as I placed my hands on the claustrophobic walls on either side of me – I listened to the shuffling feet of the music store downstairs, heard a guitar strummed out of tune and muted conversation, like another language.
I couldn’t feel my chest, and my hands shook as I worked the key into my door and swung it open and lurched in and closed and locked it behind me and drew in shuddering breaths of dust. I felt the world reel around me, like it was disgusted with me, like we were dancing and I couldn’t keep time, and I let myself drop onto the couch and hold my hands in front of my eyes – I couldn’t feel them, they weren’t my hands, they were just two weights, two great black weights sitting over my eyes and holding me down. They were like chains, wrapped so tightly around me that they cut off light, that they collared vision and cast everything down into the hold of some great, broad-bellied ship that bore my name. I thought of the diary, and the doctor, of Victoria and the dying man smoking outside the pub and the children running around the shadows of a coffee shop, and I needed a pen.
VI
The last of the sunlight is bitter; blinding. I stand before the window, one hand on the frame and the other by my side and I stare at the sky. If I raise my hand to block out the light, I can just make out the horizon, see the weak definitions of the clouds as they make their way across the encroaching void of whiteness, already giving way to the slumber of shadow and night. I take my hand away and the light returns and spites me and I am forced to look away.
There are sheets of paper upon my desk, handwritten pages that sprawl in some choreographed fashion, haphazard and, yet, ordered like a bohemian’s every motion. I cannot bear to sit there just yet; I cannot bear to read them with the dying sunlight cutting through the room. I will wait, I have decided, wait for the darkness, wait for the comfort of the night sky like shroud, wait for the flickers of slumber to assault my senses and I will fall asleep to the lines which mark the page like tattoos on fresh skin.
I remember going to work, once; but no more – my days are consumed by this strange frozen fever; this sickly desire to combat against my own fiction; whilst my evenings are spent here, in the fire of the moment, in this slow existence, in this stomach-churning speed of moments, rolling into one another and standing distinct beneath the flag of my gentle body.
Gentle – no, my body is not gentle; I tell myself that I am melancholy, that my sensations are dull things, to products of exhausted neurons, burnt-out neurons spitting like broken engines along the pathways of my body and my soul. The familiar spike of rage hits me, but fades away after a heartbeat, carried on by the stagnation of blood. I feel nauseous, in the space between my lungs, at the base of my throat, in the hinges of my jaw and the gaps of my teeth.
There is a painting hanging on the wall, and it suddenly looks so alien to me, impossible – I’ve never really seen it before, but I remember buying it. I remember the smiling woman in the market, with her broken teeth and her fat throat and her dyed red hair bleeding out at the roots. It hangs in shadows, besides the window, and I reach out and take it and hold it up to the light.
It is a raging seascape – a miasma of blacks and whites and muted blues and greens and greys; a twisting coil of nature that stretches to the distant skies and rises and hangs in the air in great watery tumours. It is so close, and the boiling darkness so vivid that I see my fingers rattle along the glass, as though trying to break into the image, as though to scoop some foreign sea into my hand and taste its distant waters.
There are dozens of little shapes within the sea and, when I focus on one and squint, and shield it from the sunlight, I can see that it is the head and the shoulders of a drowning man – they all are, not dozens of them, but hundreds, all reaching out and begging for some great force to intervene and love them and save them all. I search for a ship and, in the overhang of one crashing wave, in the shadow of the water, I notice a much larger black shape. It is the underside of a hull, a scarred piece of wood, upturned by the sheer wrath of the world.
The artist’s name is a mere scribble in the clouds, slim pencil lines and cursive and all but blending in with the furious sky – Fields? Felds? Falds? Fordes? Ferdes? I can’t make it out, it could be any one of a dozen surnames.
I toss the painting onto the bed and wipe the dust from its frame onto my jeans – there, another moment gone; another few seconds sacrificed, spent like coins in a one-armed bandit or a pinball machine or a pool table.
The sunlight drops and whimpers behind a cloud, and I lean against the windowsill. One of the music store employees is walking up and down the road, with his hood over his head and phone pressed to his ear and a cigarette clenched in his fingers – he doesn’t look real, in the haze; like a spectre, a real spectre whose existence has been disproved, like a deity forced to work a menial job after the last of his worshippers abandoned him, some young, foul-smelling, swearing, bleeding, shrivelled Adonis. He pulls the phone from his ear, and leans against the rubbish bin on the street and he looks like a modern thinker, a work of art; smoking and staring at social media; carved in flesh and light in place of green iron.
I am walking to the pub again, to that Wetherspoon’s, that same place which is the haunt of my neighbour. I pass a young couple, with his smooth skin looking around him in wonder at the buildings and the road and the sky and the occasional car that rolls by; by comparison, her features are clipped, angry, determined – she almost seems to drag him onwards just by holding his hand. I can’t help but imagine her in a blue dress.
The darkness is comforting, as I order my meal and take up the same table I had the day before. The television is on, again, but rather than the news it is playing a rerun of an old detective drama. The detective himself adopts a kind of habitual scowl, as though it was permanently ingrained in his features – the disgust of the intelligent man surrounded by idiots, the superior surrounded by the inferior; I wonder why that expression is not the standard expression of humanity.
Occasionally, of course, he smiles at the camera, or at someone just above and to the left of the camera’s eye. He has a strange smile; a smile that starts at the neck, with his muscles curving, moving into spasm from the sheer joy of it all; from the pleasure of his existence. Next, it curves along the edges of his face and up and into his icy blue eyes – they are almost grey, I realise, as the muscles tighten. Finally, it rushes with his blood down to his lips. They move, together, in time – they don’t part, but his moustache seems to elongate, unnaturally; to curve along the line of his lips.
He’s easy to hate. There’s a murderer on the loose, a sadistic rapist who leaves his targets in the ditch, by the village’s main road, and he has the careless effrontery to smile. He mustn’t have a soul to smile like that, to tighten the flesh of his eyes, to let his neck pulsate like worms.
No; I’m just tired, tired of him, tired of this, tired of it all.
The same waitress from yesterday comes over, with my drink and she lays it on my table. I see her lips move; I can’t hear her over the silence ringing in my ears, so I smile at her, thank her, and she moves away. I see her, out of the corner of my eye, cast a lingering look at me; a long and curious thing that washes over me as I take a mouthful of my pint. It doesn’t taste of anything; it isn’t a Guinness, but something pale and thin - like chilled air.
It occurs to me that I hate Victoria – what right does she have, this phantom of a woman, this spectre of a creature, to invade my body so utterly? I want to scream, I want to howl for so long, and so loud, that no one will ever be able to escape the sound. I want to sob out my rage until
Victoria herself arrives, borne on her angel wings from the dead sunset sky. I’d cry so fiercely that she would have to beg for me to stop and I would shame her and scream until the last breath emerged from my burnt-out lungs. What right does she have to be beautiful and haunt my dreams?
The waitress returns with my meal and there is no conversation this time. She drops it in front of me, smiles, and walks away. I smile at her back.
I chew my burger slowly, until it is nothing but a fine mush that can slip down my throat. It is still heavy, to me, and after a few bites I can feel it like a leaden weight inside me. After a few minutes, I feel sluggish and weak. My thoughts slow, turn in on themselves – they are like the tepid waters of the gentle canal; rolling molecules making their way from city to city. My loathing seems to have muted; it takes them longer to formulate, to whisper against the walls of my consciousness like waves against a pebble beach. I chew at the poison – what else could it be? – and wonder how many horses I’ve eaten in my life; how many burgers and steaks and more has come from steroid-ridden horsemeat. What else, but poison, could make my thoughts run that much slower, match the