familiar distance between consciousness and physical sensation.
No; it isn’t that my thoughts are running slower; instead, it is as though they are developing individually. They are not unique thoughts, not part of the great, rolling water cutting across the country, but they formulate and appear and disappear in their own time.
The salt shaker is broken – it is a squat and ugly thing, with a metallic tone caught within plastic shaping. The hole at the top has a long crack running along it, around which the white crystals have collected. They glitter and gleam at me, in the half-light, and I watch myself as my hand reaches out for it. I take it in my fingers and, like a man displeased, like a man desperate for sensation, I spread a liberal amount across the plate. The crack causes a little more salt than I expected to fall out, as though I hadn’t noticed it, and I am done in moments. I lift another mouthful to my lips; nothing. The same tastelessness, though this time it boasts an added texture; the fine grittiness of tangible salt crystals.
There! One moment is over, the tangible moment of the salt shaker – a chewed up kind of moment, nothing unique, nothing original – just another recycled second, another cup of water taken and consumed and returned to the stream a millimetre or so down the line. The water has fractured, like glass, like ice, and the reflections glitter back at me as everything slows to a crawl. My own heartbeat is a distant drum; the space between the beats impossibly long – I can feel the blood pulsate around my body as an irritant. I want nothing more than to scratch at my skin, to tear my veins out of my flesh and watch my arteries fall to the table top.
The waitress comes back over, and all the colour has faded; all the sound has fallen into another moment. I see her mouth open, and close, and open again – her lips twist in unnatural ways that approach speech, but it isn’t speech. I realise how ugly she is, then, with her upturned nose, her sunken jaw and wide, expressionless eyes. She is suited to this place, to the half-shadows and the defence of her role; she is a different person in here, a betrayal of herself – a prostitute of personality. I ask her for a whiskey – I keep my voice slow, methodical, enunciating every word. She smiles and returns in moments; I thank her, and she hovers for a moment, as though unsure whether to ask me for the money.
She decides against it, and walks back to the counter. Stop. I see the muscles of her leg as it propels her forward, even beneath her jeans. I see her foot as it lifts upwards, the white soles of her trainers. Her back is a pleasing shape, a gentle curve that hints at nudity – there was a woman there, somewhere beneath the clothes and the word – a young woman working her evenings in a place like this, when she should be dancing in nightclubs, crossing smiles with admirals and gentlemen; she could be marching for women’s rights – not serving those who would hate her. The curve of her body looks like that of a Parisian woman, looking back over her shoulder in the sunlight – with a flick of her hair, with someone else’s smile, she could have been beautiful.
The glass is empty, in my hand. I don’t remember drinking it – I try to smack my lips together, I explore the ravaged surfaces of my teeth with my tongue in the vain hope of extracting anything from it, any dreg of taste, and hint of the liquid’s potency. I even sniff at the glass itself – nothing, not even a flicker of sensation there. No, that’s not true – I can feel the air in my nostrils; I can feel it in the back of my throat, but there is no scent, none at all.
I pay her, and take another whiskey. A moment passes, a forgetful moment, a dull moment, characterised by nothing save its ending, and my glass is empty again.
It is night now, irredeemably night, and I walk through the still air which ruffles the leaves and the strands of my hair, back to my room, back to the ghosts of a song, back through the fallen cherry blossoms, grey in the night, back to my sanctuary from it all.
Day Three
VII
The air was thick with grease, I remember. When I smacked my lips I could all but taste it; the oxygen there was a meal in of itself, it was the heavy, wet fuel of a morning. It was oddly seductive and, when I woke that morning, it was nothing less than a siren call. It tore me from my bed, dragged me through the hundred-year streets and sat me down.
I chose the table set furthest from the window; it was an old, small, circular thing made from hollow metal and light plastic and it didn’t balance properly on the floor; it shifted with my weight as I leant this way or that. I was tired, I remember – not just out of my exhaustion, but burnt-out by the world. There were people everywhere, even in the dead of night, people still moved down the streets. Some were drunk and shouted, some were scared and shouted, whilst some moved with a fierce kind of intent and let their headphones blot it all out around them – I understood them, understood the moment when they became their own breath and the sound and the sight of their feet punching out below them.
There were only a few other people in the café; an old man in a pinstripe suit who looked incredibly familiar was spooning soup carefully between his few remaining teeth and occasionally glancing down at the newspaper on his desk; a couple, a little younger than him, still boasting their crow’s feet like marks of pride and a young woman, her daughter and another baby in a neon-pink pram pulled up beside the table.
I slept well the night before, almost like I used to. I went to sleep and woke up to sunlight; that’s all there was to it – no howling consciousness in the night, no agony as the feeling returned to my body in a sudden blow. I had picked up a newspaper that morning, I remember, as I passed through one of the empty galleries on my way to that small café. It didn’t look like much, I knew, just one small room opposite one of the town’s two train stations. Wallgate station was empty; the workers who had missed their train had just left, and it would be another hour, or more, before the first of the students arrived to catch their late morning and early afternoon trains to their classes, which would leave them tired and bored and numb for the train ride back.
My chair was uncomfortable, and it dug into my spine, but I spent a few moments grinding my body against it until I reached some broken level of comfort. My legs were dedicated to spiting me, that day, and I could feel the muscles of my calves straining at my skin. Almost as soon as I took my weight away from them, they seemed to relent a little, and I could have gasped as my blood flowed back into them. I was struck by the relief, a relief which flirted with the sensations of agony.
I opened the paper; the first headline was about the election; they were all about the general election. I flicked through a few other pages – politicians, politicians, a musician has come out in support of a politician, a politician was found in some sort of scandal; the queen was secretly showing her support for her favourite party by wearing yellow. An actress had taken her clothes off at an awards ceremony a few days before – I made a mental note on my phone to check it out. Already, I was looking forward to the election being over; the headlines would focus on the results, what it meant for the future of the country ad what the losing party chose to do as part of their self-pitying holiday. The winners would be everywhere, of course, smiling and talking and trying not to look self-congratulatory whilst nervously cementing their position across the country.
I forgot the title as soon as I saw it. I ignored the front few pages, in fact – I wasn’t really interested. It wouldn’t be up to us, anyway. The North West was red, it was Labour, and there really wasn’t anything that anyone could do to change that. All the political wrangling in the world wouldn’t tear that out of smoke-filled lungs, out of inherited coal-stained skin, out of bloody, rain-sodden hearts.
One of the pages in the middle of the paper was nothing more than a list of wanted and For Sale ads, along with a few graphic advertisements by local businesses. If I wanted a mobile phone unlocking, no questions asked, I could call this number – if I wanted to spend an evening with interesting young women or men, I should go to this address just off West King Street and ask for Lara – if I was unemployed, I could apply at the nearby food-packaging f
actory and watch my youth roll by on conveyor belts and stagnate in fat-dripping salads and unspecified meat sandwiches.
A short woman, of late-middle age, appeared at my table with my tea. She was the very living, breathing definition of ‘bustling’, with wide hips and obscenely large breasts, which sagged against the thin material of her dress and her apron. In fact, it was one of those stereotypical aprons that American waitresses would wear, but exclusively grey and black and blue, in place of the traditional salmon pink and well-washed white. She smiled at me when I thanked, said ‘no problem love’ and walked away with a definite sway in her hips.
I left the newspaper open, and stared at the teapot – it was all burnished metal, with scars on the handle like notches of conquest and a dent in the lid like it had been used to murder someone recently. The air above it, when I opened the bullied lid, grew hazy and seemed to sizzle; I fancied that I could smell the greasy air as it burned.
I angled my head so that it looked like I was staring at the newspaper but I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and it all went away. It went; the light, the people, the words,