the scarred table with blue-back ink marks, the tiled floor with its long-embedded stains. For the briefest of moments, I even longed for my illness to return, to consume me utterly; to block out the sound, the quiet of conversation, the rattle of plates and mugs from the other room, the radio leaking its tinny sound into the air. I longed for the Mychandra to banish the scent in the air; the grease, the eggs and the sausage and the bacon, the beans and the toast and the tea, the coffee and the cheese and the occasional flurry of gasoline from the main road.
‘No,’ I thought, ‘I don’t need my fucking disability’.
In a matter of moments, even the light which filtered through the skin of my eyelids had vanished and I felt my pupils widen in the newborn darkness – the pounding of my blood in my head seemed to wash all sensation away, and I focused on that, on the heat as it rolled through my head, focused on the pulse which concentrated against the skin of my throat like it was trying to burst out – I couldn’t even feel myself breathing and I wondered if that is how it felt to die; to slip into sheer nothingness – could I simply kill myself by attempting to replicate the space between the pulses of my blood? Could I ignore my circulation and still it, numb it, retard it?
If only it had been such a physical thing; if only I had some trigger to pull, some button to push, some door to lock or shutter to roll that might sever me from myself – that I could give my body up to the loathing of the Mychandra and just sleep – just sleep.
It was impossibly, of course; even if it had been possible, it would not have been in the splinter of daylight – I was too aware, despite my desires; I was too aware of the shapes around me, the objects, the forms in their formless state, even through my blood and my blindness. It occurred to me, then, that the light of the station café didn’t define those objects, didn’t make them stand out, but reduced them – made them part of the scene, the background to life, nothing more than a shade within just another still-life image. Harsh sunlight; that could define them! That could leave them with hard and unyielding forms as their shadows cut the ground to pieces. It seemed to me, too, that they would take on some real, physical shape in absolute darkness as well – that they would exude their own personalities, their own little auras of light that howled out ‘I exist! We exist! I am a table that doesn’t hold its weight! I am a chair that wobbles on its hind legs! I am a plate with scars!’ and rebounded from each other and defined themselves as what they were not as much as what they were.
I opened my eyes, and nothing had changed – the world itself seemed to stand still, distinct, even as the accumulated moments created nothing, not a goddamn thing. The radio still shuddered to itself, the waitress and the cook still talked quietly, the pram creaked as the woman rocked it with one hand, my tea still burned the air.
It was then, in the rattling quiet, that I noticed the other sound – a clock, high on the wall above me, moved its arms with arrogance and imperceptible ticking. I hadn’t noticed it before; the passage of time had always been the blood in my veins, not the mechanical alternative of clockwork. It occurred to me that I didn’t need a pulse, that nobody needed a pulse, whilst such things existed. What, after all, is flesh and blood against metal and plastic and glass?
It had a white face, with black hands and austere Roman numerals, set inside a border of black, silver and black. It ticked seven times as I poured the tea into my mug, twelve more by the time I lower the small milk jug back to the table and then another twenty by the time the sugar sizzles into the golden-brown mixture.
Tick, tock, tick, tock – why can’t it just pick a fucking sound? How wasteful, how ostentatious, how fucking frivolous it is to have two sounds for the same feature! Like a language, like my disease – why couldn’t it just be simpler? Why did it rely on hysteria? Why not tick, tick, tick? Why not tock, tock, tock?
I shrugged – it was probably some Eastern bollocks – a question of balance, Yin and Yang and Good and Evil, Capitalism and Socialism, Society and Humanity – eternal wars marked by the pulse for hundreds of thousands of years; muted by the ticking of a plastic metal clock.
I was suddenly so angry – I could feel it, in my throat, where all the real emotions come from, the back of the throat. I wanted nothing more than to reach up and smash that clock against the floor; I wanted to resurrect the living man over the clockwork man, the breathing woman over the mannequin in the storefront window – I wanted life to be lived by the wind, not by the train timetable. I could have done it too, could have done it so easily – I could have given in and let my fingers tear it away; leave a circle of cleanliness against the grease-stained wall. I could have turned it over and over and torn the batteries from its spine, like I was ripping out its soul, like it had a soul; I could have stabbed my wet teaspoon into its clockworkings and let it chew on the metal until it stopped; I could have ripped away the glass-front and torn the hands from the white timbre of its sound; I could have looked up at the confused and the angry and the scared faces and smiled at the little girl with pride in my guts; I could be a man doing what a man should do, what I had always told a man should do – exerting my will with my bones to make the world a better place for me. A better world for me and damn the rest of them; damn the rest of them to fucking Hell!
The waitress, with her fat body parodying romance – what right did she have to really exist; to so openly exist and flaunt herself in such a way. Was it fair, I ask you, to the rest of us, to me, that we should see life in her movements? That we should see her exhaustion and her imperfection? And that relic of a pinstripe man, black and blue-grey lines – what right had he to be old? That dead thing, living in the past and in his memories; tasting the air through a filter of nostalgia and a youthful joy built on unconscionable bloodshed! Smelling roses in the dust and the coal and the dirt of half a century before. I looked at him, looked at his misty eyes as they broke away from their soup and stared out across the grease-filmed window to the train station. I wondered, in fury, at his hallucinatory memories – did he see strong, proud young men returning from a war and hugging their eyes with one blackened hand? Did he see plumes of steam smoke burning the air above the railway itself? Did he see beautiful young women in summer dresses, walking arm in arm beneath brightly-coloured umbrellas? Or was his memory locked on flares and waistcoats; on leather-clad rebels leaning against the wall and smoking and waiting for their lives to begin? I could all too easily imagine him walking the old streets, following the same old pathways and drawing in great breaths of stale air, summoned from the stone at his familiar gait; it was easy to picture him raising his hat and smiling in flickers and hold conversations with ghosts about stores that had long since closed down – I could imagine him walking through the empty galleries and stopping to peer in shadow-wreathed, dust-covered store windows on which the shutters had closed and would never open again.
The couple, with their stiff and dignified postures, however, were the ones that came closest to dominating the room. For his part, he had the stressed features of a man with too much freedom; he had his own business, no doubt – something to do with websites or digital marketing or online retail or something wreathed in gibberish; he had the look of jargon about him. She looked more like a saleswoman, with blank eyes that stared around the room and focused on one thing a little too long and made it sweat; she looked like someone who flickered through emotions like an actress, like she was trying them on and they never fit her and it suited her more to be logical and dead and inhuman.
They looked like dignitaries, like southerners visiting a place that sometimes people come from, but where no one ever goes. I would have assumed them to be from London or Reading or somewhere, but their accents gave them – they were both Scottish, but they spoke slowly, as though they were ashamed of their accents; they tried to enunciate like middle-class homeowners. I gathered, from what little conversation I overheard, that they were heading home to vote. I wondered if they would support a free Scotland; could they smell the money in change, upheav
al, democratic and justified revolution? It would only mean one thing to people like them, rotten Southern-souls in clipped Northern accents; opportunity. The opportunity to take and take and take and pretend that their theft is noble; pretend that they are giving something back besides nothing.
The mother was no older than me, possibly even a little younger, and she looked incredibly familiar. I felt like I had seen her when I was a child, and she was a child, but that hard-faced woman was something altogether different. She stared down at her phone and a small lock of her hair had fallen in front of her eye – I wanted to want to brush it out of her face and fall in love as I did, by the electric light on her face made me feel nauseous. She had her phone laying on the table and, occasionally, she would extend a short, bony finger to scroll further down the page.
Her daughter, sitting opposite her on a chair too big for her, was on her phone as well; I couldn’t see what kind, but every now and then she would part her lips in triumph and display her goblinoid teeth. Her eyes would light up, for a fraction of a moment, before they