within its flesh.
I can feel its steps, feel the discomfort as a distant aching things and I can feel bones. I cannot feel the breeze on its cheeks, but I can feel muscles tight around the yellow-white skeleton. I imagine them snapping, all at once, and I can all but hear them – the vibration of its movements sends them splintering out and into its flesh – they don’t break the skin, but the stretch it; I picture the creature malformed, elongated, an outcast dependant on dead-eyed charity or sympathy charity or charity of convenience; I picture a creature whose ever step is agony and it has nothing to do but walk all day.
It occurs to me, vaguely, that I; that this creature; we were going to vote tomorrow. I suppose I’m voting Labour – I can’t bear to think of what the dead-mind thing might vote for. There wasn’t much point voting for anything else anyway – what else was there; who else was there? A pale soulless thing, with ranks upon ranks of pale soulless things and a moron; a pale soulless thing with vile logic replaced by the remnants of cocaine and bloody-minded selfishness? A spineless cretin who called himself a Liberal? Delusional middle-class hippies in suits? A couple of northern nationalists? No; in with the red, out with the blue.
There was always the chance that Britannica would get in, those purple fascists. After all, these islands upon which I and this broken creature walk are utterly, utterly racist; utterly superior to all other forms of life; whale, cockroach, European, Asian, Slavic, Rat, Persian; none of them were worth a damn. We only had the Americans to count on as equals – even then, it was a patronising kind of equality; the equality one gave to children when they spoke up in the classroom.
The creature stops and stares along the length of the river; little more than a canal, really. It is black and grey and intermittently catches the light and I wonder why I have never seen clear water, reflective water that boasts the perfect images of the world above it; the world superior. It watched the weak motions of the water as they guided the light along some singularly bloody path. The creature steps closer and looms over it, casting the last breath of a long shadow over the weak waves. I fancy that I can see myself in it, glittering out from the creatures’ black shape, but there is nothing more than a shade upon the water; a hazy silhouette.
What am I, I wonder; what am I really, to this creature, o nature, but an inconvenience? A weight in the back of its head; a gentle poison; a disability; a weakness; the death of evolution in favour of conscience?
The creature goes to carry on, but the first drops of rain make love with the canal and, in a matter of moments, the sky is light with liquid. I cannot feel it against my skin, but the creature can and it walks back the way it came. It wants to run, I can feel it, but it hobbles slowly back in the same disjointed footsteps. It hobbles past an all-night takeaway which is only just opening; it hobbles down a pound store which has been closed for a few hours; it limps past a train station and a corner shop with a rifle made of tequila in the window next to a skull of vodka.
It takes a seat in the bar, the old familiar bar, and waits there for a few minutes. It orders a drink and reads a paper, or pretends to, making all the right facial expressions to pretend that it knows what the words mean. It sits there for an hour, or more, reading and rereading every word and understanding nothing and looking at the pictures and not knowing what they mean and putting the beer behind its lips with a careful smile. It sits there until it can face my room again, until it can face its cage; its death; its bed. The rain peters down and the last of the evening is replaced by the cool texture of night.
When it leaves, I notice my neighbour. He is still there, still at his table, still staring up at the television with three or four empty bottles beside him and the creature’s look in his eyes. I wonder if it weighs heavily upon him, the responsibility of the following day. Whether it leaves little scars upon his brain tissue and he lubricates the blades to ensure that they snip through, in one swoop, and don’t snag on the grey matter.
I wonder, as the creature climbs the stairs, whether he finds it difficult to comprehend that his actions, his thoughts, could really change history – could he understand that his country could rely on his opinions? He would, of course, be a Labour supporter and I almost find myself admiring him; imagine that his responsibility should have such a profound effect on him, that it should ravage his countenance in such ways! That the strife in his beliefs might lead him to drink, alone, in a Wetherspoons bar in the early night!
The creature paces the floor. The creature watches porn on its laptop and jerks off into its hand and washes it in the sink with guilt in its stomach. The creature goes to bed and, after a time, I find myself there as well – my eyes are tightly closed, my head throbs in pain and I can feel lust coiling around my thighs once more. It try to ignore it, to shut out all sensation but the need for sleep.
Sleep doesn’t come for some time.
Day Four
X
It was a sickening sight, a revolting little spectacle beneath lazy sunlight that rolled with the same degree of apathy; the same quiet ferocity that didn’t burn, or smoulder, but exhibited itself like the sizzle of a brand on a haunch of meat. What made it worse was the fact that I, even I, had thought to go to that place and indulge myself in its madness.
I was tired anyway, after a night of snapping the bones of sleep and every crack leaving me awake and gasping and naked and embroiled in my duvet with clenched fists. I woke a little before midday and ate breakfast while watching a soap opera about sexy young doctors, rushing around and drinking tequila and saving lives and somehow managing to make clinical scrubs look like lingerie. I walked into town, felt the pain in my leg, and was forced to limp behind a fat woman in a floral print dress who couldn’t stop screeching into her phone for the entire time. I finally managed to pass her when she stopped to look in a bakery’s window.
The crowd in the town centre was a little larger than normal and it was easy to tell who had discharged their civic duty and who had not. The Voters seemed to speak a little quieter to their companies, or walked with their head bowed beneath the weight of their responsibility. They looked unsure, hesitant, numbed by the control they had; they were active members of society, and all that meant, and it would flash across their faces every few steps. They were themselves, they had taken part in a great thing, they made their views, their beliefs, their entire personality, manifest through the simplicity of pen and paper.
Those on their way, as I was, spoke with loud and confident voices that would only occasionally quaver. They looked like actors, I thought, virgin actors stepping onto the stage for the first time. They had a particular bounce in their step as though they couldn’t wait to join the queue by the library, to enter the cool darkness of the booth. I tried to walk quickly as well, but I wanted it done, over; I could make my mark and enjoy the sunlight with a Guinness of two and paint my disease on lined paper and wait for the criticism of diagnosis.
It seemed, even then, like the end; like I was approaching something definitive; like this was the start of my cure, that I would be normal again. That I could spend my evenings without tearing my hair and making poetry from the roll of my feet against the floor.
The small booths were set up outside the library, like portable public toilets. They squatted on the courtyard of smooth flagstones, reflecting the sunlight with grit like inlaid silver. The Face overlooked them; the Great Face of Wigan looming over it all with metallic scales in place of flesh. It looked like Imhotep, or some great tribute to a shaman or a priest with its receding temples and upturned lips which spoke of nothing so much as disgust.
I always hated that thing.
Beside it, the queue stretched down, along the road which led back into the town centre. I bought a bottle of water from a nearby corner shop, from a slim Persian man with slicked-back hair and tattered fingerless gloves despite the heat and, when I returned, the queue was a little longer. The pain in my leg made me sit on a nearby bench, silver and riddled with holes, and I leant
back into the shade. A few of the votes glared at me as I settled into place but, when I looked at them in turn, they took great interest in their shoes or their neighbours or at some fixed point further down the line.
Perhaps they thought that I was waiting for something, for someone. They weren’t wrong, and I felt Victoria skirting along the edges of my thoughts. She was so beautiful, that faceless, bodiless figure with angel wings that crushed the room around her and haunted my dreams and rose from the streets of that Hellish town with a crack that caused storms and waves to rage against every continent but ours.
They looked like children, I thought. Children waiting for the classroom doors to be opened by some officious figure with a goatee and patches on the elbows of his jacket, or a kindly-looking woman in a sweater – both of them would look so, so old; like gods, like judges, like beings beyond possibility.
I listened to the conversation of those who came in groups; within it all, I can hear the same arguments that the television has explored, the same debates that rattled on the streets with the alluring electricity of racism and fear and middle-class outrage and working-class disgust. It struck me, then,