I had heard their arguments. I knew that they had voted, they had slipped their marked papers into their boxes; I had heard them whisper independence into the stillness, as if each were chewing a fine toffee. It was sickly to them, the thought, sickly and impossible to swallow and they tasted it and they were afraid of its foreign texture and they spat it out.
The afternoon had matured, slowly darkening, slowly giving way to the warm evening, and I could barely move at all; it was all the illness, all the Mychandra, scribbling and scowling and downing poison. I was sat on a long bench, like a church’s pew, which had been nailed to the wall and given three small circular tables. I took the one in the corner, just in front of the window, and I had been sat there for an hour or more before anyone else sat on the same wood. They were a young couple and, from the way they sat, the way they talked, the way they bent their heads together, it was obvious; they were going to fuck that night. They were just going through the motions; he showed her the scars on his bicep, she made him laugh. They spent a long time talking about vodka, and he was trying to explain the existentialism behind drunkenness; she seemed impressed – I thought he sounded like an idiot.
I couldn’t think, not really; I couldn’t bear it. As they turned their lips to whiskey and wine, to rum and gin and ale, to hide themselves from the knowledge that they were hated; that their country was arranged against them; I couldn’t help but feel an immense pity for them. They had their local government, but the rest of the country was one great roar, one solid demand for money, for souls, for selfish, selfish desire. How dared they laugh and drink and dance and fuck, or desire to fuck, when their own people were arranged against them in such a way? But then, how could they not? A self-obsessed government, how could that not turn those people, those racist, sexist people into themselves; how could it not let these people believe that they were good, when they were arranged against such an evil?
They weren’t even individuals, not anymore; they were one great amorphous mass of the self – the self, broiling together into a community, a people, a clientele; they were the proof, the absence of the perfect moments, the absence of the distinct; they were whiskey and coke, water and sewage, blood and vomit together. They were a singular thing, furniture, stripped of even the possibility of comprehension, just one event crawling after itself eternally, flowing down the listless river like a corpse, a river without end, the forever river.
I thought of the specialist, how her features flickered as she moved through my notes, the civilised light in her eyes, the politeness one affords to the mad; she had the same look as Bernard, as the old man in the music store, as the waitress serving rotten meat, as the figure listening to the silent television and scowling at the flickering pictures; it was the look of drowning, desperately kicking their feet, trying to swim within the tide of seconds passing them by, pushing them down and raising them up and tearing their bodies apart. What use was higher thought, what use was self-evaluation, against the sheer tide of seconds, against the ocean of hate, the loathing of existence.
I looked down at the paper, I felt the swell of my illness and the drunkenness and the vileness of it all. My handwriting had cut back onto the page, amongst the darkening angles of the Mychandra and there it was – “live like an animal, like a beast in the field. Forget Victoria, forget angel wings and thought and dreams. Drink, eat, stand, sit, speak, listen, love, fuck, hate – exist!”
‘No more,’ I heard myself say, the sound hidden amongst the wail of hopeful, foreign guitars, ‘no more explanation, no more justification, just no more. I surrender; surrender to the illness, surrender to the Mychandra; surrender to the impulse and the body and the sensation and the world.’
The young woman beside me giggle and I let my eyes snap across the room for a second; her boyfriend, with his wild hair and his strong jaw-line and his snake-like tattoos, had his hand down her jeans and the bluest eyes I had ever seen. I left my beer where it was and walked down the stairs. I didn’t even make it to the front door before I closed my eyes, and the Mychandra opened them.
XV
The way she moves around the pool cue, in her black dress that plainly draws the road map of her body, is hugely useful. She seems to be a magnet, eight or nine stone of pure electrified steel that draws the iron of almost every man’s gaze; I could almost love her for it. As they turn to face her, turn to watch her bend over the table with straight legs, bend to catch the winking, tormenting breasts and eyes that drive men mad, none of them paid any attention to the bar.
I move through easily, able to pass them by and get my drink before returning to my spot against the mirrored wall, tucked between the digital jukebox and the fruit machine that glitters with rotten wealth. The guy playing her is going easy on her, that much is obvious, and she’s playing it up; she jeers whenever he misses a shot, skilfully sending the black careering off to a spot exactly between the two pockets. I think the crowd would kill him if he ended the game; they’re enjoying watching her bend over.
I look away, take a sip, check my phone. I’ve been making notes all evening; if she wanted thought, she wanted opinions, I’d give her some. I note something down about the duty of misery, how happiness was the lazy option, and smile; that’d do. Let her think I’m so easy, so simple; let her think she knows me. Let her kill me with conversation and drugs.
I don’t think I could survive without my illness; it’s a clock, an alarm, this ticking thing to fear in the silence of this place. Drunken biology digging at the foundations of morality; the distance, the hate, the purity of it all. I lean back, feel the wooden shelf against the small of my back, feel the cold, hardness of the mirror against my scalp. The skin of my throat has stretched and it wants to pull my mouth open, open it to the beer and the stink of old smoke, open it to the stifled wood with its constant treatment, open it to the heroine shuffling of the man in the red shirt, to the middle aged man trying to dance with teenagers, to the black dresses and the piercings and the fading colour of new tattoos, gleaming above red skin.
It feels like I’m trying to choke myself, like the tightness of my skin is a noose, snaking around me completely, not just my throat, but binding my arms, my legs, my lungs; tightening about my stomach like a corset, pulling at my skull, stretching my lips to either side. The heat is sudden; every nerve-ending is on fire, every hair follicle is burned away, every ghost of personality shrivels and screams beneath the mute fluorescent lighting and the screaming of arousal as the black dress moves around the table again.
‘Are you okay mate?’ I open my eyes, raise my head, practice my smile. Her words are in my head; it’s strange; I can see her lips move, but it isn’t her voice I’m hearing; it’s like my blood pounds in time with her tongue, with the vibrations she spits into the underground air.
‘Yeah, I’m fine thanks.’ That isn’t my voice either, it’s something else; something in my lungs that react, like a blink in the face of a blow.
‘You sure? You’re looking a little rough.’
‘No, no; I was always look like this.’ The voice pauses, the lips start to tighten again, and I realise that my body is smiling without me. ‘Thanks though, I guess.’ She laughs; I feel sick; like every atom in my body is revolving, turning away from some bright new sun with their hands over their eyes and blinking madly in the new shadows.
‘That’s the look you’re going for, yeah? The tortured genius? The Beethoven? Or have you just never heard of a brush?’ It was my body’s turn to laugh, and it did; it laughed for the perfect amount of time, just a second or two, and it regained its composure like a machine.
We’re sitting down now, throwing glances at her friends as they circulate, as they hug and pose for pictures with each other; as they declare eternal love for women they haven’t seen in hours, for women they won’t see for days. She keeps an eye on them, and my body can’t stop looking at her. Her nose is rounded at the tip, and it’s the first thing you notice; her nostrils flare slightly, and the slope stretches up i
nto her ragged fringe. She’s dyed her hair red, and it catches the fluorescent light, reflects it like fire. It is cut like a mess, not so much individual hairs but is, instead, one thing, one holy thing – a cult of hair that covers her head ad spins and twists in the light. Her eyes are in shadow, but the great brown light seems to emit from them, seems to catch the light like a cat’s would; eyes that cut the pupil in half like a magic trick, with reflections of the lights and the mirrors, reflections of the river nearby, of the smokestack silhouette landscape; of everything that I was and she was and every one of us are. When she smiled, her smile spoke of music, all music; all that music with the beat of a heart behind it, all music from feeling, the music of the soul and the spine. A narrow neck that spreads out like a divan onto pale shoulder blades and collarbones and the promises of flesh. When she moved, she moved with thought and purpose; there wasn’t a dance in her step, wasn’t some inborn desire for movement in her hands, there was just her and the space she filled.
She speaks of nothing, not really; nothing and everything. She speaks of nightmares and dreams and won’t tell me her hers