should have been a fast-paced, spitting thing; I was butchering it in my head like a child idly pulling grass from a field.
By then, the Mychandra was in my chest, like a coating on my lungs and I couldn’t feel the start or the end of my breaths. The oxygen came in my nostrils, and I felt that; it filled the back of my mouth and I felt that; it raced down my throat and I felt that, but I couldn’t feel my lungs expanding. I could see my chest inflating and deflating, could feel my shoulders move up and down every few heartbeats, but nothing else.
I still had a few hours’ grace before it reached my mouth, my eyes; my brain. It was as if my throat was a bottleneck, some great part of a much wider strategy to hold the sickness in its place. I watched the television and surfed Facebook for a half an hour until I found a picture of this girl I knew in university who dreamed of being a Suicide Girl. She always uploaded pictures of herself, half-dressed, or naked but covering her breasts, her crotch. She had been a drama student, I think, and I didn’t know what she was doing then. I never read her status updates, I just liked her pictures. I’d masturbated to them, once, but since Victoria got in my head, I just couldn’t. I gave it a try, but it didn’t take long for me to close the laptop, lie on my bed and breathe Victoria’s name as I jerked off.
I came, washed my hands and spent a few minutes writing in my notebook; I wasn’t feeling it, couldn’t get up any pace. I knew I’d write faster if I used my laptop, but it didn’t feel right, it felt like cheating, like playing a game on the easiest difficulty and pretending I’d finished it on the hardest. I wrote two pages, scowled at the state of my handwriting and decided to go for a meal, and a drink. I knew, as I shrugged my jacket across my shoulders, as I stuffed my papers into my bag, that it was a mistake. The Mychandra wasn’t far away, I had maybe an hour left, maybe less. It was reaching the top of my throat now, the numbness, the distance; when I spoke, it wasn’t my voice that I heard – I could barely hear it at all – it was the rage of my disease that muttered into the air, still hanging heavy with forgotten music.
Then, I felt the air on my face, like a screaming sensation; a thousand times more potent than the orgasm I had just experienced. I felt my mouth open and close, my eyes shudder in their sockets and my vision blurred and I caught the scent of copper and smoke and there was the taste of diesel on my tongue and I felt naked, naked against mortality and sickness and age and the Mychandra.
III
The leaves of the trees that I pass are still moving. My flesh can’t feel the breeze. There’s no sunlight anymore; the last of it has just bled out its red, inky texture into the dark sky like food colouring in oil. I am comfortable, completely; I feel nothing, like I’m levitating an inch or two from the ground, like I’m walking on the water’s surface with my hands outstretched and I’m crying, praying, loving everything with hate in my heart. I can feel the electrical impulses that cause my fingers to play some rapid drumbeat on my bag but I can’t feel the worn, tired leather against my skin. Somewhere, in my nerves or my veins or my synapses, the distance has grown.
The feet, some distance below me, are moving with a kind of rigid precision – they know where they’re going, but as I look around I don’t remember anything. I’ve walked these streets before, so often, so often that they should still bear imprints of my boots, but I can’t remember a single occasion – I’ve walked them in the sun and under the moon and on those warm nights where there is no moon and those cold days where there is no sun, just grey noxious clouds moving as an army, as a picket line across the sky. Before too long, I come upon a Wetherspoons, and I hate it, but I still open the door and lean on the bar and breathe in the strange stink. There are stains on the carpet and the walls are dark but they stay where they are and don’t compress around e and I can hear the tinny sound of laughter. The walls are decorated with local pictures; one of them is an old photograph showing a train half-overturned, half-hinging off the side of the bridge that runs over the main entrance to the town centre. There is a café there now, I know without remembering, a café that has a copy of the same picture.
An old woman asks me something; I tell her what drink, what food I want, where I’ll be sitting; I say please. She rushes off to the other end of the bar with a peculiar little waddle that infuriates me. I try to keep my breaths shallow, quiet, but I’m running out of oxygen and I need to take one great breath to rebalance myself, which must sound like a gasp or a death rattle because the guy next to me, with a white wife-beater and tribal tattoos gives me a strange look. I smile at him and he frowns at me and looks back down at the bar. He looks familiar, and I was certain that I’d seen him at the protest earlier in the day – or maybe I hadn’t; I don’t know.
She returns, or maybe it’s another person, I can’t tell – I don’t remember what she looks like. She gives me a small glass filled with black liquid, bordered by bronze bubbles – I can’t remember if that’s what I ordered, but I thank her, hand her a fiver, tell her to keep the change and I walk away before she can say anything else.
I find a seat in the corner, and there’s a flashback lying in wait for me – I picture myself with a group of people and they’re laughing about something or other as I watch the TV. Something about tall people being more susceptible to cancer or something like that. I’m the tallest one there, so I think I make a joke about being worried. That set them all off laughing again.
I pulled out my notes and took a mouthful of my pint. I couldn’t taste it, not really; there was the sensation of something slipping down my throat and I imagined it moving down my gullet, lashing out at the confines of its tunnel and being rebounded; it tried to shove my taste buds, which didn’t respond. I felt it settle on my stomach, felt the weight of my organs, but nothing else – there was no smouldering flame of inebriation, no chill of drunkenness shuddering along my muscles. Nothing.
The television was on, but it had been muted to accommodate the loud conversation of those who spent their evenings on cocktails and pitchers of cheap beer. A BBC political expert is making apathetic motions outside Number 10, Downing Street. He is bored; the security guards behind him are bored – the Prime Minister emerges and smiles and waves at the crowd behind the camera and, when he speaks, his eyes are bored and lazy, his forehead is shiny with sweat and his teeth are fine and white and straight.
I look around, and notice my neighbour sat not too far from me. He’s staring up at the same television as me; his pockmarked hand swinging a bottle of American beer in a circle on the table. The political editor moves his lips and says nothing and the old man seems to be held in a discontented rapture. He cannot pull his eyes away, but his lips twist in disgust, only occasionally breaking apart when he raised his bottle. He doesn’t even seem to be aware of it, but his hand raises and he takes a swig and the arm lowers and I fancy I can see a little of my illness in him – no; I have no illness. I am healthy.
The waitress appears at my side, places a plate before me and looks at the television. I see her mouth open, and close, and she looks at me questioningly. I must respond, because she offers me a tight-lipped smile before leaving again. The plate has a steak on it, alongside a portion of chips and a small helping of shrivelled, grey-looking salad. I cut the steak with the jagged knife she has given me to see that it is full of maggots.
That is a lie – a momentary falsity that I shall leave in its place. In truth, the meat cuts cleanly, and only a little blood spreads out from around my pressure. I take a mouthful – much like the stout, it tastes of nothing. When I chew, I can feel my teeth impacting on it, cutting it, tearing it – I can feel the meat falling down my throat, though I still cannot taste it.
I wish the steak was rancid; I wish it emitted maggots and worms and severed fingers – I wish it vomited out blood every time I touched it. I wish it was something horrible, something to react to, something to shock the Mychandra out of its existence and eave it pooling from my mouth like vomit and crawling away to find some other creature to infest and contamina
te and numb. I want it to shock sensation, honest sensation, back into me; even the colour seems to have faded from my eyes now; everything is muted, like I am staring at the world through a vintage filter. Still; I eat and I drink and I can only feel its texture, not its taste.
Before too long, the weight in my stomach makes me feel sick; not nauseous but something else – a pressure on my organs as they jostle for position; some kind of internal bio-political struggle which moves my lungs, my heart, my liver, my pancreas all away from my stomach.
The lights flicker as someone across the bar brings out a birthday drink – it is served in an ice bucket, and two oversized sparklers emerge from its rim. The young woman whose birthday it is smiles and holds her hands to her face, and she’s caught in the light of the sparklers and it reminds me of old video reels I’d seen of the War, with hundreds of people crushed into the London underground with small, flickering lamplights to show their contented features as the world shakes around them.
I cannot see the old man in much detail anymore; with the lights so low, he is only illuminated by the flickering lights