of the television. His hair has crawled back across his head, but it still clings to life at his temples so the he looks like an ageing monk, with his tonsure rotting away at the forehead. His face is marred by lines of weariness and great rings of ancient exhaustion, whilst his throat has fallen away from him and hangs in one great, ugly flap of skin – like the throat of a cockerel – beneath his chin.
I try to count the bottles of beer in front of him, but they shiver in the flickering blue light of the screen and I’m never sure which ones I’ve counted and which I haven’t – I lose count at around a hundred and give up. I’ve seen him do this before; he will sit there, or in anyone of a half-dozen bars – those with TV sets – and he will watch those mute, moving images until he is drunk and then he’ll walk the walk back to his flat. He has the tired, drawn-out look of a working man; a modern working man; a man with no calluses on his hands, only the weary eyes of the office worker and the thick veins which protrude from the flesh like scars of their own and form a criss-crossing spider’s web across the canvas of his hands, running up his forearms and under his sleeve. For a moment, I’d quite like to see him naked; I’d like to see his body like a stained patina, like to see his scars and his veins and the discolouring of his flesh.
When the lights come back on, I look at the paper on the table before me, next to my empty plate. The words have appeared on the page, though I don’t remember writing them. Another paragraph or two wasted, another few inches of space vanished, gone, sacrificed to the old demi-god staring up at the television screen and drinking his old age away. I ask myself what he might think if he knew that he had a paragraph, or two, or more, dedicated to him. Would he shrug and return to his drink? Would he be happy that someone had noticed him, or furious? Would he expect me to buy him a drink in recompense for his appearance? Could it be that simple? Could I buy his image from him with £2.57 worth of beer and a bottle to hold it in?
I should scrape it away as worthless, as nothing, as a waste of time and energy and effort and all. Better yet, I should burn it. I should throw it out of the window, leave it on the desk, soaked in beer and waiting for someone to abandon it in the recycling. I should package it and mail it without an address and never know what happened to these words on my paper – perhaps, I smiles to myself, some ancient postal worker might find it and, out of some loyalty to his duty, open it up and discover that my description beats with the heartbeat of his long-lost sibling; maybe this old man is a friend from long ago, forgotten in the waves of time as it crashed against the psyche and buried in a Northern town, mute as the television and blind as the watcher.
Or, better yet, a young man might find it – one only a little younger than myself desperately looking for some meaning in his life. Perhaps it would plague his memory – the only letter he had been unable to deliver or return. Perhaps he would obsess over it, keep it beneath his pillow and run a thumb across its sealed envelope and dream of opening it, but be held back by some loyalty to the system he despises? It could be like the last, undelivered parcel of a dead man on a desert island – a satellite phone, or a roadmap, for the soul?
I get up, pack my things, finish my drink and walk out the door. I need to be home, need to be warm in the face of this cold night and colder pub and cold place. I need to sit in my armchair and close my eyes with a dressing gown thrown over me and sit there until I’m sweating with the heat and the claustrophobia and the illness; oh, the illness! If I could only find some way of passing on my disease – if I could infect these pages in my bag with this, this Mychandratic nonsense!
‘Would that not be wonderful?’ I hear some voice breathe into the air. ‘To pass on the illness, this fictional illness – to see your numb expression, your blank and distant eyes staring back at you when you look into someone else’s face? But how? Perhaps you might love them, let your passion be your contagion? You might sleep with them beneath your pillow – carry them in your pocket for all time until they are crumped and unreadable and little more than a stained, putrescent ball of your disability and your loathing and your love?’
I shake my head – those words are ridiculous, even as the night cries them. For a heartbeat, the numbness falters and I am shaking all over, shaking with rage; my fingernails are digging into my palms and they howl in agony for a moment. My leg screeches its pain at me and I limp for a few steps before the numbness returns, like blessed morphine – the blessed Mychandra. How could my body not be angry with me? Me, who equates myself to Sartre, to Camus, to Kerouac and Ginsberg and Hamilton and all these other pulsating spirits in the night. What a staggeringly self-righteous create – what a ridiculous human-being!
I hear the toll of a bell; the church doesn’t have a bell anymore, and I have no idea where it could be coming from, but I am moving through my hallway, climbing the stairs to my flat. I can hear footsteps above me, but it isn’t the old man; he will still be at the Wetherspoon’s. I unlock my door, step through and bolt the portal shut behind me.
I’m not tired; not really. I’m not anything – just this numb little speck of existence, floating between the spaces of existence and death and suicide and being born. I’m between emotions, between sensations, like some automaton waiting for my OS to be updated. There; that’s what I feel like – a robot, a zombie, just waiting for something to happen; waiting for Asimov’s laws to shatter or my chains to break or some righteous glowing figure to appear with holy water and a fiery sword and death on his lips and love in his eyes and then the nausea returns which leaves me weak and shaking and holding on to the frame of the door as I start to shudder in great, wracking motions like I’m about the throw up a steak made of discarded figures and putrescent maggots and decay and the pus that leaks out of infected gums holding them all together like dead ponies forced into a grinder after the novelty has worn off and I gag on the air.
It is over in a few moments, and I can feel something in my flesh – some exhaustion flirting with some part of my body that I can’t pinpoint. I fall into my armchair and think of Victoria and hope I’ll dream of angel wings tonight and wish I had the urge to masturbate to send me to sleep over images of her soap-soaked flesh and everything else that she was, or that I dreamed she was.
Day Two
IV
That night was not a good night. I woke, sporadically, every time to find I had kicked out in my sleep and slid down to the floor with my legs coiled and twisted and buckled beneath me. The shaking continued; followed me like a fever through dreams of faceless, white-skinned mannequins raising beer bottles and pouring them against expressionless faces and smashing them over the heads of black and silver-skinned models; haunted me until I found myself scratching at the arms of the chair with my fingers held, rigid, in the shape of claws. My clothes were wet with sweat and I was shivering in the dry morning of Northumbria – the same ravaged dawn-light as that which saw the Danelaw come hurtling out of the East.
I’d left my blinds open, but the sunlight didn’t break through in a solid block, which I might track across the carpet, but eased its way into the room; slowly, like some thick fog that warmed everything it touched. It didn’t warm me when it touched me, it burned – it was like the flesh was being pulled away to reveal something new, something weak and squealing and pink in the light. Sensation was in the sunlight, in the spitting little rays of light that had travelled thousands upon thousands of miles to my skin and I felt, immediately, like my strength and my control was returning, even as it sent the heat into my veins like a drug itself, like a poison seeking out a cancer.
Eventually, I could stand it no more. I stood and moved into the bathroom, still shivering with my clothes and burning in my flesh. The air itself was like a settled snowstorm, laced with incendiaries that scolded me and chilled me with every movement. My bare feet touched the cold tiles of the bathroom and I took a moment to flatten my toes against the biting cold. They were bitter, bitter with sensation and I smiled. I turned on the light and my hands found the sides of the ba
sin and clamped there. No, I put my hands there and held on as my body seemed to assault itself. I fancied I could see my breath in the air; that it steamed with it – that I could feel it cutting out of my throat and wearing me down like a sandpaper religion; I could feel it in my oesophagus, burning, ravaging the muscles in my throat. I retched, but nothing came out besides air, still more vile air that lingered against the mirror in front of me and I drew in deep, panting breaths for a moment or two.
I stared through the remnants of my own sickness, flecks of yellow-black spittle hugged the mirror’s surface like molecular wasps; they created minute, bulbous caricatures of my face and my features, nestled amongst my pale, sickly-looking flesh like spots - spots holding pus-universes of their own. The light in the bathroom made it impossible to look healthy, with its yellow-tone making me look jaundiced. I looked terrible, but it suited me. My hair was wild with distant sleep – a desirous sleep that eluded me. My cheeks were pale, wan, and seemed to hang a little lower than they had before. My jawline was fading, sinking into the flesh as it fell