metal to adopt this strange kind of twist, gnarled look; like the thorns of a rosebush. I had never seen those gates closed – the park was always open and I can still remember reading about a young woman who was raped in the trees.
On the other side of the gate, the road continued, but it turned from the jagged black asphalt to the smooth grey of a pedestrian walkway. I slowed my pace as much as I could; I always had trouble keeping my speed down, my walk was also something fierce, determined, directed; not the aimless wander of pure recreation. I swung my legs widely, slowly, but I still felt uncomfortable – I could still feel the distant ache behind the Mychandra.
If I slowed my pace at all, then I slowed my breathing to match it. I filled my lungs to their capacity, felt them close to pain, and held them for three beats of my heart. Every few breaths I devolved into a coughing fit – I couldn’t seem to get my breathing back into a routine. After I had passed through half of the main pathway, I was having to draw in great breaths of air, exhale them as quickly as possible, only to draw more in immediately. It didn’t take long for me to feel light-headed, weak, and I had to sit down on one of the many benches which lined the walkway. It occurred to me, I remember, that it would be a strange way to die – to choke on fresh air, to have my body betray so completely that it would be murder; not suicide, but the wilful death of thought in favour of the dominant physical form.
The local council had cut back on the flowers in recent years – when I was much younger, I used to walk though that park with my friends and we would sit on the grass and listen to music and talk and doze and wake up tired, like we were much older than we were and take slow, lazy bus rides home with our headphones and feel guilty that we hadn’t anything left to say to each other. Back then, though it was only a few years before, there were great patches of multi-coloured flowers that broke up the greenery and, from the top of the park’s hill, looked like self-contained puncture wounds with rainbows spilling out of them. As I sat there, and breathed, the shapes on either side of the path were uniform, rectangular – the multi-coloured flowers were ugly hedges stretching in long, angular lines across the grass.
I felt my phone go off in my pocket, and I answered it.
‘Hey, man, how’s it going?’ it was Bernard, speaking in his clipped golden tones and I almost straightened in my seat when I told him yes, everything was good; ‘Great, great; listen, I’ve just been speaking with that woman I told you about and she thinks it might be a good idea if you keep kind of like a,’ I heard him speak to someone else, and the murmur of a woman’s voice in reply, ‘sorry about that, kind of like a journal or a diary or something like that for the next two days.’
‘A diary? Why? What does she want it to say?’
‘She said if you could record the times that these… attacks of yours happen, how long they last, what they feel like, anything like that – anything that you think might be useful or relevant or whatever. That shouldn’t be a problem, should it?’
‘No, no; it isn’t like I’ve got anything else to do today anyway.’
‘Oh really?’ He sounded concerned, ‘So what’ve you got planned? Just sitting in your flat all day? Having a quiet one?’
‘Not much, I’m just in the park at the minute – thought the sunlight and the exercise might do me some good.’
‘Oh, really? Have you noticed that it helps with your… problem?’
I hated the way he said it, hated his pause, but I could understand it – I don’t think he thought there was anything wrong with me; he didn’t know how it rose, how it consumed every muscle in my body – he didn’t know I’d given it a name.
‘Not really, but it’s an excuse to get out, you know?’
‘Yeah man, I’m with you on that one. Anyway, I’ve gotta go, it’s pretty busy around here – I’ll see you when you come over here on Friday, yeah? I won’t be sitting in with you, but I’ll be around anyway. Wait, hold on,’ I heard the woman’s voice again, ‘she said she’s sent the letter out; you’ll probably get it tomorrow – cutting a bit close here, aren’t we?’
‘Oh, okay. Thanks, I really do appreciate this.’
‘Not to worry! See you on Friday mate, yeah?’
I started to say the same thing back, but I heard the phone beep and go silent and I was sitting on a bench in the sun and I couldn’t feel my legs.
It was a mostly pleasant day – though my eyes seem determined to hate the brightness. I could almost feel my pupils expanding in the light, could see everything getting brighter, oh so slightly brighter. I refused to close them against the day – I was suddenly determined to record everything, so determined to ensure that I remembered everything; every single moment that stretched out before me – I would capture the light and the greenery and the distant pavilion atop the hill, looming over the two flights of cracked stone stairs, broken by the years and the feet and the weight of all those Victorian ghosts still pacing, arm in arm, along the grey pathway.
At the base of the stairs there was a fountain – it had been broken for a long time, but a few months of renovation had suddenly kicked the thing into life once more. If anything, it flowed too strongly by then and, when the wind picked up and turned bitter and people reached for their hoods and their hats and their gloves and their scarves it would sometimes catch the water and cast it over the lip of the fountain until a great wet stain surrounds it.
I walked past it and, for a moment, stared at the glittering surface of the water, study the one pence, two pence, five pence, ten pence, twenty pence coins which littered the bottom of the fountain like scaled – it seems to be a great failing of man, and also a great victory over the gods of wealth; people are all too willing to spend their money on a fantasy – no, not even spend, just throw it away out of some vague worry, some hopeful dream.
Like a child, I took care to avoid the cracks in the stone as I began to ascend. As soon as I realised what I was doing, I firmly planted an unfeeling foot on the nearest available crack. I dragged myself up via the handrail and I remembered limping down those same stairs years before – I’d been running with someone, I couldn’t remember who, and I slipped and hurt my ankle and every time I lowered my foot to the step it felt like I was walking barefoot and that the floor itself was biting deep into my flesh.
The paint on the handrail was little better than the pain of the memory; they, too, had undergone a recent repaint, with the same effect. My hands snagged and caught on the jagged rust a few times but it didn’t hurt, it was just a sensation, just some thoughtless thing proving that it existed by attempting to hurt something else; it was practically human.
The illness spread quicker that day; I blame the heat, the light – the torturous breaths that emerged from my throat and the echoes of pain in my legs and that pressure of the world at large. I felt suddenly afraid, afraid that the Mychandra knew I was going to fight it, knew that I was seeking an ally in my war and that it had had enough of my eccentricities – I was terrified that it would claim me and never let me go, or launch its assaults at random times throughout the day, and make my record look like madness – like beat generation madness.
I knew what I needed; I needed to sit in the dark. I needed to close my eyes and let the illness batter at my senses and consume me and let it dream of a steak, filled with maggots. I needed to simmer and rage and loathe and shudder my way through the fever; I needed something else, anything but this greenery and ordered beauty that wasn’t really beauty at all.
V
I took a long, slow walk around the park; used my phone to take a few pictures and listened to howling music that set me on fire. I spent some time by the pond, stretching out along a pathway that snaked past the hill. I took a few pictures of the ducks as they twisted their heads to look at me in confusion, and I tried to take a picture of one beautiful yellow flower that stuck out of the mud and seemed to soak in the sunlight until it hurt my eyes to look at, but I couldn’t get it into focus and, eventually, I gave up and walked
away.
The nearby high school had just broken up, and the kids moved around in little gangs of their own and swaggered along the pavements like they owner them and tried to get other people to move out of the way. It worked on a few people I saw, so, when one group came towards me, I stared at them and walked forwards with set shoulders and, even then, they barely moved aside in time. Even over my headphones, I heard one of them call me something and the others laughed and I would have loved to be angry with them; I would have loved to hate them and their feral faces, sharpened to a hungry point by ferocious media.
The thought of returning to my apartment, with those ghostly fingers still playing their ephemeral pianos and leaving rattling echoes in the spaces between my breaths, made me feel sick. I was so close too, I could have been back there in a matter of minutes.
A few minutes later, I was stepping into the dark warmth of a long coffee shop. The building still had the white face held together by black timber that had overlooked the town centre for a hundred years or more, but the entire bottom floor had been reimagined. The entire front of the coffee shop was glass, with a few long posters falling like tapestries from the ceiling and advertising the latest flavours – they were all