13. The living are exhausting
May (part one)
This is chapter thirteen. If you’re new, chapter one is here. It’s a riot, promise.
1.
A story about my stomach in six words: My stomach is a fucking asshole. Forget the whole the stomach is a second brain crap. All it brings is pain. I took it out because it was chronically upset, bloated and gassy and causing grief. When I say I spent years holding everything in, my stomach is where I held it. An overstuffed sack of every swallowed emotion, every half-cooked feeling, every undigested heartbreak. It was knotted like a used noose, tied up so tight it choked my insides. And now I have it back, courtesy of the box from my mother. I took my stomach out at Christmas, by her account, and left it with her after it nearly ruined my dinner. That was just the final yank of the chain. I hadn’t shit right in months. Everything I ate upset it further. So, it stays in the box and the box goes in the fridge, where I can keep an eye on it. I promised I’d retrieve it. I never said anything about putting it back in.
2.
I tried once to get rid of my lungs. I was fed up with being out of breath all the time. But I couldn’t pawn them, swap them, or give them away. Something to do with a newfound passion for smoking and growing up in an industrial town back when they still put lead in petrol. With forty fast approaching and in an effort to protect body and mind against an unplanned demise, I decide to take up jogging. Then I see it’s raining out and it looks quite cold, and I haven’t really got the right shoes and I could honestly murder a cigarette. I decide jogging can wait for another day.
3.
My running career is exactly one-point-three kilometres old when my lungs nearly leave of their own accord and I resolve instead to take up walking.
4.
As unwelcome visitors go, the ghosts have nothing on the living. I’ve spoken to a coroner, given a quote to the local free paper, the Seagate Couponer, followed by a brief consultation with a couple of Witnesses who took the news as an opportunity to try and save me and everyone else in the building. I asked them if they thought there was anything worth saving. They offered to come back. I’ve barely seen them off when the door goes again. I open it to a grey-haired woman who introduces herself as my downstairs neighbour. I’m Fern, she says. You and I are going to have a cup of tea get to know each other because I will not be dying alone in this building with no-one to find me. Sensing the futility of protest, I stand aside. I might not have lived fast or died young, but I’m planning on leaving a good-looking corpse and would prefer I was found before I quite literally melt into the sofa, she says. And then: You heard about Mr Huxley, I assume? By the time they found him he looked like a mound of tar. They had to prise him from the upholstery with a crowbar. When she leaves two teas later, I’ve agreed to let her cook me dinner, meet her goddaughter, and help her clear out Huxley’s flat. The living are exhausting.
5.
Now that I’m no longer trying my best not to leave the house, I need a content stream that isn’t anchored to a screen. Audiobooks seem like too much of a commitment, and music feels like a metronome for my stride, so I settle for the other audio medium. I’ve tried a few podcasts, usually true crime shows made by people who seem to think that a theory is the same thing as an opinion, and that an opinion is the same thing as evidence. People who should be bludgeoned by Janet Malcolm. At the back of a long list of recommendations I find one where a couple of film nerds mispronounce their way through the filmographies of famous directors, which, after a ten-minute sample is incredibly annoying. But it reminds me of my chats with Brandon. And since the episodes are three hours long, I won’t run out any time soon. I settle for that.
6.
I stand at the threshold to Huxley’s flat. That poor bastard. He was stuck deep in a January of his own making without enough left in the tank to make it out alive. I hold my breath as I knock, bracing against the stench of death, hoping despair that deep isn’t contagious. I’ve been bracing for the past week, waiting for tears that haven’t arrived. When Ridley the retriever died, there was an outpouring of love and grief. Tears that flowed so easily for a dog I’d never met are now nowhere to be found. Fern opens the door and hands me a bin liner and a pair of puncture-proof rubber gloves. Want some Vicks? she asks, offering me a pot of menthol vapour rub. Saw it in an episode of Silent Witness, she says. I shake my head. My sense of smell is hardly a finely tuned faculty, but the scent of putrefying Huxley bleeds through and gets lodged in my sinuses. I can taste him. The paramedics might have scraped him up and stuck him in a bag, but the sofa still carries his blackened outline; the curtains, the walls, the carpet, all sown through with the smell of rotting Huxley. Fern has popped the windows and is directing the clean-up, coordinating a couple of neighbours currently wading their way through forty years of grime; newspapers, unopened mail, tat. We’re here by request of his only living relative, a sister too old to get up the stairs, let alone shift his hoardings. The daft bastard has carted in anything and everything anyone ever left by the bins. The things he could carry alone, at least. There are dressers and chairs stacked like a furniture warehouse. Racks and rails of moth bitten coats, piles of shoes. Fuck me, one of the women shouts (besides me it’s only women who turned up to help). She strips off her gloves and taps out, taking herself outside before her the contents of her stomach add to the stench. The fridge, the cause of her resignation, is lined with jars of Huxley’s own organs; liver, gall bladder, kidneys, heart, and what appears to be a pair of testes, all swimming in a murky brine. I decide it’s not my problem and make my way over to the windows to work on set of bookcases stuffed with boxes. A cursory glance in the nearest box reveals several decades worth of jazz mags1. The dirty bastard. There are boxes filled with empty mason jars and mason jars filled with indeterminate liquids and mason jars that definitely contain piss. I spot a bag back behind a bookcase that looks familiar. I’ve got one just like it. I open it to find my toaster, a stack of bills addressed to me, and several of my paperbacks, including a few copies of my own book. Huxley, it seems, had wandered in and helped himself to the contents of my cupboards. Probably graffitied my wall, too. The filthy prick. I bag up what belongs to me and haul it back to my flat, very glad I never shed a tear for the horrible old cunt.
7.
I cancel dinner with Fern because I don’t want to go. Also because I’m in a fair amount of pain. My bad arm is sling bound and sore; I jarred it moving furniture at Huxley’s and now the bastard is full of fluid and stuck at a ninety-degree angle. I’d take it off, but my fridge is uncomfortably full. I’m losing body parts faster than I can find them. The arm will have to stay, along with the pain.
8.
My mood is black and my Acid Watch isn’t helping. Maybe it ran out of juice. I find a Q&A video with Dr Matthew Hoffmann, the man behind the watch on my wrist. The journalist asks if the Acid Watch tells time. His reaction is somewhat terse. Time?! Always the time question! No it doesn’t tell the time. We aren’t made of money! What do you think this is, Alzheimer’s Research? Depression is a joke! The only reason we’re allowed to give our subjects LSD is because when I proposed it someone said: well at least it might cheer those sad fucks up! So no, it doesn’t tell the time. He puts his head between his legs, hyperventilating. The journalist clears her throat. Why then, she says, did you bother to add the sticker with the clock face? He just about roars. Because! These people aren’t well! We didn’t want them to feel like they were wearing electronic trackers! There’s a moment of quiet, then the journalist points out that they are in fact being tracked, though, and Hoffmann screams in bleeped profanities and rips off his microphone. The footage cuts out. I don’t like to diagnose people with things, not out loud, but based on our interactions so far Dr Hoffmann seems like the kind of person who’d really benefit from an Acid Watch.
9.
Fern greets me with pigs in blankets and bubbles and offers a spread of vinyl for me to peruse. I select the Dylan. She approves. Her flat is the same layout as mine, same high ceilings, but it is packed with plants and mid-century furniture and walls heaving with abstract watercolours in a spectrum of hues, shades melting together in chromatic puddles. Sometimes a single colour, sometimes two or more, sort of kaleidoscopic explosions, like a paint bomb went off and the effect was elegant devastation. There are hundreds, perhaps, on small squares of paper, pinned in neat grids on every available wall. Orgasms, Fern says, and then: Yes, I have those. More cava? I take a top up. She explains her art practice is she paints her orgasms. She hands me one for a closer look. It’s like light show in the back of the eye. Each one unique. A type of synesthesia perhaps. I was just shy of something to paint and realised my brain had been doing it for me all along. I marvel at her productivity. I’d be lying if I said I had a system, she says. I just wake up and do it. She takes the watercolour, a squall of midnight blue shot through with shards of pink. She’s halfway done rehanging it when I pipe up. You’re lying about one thing, I say. I have a hard time believing you’ve ever been shy. Her laughter is full bodied, the kind that lights up entire towns.
10.
It’s after midnight when dinner winds down. I’m rolling the glass tumbler on my forehead which is what I do when I’m a few whiskies deep. Fern is dancing around the living room, swaying on her toes. She’s grey haired, of indeterminate age, but the years fall off her in droves when she dances, as if there is simply nowhere for them to stick. She’s slender, and dressed like an art therapist, wide-legged pants and a fitted shirt, cooler than I’ve ever been. Before you ask, she says. I didn’t invite you to dinner because I wanted you to contribute. She gestures to the watercolours. I smile. A few months ago, I’d have offered already, I say. As soon as you said orgasm, I’d have said how many? But I’m trying to cut down. She laughs at this. You’re very cute, she says. But I did have an ulterior motive, besides making sure there’s someone to find my corpse when I go. She sits next to me. Her tone is heavy with sympathy. It’s more of a question, actually. It’s just I noticed… When did you lose your inner child? In the distance, the needle slips beyond the last track, and we are left with the crackling sound that marks the end of the side.
As in an adult magazine. See also skin mag, porno mag, filth, smut, top shelf title. Popular jazz mags in the UK include: Men Only, Razzle, Fiesta, Escort and Club International. Less Playboy, more Penthouse. It’s like my friend Paul says: “Jazz: Love the mags, hate the music.”