Some time along one of the back lanes, Daniel stopped.
‘It’s starting to sleet,’ he said. Stupidly I looked up, and a gritty piece of hail booted into my eye. Daniel grabbed my sleeve as I covered the eye and swore. We looked around for somewhere to shelter, ‘Here,’ he said, and shouldered open a door in a wall.
In the garden we stood under a tree as the sleet turned to hard pips of ice. The tree was wide enough that we could both stand comfortably beside each other against the trunk – we stood beside the tree anyway.
‘It’s really coming down,’ I said. Daniel leaned his head back and I blinked, and could just about make out his eyes under a diamond of shadow. Between him and me were all our heavy clothes. His neck looked good. I didn’t know why I thought of that, just then. There came the kind of sound they make recordings of to help you send yourself to sleep – a sound that becomes music with drumming tickering rhythms of its own, belonging to no one.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, and stiffened in embarrassment. I think – now, when I must be fucking honest – stiffening in self-containment and stiffening in another way are not so far removed. I could see him clearer, his head and neck the only things exposed, the long lines of his throat, his hair overlong on his ears. I don’t think he thinks of himself, I thought. I think he forgets himself in his work. I felt close to tears, but with one eye shut it must have looked like I was winking all the time.
‘Do you think it’ll break the windscreens of the cars?’ I asked.
‘I think it could,’ said Daniel. ‘Wouldn’t that be amazing?’
And I smiled, just a little.
‘You know, I think that I get you a bit more,’ I said.
‘In the light of this; I’ve a violent, subversive edge?’ said Daniel.
‘That’s right,’
‘It shouldn’t be cold enough for this,’ he said, barely in a whisper, and the din of the falling hail nearly muffled it.
‘Yes,’ I said.
It had happened; I had let myself look at him. The hail pattered, lost its rhythm and stopped. I stood a little removed and very upright, wiping my hurt eye. With nothing else to do I scooped up some of the hail and shoved the pellets in my mouth.
Say, ‘How does it taste?’ I thought. ‘Say something like that to me.’ But Daniel said nothing, and we went on our way.
Corpse Road
I said that I was born on a corpse road. That’s not an exaggeration, I really was. Remember I told you part of the fantasy cycle was bringing my parents back from the dead – I’d start with the half-hour before I was born. I’d start with calm images gathered from the photos – there were many photos, once. My father in his Ford Cortina, griping the wheel smiling not at the camera but at his young wife, humped with foetal me. Both of them fair haired – that type always die tragically, don’t they, either that or they’re Nazis. Anyway some neighbour on the street had taken it at their request when they were bringing the car home from purchase. He looks like me if I had an (also blond) beard and serial killer glasses. The side-on image makes the whole – the windscreen unshattered, his body fresh, lolling arm on the driver door. It was a summer’s day, when I was born. I was meant for summer days, all of us alive – my mother in the back seat, I decided, chosen for ease of entry with her giant belly, and her need to shout fullthroated curses and groans as I tried to fire out of her from a thornier exit. My mother, she had looked happy and shy; she had been nineteen, my father twenty-two.
The road that was not exactly the straightest to the hospital but the prettiest – goes through a long ride of trees, over the hill from the dappled wood – of picnic fame – and through pastureland with a river and its oxbow lakes. The road has been widened since its first use, but on one side you can still – if you pay attention – see the things that look like stiles that are for resting the coffins on. A small high Anglican church is up ahead – a large willow planted right on the tight bend opposite it with a curved mirror hammered into it to warn of traffic bearing down – and this is all I have to change – I have to make it so my father looks in that mirror, instead of being distracted by some operatic birthing scream or general mindlessness. I’ve always hated willow trees. I’ve always hated that little church, though I only ever saw it once, the day after I passed my driving test.
I stand in front of it (I’d parked my hired car in the tiny church’s car park). A mirror breaks at the moment of my crowning. I come from the place that mirrors show. And I wondered if the willow retained the memory, and in what way it knew, by the texture and weight of a car slamming – crumpling – a horn sounding – and my mother, sobbing and falling out, grappling and gubbing on the road with glass and light trembling in her hands. And I have already almost made it out of the mirror, sopping wet. Some shard of its glass must have still been in the gouges in the bark – I was too fearful to investigate or stand at the dusty bend and feel about for it. I rubbed my Adam’s apple and kept my shoulders hunched. My mother dies when I am three and my grandmother considers it not right to talk about it. No, she didn’t die that day – no, she did – I wanted to be Victorian for a while because if death was in vogue I could be fully allowed it and the forms for it would be clear and there’d be plenty of people like me, plenty of death for the Victorians. It was normal to have a tragedy, one was not complete without it. But this was the early two thousands, I’d missed the Neo-Victorian by a couple of decades. And I was too well-built for life and had too many friends.
So part of the fantasy was that bit, rewinding, adjusting. The rest was: in our beautiful house my young parents and I lived together none of us knowing how to cook, eating toast for every meal and playing computer games together. I didn’t have to extract myself from this dream when I turned eighteen. When my grandmother said I should leave home and then croaked in the back garden in the middle of throwing a box of my things into a fire – don’t get sentimental, she had said, as I slammed my door. When I was eighteen my mother was only a year older than me, and I could have kept on imagining myself as small, and theirs, and loved, but I did stop, because that’s what I did. If you are trapped in a crashed car you pull yourself out. There is no other thing that occurs to you.
Contained
Reviving hot drinks in the kitchen. I felt light; I watched the night sit in the garden and heard Daniel’s voice. Mrs Boobs came to me, tail a question mark. I was tired – good. I didn’t want anything. We played about with the copy and the original. Daniel laughed at them both like they were the same thing.
‘You know what’s worse than this?’ I said, raising up the copy. ‘This,’ I said, raising up the original. ‘The wifi spying on us, listening to everything. It’s a lumpen device of late capitalism.’ Daniel looked puzzled, I think because it probably seemed like I was angry, all of a sudden. I wasn’t, I wasn’t. I think he got it when I got up, rushed for what I needed, took him outside and set the thing down and poured vodka on it and then lit that piece of shit up.
‘Yeah, life is weird,’ I said, standing over it, breathing in the acrid justified smoke. ‘I think I’ll be thinking about your copier, you know, for a while – trying to get my head around it, before I can have an opinion. I normally know right away, if something’s right or wrong.’
The device fizzled, made sounds, I leaned in, heard, just then, I swear, a piece of Daniel speaking, or was it Órla – Tell me how he was – it said. I knew it was us, I knew it hadn’t been said yet. I leaned in.
‘Do you hear that?’ I asked.
‘You have a strong moral compass?’ Daniel asked.
I looked at him. Silence. The air in the little garden jolted me awake. Looked at him. He didn’t look my way. The good smoke of our breaths met in the air.
‘Let’s get back inside,’ I said.
We had to peel off our clothes – such a stink on them. We threw them into the washer. And then I stood there and then something in us realised, right then. All of a sudden, I thought – Daniel wants me too. See, all this time
I hadn’t known. Not true, liar, said a voice in the back of my mind – you want him, you want to hold onto him – my heart started drumming. And all that we did was stand there a little while in the cold of the kitchen like we had each forgotten our lines. It’s all right, I thought – but I wanted, as well as to feel his skin against mine, to put my head on his shoulder and cry, just sob. I hesitated. Then said I was off to the shower.
Thought Silencer
I turned the water on full blast and the heat up to almost unbearable levels and punched my face against the stream and muttered, fuck fuck fuck, under my breath. Everything that had happened and not came back to me that night in waves. I doubled over. Desire – longing – hail – the long muffled room – the uncanny passing figure. I dunked my head and said haaahh and put it back into the water and waited for the pressure and the heat to unknot my thoughts, but even after coming out and drying myself I was still full of a miserable energy. Another run, I needed out – I put on a lightweight fleece over my running gear and headed for the door.
Out on the flat foot down thudding over tarmac road and the black frigid night for hours. I didn’t listen to music – I listened to the rubbish of my brain shift about until my muscles below burned so much I outran thought, and I kept running. And I ran to keep from— I ran into cold and hedges and nothingness. The lone buses with the anti-junkie lighting beaming blue and cold. I puffed and ran, dodging bins – cars – some early-arriving tourists wheeling their bags. Drunks clustered on one of the bridges – I always forget street names here, they don’t seem to matter against the age of them – raising their cans at me as I fled past. I turned hard right and let my legs go long and unkinked on the downward stretch of the centre. I passed a woman out late walking her dog – startled her with my heavy panting, but was gone too quickly to apologise, if I even could have spoken. I got so thirsty I could think of nothing else but dropping down – falling and staying there. I licked salt off my arm, I listened to my pounding exhalation – I stopped and bought water, drank it messily, ran on. I ran towards the dull shape of a hill – heading for the path up it – but got confused in the dark and wound up running along towards the cliffs. Didn’t care. Couldn’t care. Kept running. At a turn in the path I heaved and threw up. I couldn’t remember what I had for dinner – If I’d had dinner. I shouted once and ran on. At the top of the path I saw the plateau of the cliff going out in front of me and the lights of the city below like a city below a transparent sea. Not like the cliff. Not like here, where the sea is uninhabited, I think, but softer if I had dived in. If I do. If I stayed for dawn there, then, I’d have been late for work – I just lay down for a while feeling my chest exploding and the wires of my muscles burn and overhead I could see the woollen sky come down closer and closer like it wanted to get a look at this flea – this ant – in the wet grass. I felt like my heart was going to crush itself. I closed my eyes and gasped in and out. Time went black and I didn’t know anything.
When I came to myself I felt both better and worse – worn out but rejuvenated – real and unreal. I crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked out, squinting. Where was I in all the world? I had no thoughts, I wasn’t myself. As earlier with Daniel, when I’d worried I would accidentally forget myself – forget all my established sexuality and my desires up until this point in life and try to kiss him, I was struck by worry – that I didn’t know myself – that I had no reason to be here and then some close and dangerous reason would present itself to me. The most obvious being that I’d run up here in the night to try to throw myself off the crags. I crawled over a little further, feeling the folded edges of the bare rocks jutting out. If I kept wriggling forward, this desire would shake hands with gravity and fulfil itself swiftly on the same path far below on which I’d run earlier. I gasped – a noise like shock and a laugh – I didn’t want to die, I hadn’t thought to do it. I hadn’t thought I wanted anything, just to run. I wanted to be held.
My eye still felt sore and I rubbed it – rubbing more dirt into both of them in the process. I winced and said, ‘For fuck’s sake Tommy,’ and pulled back from the edge and rubbed and rubbed away. Eventually I sat back and thought at last.
‘I didn’t come here to do anything but run,’ I said. ‘Anything else is just coincidence.’
I don’t know if I’d thought how easy it is to make mistakes just because you stop thinking and let your body go where it wants. That was astounding to me. I’d always thought my body was a pretty reliable self-attainment machine. And it did do then what it was meant to – my eyes cleared themselves, my heart wasn’t about to pop. I sat on the cliff, weak but strong, got up slowly and walked down again. In the grass at the foot of the hill there was a huge puddle spread out, with the orange glow of the sky reflected in it. I came to it. I stood over it and saw my body in the dimness. The rest of the city pulled back – there was only grass and sky and myself.
‘Come closer, here,’ it said.
I was standing right over it. No thoughts. Slowly I lowered myself and tied my shoelaces. No thinking. I couldn’t. I was mostly blankness, dehydrated, a dip in blood sugar, a couple of nights of no sleep – this is how close we are to becoming animal ghosts of ourselves. I leaned over the puddle and looked at the face in it. It was not my face, not my body. I got up quickly, making no noise and walked on. Hands on the back of my head. Home to bed. It must have taken me forty minutes to get back, but turn me upside down and shake me out, you won’t find where those forty minutes have gone.
The End of Being Tired
There’s a room. It’s where everyone loves you, all your mates are there. You’re gathered round in some low-lit, cosy place. There’s no sound at all except a high wind of a storm. You can see people laughing and smiling, you can feel them very close to you. It’s warm and it’s never ending. You don’t have to worry about how little sleep you’ve had. Money isn’t even a thing. No one is going to turf you out. You’re not going to fail to do something right. You’re perfect, you’ve always been perfect. You touch your forearm against another guy’s when you raise your pint and it’s fine. No one flinches at the touch of you. Your grandmother is resting in a room upstairs. She doesn’t see what you do but she’s alive and she’s well. She just doesn’t feel like getting out of the bed. Two strangers, younger than you, beautiful, work behind the bar. One is heavily pregnant. They smile fondly over at you. There’s a vase of bluebells on every table, by each twinkling tealight. The room is totally silent. Everyone is speaking but there’s no need for sound. You catch your own eye in the reflection in the mirror above the fire. You’re loved. You’re safe. You will never feel bad about how little you are again.
Habitual
I entered this new cycle reluctantly, but soon gave in to its plans for me: a few snatched hours of sleep – then work in the day time; Órla’s during the evening – or out with her, or at the gym; then as little time as possible at home until it was late enough that I wanted to run. I did want to, I think. It was a need. Just like the changes to my diet. Where I normally ate three regular meals and drank as many coffees as work sociability required, now I ate something sugary for breakfast – some gross chocolate bar. At lunch I tugged the sliced meat out of sandwiches. I had to eat this in private, so no one saw – in the stalls at work, cramming rolled up ham into my gob and flushing the bread. You can manage any pattern your body needs to fall into, even if it seems a little weird – you can make it work for you. It can be done, it just takes a bit of fixing. That’s what I told myself. Do it carefully, know it’ll probably right itself in a few weeks. I was losing weight, I was feeling like my internal organs were slowly and without pain dissolving into a gel inside my skin, while my bones were like rubberised pipes. At the same time I was in better shape than ever. I could run and run. Badr stopped me one afterwork-sesh in the gym. ‘Haven’t seen you in a while, Joe. Seen you less than before you moved in, what’s going on?’
I just laughed and told him ‘It’s the work, man.’
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nbsp; He looked serious, ‘Ah, it’s that. Well, keep it up. Don’t let them find your weak spot!’ he said, and I knew that he thought it was want I wanted to hear, and I almost started crying.
‘No chance of that,’ I said and laughed, and he slapped me on the shoulder, gently, so as not to knock the dumbbells to the floor.
Right as Badr was going I saw that man again – the one from the puddle, the one who had passed me in the hall. In old cartoons, you could always tell what object a character was going to lift up, a book or an apple or whatever it was – these were distinctive because of the layering of transparencies, which gave them a colour scheme that was a little brighter, that you came to recognise as though it was more ready and willing to be lifted. I saw him with that kind of feeling, though by then I was used to him. Almost. He was part of my days and slightly above it all. His face below the dirty hair had a foxy look, what I could see of it, as he kept it turned away when I – made cocky by its constantly appearing – looked up and around for it. I began to think ‘that coy lad’, when I saw him. Which made it easier – made me smirk. At the end of long runs, towards the dawn, I would see him. He peered at me, or passed by in a flicker – I was sure it was him – through absurd apertures like puddles, cracks in fences, reflections in the black screen of my mobile or work computer. He was there and it was like he wanted to be seen even as he obscured himself – he wanted to speak, but he was reluctant.
Plans Moving Forward
At that point, within my new cycle, I felt less and less of a need to speak – at work or any other place. I wasn’t sulky or grim, just quiet. When you don’t need to speak you shouldn’t. When you don’t need to eat or sleep, same – like I said, you can deal, your body finds out a way. You should always wash though, out of consideration for others.
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