A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  ‘Man, what even the fuck, Molly. This ain’t Albany.’

  ‘Yeah it is.’

  ‘No. It’s not. We never even left the rail yard.’

  Molly stood and leaned beside him out the open door.

  ‘Yes we did.’

  ‘No, Molly. We didn’t. We hopped aboard a stopped train.’

  ‘Bullshit we did.’

  ‘Bullshit nothing. I can see where we made camp from here. I can see Billy, for Christ’s sake.’

  Billy was another kid we were supposed to be riding with, but he’d disappeared right around the time our train came chugging through. While Molly and Vale argued, Billy stepped up to our open car door.

  ‘Hey guys,’ he said merrily, water streaming through his adolescent fluff of beard. ‘What’re you all up to? Hiding out from the rain? That’s cool.’

  ‘We’re going to Albany,’ Molly said.

  ‘No,’ Vale corrected. ‘We’re not.’

  ‘How dry is it in there? I’ve been stuck in this shit for hours.’ Billy was a good-natured kid: if he sensed the tension between Molly and Vale, he didn’t let it show. He was wearing a tennis visor that must have made everything right now appear to him through a waterfall. While Molly and Vale stood by and didn’t help, Billy pulled himself up into our car.

  It would be a few days yet – when we finally hopped our actual train east – before Billy lost his grip and got his legs gobbled up beneath a flat-bed train car halfway loaded with fancy sinks. I remember that last flickering moment when Billy was still holding on to the train but his legs were getting spread for yards and yards behind us. He looked from the decreasing line of his knees back up to where I was still standing, trying to help him aboard. It’s like his eyes were saying ‘this is bullshit’ while his mouth hung open in a silent, disbelieving O. Then he let slip his grip and he was gone in the rail-side cinders. Until that moment, though, no circumstance was going to dictate Billy’s mood. Billy plopped down and drew a forty of Budweiser from his tote bag and raised the bottle like it was some sort of offering. He met each set of eyes and in turn, said, ‘Meh?’

  Though simple, and perhaps even crude, his point was valid and irrefutable. We three gathered around him and drank and resumed our game of cards.

  It always amazes me how these kids with no homes and no money somehow always have booze or drugs. I’d just escaped from a California rehab knowing I had no chance of ever getting clean in a place like that. How could anyone possibly stay sober in California? The evidence I’d seen suggested it was impossible. My guess was that being on the road would be my best bet. All my resources – every dime – would be spent on keeping my forward motion moving progressively, incrementally forward. Under such severe restrictions, survival would be my only option. But these kids, living such similarly structured lives, clearly had found a loophole. If you had nowhere to go and were in no rush to get there, why not enjoy the ride? If twenty bucks gets you sober to Boston, won’t it also get you fucked up to Springfield? God willing, you’ll get to Boston someday.

  But where’d they get their money to begin with? Maybe they just stole. My gig has always been to make bargains with my body. It’s probably easier to always just steal.

  After another hour, we’d gambled all the same nickels and buttons and drunk all our booze and rain or not, I didn’t want to be in that fucking train car any more. I announced that I was heading out on the search for more beer. I told them they could join me or not. But no one else seemed inclined to abandon our immobile train. They were opting for ‘not’. Fine. Fuck ’em. I gathered my one pitiful bag and headed for the door, where the rain kept roaring like a panther in the night. I stood in the slick doorway and looked left and right, then slipped when I should’ve jumped and smashed my face into a railway tie, so now my partial plate was all stove to shit. I found my feet quick and smiled inside towards those guys to let them know I was okay, but with my fake teeth all bent like that, I had to’ve looked pretty insane. Everyone shouted all at once. I could feel the blood flooding my mouth. Molly started out of the car after me, and with his beautiful eyes and soft bottom lip shining beneath his long moustaches sweeps, he looked appallingly like a mother. I turned tail and split.

  In the way the world often presents these things, my memory of the next little while is not entirely reliable. I know I ran for a long time with the blind sense of being chased, and that beyond the train yard, in a gravel lot abutting a warehouse, I met two dudes in tie-dyed sweaters who were smoking dope through a cast-glass steamroller in their battered old Chrysler Reliant. They got me high and gave me a ride but I’m not sure where they took me. That part of my memory is gone. I remember the scent of leather and weed in the dark backseat of their car, then I remember standing soaked in a parking lot that stretched on for ever in every direction, a repeating gridwork of street lamps punctuating the asphalt like giant specimen pins nailing the world into place, and the rain striking unerringly like an eternity of falling bombs, sizzling white sparks under the mercury lamps with each incandescent blooming. I remember thinking, while the world exploded around me, that those boys must’ve had something more than weed packed in their designer pipe. Or maybe they fed me some pills in exchange for something I could do for them. It was a really bad scene, with bright lights zeroing in rapidly from the darkness, but soon that ended or anyway, I ended. I can’t remember much more after that until I woke up early the next morning in the bushes behind a truckers’ paradise with the nearby highway roaring like a roller rink. The night’s rain had stopped but I was soaked and felt punctured, with my pockets turned out and emptied of even the lint. One of my shoes was missing, but then I found it in the flooded parking lot, wedged beneath a semi’s front tyre. The inside of my skull felt scraped clean with a spoon. Like a melon. There were tractor trailers parked everywhere in neat military rows, and a million gas pumps stationed over in an island, and a restaurant in between. All at once, I was rubbery and I was stiff. I headed towards the dumpsters to find myself something to eat. But in the impossible flooding distance between, those dudes’ Reliant was parked by itself and I could see movement inside. Someone stepped haltingly out from the back. Grey water sluiced around my walking feet and something trickled down my legs and I realised it was Molly stepping out of the dopers’ car, dishevelled and blinking and grinning like a baby in the savage wet morning air.

  We stood staring at one another like two idiots on a battlefield while Molly pissed next to the car. Then we waved.

  ‘Molly, man, Jesus,’ I said as I crossed the wet distance. ‘What the fuck happened?’ I was asking about his moustaches, which appeared to have fallen off, but he must’ve thought I meant something else.

  ‘Yeah, some party, right?’ He ran a hand through his long black hair and laughed. He wasn’t wearing pants, just a long tie-dye that barely covered his junk. His legs looked really pretty in this light. ‘Those dudes really know how to have fun.’

  Inside the car, I could clearly see a boy’s naked butt. I guess Molly must have followed me when I ran, had possibly been with me all night. But everything I remember feels so alone. Like there was no one else in all the world. Not even me. Just unholy rain falling massive in the lights.

  But all that rain was gone now. I stared at Molly all soft and full in the blue morning light and felt everything moving inside of me. All backward and strange. It had been years since I’d seen you, but as broken as I was, I still loved your indifferent cat-eyes and hard hands and impossible stretching limbs. I missed you. I missed our daughter. I missed you. But now here was this man, Indian-eyed and half-naked in a truck-stop parking lot. I hated my heart and everything it makes me do.

  Lightly around his lips, Molly was pale where his moustaches once hung. It took everything left within me not to touch that soft, once-hidden skin. Meekly, I gestured towards the dumpster and asked Molly if he’d join me, if he wanted something to eat.

  Molly smiled, and closed his eyes, and turned his head. When he opened
his eyes again, he was looking in at the sleeping boy’s butt. Then his grin grew sweeter.

  ‘I think I’m going to hang out here for a while more, Coleman.’ And he eased back into the car. ‘I’ll catch up with you boys later.’

  I’d forgotten I’d fucked up my mouth the night before. Now I remembered. I watched Molly cosy down with his boy. I watched traffic burn along the highway. So many people with places to go. But none of those places was for me. A door kicked open at the back of the restaurant and a man in whites tossed a bag in the dumpster. Then he went back inside. Behind me, a semi’s airbrakes hissed. I didn’t know where the fuck I was or where the train yard might be or what had happened to the rest of my friends. But that didn’t feel like it mattered any more. Knowing things didn’t matter. Kicking my feet through the grey floodwater sucking my ankles and heels, I pointed myself in any direction, and no direction I chose was home.

  CIVILISATION

  Will Self

  Artwork by Eddie Peake

  CIVILISATION

  Will Self

  I have been confined to my apartments by a condition at once debilitating and embarrassing: at periodic intervals my body disgorges somewhere in the region of a cupful of matter, which is both colloidal and mercurial – quicksilver and stodgy. I never know for more than a few moments in advance when the discharge will come, or where from: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, urethra or anus. This gooey stuff smells at once excremental and aseptic – a bouquet of shit and detergent. I am reminded of the time before I was so sequestrated, when I prowled the city with fierce abandon – my quarry all the sensations it has to offer. So I scaled the stepped-back skyscrapers precipitately, ledge-to-ledge – and on one occasion, using a key I bought in an ironmonger’s, I opened a manhole and descended into its stygian sewer system. Clambering down, I grabbed the rusty old ladder’s rungs with my rubber-gloved hands, palms gripping then slipping on their thick lagging of ancient toilet paper.

  I sloshed along the subterranean drains, feeling amorphous blobs sickly vacillate against my toes, shins, thighs, through my rubber waders. My torch blade struck feeble beams and gleams from the uvular walls – I swallowed hard. I heard the chirrups and squeals of the rats – but never saw one. At length, I reached the confluence of several tunnels: a chamber, perhaps five storeys high, into which they disgorged liquid sewage that gurgled and swirled in a mephitic whirlpool as it drained into some yet deeper chasm. I inched along a slimy walkway projecting out into the putrefying millrace, intent on confronting the monocular stare of this great and ineluctable process – the evacuation of everything humans deem anathema to the civilised life: their bodily waste, and the residue of their efforts to eradicate its faecal stain. My torch beam flickered over a greasy-brown boil that rose up from the morass, capturing a scrap of newsprint poised on its revolting surface tension. Around and around it went.

  As I believe I may’ve said: I’ve no way of anticipating when, or from which orifice, the silvery goo will be voided – at most, there’re a few seconds of plenitude, followed by a piercing pain which lances through the relevant duct. Sometimes it’s only a few minutes between these episodes – others, hours. A week or so ago, when nothing had happened for an entire morning, I risked an outing to the local park. A child’s model yacht caught in pondweed seemed a suitable opportunity for a good deed – but as I dabbled in the green water, freeing the keel, a cupful slopped down onto its deck. The child came running and looked on, appalled, as I submerged the yacht again and again, muttering fervidly, ‘The ducks – they did something mucky. Yes . . . very mucky.’ I haven’t risked a repeat of this sort of thing – the consequences could be disastrous.

  Instead, I remain behind the multi-density fibreboard of my front door – only descending into the corner shop which is located directly beneath my flat for essential supplies, or sallying a few hundred yards further to attend the local doctors’ surgery. He’s a young man and an old man and a middle-aged woman. He’s Asian and Bulgarian and English. ‘You disgust me,’ he said, as he analysed the silvery sample I’d coughed up into a beaker in the adjacent bathroom, ‘not that this is a professional opinion,’ he continued, squeezing the bulb of the pipette so as to add a few drops of reagent. ‘You disgust me – but this is a purely aesthetic judgement, not a moral one.’ He swirled the beaker – the gloop instantly turned a deep mauve. ‘What shall I do, Doc?’ I wheedled. ‘I can’t live like this.’

  ‘You need to concentrate,’ he said, his eyes rippling behind the lenses of his expensive varifocal glasses, ‘become more attuned to your body. That’s the trouble with modern life: our urge to be disembodied – I blame Christianity . . . all those angels.’

  ‘Angels have bodies, too,’ I observed, cinching my belt.

  ‘Maybe,’ he sighed, ‘but theirs don’t randomly disgorge silvery goo from all their orifices at intermittent intervals.’

  ‘What’s wrong with me, Doc?’ I asked, as we both contemplated the foaming, steaming beaker.

  ‘No bloody idea.’ He snapped back, ‘Now, if you’ll forgive me. I have patients waiting . . . patiently.’ His computer printer chattered out three prescriptions – one for a dietary supplement, one for a laxative, and the third for an anti-diarrhoeal preparation. In the reception area I felt the by now familiar pained plenitude – and the next moment a cupful spewed on to the worn carpet tiling. The receptionist handed me the kitchen roll as if this was a regular occurrence – and for that I was grateful. I did my best to scrub the stuff up, but still left viscous snail-trails twining the nylon bristles. I handed back the kitchen roll with an abject apology – then headed off to fill my prescriptions.

  The best posture for me to adopt when at home has proved to be on hands and knees – and I wear no clothes. Fortunately the floors of my flat are wipeable wood laminate, and I have no rugs or carpets. So long as I’m left to my own devices, and not required to associate with my fellow humans, my existence is bearable enough. When the pained plenitude comes, I either head for the bathroom – or stick it out. Statistically, two out of every nine cupfuls will be decanted via my anus or my urethra. There’s no difference I can discern between this silvery goo, and the stuff that splurges from my eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils – but I’d accord myself lacking in all civilised decencies if I didn’t experience its evacuation as inherently more disgusting. Wouldn’t I? So, I keep a rough mental count, and try to be seated on the commode in time. Of course, often I’ll be slumped there, and instead of my back or front passage, the goo will quit the building of my body through my right nostril – or my left lughole. Sod’s Law, they used to call it – but they never said who Sod was.

  I don’t sleep for very long any more. To begin with, unable to acknowledge my comprehensive leakage, I went to bed as usual – but by one or two in the morning, my sheets, my pillowcases, my covers – all would be soaked, smelly and slimy. The first time that you buy nappies as an adult can be a bit of an ordeal. If they’re for you, that is. It marks an important stage of accepting one’s incontinence – clearly, it isn’t going away. Indeed, it may well persist unto . . . the grave. A cruel and carping farewell, this – a kick in the dying human’s bemerded arse as she lurches out the door. I’ll spare you the agonies I experienced, bent double in the aisle of the chemist’s – I had my reading glasses perched on the end of my nose as I scrutinised the squishy packages. Was I large or small? I hardly knew any more. At the counter they were discussing painkillers – another cruel irony, since, as I attempted to pay for my embarrassing purchase, I felt the familiar pained plenitude. Wiping the counter clean took quite a while – they shut the shop while I completed the task. I offered the manager some money to let me go, but she insisted I mop it all up myself, while the staff all stood on the far side of the sales floor, beside the electric clippers, talking about a television show. I went to bed that night wearing one pair of pull-up absorbent pants (medium), in the normal fashion – and a second pair on my head, leg-holes serving for my weepy eyes. One benef
icial consequence of my new absorbent headgear is that it damps down the buzz . . . a little.

  Have you met the buzz? No, really – have you made its acquaintance? Say hello, Buzz, dearest: ‘Zzz-zzz! Zzz-zzz!’ There’s a good buzz – are you purring? It’s a marker of my profound isolation, I think, that the ambient noise permeating my flat has become personified. He was here when I moved in – the buzz, and to begin with I berated myself as a fool, for renting the place sound unheard. Next I did my best to track down the infuriating noise and eradicate it – but to no avail: the buzz comes from a pair of power units affixed directly to the wall of my flat, and when I confronted Mr Vairavar, the proprietor of the corner shop, he explained that they’re essential to his business. Anyway, the buzz is, it transpires, only first among a number of equally maddening noises: the subtle grind of my next-door neighbour’s bruxism – the awkward night-time breathing of the man on the other side, each inhalation long and shuddering, ever promising – but never delivering – his surcease. Then there are the buses that grunt into, and snort out of, the garage opposite. In the most minuscule hours, when the owl of Minerva flies on soft and absorbent wings, they pull out of the garage and stop at the traffic lights next to my block, so that their rumbling respiration is borne into me along its exterior walkways, and through its internal ducts, adding to the general cacophony. If I stand in my kitchenette and draw myself up to my full height, so that my head is up inside the stove’s extractor hood, I’m plunged into the aural equivalent of a panopticon. I’m able to hear all the sounds surrounding the building – from the chattering of the children who gather outside the corner shop on the far side of the road after school, to the barking of Wonga, my upstairs neighbour’s dog. One by one I identified these sounds – and in so doing, neutralised them. Only the buzz remained irrepressible – the silvery, gooey, insinuating Buzz: a tintinnabulation of my brain’s own electrochemistry, or so it has begun to seem. The buzz is the buzz of alienation and anomie – it has this in common with my malady: occult origins and a refusal to conform to any timetable. The buzz comes each time unexpectedly, endures beyond reason, then suddenly stops. In its wake arrives a silence at once shocked and profound: a fermata, during which I never fail to contemplate the utter bestiality of my condition – my bare and forked animal existence. Naked and on all fours – at bay, in a bricky thicket I pay an exorbitant rent for, my money contributing – as my landlady gleefully informed me on the sole occasion she visited – to her pension. So she rests – and I labour.