Humor

by Stanley Donwood

  I am astounded. I feel almost like an accomplice, especially when I think of The Pig. I think I am in some sort of shock. I fall asleep again.

  When I awaken it is the morning, and my friend has gone to work. She has left me a note, saying that I can stay there and to help myself to anything in the kitchen. I trudge desultorily to the refrigerator and drink some milk. I realise with a dreadful empty feeling that I still have no money. There is a local paper in the sitting room, and I sit on the sofa, leafing through the ‘situations vacant’ pages, imagining what appalling horror will befall me when I next try to earn a wage.

  Sell Your House and Buy Gold

  There was disaster coming; that was obvious. Life had been almost ridiculously easy, and now things were going to get worse. Much, much worse. I couldn’t believe that I had ever thought otherwise. I couldn’t believe that I’d ever thought that there could be any other outcome.

  But I had.

  I had disregarded a thousand different types and variations of warning for years.

  I had believed implicitly in the power of the Authorities to deal with any situation that may have worried me.

  My bookshelves were full of books, packed with scientific explanations, and I had taken out a variety of insurance that implied my life was worth money.

  I did not think that my life or, more precisely, the manner in which I lived it was effectively an inexorably lengthy suicide, although, of course, it was.

  Small things were changing, but I had preferred to remain oblivious.

  I did not much miss the butterflies, and birdsong had only reminded me of mobile phones or car alarms anyway.

  Disaster I thought of in inverted commas:

  ‘DISASTER’.

  It was something that, if it were to happen, would look like extremely expensive special effects.

  Because the world was big, and seemed to alter only in the details, I slowly became comfortable in many assumptions. I fossilised into what I saw as an eternally stable sediment.

  In this state I engaged actively with property, clothing, money, culture, and had a vested interest in continuing to do so.

  In this I was not alone.

  Even though I had often observed newly born swarms of mayflies smashed to pieces by a sudden and unexpected showers of hailstones, I often used credit cards.

  Even though I myself had mercilessly crushed legions of ants beneath my feet, I took out a mortgage on a house that I then renovated, decorated and bought furniture for. And even though I had seen on the television many harbingers of disaster, I carried on acting as if nothing was wrong.

  All of this was an error.

  No. Not just an error; it was an immense mistake.

  When, at last and unequivocally, I had to admit to my deeply comfortable self that disaster really was coming and that its coming was inevitable, I took certain steps.

  Everyone that I knew of lived in houses, and it rapidly became clear that all of these houses were either too old, too dangerously situated, or in any number of other ways inappropriate. We used our diverse and highly developed skills to research the question of what to do.

  We decided to build a new house that had none of the drawbacks of previous habitats. We selected a site and had the house built. The disaster was definitely coming, but money still worked as it always had, as did credit, mortgages, property, and all the other things we clothed ourselves with.

  There seemed to be no particular urgency regarding the disaster; only a dull sort of inevitability. Our new house fulfilled all the requirements we sought, but there was one thing we had not thought about.

  One thing we had not got right.

  We built a house with too many shadows in it. It wasn’t the sort of thing that you notice at first; oh no.

  The shadows did not become evident until it was too late.

  Of course. Not until it was much, much too late.

  And soon it was clear to us all that the disaster was almost upon us. This we deduced from the undeniable fact that many of the things to which we had become accustomed began to stop functioning.

  The telephones became unreliable, and there was often no money in the holes in the walls. There was no more petrol, which led to some very unpleasant scenes, both on the roads and elsewhere. People had certainly been guilty of selfishness before, but the stoppage of petrol made a lot of people act extremely thoughtlessly.

  In addition to our frequent and increasing daily troubles, the always-awkward-to-reach call-centre employees whom we relied upon for many things were frequently completely absent, and when the telephone systems did actually work we were usually rebuffed by recorded voices that enticed us through several options before becoming silent.

  One evening the television had nothing to show us.

  And then, almost suddenly, it was no longer possible to buy newspapers, or indeed many sundries including soap, dish-washing tablets, razors, light bulbs, vacuum-cleaner bags or toilet paper, as the family who had owned the shop had gone. We tried to find other shops, but the families who owned them had gone too.

  We now had to think about the how of getting, rather than the how much to get. This was a strain. It occurred to me, not infrequently, that our civilisation had, of late, begun to make the simplest things extremely tortuous. We had perfected what now seemed a psychotic level of complexity around simple human activities like eating, keeping clean, and moving from one place to another.

  Our supply of electricity became erratic. At the end of a day filled with minor panics of one sort or another it was apparent that there was no more of it at all.

  That was where our real problems started.

  Looking back, I can see that they began long before that. Our problems began a long, long time ago, when they were invisible, and continued during their gradual appearance.

  The problems grew and were nurtured by our casual indifference, our sneers, and the ignorant manner in which we chose to live. Our gestating problems were the dark, inevitable spectre that accompanied us to the cashpoint, into work, to the supermarket, and into our gritty, tortured beds.

  And after the end of the electricity, the shadows conspired against us.

  The dark corners began to scare us more than the coming disaster. The disaster was imminent; that was clear from the disappearance of many things that we had assumed to be vital to our being. But the threat from the shifting shadows in our house was worse, far worse.

  We began, almost imperceptibly, to panic.

  However much we reassured ourselves that we were safe, that the disaster would flow over us, that we had stockpiled, that we were defended and guarded against every eventuality, the insistent shadows illuminated our vulnerability.

  When night came, we fell to a brooding quietude, eyeing each other with suspicion, inventing justifications for our dark feelings.

  We cloaked our hidden desires; we conspired with the shadows.

  Nothing seemed to be happening.

  *

  The television, I realised, had been a sort of terminal that connected me to a wider understanding of events. And without newspapers it was impossible not to write my own internal headlines during my sleepless nights. Worry became constant; worry and enforced exile from everything I was accustomed to.

  I had never envisaged a sort of loneliness that did not involve people. But in fact it was the lack of small items that I had previously taken for granted that made me lonely. I missed tea, toothpaste, remote controls, coffee, ballpoint pens, margarine, AA batteries, and easy credit in high-street stores. I missed my favourite magazines.

  And the dead silence that encloaked the telephone and the television made me lonely. And the hollow look in the eyes of the people – oh …

  After the end of electricity, the nights lengthened.

  We had to wait in the dark, listening.

  Life had quickly become intolerable for some of us.

  It wasn’t that I found my existence more tolerable than theirs; only that I felt that I
had a sort of fortitude, a sort of – wisdom.

  Nobody was happy.

  The light in the house became less and less; the shadows darker and darker.

  Still we waited for the disaster.

  *

  And when I looked, when people moved in front of the windows in the grey light, their shadows cast quickly clattering dark talons across the floor. This only became worse as the light faded.

  I forbade them from moving, as it had become impossible to tell shadow from shadow. Or shadow from human.

  Mine was a necessary act, an act that intended to prove that we had to be strong and united against the looming disaster.

  The man had always been unreliable, but certain events had proved to me that he was a liability. If it had not been me it would have been another who would have had to take that awful decision.

  Nobody witnessed anything; not that it would have made any difference if they had.

  I was not ashamed, and after a certain amount of uproar I explained my reasoning and my actions to the others. But I did not go into the details; if I had told them about his struggling, and how long it took, there would undoubtedly have been problems.

  We carried his carcass beyond the perimeter wire and left it in a ditch.

  Inevitably, there were people who objected, and they were next.

  When disaster is coming it is difficult to see clearly, but somehow I could see through the shadows to the light.

  A long period of unpleasantness followed.

  *

  As the people in the house became fewer the shadows seemed to increase in number and in density. Often I perused my fading bank statements, lost in a reverie of long-gone financial transactions. I disliked being disturbed. Yes. I disliked that.

  The disaster was coming. That was clear.

  There were shadows everywhere.

  When I was at last alone, when the people were all gone, I waited for the disaster on my own.

  On my own.

  My Giro

  I was in a dreadful situation. The Department had got me. Usually I had been able to avoid these situations by earnestly prevaricating, feigning excitement at a new ‘project’ that I was certain would lead me to a paradise in which my Giro would be nothing but a faint memory. Never before had they tricked me into actually accepting a position of work.

  Looking back, I should have known it. The man smiled at me, allowing no ambiguity about the way the corners of his eyes crinkled. I was ready for the usual questions, but I hesitated when he asked me if he was right in thinking I was an artist. I made an almost silent flopping noise with my tongue as he went on to tell me that he had ‘just the thing’ for me.

  I had the horrible sensation that I was taking part in the tortured dream of some sort of prisoner. I felt a morbid chill low in my insides.

  The man was almost gleeful as he opened a file and passed a piece of A4 paper into my hand. I listened to him saying something, but his words had no meaning. He may as well have been speaking Latin. I looked at the piece of paper. I was led to a small room. Somehow there was a biro, and somehow I was sitting down signing the piece of A4 paper, and my mind seemed very far away, and I listened to the crackle and fizz of the static that erupted from the carpet.

  And suddenly I was walking down the concrete steps to the street and I was employed. I had a job.

  The job was, apparently, in a tattoo shop in a surprisingly smart part of the town. There were people, employed people, everywhere, all looking as if they needed to be somewhere other than where they were at that instant, apart from those who sat in the many restaurants that lined the streets. They looked as if they had been born to dine in precisely those restaurants. A wave of nausea coursed through me.

  I sat on a bench between two saplings, and stared at the dust between my feet. I sank my face into my hands and began to moan quietly.

  What was I going to do? I had to take the job. If I didn’t take the job, or if I got the sack, or if I left, I was fucked. The Department wouldn’t give me any more money. I either had to be made redundant, in which case the Department would reluctantly pay me my fortnightly allowance, or I had to become some sort of criminal, a life for which I lacked many fundamental skills.

  I had to take the job. I had no choice.

  After some time had passed, I got up and walked to the shop and introduced myself, mentioned the Department, and handed over the piece of A4 paper. I made my mouth move into some approximate smiles, and expressed a dull sort of keenness. My keenness was, however, overshadowed by the enthusiasm of the two managers of the shop. They explained excitedly that the franchise was an entirely new concept in tattoo parlours, in that the tattoos already existed and were grafted onto the recipient. The tattoos were carefully sliced from the bodies of corpses, young corpses being preferable as the artwork would not have blurred and turned blue.

  The corpses were stored in a refrigerated chamber at the back of the shop, where they lay stiffly, awaiting a wealthy customer who would take their illustrated skin for their own.

  I thought back to the morning, when I had awoken at 10.30 and ambled across the town to sign on at the Department.

  That life now seemed distant.

  My tasks at the shop were not onerous, but I desperately missed my indolence. I was required to be at work early in the morning, when the streets were filled with strange smells and sounds I was unaccustomed to. At the shop I sat behind a desk and, when a customer entered, would talk vaguely with them, correlating their personal details with entries in a database. I saw the managers in the morning and at closing time, and at lunchtime they would leave the premises to dine in one of the restaurants.

  I was not so lucky. The interruption of my routine had unbalanced my eating habits severely. A gnawing, acidic hunger plagued my belly, but the idea of eating my hastily prepared packed lunches was completely repellent. Consequently I began to focus unhealthily on what I imagined took place in the back rooms when the managers were working on the customers. During slack periods I would stare with unfocused eyes at the computer monitor, images of scalpels and the dark blood on green latex gloves washing against the shores of my mind.

  I also thought often of Giros I had cashed in the past, each one like a beautiful girlfriend who had been everything I wanted, but whom I had never really appreciated. I hadn’t much cared for the Department, but from my chair behind my desk, behind the plate glass that glazed the shop, my memories grew fonder.

  The idea of the tattoo grafts disgusted me. There was no art needed here. Despite what had been said to me, this was definitely not ‘just the thing for me’. I wanted desperately to be made redundant.

  After several weeks the managers asked me if I would like a promotion. The franchise was going well, and one of the managers was going to open a shop in the next town. They were going to hire a new receptionist, and offered me a position on the team.

  Darkly, in a gloomy corner of my being, I clutched at my Giro, but it was further out of my reach than ever. Somehow, a piece of A4 paper and a biro had altered my life profoundly. I had no idea how to undo the alteration.

  It was growing dark outside, and I was led into a room that was artificially lit.

  There was much to learn, and at first it didn’t seem possible that I would ever be on the team. But the manager who had remained at the shop persevered, and eventually his sometimes-manic enthusiasm paid off.

  An effect of the arrangement that I had not considered was my increased wage. Startled, I moved to a nicer flat, and began to take an interest in shop-window displays. At lunchtime I went to restaurants with the manager who had remained at the shop and I developed an interest in dining that was wholly new to me. It was only occasionally now that I felt hunger, and those times were like a dimly felt nostalgia.

  I bought a bicycle, and at weekends I cycled out of the town to hills in the countryside where I would grunt and sweat my way to a summit, and there survey the land spread before me. Birds sang strange tunes in the t
rees, and the clouds formed distant plateaux.

  The corpses never stayed on the premises for longer than was necessary. I surprised myself daily with the corpses. I learned how to push down gently with a scalpel until the skin gently popped and I was able to slice through the skin, bisecting freckles, drawing a straight line that curved acutely as I changed direction. Once the tattoo was encircled I lifted one edge and attached the clamps. The patch of illustrated epidermis came away relatively easily, needing few nicks and cuts at subcutaneous matter with the scalpel.

  I developed a taste for Italian food, and gradually became known as a high-tipping regular at one of the restaurants. My favourite table, by the window, was always made available for me.

  The summer drew on, and a thick, sultry heat settled on the town. I no longer used my bicycle since I found that I was arriving at work with dark circles of sweat under the arms of my shirts, which quickly grew uncomfortable in the air-conditioned office.

  I bought a car after learning to drive one. I found learning difficult, as there were three distinct pedals, a steering wheel, a gearstick, several mirrors, windscreen wipers, indicators, different sorts of lights, and a complex dashboard featuring more dials than I could hope to decipher. And, of course, there was a windscreen, the view from which required constant monitoring.