This Week I Went To Make Amends

An express emergency courier arrived at my door to deliver the message that I was required at the Crutch And Whistle Inn post haste. I wondered what time it was. She told me it was nightfall.

–

When my taxi pulled up to the pub I saw Teesikk and Buzhroot smoking cigarette’s near the door. When I got out of the car I could sense the bad energy coming from them like the stench off of hot summer garbage.

Buzhroot threw his cigarette down. Teesikk handed me his and I smoked the couple-and-one drags left on it, then we went inside.

–

Buzhroot went off to the toilet while Teesikk and I found a vacant booth. Teesikk dropped some coins into the self service vending pump and filled a mug from the tap.

He passed me the drink, then put some more coins in and filled another mug, and said, “He’s riddled with guilt. His bile’s coming out thick and quick. Reckons we were instrumental to the bartender getting raped. I said to him. Mate. We weren’t culpable. That guy Swimshimmer. He had his psychic tendrils burrowing into each of our minds.”

I said, “I haven’t thought of it that way.”

Teesikk said, “Which way? Mine or Buzhroot’s?”

I said, “Neither. I haven’t really thought about it at all.”

Red light flashed from a booth a few feet away. We both raised our posture and craned our necks to see a woman trying to pull her finger out of the fingerchip receiver hole in her selfserve vendpump.

Teesikk said, “Still got swimmers in your livingroom, mate?”

I nodded, and said, “So what are we going to do? Get revenge on the guy?”

Teesikk chuckled, and said, “No, mate. We’re just going to go find the woman and tell her we had nothing to do with it.”

Two engineers ran past us and went into the booth that was pulsing with red light. One of them opened a tin of grease and got to lubricating the woman’s trapped finger while the other attacked the machine with a hammer in each hand. Buhroot arrived at our booth and put some coins in the slot and held a mug under the tap.

Teesikk said, “Everything alright, mate?”

The tank shuddered and gurgled.

Buzhroot shook his head, and said, “It’s gotten even more viscous. I am holding my nerve against suicidal urges, Teesikk.”

Teesikk banged his fist on the vendpump, and said, “You’ve just got to hold on until we can square it with the bartender, mate. Not long now.”

Buhroot leaned down and sniffed the tap and winced, then pulled a lever on the machine’s side and red light flashed inside our booth.

Teesikk gestured toward the two engineers pulling at the woman and kicking at the vendpump in the redlight strobing booth a few feet away.

Teesikk handed his mug to Buzhroot. I finished my drink and Buzhroot downed what he was holding, and we put our empty mugs on the table and left for the hotel.

–

In the hotel lobby I went over to the reception desk and asked after the bartender we were looking for and flashed my expired courier card. They told me she was waiting tables in the subterranean dining theatre. I went and told Teesikk and Buzhroot and we got in the lift and descended to floor negative six.

We followed the signs and sounds to the dining-hall theatre, then went through a door into a vast expanse of isolated table placement before a dark, empty stage.

An usher informed us that there were no oddly numbered tables. Teesikk told him that we were expecting a friend. The usher guided us to a table for four.

In the darkness on the stage blackpainted stagehands dragged a small luggage trunk from the wings to the front of the stage then stealthily dashed into the wings.

The woman we had come to see approached the table nearest to ours and asked them for their order. She cut them off before they’d started to answer and came over to our table.

She leaned on the back of the empty fourth chair and looked at each of us in turn, and said, “Well if it isn’t the three loose ends. Let me have a guess as to why you’re here. Your mate just got released from medical isolation so now you’ve seen what I did to him. And you’ve scurried here to disavow him. To espouse lies and apologetica. Right?”

Teesikk said, “We really didn’t know him. At all.”

The woman spat air, and said, “Right.”

The lights in the dining hall dimmed. She pulled the chair out from under the table and sat down.

A spotlight illuminated a magician on the stage. The sound of mumbling and clattering and shifting rose up, then fell to silence.

The magician bowed, then tilted his head back and reached three fingers into his throat. He pushed his hand further and then stopped, and pulled a two foot long machete out of his gullet.

As the crowd applauded he materialised a grapefruit from behind his ear and the applause increased.

He threw the grapefruit upwards in front of him and sliced it clean in half as it descended. The two halves landed in front of him and he kicked them into the audience and instructed whomever they landed nearest to taste them and verify their authenticity.

As they did that he dropped the machete and went to stage left and pulled a pram out from the wings. He positioned it behind the luggage trunk, then reached inside and lifted out a naked, wide inverted trapezium shaped two-headed baby.

He held the baby under its shoulders and presented it to the cooing and applauding audience, then clutched it under one arm rugby-style and knelt down and got the trunk open and flung the lid back. He presented the baby again and lowered it into the trunk, then shut the lid.

He got up and picked up the machete. He moved the pram away and knelt behind the trunk, then he raised the machete above his head and held it upwards as he recited a canticle.

The woman at our table silently and surreptitiously mouthed it with him until she glanced over at me carefully watching.

The magician swung the machete down and clean through the luggage trunk and it stuck diagonal in the stage. There was a rush of breath sound as the audience collectively gasped. Blood pooled beneath the trunk.

The magician lifted half the lid of one half of the trunk and reached inside, and lifted out a naked baby with one head, a left arm, a left leg, and a smooth curve of a right side.

The crowd applauded as he shut the lid and laid the baby on top.

He opened the other half of the trunk and lifted out a naked baby with one head, a right arm, a right leg, and a smoothly curved left flank.

The crowd whooped and he shut the lid and laid the baby on top.

Both babies got to squirming and screeching.

The magician shouted, “They hate being apart. They want to be together again. But they’ll have to wait. Until after this word from our sponsor this evening. The Skycrab Unification Programme. Project. The Skycrab Unification Project.”

The sounds of chairs creaking and quiet mumbling accompanied a hunchbacked androgynous onto the stage. They stood beside the trunk, then looked down at it and shuffled a few inches away.

Then they took a breath and lifted their head to look at the audience, and said, “Thankyou. Thankyou all. We at the Skycrab Unification Project have made great dividends in procuring material and fuel for the vessel that will deliver the skycrab’s body to it. Unfortunately however the corpus material is still lacking. Therefore we are introducing to the zeitgeist sphere a brand new cultural concept. With the combined powers of our trained specialists and unique crystal technology you will be able to double or triple your effort to the cause. We call is. Asbetology. Yes. Thankyou. Thankyou all. There are pamphlets in the lobby. Take as many as you want. Give them to your friends. Thankyou all. Thankyou.”

One of the babies squirmed and scrunched its face up, then thck green sludge leaked out of its arse and down the side of the trunk.

The androdge gagged, then waved and shuffled away into the wings and the magician returned to the stage with his mouth and nose buried in the crook of his elbow. He pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve and tied it over his face bandito-style. He knelt down and lifted one of the babies and opened the corresponding half of the luggage trunk and put the baby in and shut the lid. He did the same with the other baby, then he dislodged the machete from the stage and flung it over his shoulder and it stuck horizontally in the back wall.

He gesticulated and barked magic words. Then he opened both halves of the trunk, reached into it, and lifted out the wide two-headed baby. The audience whooped and applauded and rapped their knuckles on the tables.

The magician bowed and carried the baby away. The spotlight blinked out of existence. The the dininghall grew illuminated again.

The woman sitting with us leaned forward and rested with her arms on the table, and said, “You guys don’t need to worry. I’m a moment to moment type of person. I linger on nothing. And nothing lingers on me.”

Buzhroot opened his jacket to show us a black stain growing on his shirt at the side of his abdomen, and said, “I’m leaking.”

The woman stood up and pushed the chair back under the table, and said, “Hope that’s cleared that up for you guys. Can I get you anything to drink?”

Teesikk ordered a round of stouts, and while she went ou of sight to pour them and let them settle and top them off we hurried out of the dining-hall theatre and into the lift and up to the lobby and out the door.

–

We walked quickly back to the Crutch And Whistle, looking over our shoulder more often than we looked ahead. Inside the pub we hurried into a booth in a secluded corner and stood with our backs to the wall.

–

On the way home a flickering streetlamp held my gaze as we passed it and imbibed me with heavy dread vibrations, and got a memory pulsing in my mind like an underskin pimple.

---

This Week I Went To See A Doctor

I was sitting in the doctor’s office waitingroom when the front door burst open and a woman came bounding in gnashing her teeth and scratching herself all over.

She got to going through a shelf of leaflets and licking them and rubbing them all over herself, and said, “So what are you all in for? I’ve got too much energy. Here for a syphoning. Got fifteen minutes to wait yet.”

An alarm somewhere behind the reception desk chirupped. The scent of lavender tickled my throat.

The woman sat down, then stood up like the seat was hot and walked a lap of the room and stopped near me, and said, “Isn’t there a treadmil or something in here?”

I shrugged.

She said, “So what are you in for?”

I briefly summarised my circadean ailment.

She said, “Crikey that sounds inconvenient. What time’s your appointment?”

I checked my watch, and said, “In a few minutes.”

A man in front of me turned in his seat and stared at me with redspeckled eyes set in socketskin that looked like charcoal ha been smudged across it, and said, “Doesn’t seem like it’s too much of a problem for you then does it.”

I shrugged and looked away.

He said, “There’s people in here with real problems. I can only sleep if I’m being screamed at. My love life is in a shambles. That guy’s desperate for weight gain surgery and reverse liposuction or else he’s going to whither to nothing. She’s liable to burn herself out into a coma. And here’s you saying you can’t make appointments on time and here you are on time for your appointment.”

I wondered if I ought to leave and return late.

Then my name was called.

–

The doctor looked up from his desk and gestured to the seat opposite, and said, “Catpiece. Right on time. What’s the problem?”

I explained to him that my circadean rhythm was askew, and got to telling him about my blackouts when he held his hand up and I stopped talking.

He lowered his hand, and said, “You made it here rather punctually.”

I said, “It comes and goes.”

He said, “Well it seems to me that it’s gone. And in my opinion you should also be gone. From this office. I have a waitingroom full of patients with real problems.”

I got up from my seat.

The doctor got to typing and writing.

I went out through the waitingroom to the jeers and theatrical moans of its occupants.

–

In the street I checked my watch. It said it was three days after the day it was and five hours slow. My nose started to bleed. I pulled my scarf up over the bottom half of my face bandito-style and headed for the bus-stop.

---

This Week A Convention Came To Town

A gothic-spired gateless gateway made of scuffed fibreglass and unkempt foam rubber had been erected at the top of the highstreet to demark the entrance to the convention of hunters of pedarasts.

Teesikk nudged Buzhroot and nodded to the banner hanging over the gateway’s old signage, and said, “Are you still annoyed they changed their name, mate?”

Buzhroot sniffed and sighed, and said, “I loved that story, Teesikk.”

Beyond the gateway, the main highstreet was lined either side by temporary stalls and booths that blocked the doorways of the permanent shops behind them.

We took a slow stroll past vendors of hides and ivory. We thumbed through shelves of atobiographies, published journals, and coffee-table books. We peered into glass cabinets full of used bait that the vendors assured us were all certifiably censored and sealed and we looked briefly at the certificates they proudly waved in our faces. We didn’t buy anything.

We’d expected our windowshopping to last around an hour. We’d seen everything worth seeing within ten minutes, then went into the Crutch And Whistle.

–

At a table in the corner we drank our drinks and I told them about the waterlog situation in my livingroom.

Teesikk said, “Send an electrical current into it. Fry the entire ecosystem.”

I said, “I was going to get an executioner in.”

Teesikk said, “That’s all an executioner will do.”

Buzhroot said, “And what about the water?”

Teesikk shrugged and finished his drink. I finished mine and Buzhroot finished his. Then as soon as we’d put our empty glasses on the table a man approached us waiter-style.

He pointed at each of our empty glasses, and said, “Let me get you all another.”

The three of us shrugged and nodded. The man picked up our three glasses with his fingers like a clawcrane and sauntered off. Buzhroot suggested throwing some immersion heaters into my livingroom pond and waiting for total evaporation. Teesikk added the idea of wafting the steam out the window.

The man returned with four pints of beer on a tray. He put one down in front of each of us, and set the fourth at the empty place at the table. He took the tray to the bar, then returned and sat on the empty chair.

He picked up his beer and raised it, and said, “Cheers.”

Buzhroot said, “And who are you?”

The man took a drink and set his glass down, and said, “Swimshimmer. And you three?”

The three of us introduced ourselves.

Swimshimmer said, “There’s no catch. Enjoy your drinks.”

I picked up the glass in front of me, sniffed it, sipped it, then gulped down a mouthful.

Swimshimmer said, “See. No catch. Just good old fashioned generosity. No reason not to drink your drinks.”

We got to drinking and talking. He wanted to know what we thought of the see oh haych oh pee, and we told him that we’d found it underwhelming. Swimshimmer grinned and invited us to join him.

–

With a duffelbag slung over his shoulder, Swimshimmer led us through the cohop zigzagging from a booth on one side to a stall on the other and back across the thoroughfare etcetera until he stopped suddenly and we all came to a halt behind him and he nodded and stared at a plastering table tucked between two booths.

He went over and we went over with him.

Swimshimmer gestured with his hand circling above crystals laid out on the table, and said, “So what are these then?”

The woman behind the table said, “Repellants. Repellant crystals. Repel paedophiles. Give them to your kids. They’re good in any pierced or subdermally implanted jewellery mount. You got to find a jeweller though. I mean. So long as you can find a jeweller can do it.”

Swimshimmer said, “Where do source these?”

The woman said, “Grow them myself.”

He said, “You grow these.”

She said, “Myself.”

He swept the crystals aside and took his bag and put it down on the table and unzipped it and bade us all to look at the bundles of banknotes inside.

We did, and then we all stepped back.

He upturned the bag and dumped the money onto the table, and said, “I’ll take them all. And. You can keep the change.”

The woman shrank into herself slightly, and said, “No that’s. Erm. That’s. Too. Erm. Too much money. Erm.”

Swimshimmer put his hands in his pockets and raised his eyebrows while she carried on stammering and declining.

When she’d finished, he said, “You finished?”

Her mouth moved silently, then she said, “I can’t take all this.”

Swimshimmer picked up a crystal off the table and made to put it in his bag, and said, “It’s alright. It’s alright. You can.”

She looked at the money with her mouth moving silently again.

Swimshimmer put the crystal down, and said, “You know what. I’ll let you keep these as well.”

We left the table with the vendor’s proclamations of her own unworthiness behind us.

A few feet away, Swimshimmer said, “That was an alright bit of theatre. Good performance. You almost thought they didn’t want the money didn’t you. Come on. I’ll show you my penthouse suite. Don’t tell me you don’t want to see it. Everyone does.”

–

We went to the hotel he was staying at and through its lobby to the bar. Swimshimmer bought us drinks and asked the bartender what time they finished their shift.

We sat drinking weak cocktails and listening to him talk about numbers for an hour and a half, until Swimshimer checked his watch an told us it was time to see the penthouse. We all got up. He went to the bar and ordered drinks to his room.

–

The penthouse suite was the same as every penthouse suite depicted in any film or teevee programme. Everything was similar to a normal hotel room, only larger and gilded.

There was a knock at the door, and Swimshimmer went to it and let the bartender andthe trolley they were pushing into the room.

Then he shut the door behind him and stood in front of it, and said, “Your shift ended two minutes ago. Are you getting paid overtime?”

The bartender said, “No.”

Swimshimmer said, “You’re here of your own accord then. Have a drink. Then the four of us will fuck you. How does that sound.”

Teesikk, Buzhroot, and I shared sideways glances between each other.

The bartender said, “No thankyou. I just want to leave.”

Swimshimmer picked a bottle off the trolley and filled a glass with wine, then picked up the glass and held it out to the bartender.

The bartender said, “No. Thankyou.”

He raised the glass up to the bartender’s face, and said, “It’s alright. There’s plenty. And plenty more besides.”

The bartender rested a hand palm down on top of the glass and Swimshimmer lowered it.

Then he reached behind the bartender and grabbed their ponytail and yanked hard so that their head jolted back while their jaw stayed where it was. He raised the glass again and poured the wine into the bartender’s open mouth.

The bartender choked, then swallowed, then doubled over and got to coughing and spluttering. Buzhroot hurried to their side and pounded a fist on their back.

Swimshimmer refilled the glass and handed it to Buzhroot, and said, “Give them this to drink.”

The bartender swallowed the wine in a couple-and-one gulps then sat on the edge of the bed.

Swimshimmer said, “Do you want to undress yourself or would you rather one of us did it for you.”

The bartender cleared their throat, and said, “I don’t want you to do anything.”

Swimshimmer said, “It’s no bother.”

Buzhroot and Teesikk and I all looked at each other and back away through the door to the main room and kept backing away until we were out of the room and in the corridor, and into the lift, and into the lobby, and out into the street and the expo therein and then out of it and off in different directions to each of our homes.

---

This Week I Returned From Wherever I’d Been

I wondered how long I’d been lying on the ground before it had started vibrating. I had the fingertips of one hand touching the concrete and I could feel the beebuzz frequency through their numbness. My stomach trembled discordant. The two frequencies met at the back of my throat.

Post-blackout anxiety hormones seeping into my brain felt like hot ants burrowing into a lump of meat.

As I squirmed and turned my clothes were like hundreds of dry cat tongues all over me.

I got up to my hands and knees. My stomach shivered. The concrete vibrated through my palms. My elbows seized, then my shoulders and chest tightened. The frequencies converged in my throat. My torso and arms siezed like my muscles were being ratcheted tight, then a bilge of vomit flowed out through my mouth.

I spat, then caught my breath and spat again. I reached for the lamp-post I’d been sleeping next to and dragged myself up to my feet. I remembered arranging to meet someone at the lamp-post. I spat again. My memory was shredded, and pierced with pieces of deep dreams. Parsing through it looking for an answer would have ended up with it more torn and tangled.

–

In the highstreet I was buffeted by music from buskers and spilling out of shopfronts and flowing into each other like errant intersecting wind patterns.

Someone approached me with a handful of dusty, crumbling white rocks in their out-held palm, and said “Are you familiar with the skycrab unification project, sir?”

I shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

They said, “If you’d like to contribute. These new crystals are for sale.”

A rush of hot paranoid guilt swam up my spine and burned an image of someone arriving at the streetlamp into my backmind. I thought about returning to it, then shivered and the image dissolved. The androgynous closed their hand into a fist and huffed and tutted and walked away.

I remembered that I might have dreamed about making the appointment, then wondered if I hadn’t.

Someone approached me, yelling, “Pocketscreen two point oh. Control your scroll, sir.”

I shook my head and walked.

She quickened her pace to walk alongside me, then held up a poxkreen, and yelled, “Pocketscreen two point oh, sir. Control your scroll.”

I said, “No. And a third time no.”

A saxaphone screech cut through my consciousness like a long shard. I went over to a bin and threw up into it. When I’d finished I stood upright and watched the poxkreen seller home in on someone else.

I couldn’t remember who I’d arranged to meet at the streetlamp. I realised that if it hadn’t been a dream then they could be anyone in the city. My gut twisted at the chance of them seeing me walking in the opposite direction to our rendevous point. White noise of possible outcomes crackled in my mind. I raised my shoulders and lowered my head and hurried away from the highstreet.

–

While I was waiting for the bus that would take me home I was approached by a man holding his tongue out by a rusty screw screwed through it. I swayed on my feet. He let go of the screw and retracted his tongue and shut his mouth.

The bus crested the hill on its way to the bus stop.

The man scratched a scab on his forehead with the rusted and mottled fingernail replacements of his screwed together index and middle finger, and said, “Do you know when the bus is due?”

I looked and nodded at the approaching bus, and said, “It’s here now.”

He clucked and the metal through his tongue clacked on his teeth.

The bus slowed and veered towards the curb.

The man said, “Do you know when it’s due though?”

I said, “No.”

He said, “It’s lumps like you why they can get away with being so consistently late.”

The driver glanced at me and tapped on the glass partition she sat behind and rolled her hand. I got on and swapped a shaking fistful of rattling coins for a ticket, then staggered past benchfuls of doubled over pocketscreen junkies, past a couple-and-one empty benches, then turned and slumped onto the fourth and looked out the window at the man scuttling back to the nook he’d approached me from.

–

The bus was nearing my tenament block when someone at the back of it sneezed.

I heard someone say, “Oi. You ought to always sneeze into a sanitized handkerchief. Have you any idea how many virus particles you just unleashed?”

I turned to watch the pair.

One of them turned and wiped their nose on their sleeve, and said, “They have as much claim to this world as you or I.”

The other took a swig from a bottle and sucked air through his teeth, and said, “One of those free the disease lot are you.”

They stood up, and said, “I most certainly am.”

The other stood up and flipspan the bottle in his hand so he was holding it like a club with the rest of the drink pouring out. He tinked it against a handrail a couple-and-one times and threw a feignt. The virus rights advocate dodged into the aisle and backed away. The bus turned a corner and they both held on to the handrails and leaned against the momentum. The virightsvocate reached back and punched through the glass front of the emergency equipment panel. The bus screeched to a halt and everyone was thrown from their seats to the backs of the seats in front of them.

A shutter slammed down over the driver’ partition.

The other passengers all gathered and moved up the aisle and over benches either side of it then stopped a few feet away and cheered and whistled. A couple-and-one people caught between the crowd and the fight tried to push through but the crowd pushed them back and slapped their faces until they submitted to being a part of it and turned to watch and cheer and whistle with the rest of them.

The virightsvocate sntached a small hammer from its cradle in the panel and swung it at the air between the two of them, then swung it at the bottle and the bottle shattered. The man made tentative lunges with the blade of glass that remained attached to the bottleneck then drew it back and brought it down against the backs of the virightsvocate’s forearms they were holding in front of their face. Both sleeve and skin tore open and slick blood gushed forth and the man advanced and continued to slash at the virightsvocate’s arms and hands and drawing more blood in thick dashes across the upholstry and metal and a constellation of exploded drips on the floor between them.

The small hammer skidded over to me and hit my boot. I picked it up and it slipped out of my hand, then I picked it up by the head and wiped the handle on my shirt and held it by the handle and struck the window next to me and the glass shattered into a cascade of a thousands tiny cubes.

The virus rights advocate turned their arms to present their wrists, and yelled, “I hereby martyr myself to the cause of virus rights. Free the disease.”

I hoisted myself through the open window and landed on my feet and everyone inside the bus cheered.

–

When I got home the phone in the livingroom was ringing.

I looked at the barricaded door and watched coloured lights flicker round the edges and listened to the phone’s muffled screeching warble coming from the room behind.

Then the sound stopped and I went to my bedroom.

The bare matress splayed on the bedframe looked like a bloodless cuboid animal with springs for guts whose belly had been torn open.

Down the hall my doorbell shrieked.

I picked an empty bottle and a couple-and-one injectibles up off the floor and dropped them inside the mattress and vomited a teaspoon’sworth of bile into it, then I went to the kitchen and spat into the sink. I chugged a pint of water and put the glass down and carried the water sloshing in my belly to answer the bell.

It was my neighbour from next door. I couldn’t remember his name. I wondered if I’d ever been told.

He said, “What did you say?”

I shook my head, and said, “Nothing. Never mind.”

He shrugged and said, “Alright. Well Stifftop’s been trying to get in touch with you. And I’ve been trying to get in touch with you to tell you. I was banging on your wall the best part of the last seventeen hours.”

I said, “What does he want?”

He said, “To talk to you.”

I said, “About what?”

He shrugged again, then nodded toward my chest, and said, “There’s some sick on your shirt. Is it yours? If you need help with your technique all you have to do is ask. Mind if I come in?”

I said, “Yeh.”

He stepped toward the threshold.

I sighed, and said, “I mean yeh as in yeh I do mind.”

His nose scrunched, and he said, “What’s that smell?”

I turned and looked down the hallway at lights flickering in the gaps of the barricade in my livingroom doorway, then turned back round and pointed at myself, and said, “Probably my breath. The sick. What does Stifftop want to talk about?”

He shrugged again, and said, “He only told me he wanted to talk to you. He didn’t tell me what he wanted to talk to you about.”

I swayed on my feet.

The phone in my livingroom shrieked and warbled.

I pointed my thumb over my shoulder, and said, “That could be him now.”

He said, “Hope so.”

I stepped forward and he stepped back then I stepped back doubly and shut the door, threw up onto it, and locked the deadbolt.

---

This Week I Rearranged My Apartment

There was water in my livingroom an inch deep. I was standing at the doorway in the hall watching the flotsam and jetsom of dismantled television parts and street detritus drifting around on the surface.

I went to my kitchen and returned with sponges and tissues. I threw the sponges into the room then got to balling up rips of tissue and throwing them in. I realised immediately that they wouldn’t soak it all up. There must still have been sedative residue in my neural receptors.

I went to my spare room, then returned with a drill in my hand and workboots on my feet, then sploshed and splashed a couple-and-one steps in, knelt down, and pressed the drillbit into the water and against the floor.

I pulled the trigger and drilled through the layer of faux floorboards. Then when the drillbit hit concrete underneath it stopped spinning. The force rattled and shuddered up my arm until I let go of the trigger.

When I raised the drill out of the water there was a thin beige thread coiled round the bit and carrying on down into the water. I raised the drill further and drew more of it out of the water. I wondered if it was a length of wire or some structural part of the floor, and then it suddenly moved like I’d flicked it and a surge of adrenaline flooded my veins.

My hand opened and I jumped back and the drill splashed into the water. The thread uncoiled itself and slipped under the surface. I lifted a foot and tilted it up and saw another wriggling in the boot’s tread. I yanked at the bootlace and the knot came undone and I kicked so the boot flew off my foot and landed with a splash upright in the corner.

I hopped to the doorway and put my unshod foot in the dry hallway and untied my other boot and took it off and flung it toward the other.

Small bubbling ripples kept appearing on the water’s surface and travelling a few seconds and then disappearing. Each one roused a sense of nausea up my spine and a primordial disgust in my backbrain that eventually compunded and compelled me to secure the area and then abandon it.

I held onto the doorframe and leaned in reaching for the door opened into the room with my other hand. My fingertips got purchase on the handle and I pulled it slightly and felt water lap over and through my socks and wet my feet. I took my socks off and balled them up and threw them into the room, then I found a screwdriver and took my kitchen door off its hinges.

I dragged the door to my hallway and propped it up as best I could in the livingroom doorframe. Then I removed my bedroom door and brought that through and rested the bottom of it against the skirting board and let it fall against the kitchen door so it rested wedged diagonally against it.

Satisfied that the situation was secure and simultaneously concerned that it wasn’t, I put on a new pair of socks and a pair of shoes and went out to the pub.

---

This Week I Stayed In

The rain against my window sounded like gravel.

The screen of my dismantled television kept lighting up with scenes from my memory, like they were being transmitted from the soft grey psychic vaults whence they had been secreted away and secured.

Everything leaks eventually.

I covered the teevee screen with spraypaint, then smashed it with a hammer. It didn’t shatter. It buckled and bent like it was made of thin metal and some of the paint came off in flakes to reveal shapes and colours shifting underneath.

The sweet poison scent of the aerosol paint made me dizzy. I put the hammer through the window. The wind rushed in and shot sharp rain into my face.

I took the hammer into the kitchen and smashed the soiled crockery that was piled up in the sink.

I wanted to smash my hammer, but I only had the one.

My eyes ached, then leaked. Everything leaks eventually.

I wondered if I had too much black bile in me. I wondered how to check, and came to the idea of drawing blood and seeing if I could see any in it. I looked for a syringe but couldn’t find one. I took a knife out of the sink and got to looking for a bloodletting bowl. At the back of one drawer I found a couple-and-one sedative injectibles. I rolled up my sleeve and held all of them in one fist and slammed them into my forearm, then I laid down on the linoleum and remembered the memories my teevee had reminded me of.

Somehing leaked and dripped and sounded like a broken wet metronome lullaby.

---

This Week I Got A Diagnosis

The doctor tapped his finger a couple-and-one times on the top of my scalp and asked me whether the resonance I heard was of a higher or lower pitch than when he’d tapped just above my ear.

I shrugged and told him I couldn’t tell.

He rolled his eyes and tapped his finger on his desk, and said, “Hear that?”

I nodded.

He tapped a different part of his desk, and said, “That is lower.”

I said, “Is it?”

He sighed, and said, “You are tone deaf. Right. Well we cannot address your circadian issues until we’ve fixed that. Now. Since this appointment is predicated on remediating your circadian issues we will have to make a new appointment to address your tone-deafness.”

He took out a ledger and opened it and ran his finger down a page, and said, “Can you come in at the same time tomorrow?”

I shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

He said, “Are you sure? Considering your reason for coming in today.”

I told him I’d try my best.

He scrawled something in his book, then looked up at me and smiled, and said, “That is all one can do.”

He closed the book. I got up and left.

–

In the corridor outside the doctor’s office I wondered whether I needed to speak with the receptionist.

I looked at the doctor’s door. It radiated a psychic force that prevented me from even reaching for the handle.

I backed away from it, then turned and walked down the corridor.

–

By the time I’d got to the reception my thoughts and memories regarding the appointments had become intertwined like a double helix and knotted and tangled. I wasn’t sure whether I would have to officially formalise it.

The idea of returning in the morning to be told that I neglected the institution’s beurocracy and would be thrown out into the cold without inspection or prognosis filled me with a thick sense of dread.

I stood at the booth, looking at the receptionist behind the glass.

She kept her head down and rolled her eyes up to look at me, and said, “Yes?”

I said, “I made an appointment with the doctor. For tomorrow. But I wasn’t sure if.”

Her eyebrows lowered and her jaw tightened, and through gritted teeth she said, “What?”

I said, “I just made an appointment with the doctor and.”

She said, “What for?”

Her question tightened the knots in my mind.

The receptionist snorted and huffed like a frightened horse, then her arms lashed and flailed as she snatched up sheets of paper and flung them around and clattered on her computer’s keyboard and poked at its screen.

Then her shoulders sagged and she looked at me, and said, “Can you make it in at the same time tomorrow?”

I said, “That’s why I agreed to an appointment for then.”

She scowled, then the glass turned opaque.

–

Outside, I hurried through the rain and got into one of the taxis. The driver started the engine and inquired as to my prognosis. I told him about my rhythm deficiency and tone-deafness.

He told me his jazz band were looking for a bongo player, then put one of their songs on the car’s stereo. When a saxophone solo began, I had him pull over. I got out and walked the rest of the way home.

---

This Week I Went Behind The Scenes

The mobile cancer ward rumbled onwards. The fittings and furnishings inside rattled, and the children bound to their beds rattled. Beneath a layer of white smoke that plumed from swinging censers chained to the ceiling two nurses held on to bedframes and medical machinery as they made their way up and down the narrow aisle administering aid and comfort and inspecting and adjusting the thick leather straps that held their patients down.

I was looking at movie posters and headshots of saints and martyrs inscribed with symbols of the Motion Picture Cult that were plastered on the walls.

One of the nurses said, “I went to the hall of animatronics the other day. I tell you. These animatronics are getting more and more realistic looking.”

The other nurse said, “Because the actors they’re replicating are getting less realistic looking.”

I wondered why it had befallen Teesikk to chaperone his nephew.

He pointed to one of the nurses, and said, “They’re the chaperones, mate. I just want to go behind the scenes of a film. It’s where all my favourite teevee shows are set. His aunt would have preferred if he went on a blimp ride. She reckons he only wants this because the video games he plays have conditioned him. She says all he does in them is get shot dead over and over. I told her. You ought to have bought him some blimp games then. She says. He’s not interested in blimps.”

The bus slowed upon entering the movie lot, and came to a stop outside a hanger with the number 247 daubed across the huge doors.

Teesikk and I helped the nurses and the driver carry the shallowly breathing children off the vehicle and into wheelchairs that were waiting on the tarmac, while a small contingent of the Sky Crab Unification Program that had gathered near the hanger booed and hissed.

One of the nurses went over to berate the crowd. The other got to inserting neural link cables from the chairs to the napes of their new occupants necks, with each one zooming off a few seconds after the connection was made.

When all the children were off the bus and racing around a woman appeared and declared that she was the assistant director’s assistant. The nurses hurried to her and bowed and she placed lanyards around each of their necks. The driver went inside his vehicle and shut the door. The woman came over to me and Teesikk and we both bowed and she put lanyards on us and the nurses got to rounding up the kids.

Once the children had been coralled we all followed the aydeeyay and flashed our lanyards at the security barring the door and went into the hanger.

–

The dark and quiet alleyways walled by the bare backs of wooden facades. The aydeeyay hurried ahead of us to kick coils of cable and carry tripods out of the way. Muffled sound of stilted dialogue stopped and started again and stopped and started again.

We turned a corner and found ourselves behind crew and equipment all facing towards a set coated with white flakes and powder, with a couple-and-one black rabbits hopping and frolicking around the dozen upright metals struts protruding from it

One of the nurses turned to the throng of kids, and hisswhispered, “Wheel to wheel. Shoulder to shoulder.”

The children manouvred their wheelchairs into a row.

The director called cut and the aydeeyay went over to him and spoke into his ear. He handed her a broom and she went onto the set and shooed the rabbits away and got to sweeping where they’d been.

The director came over and spoke with the two nurses, then he held onto his chin with one hand and studied the row of kids. One of the nurses leaned close to him and said something into his ear. He kept hold of his chin while he nodded. The other nurse detached the cable from the kid’s spine and then lifted her out of of the wheelchair and carried her off out of sight.

I nudged Teesikk, and whispered, “What did the nurse say?”

He whispered, “I didn’t hear any of it.”

I whispered, “You said you could read lips.”

He whispered, “I thought the term meant something else, mate. Something like palmistry.”

Crew members arrived with harnesses, and the nurses got to unplugging the kids and the crew members got to putting harnesses on them and carrying them two by two by a slot on the harness onto the set and propped them up against the strut and attached the harness and left them artificially standing and slightly slumped.

The aydeeyay went to the director, and said, “The two extras refused their injections and now they’re outside being sick.”

Teesikk said, “She said The two extras refused their injections and now they’re outside being sick.”

The director said, “Am I due a cameo in this one?”

The aydeeyay said, “I’ll check.”

She hurried away then returned carrying a polkadot rifle over her shoulder, military drill style.

She presented it to the director, and said, “No you are not. And here is this.”

The director took the gun and put the butt to his shoulder and aimed at the ceiling. He clucked his tongue and lowered the weapon.

The aydeeyay took the rifle and handed it to a crew member.

The director pointed his elbow towards us, and said, “We’ll use those two. Get their lanyards off them. Get wigs on them. Then get them onto set.”

The aydeeyay kicked a wheelchair out of her way and came through the gap in the row to us, and said, “You two want to be in a movie right?”

Teesikk said, “Absolutely.”

I shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

Then the two of us slunked down and she dragged the lanyards over our heads and put them in her pocket.

Then she showed us a pair of injectibles, and said, “I need to offer you this. It’s mandated by the guild.”

We both rolled up our sleeves and offered her our wrists.

After she’d complimented my veins and injected us both, she went behind us and put a hand on each of our backs and guided us past racks of costumes and coats and to an open footlocker overflowing with hair of different colours and shades. She plucked two wigs out of the mass and put one on my head and put one on Teesikk’s head and adjusted them. Then she span me round and steered me by the shoulders back past the costumes and coats and onto the set and into the heat of the limelight.

She jerked me to a stop at the opposite side of the scene to the kids and turned me slightly, then told me to stay where I was. I loosened my tie and opened my collar. Teesikk appeared beside me and I heard the aydeeyay tell him to stay where he was.

An actor costumed as the Anarchonihilist appeared from the darkness and stood at the edge of the set, with the toetips of his shoes and the tip of his nose catching the light and the polkadot rifle glinting.

The director yelled, “Get that broom out of shot.”

The aydeeyay pushed between me and Teesikk and hurried to pick up the broom and walked backwards out of the scene, sweeping the white powder clear of her footprints as she went.

When she had left the director called action and the actor portraying Anarchonihilist raised the rifle and stepped into the light.

He aimed at the row of artificially upright children. Flashes of fire and sprays of sparks burst from the barrel and at the same time holes the children’s chests and torsos and backs and flailing arms and swinging legs tore open spewing out arcs of blood and pieces and lumps. Then a rapid series of deep and heavy thuds pounded through the hanger like an out of control piledriver spasming into steel.

The acrid scents of burnt cordite and wet copper lingered in the stillness. The director called cut.

Crew members got to detaching the limp and dripping bodies from the struts and carrying them off the set.

Someone grabbed my shoulders and guided me backwards into the dark and backwards past the racks of clothes and into the wig closet. The aydeeyay took the wig off my head and left. She returned with Teesikk and took the wig off his head. Then she told us directions to leave the building, and ran away.

I looked at Teesikk and he looked at me. Then we made our way back into the dark corridors.

–

At the exit we were asked to show our lanyards. I showed my courier pass and told them that Teesikk was my apprentice. When thy asked why he didn’t have his own pass I explained that it’s custom to withold apprentices their own cards until they have exceeded their probationary period.

Outside, we went to the vehicle and climbed aboard and helped the driver in taking down the posters and the headshots from the walls.

---

This Week Was Long, Drawn Out, And Uneventful

I was standing at my livingroom window watching the silhouettes of satellites gliding across the full moon and listening to the sound of controlled vomiting coming from next door.

Then my phone started ringing and I went over and answered it.

Down the line, Teesikk said, “Remembering is the opposite of waiting.”

I said, “Are you waiting for something?”

He hiccuped, and said, “Nothing in particular, mate.”

I said, “Remembering something?”

He said, “An article I read that described the binge drinking practices of some particular hermits in the Grey. They do it to simulate social interaction. When they start to get drunk it’s akin to meeting up with someone. Heightened enjoyment of experiences and lowered inhibitions. They start drinking twice as much. As if there was someone with them. And they get blackout drunk like they’re getting blackout drunk with someone.

“When they come round they’re wracked with violent withdrawls. They experience this like an argument and then an assault. Like their friend is attacking them. And they throw up like they’re rejecting them.

“After they’ve recovered from the heavy early withdrawls they experience anxiety and guilt due to their depleted chemicals getting replenished and their surplus chemicals being sweated out. Same as after an argument.

“Then when they drink again it’s like they’re making up with their old friend. Like they can’t even remember why they fell out. They kiss the bottle and they’re friends again. You still there, mate?”

I said, “Yeh I’m still here.”

He said, “Aren’t you wondering why I’m telling you about that?”

I shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

He said, “Figured you might find it useful in your prolonged solitude. We haven’t seen you for a while, mate.”

I told him I’d been unwell. He inferred that I was referring to my curse. I didn’t deny it. Nor did I acknowledge it. He asked me if I was still there and I told him that I was.

---

This Week Ended In Failure

My phone had been ringing so loud that eventually the receiver fell off the cradle and hit the floor. A small voice crept out of it. I went over and picked it up and put it to my ear, and was asked whether I’d accept a call from the prison.

When I said that I would a tone came down the line that felt like a needle pressing against my eardrum. Then it stopped and there was a whirring sound like the needle was being retracted.

Stifftop’s voice came through, and he said, “How have you and Jhamnikkel been getting on”

I said, “Who?”

Stifftop said, “It’s been almost two months. He should have moved in by now.”

I said, “Next door to me?”

He said, “Yeh.”

I said, “We’ve been getting on alright.”

He set, “Lovely. Let him know the farm’s ready for a parrot.”

I opened my mouth while I thought of what I wanted to ask him first, and the line went dead.

I grabbed my coat and went out into my tenament floor’s communal corridor, and knocked on my neighbour’s door. A minute later it opened to my neighbour, who stood at the threshold with a rolled towel round his neck and wet vomit on his lips and chin. He looked at me with wide eyes and high brows.

I said, “Stifftop wants me to tell you the farm’s ready for a parrot.”

He tutted, and said, “Already? Alright. Come in. I’ve just got to finish my reps.”

I followed him into his flat and shut the door behind me. He went into his bathroom, and I stood in the hall listening to the little gulps and gasps and groans and the splashing sounds he made.

The toilet flushed and he came out of the bathroom, acknowledged me, and went into his bedroom, and returned in a clean change of clothes with a duffel bag over his shoulder.

We went out and down to the carpark. He threw the bag in the back seat, we got in the front and set off for the Terrace Grids.

–

Inside the Terrace Grids we trundled along the straight roads and round right-angle turns manoevering through the process of elimination style puzzle with blockades and bollards barring our progress and having us making three-point-turns every few minutes.

As soon as we turned into Faceglow Row I was jolted forward against my seatbelt like we’d hit a bollard. A pocketscreen junky was standing in front of the car. She stared past the screen in her hand andover the bonnet and through the windscreen at us. Jhamnikkel was twisting his keys in the ignition and wrenching the gearstick and ponding the pedal, and the car was coughing and snorting.

Then the car lurched into movement. The poxcreen junky slunked aside. The wing mirror on my side clipped her and folded in on its hinge and she stumbled. I wound the window down and leaned out and folded the wingmirror back out, and watched her shuffle across the road with her head bowed.

With Jhamnikkel keeping the car at a crawling speed we traveled along, looking at the rows of poxcreen junkies sitting under the scaffolding either side of us, shaded from the sun with their faces glowing with shifting colours.

Jhamnikkel said, “I really hate these people. Addicts. I envy them their lack of apprehension instinct. Their lack of self preservation instinct. All the top athletes in my disipline are the same. Same as them not the same as me. Like houses without a fuse box. No surge breaker.”

I wondered what his discipline was.

He said, “Competitive vomiting. I’m not bad. My stream can break dinner plates. But the top level. They’re beyond. I’ve seen them shatter cinder blocks.”

When we reached the end of the Row, Jhamnikkel beeped his horn and wheelspan the car in a slow arc around the corner.

–

After a dozen more U-turns we arrived at our destination.

We pulled up by an entrance to a narrow ginnel and got out of the car. Jhamnikkel grabbed the bag off the back seat and we went down the ginnel to the trashfire halfpipe, and soft scent of damp ash, and the harsh singing of parrots, and a xylophone tune.

Jhamnikkel swung the bag round to his front and unzipped it and took out a pair of long, clear plastic ponchos. He passed one to me, then put his on and raised the attached hood, and I did likewise. Then he took a telescopic birdcatching pole out of the bag and extended it as we headed towards a large birdcage that was built high up in the scaffolding and spanned the narrow gap between the backs of the terrace houses like a bridge.

Underneath it drips of birdshit dropped like slowly melting snow. Jhamnikkel hoisted the pole upwards and slotted it through a gap in the chainlink cage floor. A drop ofshit tapped me on the shoulder.

Jhamnikkel tutted and rectracted the rod section by section. When it was all back in its handle he took a cracker out of his pocket, snapped it into acouple and one pieces, and slotted one into the baitslot. More birdshit tapped on my shoulders and head. Jhamnikkel readied the snare and extended the pole again and hoisted it up and poked it through the hole again.

He clenched his teeth, and said, “Come on. You know you want it. Come on come on.”

A light on the handle blinked and Jhamnikkel pulled the trigger. The cage clanged as it rattled and shook with a cacophony of screeching coming from within and rushing both ways down the trashpath. Jhamnikkel whirled the wheel and reeled the rod down section into section with the bright bird fretting and fluttering at the tip.

I took a collapsible birdcage from his bag and concertinaed it up. He put the bird in and shut the door. Then he took the cage and twisted the top, and we headed back to the car.

–

We arrived at Stifftop’s farm around moonfall and a woman stepped out of the shadows beside the path. She walked in the headlight beams, and we followed like she was pulling the car with them.

She stepped aside when we got to the front of the only barn with its doors open. Jhamnikkel drove the car halfway into the barn, and its lights filled the place and sent flat shadows of its half a dozen occupants sliding across the walls.

The woman leaned into Jhamnikkel’s open window, and looked at the birdcage on the backseat, and said, “Keep the engine running. We need her light. Send Stifftop an invoice. You couldn’t have got one that was already plucked?”

We got out of the car. Jhamnikkel retrieved the cage, then the syncopated sound of our doors thumpclicking shut echoed off the walls and high ceiling.

Jhamnikkel held up the cage, and said, “This one’s trick is it can pluck itself.”

The woman opened the cage door and put her hand in, and grabbed the parrot and wrangled it out, and said, “How do we make it start?”

Jhamnikkel tutted, and said, “No. It can’t. Unless it can. But I don’t know that it can. And I know I don’t know how to make it start if it can.”

She got to pulling clutches of feathers out of the squirming and screeching bird in her grasp, and we walked to where two androdges were running electric razors over a naked man standing teeposed.

I lit a cigarette. Tufts of black hair and coloured feathers swirled in the warm air by my legs. Jhamnikkel took a prosthetic thumb out of his pocket and got to sucking on the tip.

The woman said, “Have we come to a conclusion regarding the teeth and the beak?”

Jhamnikkel took the prosthumb out of his mouth and gesticulated with the wet glistening tip, and said, “I stand by my opinion. I’ve heard of tooth rot but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of tooth disease. And I know I’ve never heard of beak disease. Comparison is the aim. To set a metric. Difference is deviation from the metric. They’re different. Teeth and beaks. A beak.”

She said, “You didn’t talk to Stifftop then.”

He pointed the prosthumb at me, and said, “This guy knows his uncle.”

She said, “You’re acquainted with the dentist?”

I shrugged, and said, “Sure.”

She said, “So what do you think?”

I pointed my cigarette toward Jhamnikkel, and said, “Same as this guy.”

She said, “Alright. You’ve persuaded me. Resume your oral stimulation while you think on gum disease.”

He tutted, and said, “Whatever the beak’s attached to is equivalent enough.”

The woman pointed at him with the struggling bird, and said, “I agree.”

She pointed it at me. I shrugged and nodded. Someone came over with a pair of handheld angle-grinders. The naked man sat into a wheelchair. One of the androdges injected his neck with a couple-and-one syringes. The other put a bib around his neck, and took the angle-grinder that was being handed to them. The woman held the bald, squirming parrot out and it was injected and taken from her.

Jhamnikkel, the woman and I stood behind the sheildwall of the barncrew’s backs that obscured their activities. The angle-grinders whirred and screeched. A smell like charred plastic emerged and intruded.

Jhamnikkel started swaying slightly, and rolling his shoulders, and gasping.

He leaned into himself and clenched his muscles, and through gritted teeth he said, “I’m going to throw up. It feels. Powerful. Get me. Something. To break.”

I yelled for everyone to stop. They did, and they turned round, and Jhamnikkel pointed to the limp pink thing one of them was holding and shrieked, and the man threw the parrot like it had suddenly got hot in his hand.

It landed on the ground and slid towards Jhamnikkel.

He pointed at it, and screamed, and then flung his arms back and doubled over and let out a stream of vomit that slammed down onto the bird and churned, crushing the pink creature splayed against the concrete.

When the flow stopped he spat and wiped his mouth and kicked the flattened bird away. The woman announced to the barn that the vomiting had ceased, then called for everyone to gather by the car.

Jhamnikkel kicked at the pool of thin vomit and tutted, and said, “Not even a dent.”

We went to join the group at the car. After we all compared schedules, and the martyr’s chaperone confirmed his client’s continued willingness to the cause, a date for a second attempt was arranged and we headed home.

---