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THE TELEPHONE HAS finally stopped ringing. I can’t tear myself away. I have work to do but I can’t get to it. It’s been like this for a long time now. It has no hold over me — except that somehow it does. I’m back here where I was born, in my home town, feeling almost friendless. If you and I reach the end of this, we’ll be the kind of friends who grew up in each other’s pockets but still don’t understand one another. It corners me, cries out for me when I’m not there. I feel my eardrums meeting in the middle of my head. That high-pitched screaming has me in its spell. Its boxed sound-effects and strobing coloured dots are instruments of torture. I’m sure it isn’t meant to be this way. My coffee goes cold, my muscles are wasting away, my brain fries in its own lard of under-exercised cells as I slump here, couch potato, square-eyed, pot-bellied, shiftless. “That’s not a real monkey, is it? It’s a chap dressed-up, messing about, isn’t it?” No, Auntie Sadie, that’s a lemur. I think. A llama...no, that can’t be right. It’s something else altogether. A marmoset, perhaps. What a way to live. Days pass and I have no feeling for them. People come in, say, “It’s quite warm out,” but I don’t go. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could remember, but it all disappears in a staticky electric porridge. Come to that, I can’t remember much about what’s real, either. I do remember a June day in a field on a mushroom farm, warm air heavy with the choking smell of pigs, watching metallic dragonflies taxi and take-off from a reeded pond. A dark scab, a blood clot against the heat-haze between the trees, far-off for an instant, the size and colour of a crow. Then upon us: fiery noise building, swelling like a cancer, swallowing me up, devouring the world. Sitting there with the trees rustling like dollar bills, feeling I’d go mad if this went on a second longer and wanting to scream, to shout out as it entered my skull and left by the back door with a prod like a dentist’s drill, low, high and middle frequencies all at the same time. Ground quaking, birdsong gulped down, spat out, summer day made purgatory and then — in less time than it took to appear — the deep black needle of the fighter jet gone and life resurrected. To end up here: a u-shaped membrane on a leather sofa under the sick halo of the tasselled standard lamp, bullet-grey ash creeping up the cigarette towards my fingers. With a procession of ivory elephants. Surrounded by the deep green of house plants. Meandering weave of the carpet and positively-charged ions between me and the illusion of faces on the screen. My brothers. The family. This is my world. I slouch. I hunch. I submit. Drop my guard. Become permeable. I am filled up. After that, I don’t remember. God help me.
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