Misery upon grim
The British don’t expect to be happy. On this small boot-shaped island miserableness is patriotic. The British are proudly miserable. In the depths of winter misery is a crackling fire in the pit of one’s gut. It’s the only way to survive. I thought digging out the scarves and gloves, plugging gaps under doors, double glazing windows, bleeding the radiators, test running the boiler, was preparing for winter but these remedies are cosmetic. The secret to preparing for winter in Britain is allowing the malaise to gently ebb into misery and letting it burn.
The mistake I made when I arrived in Britain was assuming the British would be slightly more used to Britain than someone who’d just arrived. It was a logical assumption to make that a person born and bred here would find the weather for instance a part of life. But no, the British are just as astonished at how vile the weather can be as someone fresh off the plane. No one gets used to it. The weather is actually moderate comparatively to other countries, never too hot, never too cold. But it’s the blinding sunshine that can come out of nowhere just as you pack away your sunglasses and step out in your thermals. The wind that can turn your brolly into a tangle of wires clinging to the rim of a bin like a massive spider resisting capture. The rain that never really gets going, just drizzle that murmurs in the background of every scene. The grey that pours into every crack. The damp that trickles into your bones and settles like a muddy puddle. Every winter the British are appalled at the dreariness of their surroundings and the degree of their ensuing misery but the thing is they don’t try and fight it.
The British embrace all forms of sickness too. They have a word that means sick but not sick. Poorly. Poorly usually lasts about 24 hours. Very rarely are you asked to elaborate on poorly. If in some strange circumstance you are asked to elaborate, poorly is a dodgy tandoori. It’s your entitlement as a citizen to feel poorly a few times a year. You just have to say the word and everyone files into line brows heavy with sympathy in silent compliance with a contract they must have agreed among themselves centuries ago. The winter is unpredictable and some days the sky feels so low you need to accept its weight and declare yourself poorly. A Londoner said to me one day with his face mushy with misery ‘poorly means blah’ trying to help me understand. I kind of got it. Blah is not an excuse for absence at work but poorly is.
Poorly often means a potential cold but so does coldy. Sore legs, aching bones might indeed be coldy but its best described as poorly, until the nose starts running. Poorly means I’m not quite right in myself. Whatever that quite means. It can mean ‘I want to be alone’ but of course this is too confrontational so poorly is a gentle retreat avoiding offence. It can be mental, physical or spiritual. It can be fatigue. Its power lies in its ability to engender sympathy without having to elaborate. Serious enough to cancel, not serious enough to go to the doctor. Bad enough to stay home, not bad enough to lie in bed all day. Could get worse probably won’t.
Poorly can mean indisposed which can mean anything at all but probably means can’t be bothered. Poorly can mean out of sorts which can mean anything and suggests you are usually in sorts whatever sorts are. Poorly can mean not up to par. Poorly can mean peaky, liverish, queasy, nauseous, off colour, under the weather, not up to snuff and crook. Poorly can mean funny, peculiar, crummy, lousy and rough. It can mean ropy and grotty, vulgar, queer and seedy. It describes every glorious colour in the rainbow of feeling like shit. It’s the perfect British adjective because it justifies a period of introspection impenetrable to outside enquiry. It’s a cave to wait out the thick internal fog of repression and usually, most of the time, nearly always an excuse to do nothing.
Oddly, very poorly is a completely different matter all-together. By placing very before poorly you’ve turned an ambiguous disposition into a life threatening situation. There is no confusion with very poorly. Call an ambulance. It means sick and probably dying.
I saw a TV show about ambulance drivers in Birmingham and when they described one of the many old ladies they found in a heap at the bottom of the stairs as very poorly I knew very poorly was a serious matter indeed. When I saw a man with oxygen strapped to his mouth described as very poorly, shortly after he rated his pain 11 out of 10 I knew the prefix of very took poorly to a red alert. Just by adding very to poorly.
Poorly meant not so good once upon a time. It’s a very old word that experienced resurgence in the late 20th century post WW2 which coincides with social change and an increase in options for British people including the right to be poorly. It coincides with film and television selling aspiration. It coincides with the science of psychiatry pathologising unhappiness and prescribing pills to treat it. The expectation to be happy is now so powerful you are prescribed drugs if you fall anywhere between miserable and happy. Americans love a pill. The British could inject a packet and still feel miserable because in Britain it’s not a condition, it’s human right.
Not being funny
A friend of a friend sat in her kitchen with views of the river Thames. She had just cracked open a beer for me and one for herself after swearing she’d never drink again after last night’s party. I thought this odd as we’d just finished two bottles of wine over lunch at a pub in Pimlico and she hadn’t mentioned last night’s party. I guessed arriving at her place and seeing evidence of last night’s party forced her to mention it.
“Balls” she said. “So sick of this political correctness”
Our common friend Gail sat on the other side of the kitchen bench getting ready to hear her long term friend’s sermon on what’s wrong with today’s world.
“You can’t say anything to anyone”
Paula was a rectangle of a woman with short cropped hair, made blonde thousands of times over. She’d just asked a waitress in the pub where she was from and the waitress had told her ‘Bulgaria’ but was frosty from that point onwards. Our common friend Gail tried to explain that while she was one who first used the word frosty to describe the waitress, perhaps asking her where she was from after repeating the food order really slowly could have been interpreted as racist.
“Balls! I was trying to make her job easier. I was genuinely interested in where she was from. I mean, this, this is why Europe can fuck off”
It was about now I realised that the UK exiting the European Union was a possibility. Not a huge possibility. A possibility. There were enough Gail’s who saw being part of Europe as a frustrating but necessary compromise but here were also a few Paula’s. It was October 2015, a few weeks before exiting my 10 year marriage. Paula was about to give me the first glimpse into the consequences of my decision to leave my 10 year relationship. She was an expert on leaving I was about to find out.
“Take my beauty salon”
It made me laugh the idea that Paula owned a beauty salon. She was not the skinny model I associated with beauty salons but she smelt like Chanel No 5 and her bolshie Libertarianism was sexy, beautiful in different way.
“I have the cameras on all the time because I know that Klaudia and Lilianna will steal from me one day. Only a matter of time. And it’s not because their Eastern European, it’s because they are desperate. They come from desperate countries. England is not as desperate so the English are less likely to steal. This is fact, not bloody racism”
Ashes to ashes, tat to tut
David Bowie said in his song Queen Bitch
She’s so swishy in her satin and tat
In her frock coat
and bipperty-bopperty hat
Tat is good bad and sometimes bad good, unnecessary but a statement none the less.
A Londoner will tell you tut describes items with no aesthetic merit or use or monetary value. In England a Northerner may use tat and a Southerner may use tut to describe the same load of old stuff.
A load of old tat is usually a comment on someone else’s stuff rather than a comment on your own stuff. It’s a way of mocking your friend’s unhealthy attachment to a load of old stuff. It’s often resented by the owner but somehow unmovable. Tat is the gossip of the unconscious. It tells you something you need to know about yourself that’s uncomfortable and that you are probably not ready to hear. The reason will reveal itself eventually but in the meantime the tut appears ominously innocuous.
Ian Dury a Londoner said in his song Clever Trevor
Nothing underfoot comes to nothing less to add to a load of old tut and I ain’t half not half glad cos there’s nowhere to put it, even if I had
Ian is trapped in his tut, helpless, it will just appear elsewhere so he makes no attempt to move it. Tut seems to be an immovable beast.
Tat is also piles of stuff that you are planning to sort or read or cut up. Pile makers are always the less pretty sister, the less athletic brother, chastised, the stuck, the people who want to be someone else, the person always 15 minutes late. Pile makers add to the pile more than they chip away at it. Chipping away at it is always hindered by something that has no relationship with reducing the pile.
Christopher says ‘I need to get stuck into that pile but I’m trying to sell that chair first’
Christopher says ‘I will sort all of that soon I just need to move the glass cabinet’
Christopher says these things as if the pile might fall on the top of him as he starts the vigorous task of ignoring the voice that lists all the horrible things that might happen to him if he throws it away. Christopher avoids sorting the pile anyway he can. Over complicating matters and making the job seem bigger prolongs his time with the pile. Found in the pile are unpaid utility bill, important news articles, several brochures on cancer, an empty Valium packet and an autumn leaf. The pile holds significance in Christopher’s mind because at one point something important was in the pile. It gives everything else in the pile a value it never had before. A torn envelope is suddenly punching above its weight in such a pile. The empty Valium packet could be a reminder of something or does it have a repeat prescription on the back of it? He’s not sure what item in the pile makes the pile significant. This will keep the pile from reducing for a long time. Christopher won’t make the connection, the empty Valium packet has something to do with the proliferation of piles around the house. Christopher’s muscles are like jelly so sorting a pile is difficult. He will be waiting on a delivery of a universal remote control that won’t work before attempting to sort the pile. The connection between the two is not obvious. Perhaps there is. But regardless he will float into slumber and wake up still angry but unable to swing a punch.
Christopher says ‘I just need to get that universal remote control before sorting the pile’
A corner often needs tat. A cane basket, an old suitcase, a few logs, maybe some wool, a few books, hats. This gives a corner a story, it’s now more than a single point where two walls meet. As important as that meeting is.
In two up two down house in a small town in the north of Wales lived Babs and John. Babs put a rusty brass kettle that had never poured a single cup of tea in a fireplace that had never seen single flicker of a flame. John sat in the same recliner every night but couldn’t fully extend the footrest because it would tip the magazine rack over which sat beside the recliner in the only place it could sit unhindered by another object. One leg ached all the time because it was just short of fully extended. John longed to stretch out both legs but had given up worrying about it as it felt like the slightest inconvenience not worthy of discussion. A set of brown rugs folded in equal parts of eight and one wool throw scrolled on top sat beside the magazine rack. These rugs were not meant to warm the knees but rather warm the air. Their tempting warm aesthetic was their main purpose.
In the spare bedroom were a collection of dolls in rows, the biggest dolls at the back cascading to the smallest at the front, with an array of wonky and startled eyes sometimes on the same doll’s face. Each had the roughly the same facial expression but the longer you stared at their faces the more they differed from each other. They could look menacing and they could look kind and sometimes blank. Some were in conversation if you tilted their heads slightly. Babs wasn’t particularly fond of dolls nor was she was particularly maternal. The dolls just warmed up a cold back room. A pink rose quilt covered the guest bed and the light shade and the tissue box on the side table. The quilt was tightly tucked under a springy mattress and it took some digging to peel it back and climb in.
The freezer was packed solid with frozen food. The freezer door was decorated in crayon sketches and magnets with sayings about life’s peculiarities. The door held in garden peas, fish fingers, pizza subs and chocolate muffins. Ice mushroomed around the stiff plastic bags and spiked in furry corners. Babs was ready for any contingency, nuclear war, a long winter. She lived in loose hanging shirts that draped over tight-fitting jumpers, she dressed to cover up her body. Babs hated being fat, the hate was less painful when she ate.
Tat is the accumulation of items that have no functional purpose for the sake of filling a space.
Tat can be a legacy of staying in one place for a long time or it can be a cry for help.
Babs and John’s son ordered something small from a mail order catalogue every week. The arrival of a parcel the next day had nothing to do with the object inside but rather the thrill of the gift. One day the mail didn’t arrive. His cheeks caved in so sharply the universe was sucked into the hole left by his despair. He once bought a miniature clamp. It never left it’s packet. What does a miniature clamp hold, maybe a tea towel. It went on a shelf beside a box of dead matches and an empty bottle of oil covered in glitter and a fluorescent hair band that had lost its elasticity. Sometimes he would clutter his room with so much tat he couldn’t find his bed. He would then reorganise it all neatly and spread it about again. Babs saw all the things she loathed in herself also in her son. His loose skin and wide open heart. His attachment to useless things. He never spent a lot of money, maybe a few dollars. It was about the parcel, the arrival, the unwrapping, the status of receiving. Tat is not worthless to those who accumulate it. All that stuff protects.
Babs watched her son grow larger. She could see he was making the same mistake she did. He smiled excitedly when she put down fish fingers on white fluffy bread lathered in mayonnaise. He helped her clean offices in the city. He sometimes forgot to spray wipe the desks so she would whack him across the head, making his ears pink. She hit him for the small things because she couldn’t hit him for eating the food she put down. That would make no sense. The fat grew around his bones like the tat around his bed. When he was rejected for being too fat to have sex with or too nice to have a relationship with, he’d put all his tat in garbage bags and shove it in a cupboard. As he slowly recovered from feelings of unworthiness the tat returned; new books, long billowy shirts, picture frames and the creep of the contents in the garbage bags from the cupboard back to his room. To free himself of the tat he would need therapy and in his sessions he would need to hate his mother for sending him mixed messages of affection as teenager. Hate his mother for over feeding him. Hate him for slapping his fat leaving a white tattoo on his skin that fades as her hand sways back passed her hip. But he would rather hate himself than hate his mother and let the tat be a small price to pay.
Babs will decorate a bookshelf until she can’t pull out a single book for the tat. She’ll display candles, brass rings, incense sticks, figurines, feathers, tobacco pipes and she will also have a universal remote control that every few years wakes up and changes the channel on the TV next door. She has books on the very top of the book shelf and quite impressively manages to store a small dolls house, a tennis racket cover and Balinese fan collection on top of these books. The book shelf will forever be a cumbersome thing about to topple but she will continue to decorate it with frilly regrets, best intentions and memory catches. And a picture of her son.
Crazy
A crazy person said once that “everyone’s life is a form of psychosis in slow motion and that crazy people are just experiencing psychosis in real time so its more noticeable”. For most of us there’s just enough gaps between disastrous events to create the illusion of sanity.
Crazy people provide a perspective on your lifestyle achievements that you take for granted; house, car, family, dog. You won’t have realised for instance that a house is an ostentatious expression of your control tendencies. A car for instance is the penis you envied in the gym changing rooms. A family is the fear of being alone. A dog is a crutch for your social ineptitude.
Crazy people will churn out great works of beauty as acts of defiance. Stand-up comedy is a slow and public nervous breakdown. We shouldn’t be laughing we should be calling an ambulance.
Crazy people are unpredictable, vulnerable and authentic. The combination of these are an aphrodisiac and will conjure love. Crazy people will do anything to make themselves feel better. Their self-effacing twists and turns will make you laugh and invigorate your spirit but exhaust the crazy person. You’ll want them in your arms radiating manic energy but they will fall limp well before you’re ready to stop feeding off them. You’ll justify the chaos by declaring that opposites attract. The sex will be unparalleled because you’re having sex with a body in turmoil as personalities jostle for attention. It’s an orgy without the insecurity body image issues. Then inevitably a relationship forms, you may even marry and suddenly they want to have sex with you ONLY to mute panic. You will feel like a carer at best and a piñata full of antidepressants at worse.
A crazy person never sees themselves as crazy particularly when they’re in a relationship. They think the other person is crazy which of course is true making them even more convinced they are right about everything including their misguided view of themselves as sane. This is the very definition of crazy.
If two speeding cars collide, the impact is the combined speed each are travelling at the point of collision. This is a relationship when both people are crazy. The coming together of crazy people is always a glorious explosion.
Robert’s eyes are fixed on Cameron’s. Cameron’s feet are stuck to the floor. The beers keep arriving and when the crowd thins Robert moves in. Now Cameron can see the colour of his eyes. A distant blue under thick shattered ice. Too many late shifts. He places another beer in front of Cameron and asks the last few customers to leave so he can close up. They complain, over-using his name. Robert. Did he hear correctly? Eventually the customers do as they are told. He locks the door behind them. Robert sculls Cameron’s beer to wash down his fear and rests his elbows on the bar. A hand grabs his belt and swings him round. He pauses for a few seconds to study Cameron’s face and then begins undressing him. He lies Cameron on the bar. Wet beer squelches beneath his spine. He undresses too now, keeping his eyes fixed on Cameron. Once he’s naked he climbs on the bar and places one foot on either side of Cameron’s hips. He slowly lowers himself down.
Cameron goes back to the bar night after night. It’s the same ritual. Cameron wants to lay himself down on the bar from the moment he arrives but he has to wait all night till the bar closed. Robert barely speaks but he makes his intentions clear through eyes that glue on to his. Holding Cameron long in his stare he feels guilty for crimes not yet committed. Only Robert know this.
Cameron tells Robert they are in a relationship as he licks Cameron’s torso clean of beer. Cameron nods and lets his hands rest on the peak of Robert’s buttocks.
The bedroom feels stale. He needs more. Fresh beating heart. Seduced, just as Cameron once was. The smell of cigarette smoke and beer was hard to adjust to first thing in the morning but Cameron got used to it and looked forward to it after a while. Robert would pull the man to Cameron’s bedroom and undress him starting with a tug of the belt. Robert would stare into Cameron’s eyes as the man pushed into him. His eyes were an embrace.
“Are we open?” Cameron asked. He was not sure what this meant but if it meant living a life free of social and moral restrictions he wanted in.
“Polyamory”
“What?”
Cameron laughed and held on to him tightly. A man like this would ground him.
“So you’re okay with it then?”
“If you are?”
Robert kisses Cameron’s forehead.
“Monogamy is unnatural. I don’t own his body and he doesn’t own mine”
He waited till noon to hear his knock. He went to the bar. He hadn’t turned up for work the night before.
Cameron went home and waited.
Cameron is naked on his bed with the fire exit door open waiting for a breeze. It’s the darkest hour just before dawn and the air is still thick with humidity. The thin skin of his testicles sticks to the inside of his thigh. He peels the skin away and flicks them gently to keep them cool. He stares at the ceiling and tries some Jungian interpretation of the stains and cracked paint. Cameron sees only Robert’s face, arms, legs. Silence is typical of this time of day but the silence this morning has depth. It hangs heavy and sticks fast as if it is a sound in it’s own right overbearing all other sounds. Like white is a colour, silence can be a sound. He understands it’s depth. It was holding something, someone. He didn’t hear footsteps so when he appeared it was as if he was floating. Robert. Beside him, propped up on one elbow and staring into his eyes. Robert’s eyes are colourless he remembers they are blue but he can’t see the blue. It’s dark. He rests his lips, his breath falters. Cameron holds on until finally his tongue pushes into his mouth. He places his hand on the back of his head and pulls him in. The room cools. This is a good thing this humid morning but an ominous sign too. Cameron tries not to think about it as he kisses him, his first love. Robert where are you?
Cameron and Robert made clumsy love. Cameron kissed Robert with a welcomed objectivity, without the deep hunger he felt when he made love to him two years earlier. Robert sensed a detachment and stepped it up. His writhing body and honks of wonderment at Cameron’s thrusts stretched his cock to new lengths. Although this time he was only mildly intrigued by his dance. Cameron remembered why he lusted for Robert so irrationally once. He wasn’t a fool after all, Robert was just very good at what he did.
Cameron smiled at Robert slouching against his pillows chain smoking not because he loved him in any romantic sense anymore but because he remembered how desperate he was for him to be in his bed once. Cameron was filling in the gaps and honoring his younger less resilient self.
Robert was a fantastic lover. He gave all of himself in fits of vulnerable desperation and slutty exuberance. He made Cameron feel like he was the only one who could satisfy him and the only one who could save him from self destruction.
Cameron was lead into a room by a thin man with round spectacles. He had a beard that struggled to flourish on his face and instead knotted and crisscrossed in patches of unremarkable growth. When his kind eyes set upon Cameron, he felt like he was stroking him gently. “My name is Angus”. He told Cameron he wasn’t judging him. Cameron described his relationship with Robert as intense and complicated. He shook his head back and forth and shrugged in a prolonged heaving forward.
“He creeps inside me and before I know it I’m lost in him” Cameron said. Angus nodded . He knew what he meant, it seemed. Angus was a good 20 years older than Cameron so he assumed he’d stacked up plenty of intense and complicated relationships, presumably so many that he now just referred to them as relationships, the intense and complicated bit was a given.
There was no way Cameron was going to start from the beginning. He knew how therapists worked. He remembered they had a habit of cutting you off at 45 minutes just when you start to make some sense.
“To be honest I feel like my brain has been bashed in”
“Is that how you feel about our session, someone trying to bash the answers out of your head? Angus bashed his own head.
Cameron dropped his shoulders to show he was exhausted.
“It’s totally voluntary but I was wondering if you could provide me a list of phone numbers
Cameron heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes.
“Robert could give us a few phone numbers and we could call them. Robert would remain anonymous. It’s helpful in terms of getting people tested”
Cameron flared his eyes and nostrils and dispensed a cluster of air trapped in his lungs.
“For fucks sake” his hands now running through his hair, “Yeah I get it, I get it, I guess”
This was easier than analysing the reason why he loved sadistic men. Public good was something he could rally behind.
“There really is no telling how many men he slept with while I was at work. No telling. He fucks everything – butcher, baker, candlestick maker”
Angus looked overwhelmed but he kept his professional demeanor by pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“I will try and get a few numbers for you and bring them in tomorrow”
Angus thanked him and continued.
“Maybe Robert personalised the failure of monogamy but the truth is its failure has nothing to do with you”
Cameron smiled at Angus and looked at his feet, he needed to leave now.
He knew what Angus was talking about in laymen terms, that Robert will fuck anything”
Cameron gave Angus’s comment some thought as he walked home but he couldn’t give it the attention it needed since he was preoccupied with planning the phone conversation he needed to have with Robert. He walked through his front door and sat down beside his phone and rehearsed the conversation out loud. When he felt ready, he dialled the number. He was put through to Robert’s room. To hear his voice again was like sunlight sinking into cold skin. He sounded upbeat. Cameron wanted to say nothing, let Robert do the talking, but he couldn’t help myself. He told him everything. He was after all an old friend not just a guy who broke his heart.
“There are drugs now” Cameron said.
“I take pills three times a day. I get to live. We are lucky fags Cameron” Robert replied.
His declaration made Cameron’s cock grow. The boldness, the ownership of the word fag.
Robert was a hedonist. He was a hedonist not because he was a fag but because he was a hedonist. The best kind. Cameron started to understand Angus’s parting comment. The only way he could understand and accept Robert’s desires for other men was to think of Robert’s sexuality as something to do with him. The realisation that possibly Robert was a victim of Cameron’s narcissism rather than the other way round eased the arch in his shoulders.
A door slammed in the hallway outside his apartment. His neighbour was leaving for the day. A bit late, he thought. He was pleased he had the mind space to think about the mundane again. Everything felt a little less crazy.
Glitter
Each year as I sit amongst the ruins of another Mardi Gras, a vague yet eternally relevant question falls from my amyl bleached lips. What was all that about?
I blink less and survey the damage to my flat. What’s before me is the kind of destruction only ‘The Gras’ can create. ‘The Gras’ – sounds like a good name for a disaster movie. Thousands of sub-plots, all about the plot being lost. I identify the flat as mine. It must be, why else would I be sitting in this dump.
Sifting through the devastation I assess the hoc-ability status of any valuables remaining. My crossing eyes stop crossing for one brief second to seize upon a gold mine. One of my international visitors kindly left his Clarins products in my bathroom. Those Happy Hocers in Kellet street should give me enough cash to keep me in sushi with extra wasabi for a couple of days.
Everywhere I look and I look everywhere, decay prevails.
I lift a fur coat from the floor and blink for the first time in days as I unveil some quivering queen who has taken shelter under the fake fur. Clad only in a sequin band aid, this is the single most terrifying display of depravity I’ve seen since, well, since the fog cleared from the mirror after my shower this morning.
He is not familiar to me but then his constant convulsions make it difficult to make a positive identification.
Perhaps he is a friend in which case I should consider calling an ambulance. Perhaps he is stranger, in which case I should consider calling a friend so we can both have a laugh. A violent convulsion this time hurls him in the air. Conveniently, he lands facing heaven enabling me to get a good look at him. The fading shade of lipstick his sporting strikes a familiar chord. Is it? Could it be? No? Yes! Shocking Burgundy. I have some vague recollection of some chatty, anaemic homosexual wearing that very shade arriving in my lounge room shortly after the parade on Saturday. Someone got stuck with him somewhere along the line, like chewing gum to your Docs Martins. Someone’s trade, someone’s dealer, brother, sister, girlfriend, whatever. I’m certainly no authority on the subject of house guests around this time of year. They come, they go. However if it is the queen I think it is, I can safely say he wasn’t a picture of health then. Oh dear. I drape the fur across his quivering frame, returning the worm to his cocoon. I pray for a butterfly by morning.
My stomach feels light and my eyelids feel heavy, reminding me of two concepts – eating and sleeping. I continue to scrounge around for valuables, scratching, sniffing, scratching, sniffing. But there is nothing more for me here. How is it I realise so many things when I’m on my hands and knees, (I realise on my hands and knees realising so many things). The Clarins range decorating my bathroom cabinet is the only thing of any worth.
Realisation 1 – Can’t hoc facial products.
Realisation 2 – Sell them to my neighbour.
I knock on her door and put forward what I consider a reasonable offer. She tells me to get some sleep and slams the door in my face. So insightful that neighbour of mine.
Realisation 4 – Reality is such an unnecessary state of mind. I walk back into my flat and fall to my hands and knees, again, realising I forgot Realisation 3.
From my hands and knees I roll over into the security of the foetal position and cry. My stomach whines, my lungs burn and my kidneys ache.
The carpet absorbs my tears, my burdens and my glitter. Glitter, in plague proportions, otherwise known as drag queen dandruff. Glitter finds its way into my bed and underpants all year round. Even when I declare my flat a drag queen free zone which I’m forced to do every so often in order to exfoliate my social life and to regain a semblance of sanity, glitter finds its shimmery way back into my nether regions.
Like the very air we breathe glitter will always be with us. Perhaps it’s a constant reminder that we must shine in order to survive. Or is it just that we simply appreciate the kind of cheap makeover a bottle can provide? I can’t eat it so who cares.
I fall into a much needed slumber, dreaming that each piece of glitter is a diamond. Reality ebbs slowly from my bones. Replacing it is a parade of fears and delights emerging from my subconscious. Where I want to be.
Misery upon grim
The British don’t expect to be happy. On this small boot-shaped island miserableness is patriotic. The British are proudly miserable. In the depths of winter misery is a crackling fire in the pit of one’s gut. It’s the only way to survive. I thought digging out the scarves and gloves, plugging gaps under doors, double glazing windows, bleeding the radiators, test running the boiler, was preparing for winter but these remedies are cosmetic. The secret to preparing for winter in Britain is allowing the malaise to gently ebb into misery and letting it burn.
The mistake I made when I arrived in Britain was assuming the British would be slightly more used to Britain than someone who’d just arrived. It was a logical assumption to make that a person born and bred here would find the weather for instance a part of life. But no, the British are just as astonished at how vile the weather can be as someone fresh off the plane. No one gets used to it. The weather is actually moderate comparatively to other countries, never too hot, never too cold. But it’s the blinding sunshine that can come out of nowhere just as you pack away your sunglasses and step out in your thermals. The wind that can turn your brolly into a tangle of wires clinging to the rim of a bin like a massive spider resisting capture. The rain that never really gets going, just drizzle that murmurs in the background of every scene. The grey that pours into every crack. The damp that trickles into your bones and settles like a muddy puddle. Every winter the British are appalled at the dreariness of their surroundings and the degree of their ensuing misery but the thing is they don’t try and fight it.
The British embrace all forms of sickness too. They have a word that means sick but not sick. Poorly. Poorly usually lasts about 24 hours. Very rarely are you asked to elaborate on poorly. If in some strange circumstance you are asked to elaborate, poorly is a dodgy tandoori. It’s your entitlement as a citizen to feel poorly a few times a year. You just have to say the word and everyone files into line brows heavy with sympathy in silent compliance with a contract they must have agreed among themselves centuries ago. The winter is unpredictable and some days the sky feels so low you need to accept its weight and declare yourself poorly. A Londoner said to me one day with his face mushy with misery ‘poorly means blah’ trying to help me understand. I kind of got it. Blah is not an excuse for absence at work but poorly is. Poorly often means a potential cold but so does coldy. Sore legs, aching bones might indeed be coldy but its best described as poorly, until the nose starts running. Poorly means I’m not quite right in myself. Whatever that quite means. It can mean ‘I want to be alone’ but of course this is too confrontational so poorly is a gentle retreat avoiding offence. It can be mental, physical or spiritual. It can be fatigue. Its power lies in its ability to engender sympathy without having to elaborate. Serious enough to cancel, not serious enough to go to the doctor. Bad enough to stay home, not bad enough to lie in bed all day. Could get worse probably won’t.
Poorly can mean indisposed which can mean anything at all but probably means can’t be bothered. Poorly can mean out of sorts which can mean anything and suggests you are usually in sorts whatever sorts are. Poorly can mean not up to par. Poorly can mean peaky, liverish, queasy, nauseous, off colour, under the weather, not up to snuff and crook. Poorly can mean funny, peculiar, crummy, lousy and rough. It can mean ropy and grotty, vulgar, queer and seedy. It describes every glorious colour in the rainbow of feeling like shit. It’s the perfect British adjective because it justifies a period of introspection impenetrable to outside enquiry. It’s a cave to wait out the thick internal fog of repression and usually, most of the time, nearly always an excuse to do nothing.
Oddly, very poorly is a completely different matter all-together. By placing very before poorly you’ve turned an ambiguous disposition into a life threatening situation. There is no confusion with very poorly. Call an ambulance. It means sick and probably dying.
I saw a TV show about ambulance drivers in Birmingham and when they described one of the many old ladies they found in a heap at the bottom of the stairs as very poorly I knew very poorly was a serious matter indeed. When I saw a man with oxygen strapped to his mouth described as very poorly, shortly after he rated his pain 11 out of 10 I knew the prefix of very took poorly to a red alert. Just by adding very to poorly.
Poorly meant not so good once upon a time. It’s a very old word that experienced resurgence in the late 20th century post WW2 which coincides with social change and an increase in options for British people including the right to be poorly. It coincides with film and television selling aspiration. It coincides with the science of psychiatry pathologising unhappiness and prescribing pills to treat it. The expectation to be happy is now so powerful you are prescribed drugs if you fall anywhere between miserable and happy. Americans love a pill. The British could inject a packet and still feel miserable because in Britain it’s not a condition, it’s human right.
Not being funny
A friend of a friend sat in her kitchen with views of the river Thames. She had just cracked open a beer for me and one for herself after swearing she’d never drink again after last night’s party. I thought this odd as we’d just finished two bottles of wine over lunch at a pub in Pimlico and she hadn’t mentioned last night’s party. I guessed arriving at her place and seeing evidence of last night’s party forced her to mention it.
“Balls” she said. “So sick of this political correctness”
Our common friend Gail sat on the other side of the kitchen bench getting ready to hear her long term friend’s sermon on what’s wrong with today’s world.
“You can’t say anything to anyone”
Paula was a rectangle of a woman with short cropped hair, made blonde thousands of times over. She’d just asked a waitress in the pub where she was from and the waitress had told her ‘Bulgaria’ but was frosty from that point onwards. Our common friend Gail tried to explain that while she was one who first used the word frosty to describe the waitress, perhaps asking her where she was from after repeating the food order really slowly could have been interpreted as racist.
“Balls! I was trying to make her job easier. I was genuinely interested in where she was from. I mean, this, this is why Europe can fuck off”
It was about now I realised that the UK exiting the European Union was a possibility. Not a huge possibility. A possibility. There were enough Gail’s who saw being part of Europe as a frustrating but necessary compromise but here were also a few Paula’s. It was October 2015, a few weeks before exiting my 10 year marriage. Paula was about to give me the first glimpse into the consequences of my decision to leave my 10 year relationship. She was an expert on leaving I was about to find out.
“Take my beauty salon”
It made me laugh the idea that Paula owned a beauty salon. She was not the skinny model I associated with beauty salons but she smelt like Chanel No 5 and her bolshie Libertarianism was sexy, beautiful in different way.
“I have the cameras on all the time because I know that Klaudia and Lilianna will steal from me one day. Only a matter of time. And it’s not because their Eastern European, it’s because they are desperate. They come from desperate countries. England is not as desperate so the English are less likely to steal. This is fact, not bloody racism”
Ashes to ashes, tat to tut
David Bowie said in his song Queen Bitch
She’s so swishy in her satin and tat
In her frock coat
and bipperty-bopperty hat
Tat is good bad and sometimes bad good, unnecessary but a statement none the less.
A Londoner will tell you tut describes items with no aesthetic merit or use or monetary value. In England a Northerner may use tat and a Southerner may use tut to describe the same load of old stuff.
A load of old tat is usually a comment on someone else’s stuff rather than a comment on your own stuff. It’s a way of mocking your friend’s unhealthy attachment to a load of old stuff. It’s often resented by the owner but somehow unmovable. Tat is the gossip of the unconscious. It tells you something you need to know about yourself that’s uncomfortable and that you are probably not ready to hear. The reason will reveal itself eventually but in the meantime the tut appears ominously innocuous.
Ian Dury a Londoner said in his song Clever Trevor
Nothing underfoot comes to nothing less to add to a load of old tut and I ain’t half not half glad cos there’s nowhere to put it, even if I had
Ian is trapped in his tut, helpless, it will just appear elsewhere so he makes no attempt to move it. Tut seems to be an immovable beast.
Tat is also piles of stuff that you are planning to sort or read or cut up. Pile makers are always the less pretty sister, the less athletic brother, chastised, the stuck, the people who want to be someone else, the person always 15 minutes late. Pile makers add to the pile more than they chip away at it. Chipping away at it is always hindered by something that has no relationship with reducing the pile.
Christopher says ‘I need to get stuck into that pile but I’m trying to sell that chair first’
Christopher says ‘I will sort all of that soon I just need to move the glass cabinet’
Christopher says these things as if the pile might fall on the top of him as he starts the vigorous task of ignoring the voice that lists all the horrible things that might happen to him if he throws it away. Christopher avoids sorting the pile anyway he can. Over complicating matters and making the job seem bigger prolongs his time with the pile. Found in the pile are unpaid utility bill, important news articles, several brochures on cancer, an empty Valium packet and an autumn leaf. The pile holds significance in Christopher’s mind because at one point something important was in the pile. It gives everything else in the pile a value it never had before. A torn envelope is suddenly punching above its weight in such a pile. The empty Valium packet could be a reminder of something or does it have a repeat prescription on the back of it? He’s not sure what item in the pile makes the pile significant. This will keep the pile from reducing for a long time. Christopher won’t make the connection, the empty Valium packet has something to do with the proliferation of piles around the house. Christopher’s muscles are like jelly so sorting a pile is difficult. He will be waiting on a delivery of a universal remote control that won’t work before attempting to sort the pile. The connection between the two is not obvious. Perhaps there is. But regardless he will float into slumber and wake up still angry but unable to swing a punch.
Christopher says ‘I just need to get that universal remote control before sorting the pile’
A corner often needs tat. A cane basket, an old suitcase, a few logs, maybe some wool, a few books, hats. This gives a corner a story, it’s now more than a single point where two walls meet. As important as that meeting is.
In two up two down house in a small town in the north of Wales lived Babs and John. Babs put a rusty brass kettle that had never poured a single cup of tea in a fireplace that had never seen single flicker of a flame. John sat in the same recliner every night but couldn’t fully extend the footrest because it would tip the magazine rack over which sat beside the recliner in the only place it could sit unhindered by another object. One leg ached all the time because it was just short of fully extended. John longed to stretch out both legs but had given up worrying about it as it felt like the slightest inconvenience not worthy of discussion. A set of brown rugs folded in equal parts of eight and one wool throw scrolled on top sat beside the magazine rack. These rugs were not meant to warm the knees but rather warm the air. Their tempting warm aesthetic was their main purpose.
In the spare bedroom were a collection of dolls in rows, the biggest dolls at the back cascading to the smallest at the front, with an array of wonky and startled eyes sometimes on the same doll’s face. Each had the roughly the same facial expression but the longer you stared at their faces the more they differed from each other. They could look menacing and they could look kind and sometimes blank. Some were in conversation if you tilted their heads slightly. Babs wasn’t particularly fond of dolls nor was she was particularly maternal. The dolls just warmed up a cold back room. A pink rose quilt covered the guest bed and the light shade and the tissue box on the side table. The quilt was tightly tucked under a springy mattress and it took some digging to peel it back and climb in.
The freezer was packed solid with frozen food. The freezer door was decorated in crayon sketches and magnets with sayings about life’s peculiarities. The door held in garden peas, fish fingers, pizza subs and chocolate muffins. Ice mushroomed around the stiff plastic bags and spiked in furry corners. Babs was ready for any contingency, nuclear war, a long winter. She lived in loose hanging shirts that draped over tight-fitting jumpers, she dressed to cover up her body. Babs hated being fat, the hate was less painful when she ate.
Tat is the accumulation of items that have no functional purpose for the sake of filling a space.
Tat can be a legacy of staying in one place for a long time or it can be a cry for help.
Babs and John’s son ordered something small from a mail order catalogue every week. The arrival of a parcel the next day had nothing to do with the object inside but rather the thrill of the gift. One day the mail didn’t arrive. His cheeks caved in so sharply the universe was sucked into the hole left by his despair. He once bought a miniature clamp. It never left it’s packet. What does a miniature clamp hold, maybe a tea towel. It went on a shelf beside a box of dead matches and an empty bottle of oil covered in glitter and a fluorescent hair band that had lost its elasticity. Sometimes he would clutter his room with so much tat he couldn’t find his bed. He would then reorganise it all neatly and spread it about again. Babs saw all the things she loathed in herself also in her son. His loose skin and wide open heart. His attachment to useless things. He never spent a lot of money, maybe a few dollars. It was about the parcel, the arrival, the unwrapping, the status of receiving. Tat is not worthless to those who accumulate it. All that stuff protects.
Babs watched her son grow larger. She could see he was making the same mistake she did. He smiled excitedly when she put down fish fingers on white fluffy bread lathered in mayonnaise. He helped her clean offices in the city. He sometimes forgot to spray wipe the desks so she would whack him across the head, making his ears pink. She hit him for the small things because she couldn’t hit him for eating the food she put down. That would make no sense. The fat grew around his bones like the tat around his bed. When he was rejected for being too fat to have sex with or too nice to have a relationship with, he’d put all his tat in garbage bags and shove it in a cupboard. As he slowly recovered from feelings of unworthiness the tat returned; new books, long billowy shirts, picture frames and the creep of the contents in the garbage bags from the cupboard back to his room. To free himself of the tat he would need therapy and in his sessions he would need to hate his mother for sending him mixed messages of affection as teenager. Hate his mother for over feeding him. Hate him for slapping his fat leaving a white tattoo on his skin that fades as her hand sways back passed her hip. But he would rather hate himself than hate his mother and let the tat be a small price to pay.
Babs will decorate a bookshelf until she can’t pull out a single book for the tat. She’ll display candles, brass rings, incense sticks, figurines, feathers, tobacco pipes and she will also have a universal remote control that every few years wakes up and changes the channel on the TV next door. She has books on the very top of the book shelf and quite impressively manages to store a small dolls house, a tennis racket cover and Balinese fan collection on top of these books. The book shelf will forever be a cumbersome thing about to topple but she will continue to decorate it with frilly regrets, best intentions and memory catches. And a picture of her son.
Crazy
A crazy person said once that “everyone’s life is a form of psychosis in slow motion and that crazy people are just experiencing psychosis in real time so its more noticeable”. For most of us there’s just enough gaps between disastrous events to create the illusion of sanity.
Crazy people provide a perspective on your lifestyle achievements that you take for granted; house, car, family, dog. You won’t have realised for instance that a house is an ostentatious expression of your control tendencies. A car for instance is the penis you envied in the gym changing rooms. A family is the fear of being alone. A dog is a crutch for your social ineptitude.
Crazy people will churn out great works of beauty as acts of defiance. Stand-up comedy is a slow and public nervous breakdown. We shouldn’t be laughing we should be calling an ambulance.
Crazy people are unpredictable, vulnerable and authentic. The combination of these are an aphrodisiac and will conjure love. Crazy people will do anything to make themselves feel better. Their self-effacing twists and turns will make you laugh and invigorate your spirit but exhaust the crazy person. You’ll want them in your arms radiating manic energy but they will fall limp well before you’re ready to stop feeding off them. You’ll justify the chaos by declaring that opposites attract. The sex will be unparalleled because you’re having sex with a body in turmoil as personalities jostle for attention. It’s an orgy without the insecurity body image issues. Then inevitably a relationship forms, you may even marry and suddenly they want to have sex with you ONLY to mute panic. You will feel like a carer at best and a piñata full of antidepressants at worse.
A crazy person never sees themselves as crazy particularly when they’re in a relationship. They think the other person is crazy which of course is true making them even more convinced they are right about everything including their misguided view of themselves as sane. This is the very definition of crazy.
If two speeding cars collide, the impact is the combined speed each are travelling at the point of collision. This is a relationship when both people are crazy. The coming together of crazy people is always a glorious explosion.
Robert’s eyes are fixed on Cameron’s. Cameron’s feet are stuck to the floor. The beers keep arriving and when the crowd thins Robert moves in. Now Cameron can see the colour of his eyes. A distant blue under thick shattered ice. Too many late shifts. He places another beer in front of Cameron and asks the last few customers to leave so he can close up. They complain, over-using his name. Robert. Did he hear correctly? Eventually the customers do as they are told. He locks the door behind them. Robert sculls Cameron’s beer to wash down his fear and rests his elbows on the bar. A hand grabs his belt and swings him round. He pauses for a few seconds to study Cameron’s face and then begins undressing him. He lies Cameron on the bar. Wet beer squelches beneath his spine. He undresses too now, keeping his eyes fixed on Cameron. Once he’s naked he climbs on the bar and places one foot on either side of Cameron’s hips. He slowly lowers himself down.
Cameron goes back to the bar night after night. It’s the same ritual. Cameron wants to lay himself down on the bar from the moment he arrives but he has to wait all night till the bar closed. Robert barely speaks but he makes his intentions clear through eyes that glue on to his. Holding Cameron long in his stare he feels guilty for crimes not yet committed. Only Robert know this.
Cameron tells Robert they are in a relationship as he licks Cameron’s torso clean of beer. Cameron nods and lets his hands rest on the peak of Robert’s buttocks.
The bedroom feels stale. He needs more. Fresh beating heart. Seduced, just as Cameron once was. The smell of cigarette smoke and beer was hard to adjust to first thing in the morning but Cameron got used to it and looked forward to it after a while. Robert would pull the man to Cameron’s bedroom and undress him starting with a tug of the belt. Robert would stare into Cameron’s eyes as the man pushed into him. His eyes were an embrace.
“Are we open?” Cameron asked. He was not sure what this meant but if it meant living a life free of social and moral restrictions he wanted in.
“Polyamory”
“What?”
Cameron laughed and held on to him tightly. A man like this would ground him.
“So you’re okay with it then?”
“If you are?”
Robert kisses Cameron’s forehead.
“Monogamy is unnatural. I don’t own his body and he doesn’t own mine”
He waited till noon to hear his knock. He went to the bar. He hadn’t turned up for work the night before.
Cameron went home and waited.
Cameron is naked on his bed with the fire exit door open waiting for a breeze. It’s the darkest hour just before dawn and the air is still thick with humidity. The thin skin of his testicles sticks to the inside of his thigh. He peels the skin away and flicks them gently to keep them cool. He stares at the ceiling and tries some Jungian interpretation of the stains and cracked paint. Cameron sees only Robert’s face, arms, legs. Silence is typical of this time of day but the silence this morning has depth. It hangs heavy and sticks fast as if it is a sound in it’s own right overbearing all other sounds. Like white is a colour, silence can be a sound. He understands it’s depth. It was holding something, someone. He didn’t hear footsteps so when he appeared it was as if he was floating. Robert. Beside him, propped up on one elbow and staring into his eyes. Robert’s eyes are colourless he remembers they are blue but he can’t see the blue. It’s dark. He rests his lips, his breath falters. Cameron holds on until finally his tongue pushes into his mouth. He places his hand on the back of his head and pulls him in. The room cools. This is a good thing this humid morning but an ominous sign too. Cameron tries not to think about it as he kisses him, his first love. Robert where are you?
Cameron and Robert made clumsy love. Cameron kissed Robert with a welcomed objectivity, without the deep hunger he felt when he made love to him two years earlier. Robert sensed a detachment and stepped it up. His writhing body and honks of wonderment at Cameron’s thrusts stretched his cock to new lengths. Although this time he was only mildly intrigued by his dance. Cameron remembered why he lusted for Robert so irrationally once. He wasn’t a fool after all, Robert was just very good at what he did.
Cameron smiled at Robert slouching against his pillows chain smoking not because he loved him in any romantic sense anymore but because he remembered how desperate he was for him to be in his bed once. Cameron was filling in the gaps and honoring his younger less resilient self.
Robert was a fantastic lover. He gave all of himself in fits of vulnerable desperation and slutty exuberance. He made Cameron feel like he was the only one who could satisfy him and the only one who could save him from self destruction.
Cameron was lead into a room by a thin man with round spectacles. He had a beard that struggled to flourish on his face and instead knotted and crisscrossed in patches of unremarkable growth. When his kind eyes set upon Cameron, he felt like he was stroking him gently. “My name is Angus”. He told Cameron he wasn’t judging him. Cameron described his relationship with Robert as intense and complicated. He shook his head back and forth and shrugged in a prolonged heaving forward.
“He creeps inside me and before I know it I’m lost in him” Cameron said. Angus nodded . He knew what he meant, it seemed. Angus was a good 20 years older than Cameron so he assumed he’d stacked up plenty of intense and complicated relationships, presumably so many that he now just referred to them as relationships, the intense and complicated bit was a given.
There was no way Cameron was going to start from the beginning. He knew how therapists worked. He remembered they had a habit of cutting you off at 45 minutes just when you start to make some sense.
“To be honest I feel like my brain has been bashed in”
“Is that how you feel about our session, someone trying to bash the answers out of your head? Angus bashed his own head.
Cameron dropped his shoulders to show he was exhausted.
“It’s totally voluntary but I was wondering if you could provide me a list of phone numbers
Cameron heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes.
“Robert could give us a few phone numbers and we could call them. Robert would remain anonymous. It’s helpful in terms of getting people tested”
Cameron flared his eyes and nostrils and dispensed a cluster of air trapped in his lungs.
“For fucks sake” his hands now running through his hair, “Yeah I get it, I get it, I guess”
This was easier than analysing the reason why he loved sadistic men. Public good was something he could rally behind.
“There really is no telling how many men he slept with while I was at work. No telling. He fucks everything – butcher, baker, candlestick maker”
Angus looked overwhelmed but he kept his professional demeanor by pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“I will try and get a few numbers for you and bring them in tomorrow”
Angus thanked him and continued.
“Maybe Robert personalised the failure of monogamy but the truth is its failure has nothing to do with you”
Cameron smiled at Angus and looked at his feet, he needed to leave now.
He knew what Angus was talking about in laymen terms, that Robert will fuck anything”
Cameron gave Angus’s comment some thought as he walked home but he couldn’t give it the attention it needed since he was preoccupied with planning the phone conversation he needed to have with Robert. He walked through his front door and sat down beside his phone and rehearsed the conversation out loud. When he felt ready, he dialled the number. He was put through to Robert’s room. To hear his voice again was like sunlight sinking into cold skin. He sounded upbeat. Cameron wanted to say nothing, let Robert do the talking, but he couldn’t help myself. He told him everything. He was after all an old friend not just a guy who broke his heart.
“There are drugs now” Cameron said.
“I take pills three times a day. I get to live. We are lucky fags Cameron” Robert replied.
His declaration made Cameron’s cock grow. The boldness, the ownership of the word fag.
Robert was a hedonist. He was a hedonist not because he was a fag but because he was a hedonist. The best kind. Cameron started to understand Angus’s parting comment. The only way he could understand and accept Robert’s desires for other men was to think of Robert’s sexuality as something to do with him. The realisation that possibly Robert was a victim of Cameron’s narcissism rather than the other way round eased the arch in his shoulders.
A door slammed in the hallway outside his apartment. His neighbour was leaving for the day. A bit late, he thought. He was pleased he had the mind space to think about the mundane again. Everything felt a little less crazy.
Glitter
Each year as I sit amongst the ruins of another Mardi Gras, a vague yet eternally relevant question falls from my amyl bleached lips. What was all that about?
I blink less and survey the damage to my flat. What’s before me is the kind of destruction only ‘The Gras’ can create. ‘The Gras’ – sounds like a good name for a disaster movie. Thousands of sub-plots, all about the plot being lost. I identify the flat as mine. It must be, why else would I be sitting in this dump.
Sifting through the devastation I assess the hoc-ability status of any valuables remaining. My crossing eyes stop crossing for one brief second to seize upon a gold mine. One of my international visitors kindly left his Clarins products in my bathroom. Those Happy Hocers in Kellet street should give me enough cash to keep me in sushi with extra wasabi for a couple of days.
Everywhere I look and I look everywhere, decay prevails.
I lift a fur coat from the floor and blink for the first time in days as I unveil some quivering queen who has taken shelter under the fake fur. Clad only in a sequin band aid, this is the single most terrifying display of depravity I’ve seen since, well, since the fog cleared from the mirror after my shower this morning.
He is not familiar to me but then his constant convulsions make it difficult to make a positive identification.
Perhaps he is a friend in which case I should consider calling an ambulance. Perhaps he is stranger, in which case I should consider calling a friend so we can both have a laugh. A violent convulsion this time hurls him in the air. Conveniently, he lands facing heaven enabling me to get a good look at him. The fading shade of lipstick his sporting strikes a familiar chord. Is it? Could it be? No? Yes! Shocking Burgundy. I have some vague recollection of some chatty, anaemic homosexual wearing that very shade arriving in my lounge room shortly after the parade on Saturday. Someone got stuck with him somewhere along the line, like chewing gum to your Docs Martins. Someone’s trade, someone’s dealer, brother, sister, girlfriend, whatever. I’m certainly no authority on the subject of house guests around this time of year. They come, they go. However if it is the queen I think it is, I can safely say he wasn’t a picture of health then. Oh dear. I drape the fur across his quivering frame, returning the worm to his cocoon. I pray for a butterfly by morning.
My stomach feels light and my eyelids feel heavy, reminding me of two concepts – eating and sleeping. I continue to scrounge around for valuables, scratching, sniffing, scratching, sniffing. But there is nothing more for me here. How is it I realise so many things when I’m on my hands and knees, (I realise on my hands and knees realising so many things). The Clarins range decorating my bathroom cabinet is the only thing of any worth.
Realisation 1 – Can’t hoc facial products.
Realisation 2 – Sell them to my neighbour.
I knock on her door and put forward what I consider a reasonable offer. She tells me to get some sleep and slams the door in my face. So insightful that neighbour of mine.
Realisation 4 – Reality is such an unnecessary state of mind. I walk back into my flat and fall to my hands and knees, again, realising I forgot Realisation 3.
From my hands and knees I roll over into the security of the foetal position and cry. My stomach whines, my lungs burn and my kidneys ache.
The carpet absorbs my tears, my burdens and my glitter. Glitter, in plague proportions, otherwise known as drag queen dandruff. Glitter finds its way into my bed and underpants all year round. Even when I declare my flat a drag queen free zone which I’m forced to do every so often in order to exfoliate my social life and to regain a semblance of sanity, glitter finds its shimmery way back into my nether regions.
Like the very air we breathe glitter will always be with us. Perhaps it’s a constant reminder that we must shine in order to survive. Or is it just that we simply appreciate the kind of cheap makeover a bottle can provide? I can’t eat it so who cares.
I fall into a much needed slumber, dreaming that each piece of glitter is a diamond. Reality ebbs slowly from my bones. Replacing it is a parade of fears and delights emerging from my subconscious. Where I want to be.