Caliban

A complete absence of light. I walk down a hallway. It feels narrow, three times the width of my shoulders. But it could be infinite. I can’t see its walls. I walk and think of nothing. As I walk my skin prickles. It feels like the walls are closing in but I can neither speed up or slow down the rhythm I make, boots on tile, the peal of a second hand. The hallway has no start, no end, and a ceiling, as if strung from a star, so high as to be inconsequential. And all the while the tingle of apprehension, the hindbrain warning of what the mind and senses shirk perceiving –1

Ow.2

I wake up. Sit up. A florid mark on my forearm tells me I shifted my arm in my sleep, and lain it on the radiator at the side of my bed. I think I may need to find a new spot for this bed before I brand myself again. But not now. The greenish-yellow tint of a vodka-and-wine hangover is spreading from my head round my body. A wave of nausea follows it down my throat to my stomach, and a small gob of bile bounces up the other way. I roll out of bed with eyes and mouth closed, and shuffle like a child playing blind man’s buff across the room to the wash basin beside the door. I spit, and wait to see if anything else wants to join that mouthful in the basin. Nothing does. Small mercies, I suppose. I grope on the edge of the basin for the tooth mug, and find my brush and the toothpaste by feel. A rising hiss of water as the tap comes on, followed by the grinding hiss of toothbrush in mouth. The sound reminds me of explorers in old movies, machetes in hand, slicing swathes of vines and trees, driving through the forests of darkest Africa. I spit again, feel for the pint glass beside the toothmug, half fill with water and swill the slightly stinging mint out of my mouth. Then I stand and enjoy that moment of lull, that empty moment between feelings, before the hangover kicks in again.3

-4

There it is. The nausea has gone but the lethargy stays, the feeling of stewing in toxins your liver is still getting around to dealing with. Something smashes in the sink. I open my eyes. The pint glass I was holding has slipped out of my fingers and now lies in shards around the plughole, above the sticky granulose remnants of my morning vomit-burp. Later I think. Claire won’t be home for another few hours, which leaves time to do something about the bed situation, shift the evidence of my cackhandedness, and see if this hangover will budge any. I look up and catch myself in the mirror above the basin.5

Short dishevelled brownish hair. Crooked nose and large eyes with bags under them. Skinny frame, naked except for the occasional small tuft and plain navy boxers. All as it was yesterday. Next step? Find clothes. To the right of the mirror - my right, the mirror’s left - is a wardrobe. Everything in it is familiar. Shirts, jumpers, skirts, blouses, jeans et cetera. Through the tall PVC window facing the mirror it looks sunny, but the sun is bouncing off the terrace opposite at an acute angle, so it will be cold. Shirt, jeans and heavyish jacket then. Strange, from this angle the room looks strange, alien. The dimples and patterns in the white paint seem different. Time to leave before the feeling gets any weirder.6

The feeling only gets worse on leaving the bedroom. There is little light in the hall. Directly in front is a sturdy red-painted door, the front door. Behind the bedroom door is painted the same shade. The hall carries on to the left for a couple of yards, and then heads off at right angles to the rest of the flat. Nothing doing down there.7

The front door sticks as it opens and closes with a crash. And the stairs sound cavernous with their high curved ceiling. The main door leading from the three flats upstairs to the outside presents fewer problems. A gust of wind flurries some dead leaves and muddied tabloid pages in the street in front of the house. A red brick terrace either side of a fairly narrow road. About half a dozen parked cars, old and small for the most part. The street is silent but for a faint hiss of traffic on the main road to the right. Left or right? Left, away from the main road. Something needs to be done about this hangover.8

The street widens as it goes on. There is a large neo-classical building at the top, halls of residence for the university, surrounded by half-empty ochre trees. A left turn before that leads to the shop, past a plain red brick non-denominational church. This street is completely empty. Mostly students live here, and they all go home at weekends. This is a Sunday morning, so the area is still. It’s a lot nicer like this. In the shop there is a large grey-haired man in a black bomber jacket watching the door as if it’s already tried to run away and he doesn’t want to chase it again, and one bored-looking girl with short hair and glasses behind the counter. The cigarette case behind her has a mirrored back, and my reflection is in it.9

I know I want to ask her for some Resolve and cigarettes, but I can’t seem to remember how my vocal chords work. This throws me somewhat, so I turn away from the counter and head for the sheltered corridor created by the caffeinated drinks fridge and the mostly-empty vegetable bins and ponder the problem. I know air is involved, and I have to open my mouth to articulate the words. This poses no difficulty. The trick is knowing how to make the vocal chords vibrate. I stand there for a while beside the bottles of rip-off glucose drinks breathing in slowly, then out even more slowly through my mouth. All that comes out is an asthmatic hiss, no matter how hard I strain. I wonder whether the doorman’s noticed. Must look pretty weird. Maybe he thinks I’m counting calories or checking for E numbers. I breathe once more, then out, hard. A hoarse growl escapes my throat. Thank fuck for that. Just sounded like I was clearing my throat. Can’t very well go up to the counter and do that while mouthing “Resolve and twenty Lambert please” though. I’ll look like a crazy person. So I try to hum along to the tune on the shop radio, as I walk down the line of fridges towards the empty hot food counter at the end. After a couple of failed attempts I get the hang of it, and the radio masks the noise I’m making. I grab some cold sausage rolls and one of the generic fluorescent orange energy drinks and make my way to the counter without any other hiccups. The shop girl doesn’t catch my eye as she serves me. Either she’s shy or I was making more of a din than I thought. The second proves to be the case as I leave the shop, and the puffy-jacketed doorman regards me with a wry leer, halfway between pity and humour. This comes as no surprise; you get all kinds of oddities walking around town at this time, still on God knows what, yammering away, eyes on stalks. Which reminds me - I have to cover half of someone else’s shift at work this afternoon. That leaves about an hour to do something about the state of my mind, my bedroom and my personal hygiene, and get to Cromac Street to stand in an unfamiliar place full of strange twisted Markets inhabitants for seven hours. For under a fiver an hour. Then home to help Claire eat the care package her mother will inevitably send back to Belfast with her, chat about nothing over a film that neither of us particularly like and put this disaster of a day to bed. I rush across the eerily-quiet street back to the house.10

The stairs seem a lot darker than when last I was here. It looks like about six hours have passed, so much so that I reflexively check the time on my phone. It’s just before one in the afternoon. That episode lasted around half an hour. I close my eyes and take two or three steps into the darkened stairwell and stand for a while, eyes shut, basking in the gloom while I try to order my thoughts. I remember when I was at school; we took a class during our A-levels, during which we were to learn about some things that weren’t necessarily on the curriculum: sexual health, financial and careers advice and so forth. Most of us took the opportunity either of polishing off some homework we hadn’t been bothered with, or else doing something properly extracurricular, like malingering at the back gates with knock-off Spanish cigarettes which tasted like floor coverings. No-one was overly stringent about our attendance of these classes. But once I did hazard a crack at a class. A slightly strange RE teacher taught meditation. He invited us all to get comfortable – as far as this was possible on miniscule plastic moulded chairs – and with a low, breathy, droning voice he talked us through one way of preparing to meditate. I’m not sure why I remember this now. I have never thought of this since, but now, in this slightly mouldering stairwell it seems like a good idea.11

First I take note of all the thoughts spattering around my head, all the things nagging at me, from the tit I just made of myself in the shop, the shattered glass I’d have to clear, the fact that I can only remember up until around midnight last night, at which point I was debating whether to get a second bottle of wine in the bar, and after which point there is a niggling apprehension that something messy has happened. I take all these thoughts, make a note, and let them sit on the top of my mind like drops of oil on a slightly wet pan. Next I take stock of the sounds going on around me. The street is quiet outside the door. There is some kind of bustling noise in one of the flats, reverberating around the bare walls and high ceiling of the hall. I know without opening my eyes that the door to the ground floor flat is directly to my left, though not one sound is coming from there. The girls downstairs won’t be around for some hours yet. The rustlings are too urgent-sounding, not muffled enough to be coming from the third flat in the house, the top one. Does that mean… our flat?12

My heart rate increases noticeably as I realise there is someone in the house when there absolutely shouldn’t be. I place the fluorescent energy drink from the shop in my outside pocket and slink up the stairs, quick and quiet, fingers barely brushing the balustrade as I turn the corner on the stairs.13

The large fire door to the flat is as tightly closed as when I left it. But there is undeniably something happening in there. The narrow vaulted stairwell amplifies the sounds of commotion coming through the door. Rustle as of cloth rubbing against cloth. And is that a girl’s voice? Sounds for all the world like a girl moaning. Like someone enjoying themselves. Sounds like Claire. I can feel my hackles rise; my face twists with a sneer.14

I slip the single key from my pocket, notice how silent it is without a keyring to jangle against it. It slips into the door almost as silently. I lean my shoulder to the door, apply steady pressure till it unsticks with a slight click. Whoever is in the bedroom appears not to have heard. A high sustained note in the midst of the heavy breathing ends in a grunt, and the panting resumes. I set my shoulders and put my hand to the cold brass of the door handle. Twist slowly. Push slowly.15

There is Claire, lain on the bed, evidently just out of the shower, her long brown hair wet, pink towelling dressing gown wide open, naked underneath. Her right arm reaches above her head and is tensed; one hand grips the slightly tousled bedclothes, the other hovers a few inches above her arced pubic bone. And there is nothing between it and the top of her open thighs. She is alone on the bed, though from the way she is writhing and the racket she is making it doesn’t look like she is aware of this. I can’t see any toys involved, and I don’t hear any buzzing. Her eyes are closed, and her head is on one side, facing away from me. She appears not to have noticed my entrance; her breathing is still heavy, and her moans are becoming more insistent, longer. I look down at the sink. The shards of glass and sticky remains of this morning’s eruption, rough and grainy as the surface of my teeth felt afterwards, are still in the bottom. I look at the mirror, almost side on. In it I can see the bed, but not myself. Or so I would think.16

In the mirror, between Claire’s legs, instead of the shadow of her hand and the brown wisp over her parted lips, I can see a back, shoulders and the back of a head. I have a limited knowledge of the subject, but to me that looks like the back of my head. Same colour hair, the double crown I’m beginning to think is becoming a bald spot. In the mirror, as outside it, I’m still fully clothed, with jacket still on. And my mirror image is as intent on Claire as she is on it.17

My mind goes blank, and a cold dull sensation spreads from my core out to my skin, where it tingles. I freeze, watching the back of my own head, as it bobs up and down like a dash ornament, while the sounds Claire makes turn from sighs and pants to high tremulous moans, and hips buck forward, faster and faster, and more and more savagely. I want to spring on her, to scream, to move, to do something, but I can’t remember how. But a tingle in my legs intensifies. I take one step to the left and half-turn. I am facing the mirror, and blocking out everything else.18

A voice from behind- “Where are you off to?”19

Soft hand on my cheek. Claire slides off my jacket, turns me around. There is no-one else in the room. I melt into her.20

I am in the shower afterwards. The water is hot, a little hotter than I think I can stand. I feel like I’m poaching. There is a strange feeling now, as I put a globule of blue gel in my palm and sud myself. It feels as though there is a small clear layer, like clingfilm or Teflon, between my hand and my body. I am aware that I am touching something; my hand feels contact where there should be contact, and what I touch has the hard yet yielding, slightly detached feel of skin over half-emaciated muscle and bone. My body, also, is sending signals that it is being touched, probably by something calloused in places, smooth in others, operated by someone clumsy and preoccupied - this fits the description of my hand. But there is no connection in my mind between the two sensations. I am touching something, and being touched by something. I am not washing myself. I continue running my hands over myself long after the soap has gone. My hands notice the different textures: hard and especially smooth at the ribcage; faintly doughy and not as resisting over the stomach; tense over the shoulders and arms, and tight on the thighs as the muscles work to keep me standing upright. I clasp my hands together at the back of my neck, like a footballer disbelieving after a glaring error, and let the stinging water boil my fingers, and run down my back feeling colder.21

I must have stood in this manner for a while – my alarm goes on my phone to tell me to make a move to work. I step out of the shower. There is a mirror in front of me, showing me from waist height upwards.22

My mirror grins at me. He has blotches, heat rash, starting to develop on his chest. His fingers are bright red, and look as though they are throbbing slightly. He takes a step towards me. I can no longer see his hands, but the blotches on his chest show more detailed, dimpled nebulae under sallow, freckled pelt. He stretches a hand towards the mirror. I do the same. He places something on the mirror, sticking it to the watermarked dusty surface between us, linking us. It is something small, so as to be invisible when I look at it. My image takes a step to the left – his right- and I can’t see him anymore. But I still stand straight on to the mirror. I am directly in front of the bathroom sink, in front of a mirror, empty, which could be a window, into a dingy toilet lit by a bare sixty watt bulb, and what look like gravy stains on the pallid painted wall, globs of brown almost as thick as the paint itself. I step towards the glass and squint at what was stuck to it. One short curled brown hair. I reach out, touch the glass, take the hair between thumb and forefinger, look up to the mirror. There I am again, brow furrowed, thumb and forefinger together around a circle of air as if giving myself the all-clear underwater. I drop the hair; methodically, without breaking my staring contest with my image I bend, pick up some jeans from the floor and pull the on. I bend again for the navy polo shirt I will wear to work. The locked stare is broken for a second while this goes over my head. And there I am, in what passes for a uniform. Enough of this. Have to get to Cromac Street.23

The streets are dead as I slump up the Ormeau Road, huddled in a large black coat with the collar turned up. I notice nothing about the walk, other than a headwind which switches unpredictably to buffet my side and nearly put me into one of the buildings to the left. I reach the glass-fronted off-licence almost before I notice it, and I fall against the door. It has a magnetic lock with a buzzer under the counter. The manager, Dee, is at the other end of the shop, putting bottles of white wine on a shelf. He takes a while to look up. When he finally points his glasses this way, he turns and jogs like the fat man he is, a tense jiggling trot, five or six steps to the counter, which he leans over with a stretch to push the buzzer. I stagger in.24

A terse nod of the shorn head. “Well, what’s the craic.” This is not a question. The Belfast accent descends for questions. They sound like definite, derisory statements to my ears. Still, I answer with a non-committal, non-descript sound in my throat.25

“You look like you’re dyin’ still.” Understatement. That reminds me. I’ve got a hangover. I run a hand across cold wet hair.26

“Don’t feel right at all.”27

Some denomination of dance music stutters from the bashed radio under the cigarette display. I look at Dee for a moment. Something is unusual about his aspect. It’s almost as if his edges are defined by a thin line. He doesn’t look as though he exists in three dimensions. He looks like he is being projected onto a flat surface, like a sticker I could peel right off and fold. I can’t tell whether the music has progressed in this period, but it sounds like two bars have gone past.28

“I’ll leave ye to it, well. I’ve to get outta here, meetin’ her in the bar for the match.” By this he means he’s off to join his girlfriend, watching a Celtic match presumably. He comes towards me. As he does I can still see the line around him. He looks like a drawing, except he moves to zip up his grey hoodie. Then I remember I am still standing at the door, barring his path. I step to the counter. My feet feel like separate entities to my legs, and somehow the rest of my body follows them to the till. I reach over and press the buzzer. Dee leaves with a noise that means goodbye.29

The shop is cold. Strip lighting gives the place a yellowish tint. Long glass-fronted fridges cover the wall opposite, which I stand behind now. The place seems dark, even though outside mid-afternoon is still happening. There is a main road outside, across which are a grass verge, some bare trees and the squat red-brick semi-detachedness of the Markets. Around this time the Markets people will be coming in for their different hairs of the same dog. I think I need to sit down.30

A half-full cardboard crate of Kulov quarter-bottles serves as a seat. It has been left out of the store room at the back because it probably won’t last the shift. One of the two drinks that go fast here, that and Harp. A crate of Kulov is a low seat, and from this vantage point I am obscured from the view of people walking past by the waist-high wooden counter in front, and the confectionery stand to the left against the window. Under the counter are the stores of spirits, sorted on shelves, smallest at the top, largest underneath. There is also a change safe, a battered computer which operates the CCTV cameras, some boxes of stalish peanuts that were never sold, and a safety knife for opening boxes and crates. The dance music is still happening on the twenty-year-old radio beside me, and still sounds as though it repeats after four bars. I sit on the crate and breathe.31

I am finding it difficult to know when to breathe. What does suffocating feel like? I can’t remember. So I keep my breathing steady, matched to the non-music. In boof boof boof, out boof boof boof. My body evidently thinks this is too shallow. I yawn widely, showing the back of my throat to the glinting vodka bottles in front. Try iiinnn boof boof, oouuttt boof boof.32

No complaint so far.33

I don’t ever remember being as aware as this of a bodily function. Like blinking. Always seemed more or less autonomous. Just as I think this my eyes feel like they are swelling, trying to get away. I close my eyes and jab fingertips into my eyelids, rub them hard for a while.34

How do you know when to breathe? And once you figure out a pattern, how do you keep this going automatically? Am I going to have to plan every breath, from now until I go to sleep? And what will happen when I do try to sleep- will my body forget the pattern unless I keep reminding it? I am thankful that my heart has its pacemaker, beating away on its own, keeping time. I would never be able to keep track of that too.35

I feel at one remove from my body again. I am at a loss to figure out where in this body I am; I feel as though what I call ‘I’ is stuck to the front of my face, attached like a mask or a sticker that could be peeled off, if I could see the join. Outside the window the night that the day has been threatening for a while is finally falling. Dense cloud has appeared from somewhere, and through a gap between promotional posters in the double-glazed window I can see it undulate, borne on the wind which is still worrying the trees across the road.36

There is a rapping on the door. I press the buzzer mounted to the underside of the counter, and stand up slowly, with a creak at the knees. A youngish man, build disguised by a large woollen coat, hair thin, black and quite long, small glasses and an unsure gait. My gaze seems to be causing this uncertainty. He looks like he was about to say something, but thought better of it. He may have been stuck outside for some time. He fidgets his way through the door, throwing glances at me. I can see the outline of him. He looks just as if someone were moving him around against a static background, the way they used to make cartoons. He could be no thicker than a sheet of paper. He could be no thickness at all.37

He shuffles over towards the wines, at the opposite end of the shop from the door. His flat shoes make little rasping noises against the rough tiles. My eyes follow him as he slipes over to the back of the shop, picks up a bottle of red and reads the label intently. It just does not seem feasible, someone so paper-thin picking up something so solid as a glass bottle. Maybe the bottle is another sticker that he peeled off and stuck to himself. He is studying that label. He needs the right paper wine to go with his paper dinner, on his 2D table in his 2D flat. Paper money need be no object.38

He has made his choice. He brings it to the counter, an awkward grin at the corners of his mouth. He sticks the wine on the counter, where it makes a solid clunk against the thick wood with its space underneath. I look at his eyes. They don’t change at all, small and black behind their drawn-on frames. I keep my eyes locked on his cartoon eyes for some time. Iiinnn boof boof, oouuttt boof boof, three times. He giggles nervously.39

“Can I get that, please?”40

I heard the sound; it mingled with the beat and announced itself to me through my ears. I saw the cartoon’s mouth move. What connects the two? What makes this 2D shape able to disclose to my mind that it wants this bottle of wine? I look and I can’t see.41

Until… there it is. There, just inside the jagged edge where someone cut him out. It stretches from the top of his forehead, over his eyes and nose and cheeks, like a latex mask. That’s where he is. The part of him that wants that bottle of wine, and asked me for it, passing thin air over whatever works as vocal chords in his two-dimensional body. Not even a one-dimensional line divides them. A mask on a sticker.42

The right hand belonging to my body is reaching under the counter. It finds the safety knife, cold painted metal. I know what it wants to do. My body wants to know if it can peel off the mask. I am curious too. I lock those cartoon eyes with mine. The grin leaves the mouth. The 2D man stands transfixed, stuck fast, laminated. My right hand tells me it has extended the blade of the safety knife, still out of sight of this cartoon. My left hand volunteers a plan; it rests on the counter beside the till. My body coils and vaults the counter in one swing; knees catch the cartoon in his taut paper chest; he staggers, but stays on his feet. My left hand is at his throat, his back now pressed against the door of the walk-in fridge. My right comes up to his cheek, blade extended. A feral high sound comes from somewhere; his teeth are bared like a cat. The blade barely makes a mark as it slides along the edge of him, that line I can hardly see between the transparent sticker and its grease-proof paper. It is coming off though. I can see the underneath.43

His hand still holds the bottle of wine. He swings it before I can react, and it connects flat against the top of my head. It shatters, and my eyes stop working. I let go and stumble, arms out, trip over a box on the floor and land on my backside with a slide of denim. He bolts for the door, which is held by the maglock; he pulls it with one hand and it doesn’t budge so he wrenches it open with two. He runs out into the setting dark.44

I stand and look at the shop front. It stretches wide, one three-fold window split by green metal frames. Some posters are stuck to the inside on the left pane. I walk over and tear them down, then turn and look at the window again. The cloud cover outside makes the falling night look heavy- the dark air looks liquid, and I stand, framed green around blue, a ghostly double reflection like a fish on the inside of its tank, whited out as the shop’s lights turn the window into a three-fold mirror, translucent but not transparent. And now I see it. The place where I end and my body begins. The split between spirit and carcass; the place where air and fire join with earth and water. And I can feel my body wants to get rid of me. It has been a good pack horse for twenty-one years - it has never complained, seldom broken down, a golem made to work by a word I cannot translate, because it is me, and a word cannot translate itself. Now, though, my body wants no more of me. These molecules have had enough of orders, enough of order; they want to go back to entropy.45

My right hand still holds the safety knife. I raise it to the top of my forehead, the top of my reflection, where the blood runs down from the shattered bottle. I follow the line I can see, the split between me and my body, until the hand holding the safety knife is no longer mine. There are still two reflections in the mirror. One steps to the left, one to the right. The one on the right sways. It falls flat on its back. I am alone in the mirror. I can see nothing else. I can feel the walls all around me, but I can see neither them nor the ceiling. The space is never-ending, but there is nothing here. Infinite dimensions, simplified to two. Nothing but light and reflections. Nothing.