The Apartment

was lying on an eighteenth-century fainting couch. They had seven such pieces of furniture dotted strategically around the apartment. I was grateful for this, as I usually felt nauseous when I saw them. Toby and Samantha that is, the couple who owned the apartment I found myself in. Samantha was fussing over my contorted body. I had my head between my knees and was mewling like an injured Prussian whilst rocking back and forth from my waist axis. I wanted to tell her that her actions were actually making things worse, but I couldn’t for some reason.  I raised my head and looked at her face. She seemed a worthwhile person. I wondered if I was in love with her, and that’s why I couldn’t say that her mere presence made me sick. I put my head back between my knees and thought about this concept for about 14 minutes. I drew strength from its paradoxical nature and felt slightly better.

Toby then rolled into the room like an egg. Although a young person, his face consisted entirely of jowls. Jowls. It’s as if they’d had a fight with his cheek and jawbones and the cheek and jawbones had not only lost, but had been so traumatised by the experience that they could no longer function as anything useful anymore, whilst the victorious jowls descended lower and lower until they resembled two empty scrotums hanging from each side of his face, like a grotesque pair of drop earrings.

Toby was standing over my body. He looked moderately concerned as he asked Samantha what was wrong with me. 

‘His intestines have gone to sleep.’

‘Ah, of course’ said Toby.

I was surprised at this swift diagnosis from a person untrained in medicine, as well the casual ‘matter of fact’ acceptance from Toby. In actual fact, it felt the exact opposite: my intestines were wide awake and looking for ways to leave my body. I groaned like Geoffrey Chaucer, or how I imagined Geoffrey Chaucer would groan after a night drinking strong ale.

‘Listen to him’ said Samantha. ‘He’s groaning like the Venerable Bede after eating chips.’

She’d misdiagnosed me again, but I let it slide. Toby suddenly crouched down to my bent over frame. I noticed distractedly that his jowls took slightly longer to reach the same level as the rest of his face. Some kind a lag effect, presumably. For want of anything else to say, I repeated this observation out loud to him. His slapped-arse-of-a-face looked sad, like Droopy Dog’s after being told his family had just died in a house fire. Frustratingly, however, it soon cheered up.  He went on to say that my rudeness – or was it candour? – was down to the delusion he thought I was suffering. This was not the case; although I was in physical discomfort, I felt shockingly lucid in my thinking.

Samantha and Toby clearly didn’t think so, as they were now talking about me as if I wasn’t in the same room as them. I heard them say I was socially and mentally retarded and incapable of sustaining a relationship with a real live woman, as well as being a compulsive masturbator and bed wetter. Most of these accusations were half truths at best. Granted, I often combined the masturbating and bed wetting, (two birds with one stone, etc.) but there was nothing compulsive about it. And all the other allegations are just hearsay.

I decided I had to do something to have them notice me. In keeping with the traditional etiquette of such a situation, I pretended to clear my throat loudly, hoping to alert them of my presence, and thus persuading them to discontinue their character assassination, which had now moved on to me deliberately pushing a shopping trolley into a toddler’s face in Waitrose. This, again, was another slander. What I’d actually done was push a shopping trolley over a toddler’s face in Waitrose. There’s a subtle difference, and they really should have acknowledged it. This is what happened: the child was lying in one of the aisles colouring in some pictures of tigers, and, feeling surprisingly confident, I tried to ‘bunny hop’ over him. I’d often practice this trick in my spare time, of which I had quite a lot. Unfortunately, I didn’t factor in the weight of my groceries in the trolley, and this meant I was unable to perform the manoeuvre. Consequently, the right front wheel and the right back wheel of the trolley ran over the child’s jaw, nose and forehead (in that order).
I looked back at what I’d done and felt a bit guilty. But I believed there was still time to retrieve the situation. Fortuitously, all this had happened in the stationery aisle, so I opened a packet of post-it notes, wrote down my details, and stuck it on top of the boy’s head. That way the owners could contact me to sort out any insurance issues or other problems. I then left the supermarket feeling quite altruistic.  

Later I realised that instead of writing my name and address on the post-it note, I’d actually drawn a picture of a duck. I don’t know why I did this.

I’d been narrating this episode out loud, in the hope that Toby and Samantha would acknowledge me. It didn’t seem to work, as they had now started to have sex. Toby mounted her like a sweaty warthog. Samantha looked like a praying mantis only bigger. I declared it weirdly anthropomorphic in my mind, and added an Attenborough narration for effect. I watched them for a while, and listened somewhat inattentively as Attenborough described cross-species coitus. There was then a disjuncture and things became quite turbid. When I looked again Toby was lying dead on the floor. Or perhaps he was sleeping. I couldn’t tell the difference.

Presentation

Shamed out of my sleep by dreams, I awoke to find myself on a Procrustean bed of filth. I was in what I thought was a hotel room. I had a vague sensation that my name meant something but I could find no certainties. I had a less vague sensation that I had been here before. But for the moment my worldview was entirely solipsistic: I could not comprehend anyone else existing. I closed my eyes and urinated bliss through my underpants. Warmth, exuded and spread and I lost consciousness. 

A timeless period passed and I found myself in an auditorium with a backstage pass stapled to my forehead. And then... clarity: Allah had held a match to my pilot light and illuminated my world. I remember... I remembered the day I pawned my dignity and stepped onto this endless treadmill. This was why I was here today. I intended to give a presentation on Nihilistic Angst in the Children’s TV Programme Pingu. I had no knowledge of the subject yet felt fully confident to grant an ill-informed opinion and have it accepted as zeitgeist defining brilliance by London-based hubristic twat-nozzles.

The act before me was a TV nutritionist plugging her new diet book, Wank Yourself Thin. It entailed eating only smoky bacon crisps for 10 weeks and then masturbating the calories out through your genitals. A demonstration ensued, which I was only dimly aware of. As she worked herself into a state of pork ecstasy gush flap, in the wings I myself inhaled 12 bongs at once and bench-pressed gravity in anticipatory numbness. I then heard a name over the PA system and realised it was probably mine and that I should start doing something. I strode onto the stage like a cocksure tit and immediately began high-fiving invisible people who my imagination had created to keep me entertained. This lasted for about 15 minutes. The real audience thought I was being ironic and whooped like eggplants. I then stepped up to the microphone and blew some lung air across my vocal cords. Shrugging off originality, (a wheezing old carthorse) I larded my conversation with buzzwords cribbed from a Sunday Supplement article about non-floating Hasidic Rabbis. A surprising amount of overlap in each area. Reasons for this: small world shrinking to no hemisphere; words/experience declining likewise in proportion as existence condenses to a quantum singularity.

After enunciating this encyclopaedia of drivel, I unbox tautology and dandle a ventriloquist’s dummy on my knee (likeness of Unwin in spats), and hold court to the applause of idiots. We click together, Unwin and I. They ache for my words (and Unwin’s, but his words are mine). They are talent vampires seeking sustenance and I let them feed.

But on what?

I only provide milk placebos.

They still starve.

I am fraudulent. 

After mashing unbuoyant Jews and bolshy penguins into a steaming pile of inanity, I reached the shank of my presentation. This with straight face I state:

“Pingu is a sick fuck who shits bourgeois edification in a dish and pisses ennui up against a rapidly melting igloo.”

The igloo, I reveal, represents the melting of the polar icecaps (the shit in a dish lacks a precise referent). This was accompanied by a PowerPoint slide of the planet earth and underneath the words GLOBAL WARMING in 72-point Helvetica Bold. The audience loved this visual stimulus I provided. I am bukkakeing them with stupid and they gurn with pleasure as it lands on their faces.

They cheer me like I’m God.

In return I scream unintelligibly into the microphone for 20 minutes.

They cheer me for that, as well.

I continued to receive the adulation of the audience, for no reason other than stringing together impressive sounding polysyllables and wanking up a storm of fustian slag bonnets. I had finished dabbing paints at my tripe easel and now wanted to leave the building. Corner eyed, I noticed that Unwin had unsurprisingly come to life and had begun threatening violence in revenge for me boxing him up like a musical instrument and taking him on tour.  Tiny arms whirl pathetically in a sad tantrum. He looked like an angry 85-year-old toddler. Feeling pity, I promised to give him a backstory and royalties in return for blowjobs. Unwin agreed to this and climbed back into his box (little legs scrabbling for footholds). I then drew directions to the hotel on my face and lost consciousness.

I awoke sometime later in the same bed and the same room as before. Again I could not remember who I was. I had an uneasy feeling about what would happen next as a dam burst in my bladder.

“Life is a circle except when it isn’t” (ancient proverb)

Some Creative Writing

Paragraphs 5

1. My prayers, aimed at the ceiling and going no further, I stood up and experienced taste of acrid failure. And saw: Christ on a quad bike, skilful with poise, takes a difficult corner. I bend the knee and give praise. I then ask if he has ever heard of the DIY product No More Nails. He smiled kindly, as if I was the first to make the joke, whilst mentally putting an asterisk next to my name in the Book of Life.

2. I saw the problem clearly now. Never propose necrophilia on a first date. Mistake number two: giving her sex aid with in-built oscillating wank function for use when I not there to tend to her. Her ill humour understandable, fierce. I took my defeat and went home, into the welcoming arms of the internet. Browser history shameful.

3. ‘Culture constructs reality’, clucks English professor. Strange man: tenured and hubristic. He says to wraith-like audience: ‘I coil postmodern turds on the bedsheets of empiricism.’ Example of this given: excreta screams from below diaphragm; backward whooshing sound; noise and bowel move in unison and expelling matter.  Glazed eyes, dribbling into his lectern, drunk on own claptrap. Exhausted, he falls to the floor like an old sock. Applause followed.

4. Knowing nothing of the real world I take solace in word and song. Title: A Road Paved with Carcasses. Result: a smorgasbord of post-apocalyptic banalities. Writing words with bones I composed this line, ‘Pablo, take your rusty crap hammer and perforate my membranes.’ Music accompaniment for this: glassy tones. Like cattle pissing on harps. 

5. Bending porn around allegory and dung into metaphor, with symbols I hacked at the body of a pageboy who lies without motion. Joints dislocate with careful twist, toothpick arms snap off, dimpled cheeks cave in with accurate applied pressure.  Lengthways sexual turn, uncoil a narrow two yards and receive me. I finish, twitching like a fisher’s rod. Despondent experience. Swabbed-out afterbirth pools on floor and taunts me.