Becalmed by Chris Fyles

Nov_2010_Becalmed

 

Read by Will Goodhand

 

Be all you can be. If you want something enough, you will get it. The world is your oyster. And in this case:

“Success can be all yours simply through positive thinking. Visualise your success and it will be yours. All yours. Get a good, clear picture...”

A slow, white curl drifts like a spinning spiral galaxy.  The eye follows it as it rises, gently succumbing to invisible Brownian impacts somewhere close to the ceiling. The eye informs a jealous mind. Unlike the mind and the lumpen, lumpy body in which it is contained, the curling, evaporating smoke is free.

The body lies on a sofa. Neither the sofa nor the body are visibly disintegrating, yet they are slowly decaying, nonetheless. The sofa, almost certainly, will be first to go, but the body will go in time, just the same.

The body is hungry. The smoke has made it so. The body would like some more pickled onion Monster Munch. But the body doesn’t stir.

This is because the body is shaking, all over, so much so that it can’t raise itself from its curled-up rest on the sofa. Not that it is at rest. Far from it.

If the body is shaking, then the mind it contains is in the grip of an earthquake. Shuddering waves of terror surge through the mind, faster and faster until they are close to being one, great, continuous bore of panic. There is no way of stopping them, nor will they allow a glimpse of the shore. Treading water will only lead to drowning, but the drowning will be slow.

There's a ringing sound. It's the doorbell. I could pretend that I believe it to be the high, clear note of a squadron of enchanted porpoises and their mermaid drivers riding to my rescue. But I know it's the doorbell.

“Gareth? Can you let me in please? Gareth!”

Because of the shuddering fear and also, probably, because of the psychotropic effects of the cannabis on my neurones, her voice seems to quaver and whistle. As though under water. As though I'm under water and she's up above, on the other side of the shimmering surface.

The thought train I'm now aboard is enough to take me away from the fear, for just long enough that I can at last sit up and swing my legs over the edge of the sofa.

“Gareth? It’s Louise. I’ve come to see you, love, can you let me in, please?”

I know it’s Louise. Who else would it be? But I’m not sure that I can let her in. Not with all the smoke and the burning roach still burning in the laden ashtray on the floor by my dirty, bare feet. Because if I let her in and let her see and smell and taste the smoke and see and smell the rubbish and dirty clothing lying on the floor by my dirty, bare feet, if I let her do that, she will know.

She will know about me.

“Gareth?”

I stand up. I bend down and pick up the ashtray. I run with it to the kitchen, stumbling and trembling and feeling sick and sweaty.

I am very sweaty. The sweat is trickling from my bald head and down my sharp nose.

“Gareth? Hello?”

“Hello!” I say. As I say it, I slide the ashtray into the grey, busy water in the sink, where it slips easily below the surface and drowns quickly.

“OH!” she shouts, making me wince. “You are in! Let me in, you wee monkey!”

I come back into the front room and lean my back against the wall near the door while I pant and tremble and my chest crunches. I manage to slide a bit closer to the door, until I can reach up and start to fiddle with the handle.

“Morning, love!” says Louise, standing on the mat in front of the door. The hallway beyond her is empty, which is a great relief. I stand and stare at her and realise that I am hardly wearing any clothes and that I smell quite strongly. 

“All right?” says Louise. I realise she is saying it in such a way as to mean “All right if I come in?” There is no way I can prevent her from coming in, so I suppose it will have to be all right. But as she brushes past me on her way over to my sofa, the waves of fear start to wash back over my head. I wish, I really wish, she hadn’t brushed against me like that. I’m so filthy and disgusting and now I have been touched.

But I do my best to move towards the kitchen. That way, firstly I won’t have to explain to her how frightened she's made me and why I'm clinging to the wall like I am. Secondly, if I can get into the kitchen she can do what she's come here to do, it can be over quickly and she can leave.

It’s not that I don’t like her; I actually think she is a very wonderful person for wanting to come here to see me, but I don’t want to see anyone today. The effort of allowing her into my flat is making me feel sick and every muscle is trying to tear itself free to get away from her. I get alongside the kitchen door just as Louise says:

“You shouldn’t be smoking this stuff, you know. Haven’t we talked about this?”

We have.

“You know it makes your anxiety worse, Gareth.”

It makes my anxiety worse. That's what Louise says. But it doesn’t. Nothing does. It’s as bad as it could be and smoking the odd joint can’t make it any worse. Perhaps if she'd got here earlier I wouldn’t have had to smoke it, anyway.

But I can’t think like that. Thinking like that is wrong. I am wrong. She is good and much better than me. How dare I?

I go into the kitchen and wait, although it feels more like I’m hiding from her. She comes after me with her bag and I start to feel even worse. How can that be?

“If you’re already feeling anxious, this stuff will make you feel worse, Gareth,” Louise explains. “You remember we were talking about you trying to engage more with some social activities? If you’re serious about that then I’m afraid you’re going to have to cut this out, all right?”

Louise smokes cannabis. I know this because Miranda, my support worker, told me so, more or less. Louise smokes cannabis and drives a big car and lives in a great big house in the country with her loving husband and her loving children and goes to parties and goes on holiday and does a job that makes her feel fulfilled.

“What’s this?” asks Louise. She startles me in saying that, because when I look at her again I'm expecting to see that she's taken out the big needle. She knows what the big needle is, we both know, which is why her question startles me. That, and the strange, gurgling sound of her voice which sounds like one of us is underwater, just like with the doorbell.

But she isn’t holding the needle. She's holding up the piece of glossy card with its pink borders and its photo of a smiling woman. I don’t answer Louise.

“Be all you can be,” she reads, “Success can be all yours simply through positive thinking ...”

She pauses and turns the card over in her hands. I know that I'm sweating even more than I was, that I'm red in the face, stinking, wanting to urinate and cry and say how sorry I am. The pause is long and terrible. I know that Louise is trying not to show how funny she finds the card.

“Oh, Gareth ...” she says softly, with great warmth and motherly feeling in her voice. Her pity is like hot fag ash in my stomach and a vice on my skull. “Where did you get this?”

I try to tell her that someone gave it to me by posting it through the letter box at the end of the hallway outside, but my voice is too painful in my throat. Someone I have never seen, as far as I know, shoved the card into a communal hallway along with a big bundle of identical cards and I happened to get hold of it the last time, many days ago, when I managed to get as far as the door to the outside world. The world on the surface. The world in the looking glass. The place I can’t reach.

Then, Louise, who smokes cannabis and drinks alcohol and eats junk food and is just like me except that she lives in the reflected world where you can have a job and friends and a family and love and two weeks in the Maldives, tells me:

“I’m sorry, Gareth, but life just isn’t like that, you know. Best chuck this out, love.”

Then she brings her bag over to the worktop next to the sink and rummages around in it. I lift my dressing gown and slip down my boxers to expose what I imagine is a deathly pale, wobbly buttock. I stare at nothing for as long as it takes her to fill the syringe.

Each breath in seems to me like a wave rushing to the shore. I know this is not an imaginative way of looking at it and I'm angered by my failure, because my imagination is the place in which I can be somewhere else, I think. Somewhere that has no needle being jabbed into my bottom so that anti-psychotic drugs can be released into my blood to soothe my thoughts and remind me that the route to feeling better is through my arse.

But each breath in seems to me like a wave rushing to the shore. And each breath out is my life escaping with the waves that go back out to the great sea of life. And all of this is experienced from below, far below the shimmering, surface of the mirror sea. Down where I am.

Up there is where she lives, in the bright air, doing everything I do but doing it well, doing it right, doing it for fun. And doing everything else besides. That's how the other half live, in opposition to how I do. And as I lean over the sink to watch her getting into her shiny car and driving away, as I peer through the grey bladderwrack of my lace curtains, I know I will always be down here. I have tried. I have failed. No matter how soothing the flood from my rump becomes, I can never break through to the other side of the mirror, not ever. She is away with her loving family and her financial adviser and her sense of satisfaction. And I am not.

I stumble woozily from the kitchen to the sofa and get ready to carry on and be all that I can be.

 

--

 

Becalmed by Chris Fyles was read by Will Goodhand at the Liars' League Smoke & Mirrors event on Tuesday 9 November 2010 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Sq., London

Chris Fyles has now had three stories accepted by the League, and he's getting cocky. Moreover, he's got stuff coming out in Scotland, has just made a film, and is particularly proud that his elegy to his cat is being included in an anthology. It's what Tigger would have wanted.

Will Goodhand is the only man to make multiple-adventurer of kids’ cartoon fame Mr Benn jealous: Internet entrepreneur, radio DJ, Beauty & the Geek star and etiquette coach to Britain's Next Top Models, Will regularly performs stand-up and story-readings on the London circuit: for details of upcoming gigs, email [email protected].