Nicola Barker - Three Button Trick and Other Stories

He wasn’t sure that he’d heard her correctly. ‘What?’

She smiled as though what she was telling him caused her infinite joy. ‘I’ve got a tapeworm, Sean, it’s symbiosis. We both depend on each other to carry on.’

Sean shook his head in disbelief. ‘What do you mean, Shelly? Is this a joke or something?’

Worms disgusted him. He had seen part of a nature programme on television a few weeks before which had featured something about worms that had made him almost physically sick. He had turned it over straight away.

Shelly returned to her meal, unperturbed. After a mouthful she said, ‘I got him by eating raw mincemeat. It took a while and obviously I had to specify certain parts of the animal, you know, stomach, offal. I actually told the butcher that I wanted meat minced for my dog. As I said though, it took several attempts.’

Sean’s lip curled in disgust. ‘You ate raw dog meat?’

She shook her head. ‘No, low quality meat, not from a can. Lots of animals get tapeworms. Obviously though there are many different varieties. It’s very complicated because I think they reproduce in lots of different ways. I went to great lengths to get mine.’

Sean still couldn’t be sure that Shelly wasn’t joking. He said, ‘What do you call it? Trevor?’

She laughed. It was the first time that she had laughed properly all evening. ‘I don’t have a formal name for him—I think he’s asexual. I haven’t read all that much about them.’

The waiter returned to the table to make sure that their meal was all right. Shelly answered, smiling, ‘It’s absolutely delicious, thank you.’ Sean just continued to stare at her face. Once the waiter had moved away he picked up his fork and tried to eat one of the lightly battered prawn balls on his plate. As he chewed Shelly said, ‘You see, the tapeworm consumes my undigested food so that it doesn’t have the chance to turn into fat. That’s my theory anyway. He then uses the food to grow and reproduce himself. He sort of develops another segment which divides away from his body after a certain period. This segment, I’m slightly confused on this point though, this segment then either stays in the stomach, hooking on to a prime place, or it’s flushed out with your body fluids.’

Sean said nothing. He was pushing prawn and batter around his mouth but he couldn’t swallow. Shelly took this silence as an indication of interest so she added, ‘I’m glad you’re not a biologist, Sean, because I’m explaining this very badly’

Sean carried on chewing. On his forehead were slight beads of perspiration. He picked up his napkin and blotted them. Shelly took a sip of wine and said, ‘I have to be careful about alcohol. I sometimes think that it must be bad for him so I don’t drink very much any more. That’s something else good that he’s brought to my life.’

Sean pushed his mouthful of well-chewed food into his cheek and said, ‘What happens when it grows, Shelly?’

She shrugged and picked up her knife and fork again, ‘I’m not absolutely sure. In general I think they just get bigger and bigger until they fill up all your tubes. I think they can grow to an enormous size. They just grow bigger and bigger and reproduce.’

Sean shuddered. ‘And what happens then? I’m sure they’re harmful.’

Suddenly an image flashed into his mind, an image that he had seen accompanied by the voice of David Attenborough. There had been a snail on a leaf. As it ate the leaf it had consumed some sort of worm the size of a pin head. The worm lived and grew inside the snail, created a home for itself in this new snail-stomach world. After several weeks the maggot had grown rather large. It became visible inside one of the snail’s two feelers. It grew and grew until eventually it filled the feeler entirely. After a while it looked as though, instead of a feeler sticking out of the snail’s head, it had a large, independent, squirming maggot whose movements were curtailed only by a thin layer of the snail’s translucent skin. The maggot moved, squelched, writhed under the snail’s skin, eating, growing.

Several days later the snail’s other feeler began to fatten up, to grow pale, to move against its own will as another maggot appeared in this feeler. Sean hadn’t been able to tell whether this was the same maggot or a different one. They certainly looked like two fully formed and independent creatures. Eventually the snail had no feelers left, just two white maggots sticking out of the top of its head, living on its juices, eating it while it carried on moving and living and breathing. The maggots shuddered and vibrated inside the snail’s feelers, its eyes, prisoners in its skin, eating him.

Sean had yelped his horror and had snatched for the remote control to switch it off. He couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards though. He was sure that the snail must’ve died, but after how long? He felt like gagging.

Shelly had almost completed her meal. She was saying, ‘Sean, eat something. It’s such a waste.’

He spat out his masticated mouthful into a napkin. She said, ‘I haven’t been so happy in a long time, Sean. The only tiny way that I notice the worm is when I go to the toilet. Often when I go now a segment of the worm comes out in my urine.’

One of Sean’s main rules of love was that women didn’t go to the toilet; or if they went they did different things there than men. He refused to have his idealism shattered. Shelly had always been very circumspect about her personal habits in the past. She had always called the toilet the Little Girls’ Room. When she said it he liked to imagine that women kept dolls and horses and perfume and lipstick in the Little Girls’ Room, that they popped in there for a bit of fun and then came out again, beautiful, perfect and squeaky clean. He was a firm believer in the use of feminine deodorants.

Shelly was saying, ‘I think the segment is just part of the worm that is dead because when I’ve studied it it doesn’t move or anything. It’s not like an independent life form …’

Sean couldn’t believe that Shelly was saying these things; he interrupted, ‘This is all a tiny bit intimate, Shelly’

She shrugged, ‘I don’t know. I think I’ve really changed in that respect over the past few months. I used to be embarrassed about my body before and the things that it does naturally. My tapeworm has changed all that. It’s like I’m now involved in a very natural and obvious relationship. It’s like I can see at last how I relate to the world as a creature; to trees and grass and cows and pigs, and the moon’s cycles and the sea. We all are alive in a similar way. It’s all connected and we all depend on each other, in a sort of chain of existence.’

As she spoke the waiter returned to their table and took away their plates. Shelly smiled at him as he completed this task and said, ‘I’d love an Irish coffee.’

He nodded and looked at Sean. Sean said, ‘Just a plain coffee for me, please.’

Shelly straightened the table cloth and picked up a few crumbs to put in the ashtray. Sean felt inside his jacket pocket and took out a couple of cigarettes. He offered Shelly one. She shook her head. ‘I’ve given up.’ He raised his eyebrows then stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. After inhaling he said, ‘Shelly, you’ve got to get rid of that worm.’

She smiled. ‘No.’

He exhaled vigorously. ‘Well, what’s going to happen when it grows to an enormous size? I’m sure you eat enough to treble its size every other day.’

She ignored this insult and said, ‘I’m going to keep this one for ten months then get rid of it. Afterwards I’ll get another small one and start from scratch all over again. That means it’ll never get out of control.’