Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

ME

Could we start again?

CANDY

I can’t –

ME

Why not?

CANDY

Let’s not do that –

And suddenly I had nothing else to say. For obviously, she was right. She was the noblest person I knew.

— Go, I said. — It’s OK.

It was really very sad, to think that there would be no second chance, and to suddenly see the entire recent history of my life, as if from a great height: to realise, in other words, that the judgement of time was now definitively against me. It’s like those history paintings which up close are all swarm or splurge, with gouts and gross enlargements, but when you move back far enough you see the grand coronation, or liberty at the barricades. Or like one of those blurry crowds where only if you get back far enough do you see they’re holding up those electronic flip cards spelling out the name of the immortal and only leader. For a long while after Candy had left, I sat in the kitchen, looking at this room. I had nowhere else to go. I was like a pond or pool, where all of time was eddying and stilled. Then finally I went upstairs to bed, and for a moment was confused, because something else was missing but I could not name this extra absence — and then I remembered that, of course, the dog was gone.

from which he wakes up transformed

When I woke up the next morning it was very peaceful. Life was just immobile, like a field. It had no ZOOM! or WHAAM! My mother and father were still away. Candy had left for Tiffany’s apartment in the hot polluted city. I did not think that I would talk to Romy again, or certainly not soon. And the dog was an absence, too, but in some way the absence of the dog was worse because he was gone for ever, so that no longer was he breathing on my face in the night, or moving pensively around the bedroom. His paws were not at my nose, with their warm milky smell. Our dog smelled of rice, or toast, or sometimes vanilla frosting. Our dog smelled supersweet. Only Hiro was still here, snoozing in the spare room — and I was pleased that at least I had that company in the world. Always I was used to the attention of other people — and so I did the only thing I could think of, which was to wake up Hiro and together have a larger narcotic breakfast than was usual even for us, with white powder to make things seem more electronica and carefree, then the white pills to even the sensations out. It did seem to make things better and I could reason much more clearly. Even if traumatised and terrified and alone, that’s no reason to give up on one’s ongoing projects. Very obviously we needed to return the money — and even if I was not entirely sure where exactly this money was due, it seemed most likely that the nail salon was where we should go, since it was from the nail salon that we had taken the most money, and it was the nail salon that seemed to me the most likely to have sinister violence hidden behind it. I had no idea if that was in any way a correct line of thinking. To make things right was such a burden! It was such a bundle of decisions. And yet also it was delightful if I could think of doing this so that everyone else could live carefree, while I alone knew no rest from morning to night bearing other people’s burdens. And one further task, I realised, in trying to continue to make things right, was to give our dog a burial. The previous day, we had put him outside in the garden, and the thought of him lying out there overnight, while Candy and I argued and cajoled each other and separated for ever, this was a melancholy thought and left me ill at ease. And so in my pyjamas I went down to the garden, and that did feel good, I mean to be at last taking control and doing the right thing. It was one step at least towards a better life. I wanted to bury our dog in the fields far out, on the edge of the city, in the woods, among the breadfruit trees and oaks, where he so liked to roam. But when I walked down into the garden and stood there, with the backdrop of one plum tree and one chirimoya tree, and in the distance the noise of the autostrada, I could not help a sort of terror. I had forgotten the violence that had been done to our dog, the violence and its effects, so that his skull had this depression in it, the way a button might jam on some ancient tape deck and never return to its right position, and his jaw was awry so that his teeth did not match up, like he was grimacing, or smiling very clownishly. Blood was now brown and biscuity all over his muzzle and fur. And it was as I looked at this blood on his muzzle and also on his paws, because some had dripped from his head to his front paws when we had lain him down, that my feelings in some way changed — because our dog was always very clean, he liked to lick the mud off him or any other dirt, in the manner of a very houseproud person. Never would he have allowed such staining to his paws, no never, and it was this staining that suddenly made me feel enraged, and I paused there, in this bright stain of my own fury, and was only woken from this daze by the sound of my phone.

rejecting all guilt

Once again, I had a message from this number I did not recognise. I sent a furious reply, and received no answer. And while I understand that once again such a message could have a very innocent explanation, it seemed to represent a major problem that I needed to confront. It was as if the world would never leave me be. Always, I was thinking, I must be the one who goes in fear. And while I was willing to accept that there was a case to be made against me, I also did feel that there was much to be said in my defence. And I still do not think that perhaps it was so wrong, to want to question this assumption of my guilt, since this is surely very intricate and infinite to answer. So that if now as my historian I was looking for reasons to explain this whole catastrophe, then I would have to begin very slowly, like it would need to include also other people around me in the background, like the man who walked his Rottweiler in the local parks and did not like me letting my dog off-leash at the same time as his because my dog annoyed him, because he was too quick and upset his slower beast, and also the woman who used to tell me not to let my dog mess her dog around like that, He doesn’t like being messed around with , she would say, as if my dog were a paedophile or delinquent. And then also there could well be other causes, like the way the first girl I ever kissed never spoke to me again, which did make me very sad, or perhaps I was sad already, and therefore in this picture of those to blame I would have to include also my dead and absent grandparents, yes, I would have to go back very far, perhaps as far as my swimming instructors at the municipal pool, who let me leave school without ever learning how to swim, and my dentist who removed a milk tooth and then never replaced it, so I had this wonky gap in my teeth, then the teachers at my school who would not give me the magic mark which would allow me to use a fountain pen, which meant that technically I am still forbidden from using anything other than pencil or biro. And then the other children at my under-14 county athletics trial who upset me with their speed. In fact the more I think about my entrance to the adult world I am amazed at the handicaps I was born with, including the chance procedures that had gone into the make-up of my body, and especially my skin. Ever since birth, my skin has been inadequate, luminous with rashes and little weeping cuts. And this means, I’m just saying, that most things associated with pleasure become a problem — like beaches, for instance. I go to the beach and I develop heat rashes and my skin is finely speckled. In the children’s hospital, they swaddled me in bandages, to try to stop me scratching, and later I learned to bathe my hands in chemicals, so that they might harden. Or also we would try the various mixtures of twig and bark provided by the Chinatown apothecaries, even though neither my mother nor I believed that they would work — and they tasted very disgusting, and did not work. Yes, you really could continue very minutely, when you started thinking in this way. It was like two facing mirrors. Or like the way once a muezzin begins it starts off all the other muezzins pre-recorded muezzining.