"Do you fancy going somewhere else?"
She laughs, throwing her head back. She's wearing a velvet choker, with
a bell on it, like the collar on a cat. I like that, it's a nice
conceit. But I can feel the moment slipping. She leans into me, shouts,
"Now? But I've only just got here!"
I shrug, "Is it cold out?"
She looks at me, then nods, vigorously.
"Then let's go somewhere warmer!"
She draws back, looks into my eyes, laughs. Then she kisses me. I draw
her face in, sliding my face past her lips. They feel wonderful on my
smooth cheeks. That's something I never get used to, the late-night
smoothness. It's wonderful.
"Boy, you're in a hurry!"
I smile, nod, look away. Yes, I am. A desperate hurry.
"I'm Cinderella!" I shout back. "After midnight I turn into a pumpkin!"
She laughs again, shakes her head. Looks into my eyes with a half-smile. "Is it something that a fairy godmother can fix?"
I smile and shake my head. No. " I'm catching a plane!" I explain. "Have to be at the airport by midnight."
She nods., leans forward, throws an arm over. "Well," she breathes, "I
guess I'd just better make the most of you while i've got you.."
So we kiss, which at this point is all I could even dream of. Lust has
weakened, shifted; moved an octave higher. And unless I'm not quick,
it'll soon be joined by other things.
I disengage breathlessly, blow a last goodbye kiss (she gives a little
moue of disappointment, but smiles when she realizes she can't persuade
me to stay, and turns back to her friends), and head out. I make sure
I'm shucking on my jacket as I pass the bouncers - I don't want them to
get a clear view of my face, not now.
It's not a steady thing, my condition. Every cycle's the same, but
within each cycle it's patchy. It's like some sort of dance - quick,
quick, slow, quick, slow. That's probably a good thing, because
otherwise by this time of night I'd barely be able to walk. As it is,
I'm nervous and feeling vulnerable. I tuck my chin deep into my jacket,
and dive from sodium patch to sodium patch, trying not to accelerate as
I skirt the darkness of the Meadows.
I've left it late tonight (and underneath the collar of my jacket I
grin - boy was it worth it), and I can feel the occasionally curious
glance thrown at me. I can feel people wondering: who'd let their child
out so obviously past their bedtime?
I went to a doctor once. At first he didn't believe me, so I went away
and came back an hour later. Then I practically had to break his arm to
get out, he was so excited. Thirty seconds in there was enough to
persuade me that the 'program' he was mapping out was an
extraordinarily bad idea. Specialists, tests... world fame, a life as a
freak. Guaranteed. I'd never survive. I left; I didn't answer his
calls. When social services came round, I let them in, was very polite,
told them I was my own grandfather. Who wouldn't believe it? The truth
is too stupid to be true.
In ancient times, communities (I think this is in the bible, but I'm
not sure) used to get together and symbolically heap all their sins
onto a goat, which they'd then kick out of the village to wander into
the desert, taking everyone's sins with it. That's where the word
'scapegoat' comes from. I sometimes wonder if that's what happened to
me, that I've become sort of a scapegoat for everybody., for my whole
society. That somehow we've been guilty of some sin of time - there's
plenty of condidates. The whole Cult of Youth, banishing signs of
ageing - mine woujld be an excellent punishment for that, although
probably the wrong way round. Or possibly the sin of trying to cram too
much into our lives; definitely appropriate, although I've never been
particularly good at that even before.
Sometimes, when the feeling that I'm being punished lies heavily on me, I simply wonder whether this is what hell is like.
I reach the flat - blessed relief, sanctuary. My space, where I can be
as weird as I want. Well, no, that's not right - after a lifetime of
this you think I want more weirdness? No. Here, I can just be as weird
as I am. The cat miaows reproachfully, unused to being left alone for
so long. I pick here up and fuss over her for a bit, but I'm startled
to realize she's getting heavy - a really bad sign. I hurry to get to
bed.
I tried, for a while, to stay awake through the night, to witness my
own metamorphosis. How do I go from a newborn to an old man? How does
it happen? I still don't know - never mind the question of staying
awake, how much do you remember from your first few years of life?
Every morning I wake up too startled by the muddying aches of age to
really focus on it, and by the time I've thought 'how did I get here?'
It's already started to fade, dissolving like a dream. So I don't know.
I think there's a light at the end of a long tunnel, and I can
hear voices... nah, I'm just kidding. I have no idea. When I go to bed,
I’m a child of somewhere between twelve and six. When I wake up, I’m an
old man of about eighty. I simply come to, out of a dreamless sleep. My
soul dragged from the depths for another go round. I wonder if it goes
anywhere in the meantime. Maybe it just hovers for a second, so that if
I woke up at exactly midnight, I’d open my eyes to find myself looking
down from the ceiling, like one of those out-of-body experiences people
say they have. Looking down on maroon walls, the black-iron bed, that
ludicrous duvet cover with the fish on it (really must get rid of that
– my poor soul must writhe in embarrassment. Serve it right, the
bastard thing). A moment floating free between childhood and being
rammed into some disccated hulk of wrinkled flesh
I sleep naked; I'm too scared of throttling my young self (or fatally
constricting my older version) to wear anything. The bed seems huge,
the room cold, impossibly adult and unwelcoming. I turn on the
nightlight. I blush as I do it, I feel so utterly foolish; but I know
I'll be glad of it if I wake before midnight. I never liked the dark
when I was a kid.
I know the morning will be a struggle. At least old people don't need
much sleep, so I normally wake up early. A good thing, because it takes
me a while to remember where I am, and who I am, and what's
happening/happened/will happen to me.
But hey, I found a girl, talked to her, had a snog. That was worth a
lot. That made my day - made my week, hell, it made my month,
frankly. People say you get used to living alone - I think you can get
used to poverty of all sorts, and this is just another. It doesn't make
you any less impoverished.
It came on gradually, my... condition. I was in my late twenties. At
first I didn't even notice, then I told myself that this was just
natural ageing, that I was not very good at mornings. I'd be very
lethargic early in the day, haggard and creaky, but by seven or eight
in the evening I could take on the world. It was great, and I abused it
to the full. Mornings were discounted as hangovers, evenings were a
long round of barely-remembered drunken exploits. But it didn't take
long for the hangovers to really seriously take their toll, and I’d be
struck down by hangovers that seemed to have matured and fermented for
thirty years, distilling their pain and weakness until I called a halt
to the whole thing. Then I improved (surprise), but it was temporary.
By the time I was thirty-two, I could see the differences between
myself and my friends. They were able to go for longer (I'd be
completely legless by ten o'clock, and if I insisted on staying up I'd
end the evening throwing up and crying until some random girl's
maternal instincts kicked in and they bundled me into a cab). I would
always have recovered by lunchtime, but the early hours of the morning
were full of heart palpitations, spots before my eyes, palsied shaking
and generally a total inability to move. So I knocked the drinking on
the head, and it got better for a while. But then I began to descend
again, and by now I couldn't pretend this was anything normal. Thus
far, I've had no explanation. I probably shouldn't complain too much
about that, seeing as I've hidden from the doctors who might have come
up with something, but I can't help the occasional, sneaking feeling
that I'll wake up some morning and find a bejewelled demon sitting at
the bottom of my bed with a clipboard, who'll take one look at me and
say, "Well, how do you feel? Pretty sorry for yourself, I should hope.
Last week was for stealing plums from Mr Petwin's greengrocers when you
were nine. From today we'll be moving onto the next deadly sin, which
is, ah yes, sloth. Oh deary dear, quite a list in this category..."
...but it never happens. Metamorphosis, huh. At least Kafka's sorry bugger had some family to kill him when it all got too much.
Presumably, I'll get to the point where my morning reincarnation will
be into a body which is so old that it'll already be dead, and the
whole charade will be over. Until then, though... well, I’ve got a job,
I've got a life. I own my own flat, I have friends. I get by. I don't
get out as much as I'd like, but hey, who does?
5 comments:
I conceived this as being some kind of modern myth, like the stories of Prometheus and Tantalus from Greek mythology. But it still needs a story, and it doesn't have one. And I can't see a gap to shove one in anywhere. Any thoughts? Any suggestions about how I can advance this?
It's a strange ailment - especially to go in reverse like this. It's like living life backwards. If the rules are already being bent in that direction, mightn't you also be able to give this chap a similar condition, only over a longer term. Like a memory that turns out to be a premonition, or a premonition that turns out to be a memory. Maybe he meets someone who's going through the same thing, only in the other direction, someone from whom he learns there's a cure. Or at least an answer. The real question has to be why? Why am I cursed with this strange affliction?
But as an aside, have you read 'The Time Traveller's Wife'? This reminded me of that a little. And I like the Kafka reference. That sentiment (having friends/family around to finish you off) has the potential to turn around into a nasty ironic twist.
I have been thinking about this. Perhaps the condition is the story itself. From here, it seems like an assessment of the physical impact of heavy drinking, alcoholism probably. Or you could flesh out the love story, cyclical reverse aging man meets cyclical aging woman: they are in love, but they can only be together (physically at least) in a short window of age compatability. It'd be a chilly, marginal existence, for sure. Or do both - a couple of addicts living together, only suitably self medicated to get on well enough for a short time each day.
Perhaps his search for a cure or a cause is the plot - fruitless travelling all over the world, having to hide in airports at night, sham mystics, near misses, incredible scrapes. Race against time - a emsmallening useful period of the day.
Excellent work, though. One very minor point: I'm not keen on the explicit Kafka reference. I'd leave it to the reader to drawn his or her own parallels. But that's just me.
And another thing - maybe each section is a day, cycling, with the first person language starting off elderly, wise and getting progressively more basic, more childish as the section wears on.
Yeah, that's it exactly. That's the spirit I was trying to convey.
Thanks guys, much appreciated!
The basic premise was that this was some sort of punishment with no logic and no explanation - very much along the lines of Kafka'a Metamorphosis. Reading it back now, it's desperately bloated and needs a savage edit. The alcoholism needs to come out, that's a complete red herring - the rapid ageing was supposed to be a comment on our pace of life, and how (as a culture) our desire to be younger seems to get ever more desperate the older we get.
The problem is finding some sort of resolution when I don't really want his plight to be resolved. He's supposed to be like Tantalus in Hell, forever reaching up for fruit just out of reach, or the dude who pushes a rock uphill all day just for it to fall back down. It's a portrait, really, rather than a story. But it still needs some narrative.
Maybe he could meet an old woman with short term memory problems - then she could be his wife in the mornings, his mother at lunchtime, and his gran in the evening. Even then, that smacks of redemption, and I don't particularly want him redeemed.
If that's the aim, then I'd say that there either should be no plot, save a description of the ever worsening condition and how it impacts on those around him. (Perhaps he has a better half, she gets worried, goes to a doctor and he, afraid of a freakshow future, kills her one evening, the child that he was can't possibly be him? Not sure how you'd get round the hours in the cell, though. Anyway.) I suppose the majority of the punishment isn't the ailment itself but how it alters his life. A slide from gregariousness to stay-at-home.
You could have redemption - not of the ailment, but a sort of interpersonal redemption, forgiveness for his past transgressions: he makes a full and frank inventory of his life, hoping seeks forgiveness from God and, well, doesn't get it. He's a better man than he's ever been, but he is still punished and dies one night, on a piss-soaked mattress, his body that of a still born infant.
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