Good China for Ash

I step out in front of the car. Explode like Beaujolais over the pavement. Reoccuring. Beautiful. Silence, as my blood forms rivulets, running towards the toes of my mesmerized audience. I am peeled like a man-orange, slipping from my skin. My bones disjoint happily, sockets open mouthed regurgitating their ball. I wake in a salt lake of my own juices with cramp in my right calf muscle. The reality of gravity descends as my dream world rises, damp with sweat. I flinch for confirmation. My fingers are intact but for a brief moment I am strung between the sensation of waking and sleeping. Both weightless and heavy. Where am I?

I am here. I have been here for seventeen months. Slowly staining the ceiling an attractive nicotine colour. Ignoring the layers of dust, furry like mould, which have settled in the places where I don’t rest my coffee cup. Using the saucers that my mother gave me as ashtrays. I imagine her disappointment. At having a son that uses good china for ash. I stew in my juice. Wrap myself up in smoke. I leave the house when the milk turns sour.

Days mould like conjoined twins in this cocoon. Monday becomes Thursday and Sunday spits me out into the rain with a shopping list scrawled on the back of my hand. My neck is aching. The previous night, I sat up in bed so fast I gave myself whiplash. Like a giant bullet I was propelled upwards so far that for a split second I had a perfect birds eye view of my landing site before I hit it. Only, I never hit it. There’s a serene predictability to these dreams. Always a violent force that drives me into the air but once I’m up I float. Skimming layers of air like a feather. Stranger still, I am filled with a sense of calm.

My mother always said, you’re like china, fragile. This was my curse; Juvenile Arthritis. Oligo-articular juvenile idiopathic arthritis. One in a thousand, I was told. The tack was to glamorise it almost, like it was a super human attribute. Something special that most people don’t have, like x-ray eyes or the ability to fly. Special. I moved out of home when I was seventeen, took a flat in the centre of town when I started college. My mother was beside herself at first, visiting me every day. When I wasn’t in she’d push notes through the letterbox. I refused to give her a key. I needed to try it, attempt being alone. I’d saved a lot of money, sensibly stashed away in a savings bond since I was four. And so I could do what I liked, it was my money. That’s when the dreams started, when I moved into my first flat. Dreams where I was china, made of china. China that would splinter; shatter. Explode. Or, sometimes my body would just peel away. De-robe from its skeleton. Unravel. And I would float, like I was made of a million parts; like a million leaves falling free all at once. Twisting and dancing in the wind, spiralling down, down, down.

*

Dan had suggested The Red Lion. It was a large labyrinth of a pub, with old fashioned booths plotted along the walls between pillars. 40 Watt lightbulbs overhead, stifled beneath red and green glass shades. The standard brass on the walls and sticky wooden tables. Stools stretched with faded, flat red felt. Dan was sat in our usual booth. And yet, he would always ask where we should meet, knowing full well we’d always end up there. The landlord knew my face but not my name and brought my Guinness over once it had settled. Dan noticed me cradling my neck. I flinched and muttered something about carrying boxes. It would be difficult to explain. Explain the reoccurring beauty of it, the up up up. That listless ascent. I slid my plastic shopping bags under the table. This had become a weekly jaunt, Dan and I in the Red Lion Sunday afternoon. Dan worked at home all week, computer programming. By Sunday he was alive with conversation, electro static. Dan sometimes talked in binary. Desperately hoping that one day I would understand and be able to reciprocate this scrambled language of ones and zeros. Today he was high on Fibonacci; basic maths, he said. I said I didn’t remember it from school; Pythagoras, perhaps. Easy, he said. Start at zero and add the previous two numbers together; recurrence relation. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on. I said this was the language of maths. He said it was the language of science, of nature. He explained that this basic formula was existent in nature; pine cones, shells, waves, branching trees. He said maths is science is nature. The thought compelled me. He went on, sketching a neat pattern onto the back of a receipt. I imagined a shell and the equation that existed before the shell was even thought into existence. The maths that would pre-destine the pattern of a pine cone. Before the seed that spawned the cone was even spilled, its maths was destined. Its physical composition fated by a sequence of numbers.

It seemed so finite, so futile. So disastrously simple that each beautiful flower, or unfurling cone or curl of a wave could be explained, de-coded. Perhaps my dreams could be explained simply by maths. My personality, my body, simply a sequence of pre-destined formulae. The beauty of maths, is that sometimes it doesn’t add up, Dan said, anomalies are natures way of saying ‘fuck you’. I wondered what he meant. But science, maths, can be applied in creative ways, Dan said. Think of poetry, some poems are numerical maps; haiku, for example, the counting of syllables. People write poems using Fibonacci sequence; think about it, he said. Dan was appealing to the one thing he knew I could relate to; poetry. I sipped my Guinness and visualised the pattern.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,
I
sip
my pint
and wonder
why we are bound by
the need to understand beauty

Dan had finished his drink and I took our empty glasses up to the bar. I thought how simple life could be. And yet. How much it burned at times, just thinking about it, the effort of simply living. I thought about my dream lastnight. The feeling of invisibility. No, not invisibility but something, something similar. Lightness. Like electricity or wind. An invisible force so powerful, and yet intangible. Not defying gravity but becoming it.

It was while I was at the bar, my thoughts dissolved in this existential crisis – brought on by the first pint flutter of drunkenness – that I saw her. People bring parts of their world in with them when they enter a room. Conversations are like invisible threads that cling like a scent and follow you. Thoughts and feelings invisibly carried around, telling people’s silent stories. You see, I believe this. I believe this because when she walked into the pub, it was as if a trail had followed her, like the tail of a comet. As if she had been traced onto paper. A copy of herself more real than the original. Long after I went back to sit down I re-lived her. Imagined her face, tried to commit it to memory.

*

Night time. I was stoned in my sleep, twitching like a dog chasing rabbits in a dream. The pain of impact didn’t come, it never does. It is substituted by a strange sensation. I fall apart, pieces of me orbiting, floating up, up. The road below becomes the spine of a thin grey snake. Until the dream melts like wax, as if it were never really there, never real. And I drift silently back into consciousness.

The next morning I made a cup of tea with sour milk and winced as I took the first unknowing sip. I tipped it down the sink and strode out of the house. Rain spat against my face, I leaned into the wind and pulled my hood up. The Milk Mission. I paced the road towards the shop. Half way along I noticed a bottle of milk sat on a doorstep. It was well past midday, so, deciding it wouldn’t be missed, I passed in through the front gate and picked it up. And as I did so, the door opened. I stood still, my unlit cigarette hanging limp between my lips, on the verge of dropping to the floor. A girl stood in the doorway. The girl from the pub. The girl with the comet; a tail of discarded words and thoughts trailing off behind her. In space, a comet’s tail is made of gas of rock. But from Earth, from a distance, it becomes something beautiful.

Slowly realising that I was stealing her milk, she suddenly remarked, Excuse Me? Part question, part accusation. I stood still. I couldn’t find the word I wanted, I scrabbled for something to say. After a moment she said, Excuse me, are you stealing my milk? She emphasised the word ‘stealing’, letting the vowels sound. I had no other option, could not find any alternative speech, so I simply said, yes. Well, she said. I hadn’t moved from the doorstep or attempted to put the milk back down. I was a statue. Can I have it back, she said. Yes, I said. I handed it over to her and remained standing on the doorstep. I noticed she was still wearing pyjamas. White cotton with navy blue lines running along them. Thanks, she said. Guilt suddenly surged up inside me. I’m sorry, I said, it was a terrible thing to do. Well, she repeated. She also seemed to have lost her words, couldn’t choose the right one. Finally, starting to ache from holding this pose, I turned and made my way back out of the gate. I said goodbye, quietly, apologetically. Half way up the road I turned and went back. The front door was closed. It was a blue front door with a stained glass pattern in a crescent above. I knocked. The door opened quickly. She was still holding the bottle of milk. I’m really very sorry, I began.