The Crab

Veenee's hunched over. Or slumped over, it's hard to tell. I can understand the urge, the room's been shrinking steadily for hours now.

I focus on the blue and green of the illuminated globe by my feet. I lean forward to give it a spin but the sofa overwhelms me so I lie back, defeated.

Tony must feel the space shrinkage too because he suggests an outing to the shop. He's standing in the middle of the room, engulfed by his filthy yellow coat. He speaks through a loose fist, as if holding an imaginary microphone.

He's a fucking mess and I tell him so.

Veenee lives. She raises her hand, pointing her pen triumphantly at the ceiling. "Choc dips!" she yells.

Tony pulls me to my feet and I study my surroundings. Everything is much clearer from up here. I explain in painstaking detail the naivety of believing something can come from nothing, that it’s probable there is a God, or a Bahamut, or in any case an incomprehensible constant of some description bearing the weight of the chaos.

Matt and his pointy beard are in the doorway. He’s indignantly brandishing an unlit cigarette. “You’ve lost your mind,” he says. I don’t argue. Everyone knows his Catholic upbringing prejudiced him against theism. The only lord and saviour he recognises is The Crab.

But he’s talking about commuters, not God. He pulls up the blind to reveal the slug of human misery oozing its way through streetlit puddles to the tube. From behind his lighter’s flame he adds: “Going to the shops in these conditions is madness.”

The coat throbs beacon-like as Tony addresses me from its depths: “He’s right. We’ll need an ashtray, or they’ll think us savages.”

I speak words at Matt until eventually his fears are assuaged. He leans in conspiratorially. “Fucking stealth it, ninja-style,” he advises. I remove his hand from my shoulder and assure him we will.

We don’t. There’s no such thing as a low profile when you're accompanied by a walking lighthouse carefully guarding a saucer of crushed cigarette butts. So I abandon my self-consciousness along with any hopes of blending in, and focus instead on the rapidly blueing sky and the promise of sugary snacktreats from Londis.

The door is locked but the security window is open. I tap on the glass with a coin and the shopman raises his hand from behind a shelf.

We have a game for these occasions and Tony reminds me that it’s my turn to pick the forbidden words. "Choc, dip, biscuit," I say. He nods solemnly: it's a tough challenge.

He raises his invisible microphone and begins speaking, but he’s fucked it all up, his timing’s gone to shit, the shopman is still too far away and can’t hear a word.

There's a moment of awkward stillness before Tony gets the fear. It’s fight or flight but the only threat is his brain. He tears off down the road, a yellow comet trailing ash. I’m alone.

I lean in towards the shopman. Forbidden words are forbidden words and I valiantly attempt to avoid them. “I want-- You know those things in the… in the pot, where you put the... you di-- Ugh! You push the thing in the thing…”

The shopman and I are flummoxed and frustrated respectively, so I give up the ghost and ask straight up for twenty Marlboro reds, ten Lambert & Butler and five choc dips.

Back on Casterfield Road the postman is walking towards me down the drive. He nods at me amiably but I slip away and stealth it ninja-style to the door.

Kyla's downstairs and everyone's moved around the front room. She and I play Snap until our hands hurt, then Connect 4 until the rack resembles an unwinnable colour blindness test.

Across the room Veenee’s still doubled over, now on the sofa. Curious, I move to the floor by her feet. She’s drawing but I can’t make out the details. I rest one hand on her ankle and the other on the illuminated globe.

I’m trying to find Chad when I notice China twitching. Then it all goes haywire, the landmasses begin merging into one amorphous blob of brown and green. I try to touch the area that a moment ago was Britain but the whole supercontinent slips out of sight. I rotate the globe, but land is always just beyond me. I spin it faster and faster, but it’s no use, there’s nothing but blue, blue, blue. I hold the glowing ball aloft, bearing the weight of the chaos.

The truth is, I’m uncomfortable with how everyone has arranged themselves since Londis. It feels like a different place, and smaller than ever. Globe in hand I scan their eyes for an anchor. There's none. Instead I focus on The Crab, whose image hangs above the television, a single triumphant claw raised to the heavens. If you look closely enough it waves and scuttles along the beach. Veenee gently detaches me from her leg and nods towards the door.

The lights are off in the bedroom. I can't find any words so I crawl silently onto the bed and foetal myself tighter and tighter until I can barely feel.

I find myself being shuffled around until my head is on her lap. She pulls the covers over me, rests the heel of her hand on my cheek and drums out a reassuring da-dum, da-dum,  da-dum on my temple. A mother’s heartbeat.

I remember being a child and lying awake at night, afraid that if I didn’t consciously control my breathing my lungs would stop working altogether. Now I have a similar sense about my arms and legs: I fear that when my attention wanders they will simply cease. I drift in and out of near-sleep in sporadic fits of judders and jolts.

Veenee understands. She pushes my skull down into her lap, submerging me in pressure and warmth. My limbs are gone entirely. My torso is nothing more than my washing-machine stomach. I can’t tell my head from Veenee’s hand or my ear from her leg. I’m too distant to know how to panic.

Days pass like that, followed by months of sitting, and years of pacing. Eventually I come back to myself, and back to the room, which is lit dimly by the yellow glow of a streetlight outside. Veenee hands me a cigarette and I smoke peacefully.

Now Matt and his pointy beard are at the door again, a silhouette against the hallway light. “What the fuck, man?” he’s saying. He has no patience for this kind of indulgence.

Veenee grabs my hand and the three of us head to the front room. Tony is back. He’s at the coffee table with everything laid out in front of him: assorted weed-related paraphernalia, a half-drunk bottle of Benylin cough medicine and six nail-sized pieces of cardboard arranged in a rectangle.

Matt puts a cigarette in my left hand, a controller in my right, and unpauses the game. We race. Or rather, our little racers remain static, glued to the foreground, while the background rushes towards us. I play with one eye and watch Tony with the other. He puts the cardboard on his tongue and drinks from the Benylin bottle.

“You’re mad,” I say. I pass him the controller. His hand is shaking, but that’s not a today-thing, that’s an always-thing. Tony and his shaky hands. It’s why we never clicked at the start: everyone knows it takes time to trust an unsteady man.

“We’re all mad,” says Veenee. She’s drawing again.

Tony pauses the race. “Bullshit,” he says. "Greetings card bullshit." This from the man who celebrated his first night in halls by writing DISEASED on the door of his room in his own blood. To change the subject I nod at the table and ask, “How many so far?”

"Four," he says, then chews another. "Five."

"Suicide," says Matt.

"Depends," Tony says, invisible mic in hand. "They soak huge sheets in it, right? And I mean really huge, a thousand tabs' worth. Then they hang the sheets like photos in a dark room. So as it dries, the solution runs down the sheet." He looks at us in turn. "Don't you see? It's a fucking lottery. It's Russian roulette. Get loads from the top, and you might as well spend an evening doing magic eye pictures. Get one from the bottom..." He pops another in his mouth and chases it down with Benylin.

"Fucking suicide," repeats Matt. Tony ignores him and unpauses the game, where a wall immediately slams into his little racer.

Above the poster of The Crab there's a clock. Somehow it's 9am: it seems I’ve lost an hour or so. That’s usually a sign to leave, but Mehmet's here now, smashing a small bag of pills with a mug while agitatedly asking Veenee to skin up for him. I don’t want to miss out so I settle down for another round of Connect 4 with Kyla. Matt and Tony are watching Dark City in the corner, eating their choc dips. Tony is manic. Matt is, as ever, emotionally even.

The open door policy of 102 Casterfield Road gives the place a dreamlike quality. People are here, and then they’re gone, some come back, some vanish, some it seems never leave at all, they just doze in the corner, skin tainted blue from the soft light of the illuminated globe.

I’m convinced the total level of energy in this place at any one time is fixed. That’s why when Tony is struck stupid by the eighth tab of acid, I find myself by way of balance animatedly explaining to Veenee that of course everything comes from nothing, that the Taoists had it right all along.

Here in this house we sway and we flit and we compensate, as the need arises.

Sometime that evening leaving becomes unavoidable. Veenee grabs my hand on the way out, her eyes all pupil. “I have this for you,” she says. She hands me the drawing she’s been working on.

It’s a picture within a picture. The smaller image is of me. I’m re-imagined as a DJ at the decks. My cap reads Ben-Jammin’, and I laugh because I’m kind of flattered even though it’s silly. The drawing of DJ Ben is held in The Crab’s claw. She’s re-created the beast perfectly, and in chunky lettering she's copied the title as it appears on the poster: The Fat of the Land.

I take the picture and thank her sincerely. I pocket a choc dip and slip out into the fresh evening air. I light a cigarette. I am free to go anywhere but I choose to go home, where I pin the drawing to my headboard and lose a day and a half to empty sleep.