A BUTTERFLY, PT. 1

 

 

A BUTTERFLY , PT 1

Like being in a fish tank. 

That’s how he would have described it to the shop assistant, had she asked. But she didn’t. Judging by the routine glances she made at her wrist, lunch was about to start and feigning interest in customers would have to pause. 

The tambourines cackled through every cubic foot of the shopping centre that day, hitting the glass ceilings and falling back down three stories to the crowds below. People everywhere. Children everywhere. 

Is 18th November too early for Christmas songs? The band certainly didn’t think so. Or maybe it was their management. Make hay while the rain shines. Reindeer-patterned jumpers and synthetic elf hats wore the amateur musicians like poltergeists. Wilted imitations of Mariah Carey and George Michael fell out of the singer as she waved side to side at a Nuremberg of little devils, performing for their middle-class mummies. 

Like being in a fish tank. 

The bathrooms were at the other end of the balcony and the only way was through. Before sliding the new packet of nicotine gum into a pocket, he ingested his first piece in 12 hours, and began weaving between the faces. So many smiling faces: 

A mum, a dad, a child, a dad, a grandma, a child, a mum, a child, a child, a mum, vibrating with Christmas cheer… or fear of the oncoming January debt. 

From somewhere amongst them emerged a Ukrainian Willy Wonka - would you laik to trai an gobstopper? Ve pgroduce theym in my factory - who vanished as quickly as he had appeared. 

Space.

Stationed outside the entrance to the bathrooms was a face-painting stall, commanded by a fat, fifty-something-year-old creature with red hair and snowman earrings. Little boys had become lions. A pig-tailed girl was metamorphosing into a Christmas monkey as a line of three others fought over who could be a dog. 

Like being in a fish tank. 

The men’s room was empty and he had the pick of the cubicles. No paper, no paper, piss on the seat, skid marks, paper. Unbuttoning his trousers, he edged onto the unfriendly rim and shat. 

All in one go. The nicotine was doing its work, as was last night’s gin. It felt as though something had been exorcised, or that his rectum had wanted to escape the abuse.

Blood on the first wipe wasn’t unheard of, though this was more like a nosebleed than a grazed knee and raised a tired eyebrow. Blood on the second wipe was unheard of, and it remained that way. Just shit from then on. 

Fickle sensors governed the stainless steel taps which spat hot phlegm onto his already chapped hands, drying them out even more. In the mirror a ghost of near-Christmas eternal glazed back. The air dryer was a non-starter - he didn’t have time for it, anyway - and the armpits of his coat would suffice. 

No one wanted to line up after a man getting painted as a butterfly and the band had started playing Let It Go, so he had the stall to himself for now. She took her time, a true artist, and then took the £5.  

 

One of those YouTube compilations had given him the idea. At some point in the last two weeks he had seen a clip of a comedian on a panel show explaining how he’d had a mysterious rash on his penis that he combatted by switching his underwear from briefs to looser fitting boxers. Panel shows, he believed, were an outdated format. In fact, TV in general had come to feel obsolete since the advent of streaming and social media. Why would you wait for a scheduled show when you could find five other alternatives any time you liked, all equally high-budget? Panel shows were just examples of people who had grown up with their sights set on the BBC, but hadn’t noticed the changing world around them. All this being said, when they provided sound medical advice, he trusted panel shows with far more zeal than his doctor. 

It’s no use having disposable income if you don’t dispose of it every once in a while. 

In the lift from the ground to the first floor he clicked his neck. In public he could perform this task on his right side quietly: the joints were more supple and forthcoming. But the left side of this neck was the problem today, and that needed to be done in complete privacy. There was always the chance of severing his spinal cord and he knew from the thousand previous attempts that he was nearly there, but so far it hadn’t brought him any death, only satisfaction. Click. Only after he had achieved the hit this time did he notice the hemispherical CCTV camera lurking in the corner of the lift. Perhaps the person who reviewed the security footage also shared his habit, who knew?

 

It wasn’t surprising to realise that there were at least four different types of men’s underwear, but it was frustrating. When the comedian had said boxers and not briefs, did he account for boxer-briefs? The tyranny of choice between underwear wasn’t what frustrated him, though, it was the amount of time he had to spend finding the correct rack. Department stores have more space than they have goods and always insist on placing related items at least a tennis pitch away from each other. Finally he reached the boxers… the proper boxers. 

Sex doesn’t exist when it comes to loose-fitting male undergarments. Unless you’re a gigolo servicing a client with a penchant for well aerated balls, you don’t enter this ghetto. None of the men who frequent the rack have been intimate with their spouses within the decade, that’s a given. Most of them gave up attempts at seduction after the second affair, but decided to stay for the kids. All of them wish they could get laid again.

“The waitress who works on Wednesdays,” they delude themselves, “Looks like she loves a bit of maturity…”   

When you’re getting on for fifty-two and still have the scars from your vasectomy, it’s unlikely you’ll be in the game of marketing your testicles to the women of the world with any degree of success. This won’t ever be enough to stop you, though. Still got it.

In spite of the usual suspects and how his presence in this aisle might have appeared, there he stood. He could get away with saying that he was there on behalf of an uncle or a grandad - his hair was still firmly brown and a jawline still existed -, unlike the other punters. But it didn’t make it any easier, he thought: he now had to make the choice of which pattern he wanted. Polar bears on a grey background or bumble bees on white? There was another animal loitering on the rack - a deer, maybe -, but that was a non-starter as it lived on an expanse of swamp-green and only came in Large. He needed Small. So the choice had been laid out in front of him and, for a moment, he wondered if he had inadvertently become the victim of a campaign from some climate activist organisation. Which endangered animal do you care about most? He looked between the two sets of pants for five minutes, weighing up which deserved his £25.99 more.

Polar bears.

“What a lovely pattern!” Said the old crone of a cashier. He smirked back politely through his butterfly cheeks, and paid with his card, “Would you like a bag?”

He wouldn’t.  

 

So far - and it wasn’t yet one o’clock - he was £30 down. It could be argued that with his new gum, pants and facepaint he was up, but when your balance was shaped like his it didn’t matter which way you looked at it: going, going, gone. Still, he was here and he had started spending, so he might as well continue on. 

Why go to a shopping centre in the first place if you didn’t intend on spending anything, he thought. Some people, he supposed, genuinely bought into the fallacy of ‘just browsing’, though those people would invariably end up spending fiver on an Elf Bar in the newsagents by the exit, rendering their ‘just browsing’ status inaccurate. There were also the elderly and the school-age children who had to rely on local bus services to get around, the majority of which either started or ended at shopping centres. This part of the demographic didn’t have anywhere better to be: they were either too infantile or too poor to spend their afternoons in the pub - the jury was out on which one was which. He had also wondered whether a good portion of shopping centre footfall came from the homeless, capitalising on a dry space with no entry requirements. This might go as far as to explain why malls often seem far busier than they ought to; it’s the illusion of busy-ness. Business…?  

Of course, that day was different. The elves were there. The band was there. Willy Wonka was there! There were legitimate reasons for people to come and skate between shops, leaving their children in the care of enthusiastic strangers whilst they looked for cheap Nike knock-offs to give out around the electric heater when Christmas came. As for the suspected homeless portion, they might have found themselves displaced for the day in lieu of the management’s actual target customer-base - you can’t please everyone all of the time. 

The reason for his being there on that 18th November were unknown, even to himself. It seemed that he’d opened his eyes to only find that he’d been teleported to the checkout in front of the hungry shop assistant. Perhaps he had been subconsciously drawn to participate in the pre-emptive merriment, or maybe the twelve hours of nicotine withdrawal might have had something to do with it, who knew. Either way, he was there now and was committed. 

 

The gum was wearing off by the time he walked out of the shop. He could no longer feel the sting of nicotine-infused mucus dripping down his throat and, though the mint still lingered, he knew he was due another dose. It was obvious to him when his receptors were being starved: the back of his tongue felt like cotton wool and his brain started to itch. All of this was compounded by the feeling of dissociation that shaded the corners of his consciousness as he became aware that something was lacking. And he knew exactly what that something was. It was when he slowly started to see himself in the third person that he knew it was no longer possible to stave off the craving. 

The fact that he had managed twelve hours cold-turkey that day seemed like a feat of superhuman willpower - maybe I might be able to finally quit this time, he mused. In reality, ten of those hours had been spent sleeping, one had been spent in a fraught internal dialogue about whether or not he could really ‘pull this off’, and the other was spent looking for parking. What concerned him most when he did eventually get that first molecule in his bloodstream was the knowledge that he was now rudely locked back in the cycle of regular dosing, kept hostage by his fresh pack of Nicorette. Supply and demand. 

Like being in a fish tank. 

So, after slipping a new square into the butterfly’s arse on his face, giving it a few furious chews and placing it between his cheek and gums, he took a tentative step back into the festivities. 

 

“I hope everyone has been good this year!”

YEAH! WHOOP!

“Have you all been good little boys and girls?”

WOOHOO! YEAH! 

“And what about you children?”

Ha… Ha. 

 

Willy Wonka was a woman now. Well, a young adult female. He noticed the spine of a cigarette packet protruding from her… his … their inside pocket as they spun to hand a lollipop to a drooling child. Smiles and flourishes.

Thoughts of where to go next bounced off the inside of his forehead as he considered what being ‘committed’ to this meant. Was there anywhere that really deserved his money? No. Was there anything he had been hankering for, that only this place could satiate? No.

At a loss for what his purpose there now was - though his purpose for being there in the first place was still unclear -, he took a moment to assess his biology. Aside from the unambiguous signs of withdrawal, he regularly had trouble figuring out why he was feeling ‘un-good’, as was so often the case. It was only in times like this - where he would pause and take stock of what was actually going on - that he would start to notice the gnawing pain at the roof of his spine, or the callus that rubbed between his big and second toe. The aches and pains of daily life. Things that, when left unacknowledged, were absorbed as total components of his complete self.

It was hunger this time. From somewhere deep inside his gut, he was being complained at. The lining of his stomach, he now realised, had begun to grate against his vertebrae at some point in the last few minutes. Or maybe it was hours. There was no knowing when he last ate. The nicotine had been known to play tricks on his appetite before, muting the signals to synapses and refusing to notify him whenever it might be time to eat. It took a concerted effort on his part to acknowledge that it might not be anything other than hunger that had been shading his lived experience until then. And now it had been acknowledged, it was the only thing in the world. 

Salt.

All he needed was salt. 

Clothes shops don’t sell salt, he thought. Neither do phone shops or book shops. 

With his eyes rotating around the huge glass box that he was dying in, he saw it hunched in a corner. The lifeless, dark grey threshold, adorned with a blue and white sign, garishly burrowing into his retina: GREGGS. Visions of melted cheese oozing out of golden-brown bread; hot mince bubbling above the parapets of fluffy pastries; charred pepperoni slices nestled between ripe tomatoes and diced onions. Within a second of these visions, he was at the counter.  

It had all gone. 

No pizzas.

No pasties.

No paninis. 

He left there with -  for his sins - £1.20 down and with no more than a vegan sausage roll. A stale, penis-shaped mutant of culinary exploration. There was a reason they were the only things left on sale. It was with great courage, he convinced himself, that he even ventured to take a first bite. Eating the grease-stained paper bag that it came in would have been more appealing. But food is food and salt is salt.

It hadn’t occurred to him, before he clamped his incisors down on the cardboard coloured pastry, that in order to make this ‘vegan sausage roll’ taste anything remotely close to an actual sausage roll, it would have had to have been pumped with sodium first. So it was with almost ecstatic delight that his tongue met the nondescript contents of that parcel. Akin to the rush of nicotine sliding down his throat, the grey ‘meat’ exploded onto his tongue with a kaleidoscopic excitement that felt like a salve to his inner cheek and internal organs. From then on it was an unconscious game: bite, swallow, bite, swallow.  

And when it was all gone, it was all gone. 

That feeling, that hunger, had been dealt with and yet that feeling persisted. He tried again to diagnose the ‘un-good’, attempting to communicate with the extremities and intricacies of his body, but received no feedback. It quickly became clear that there was nothing left for him there. He had his gum, he had his pants, he had his food. All he wanted now was his solitude. It was time to leave.