The Escapologist's Water

Every time I begin a receipt for someone pleasant, I vow to make my handwriting really nice. This is just about possible in theory, but my hands rebel every step of the way. In school, they gave us elongated rubber pyramids to slot onto our pencils, so we’d hold the pen right and our handwriting would improve, the loops of g and y hitting one set of guides, the high poles of t and l clicking into place above the central tramlines. I chewed at least three rubber pyramids to shreds before they gave up and let me slide into holding my pencil like a determined monkey holds a dagger.

In short, the receipts turn out as drunk as ever.

I write a fair bit in my job, but this has, if anything, a negative impact on my script. It’s like tea. Whenever I make tea myself, however much care I try to take, it never tastes as good as when it’s been made by someone else. You become aware of the mechanism behind the miracle: it’s water with stuff in it.

The evenings slip down behind the bed. Unlike tickets and favourite pants, however, shifting the frame out of its bright square of carpet doesn’t reveal them lying in a pile, ready to be used. Perhaps the Rentokil spray we’ve been dousing the silverfish with acts on those hours between six and midnight, leaving them not even twitching, but vanished like computer game swordsmen.

The scum on the sink doesn’t bother you after a while, even as it ripens from transparent to a watery varnish brown. Nor does the suspect stain in the toilet bowl. You wash as normal, you brush, you slough off dead skin with evoked papaya and walnut shell. But if you go to someone else’s house, or if they come to yours, it’s like drinking water to ease a mouth full of hot curry. Your palate is stripped and suddenly - well, yowzer. You can’t stand it. You wrap your toothbrush in plastic, rather than let it dream of contacting that bristle-peppered sill. If it does, your mouth is full of beard.

How well someone peels the rind off cheese is no way to choose a wife. What if you want Cheshire? Does the rule apply to bacon? How about the many-layered chunky blades of grass that you flay when you can’t be bothered to make daisy chains?

I think the trees want in some days. They wave through the window like old friends, shy across a marketplace. It’s like they’ve been waiting so long their feet have grown into the concrete and even the blare of the cars behind the car that doesn’t go on amber can’t shake them loose.

If you wanted to kill an escapologist, you could probably just salt the water in his tank. Escapologists leaning more towards fresh water, if anything.