Pongo #41

Andaw

I am wrestling with the skin of a mango when the intercom goes. The video screen shows a large man in security armour yawning. I am about to fuzz over the intercom that I want to see ID when I notice the parcel under his arm. So they sent a knight this time. Three seconds, a deep breath, and then, just as I see him cuh and reach again for the button, I buzz him inside.

After I have signed and the courier has gone, I place the package on the kitchen table next to the collection of Zooms I have been archiving and preparing to bind. It stares me down as if it contains a baby, a bomb, the key to the kingdom. My heart is beating like that of a maze mouse. The standard delivery note, with its generic instructions, normally allows for sickness and other such unexpected delays, granting three days grace before the sweeper must legally adopt the mask's contents. Today, however, it takes on a new urgency: APPLY WITHIN 24 HOURS OF RECEIPT.

My first thought is to do it immediately. I belt the computer's ON button with the casual backhand of a femme fatale and begin to unpack the layers, Pass-The-Parcel style. As the excess falls to the floor, however, adrenaline, that most useless remnant of survival instinct, surges through me and I drop the whole mask to the floor, shaking.

Cold water on the wrists. I remember from primary school the way the teacher would always rush whichever kid was crying to the sinks and blast their pulse points with cold water. Shock or remedy, it seemed to work. I hold my wrinkled wrists under the ceaseless spring and wait for a bucket of calm to empty itself over me. It almost works, but then I notice a corner of the mask peeping from its packaging and the shaking begins afresh. I dunk my head under the taps. That ought to be the biggest pulse point other than my heart. When I snicked a razor against my forehead a couple weeks back (don't ask), it bled like I'd caved in my skull and popped my brain like a water balloon.

As the water slides over my head, darkening the grey straggles, blackening the brown, I think how easy it would be to dump it. Just this once. In all the years I've been a sweeper, I have taken every package ' every knobble, twist, sag, rotten tooth, clump of unwanted hair, every expanse of unwanted, port wine-stained, acne-riddled, rash-bobbled flesh, and I have worn every bit of it like a fucking crown, like some kind of martyr's crest, priding myself on never stooping to passing the buck. It's one of the reasons I get so much work from the agency. Word of mouth: Sweeper #57555 is a keeper.

But just once. This one scares me. It's my personal Black Spot and like Billy Bones himself, I damn well earned it and that, Jim lad, is exactly why it frightens me.

Sometimes when the wind rushes my prematurely feeble bones, shakes me off balance, prods my arthritis and leaves me doubled up at bus stops, I think about ringing Gilligan's PA to ask her if she's ever described me to her boss. Well, have you? Have you told her over iced Manhattans about the web of gristle arcing across my belly from her pregnancy marks? How about the flightless wings oozing off my back, my arms? Why not bring it up at her hundredth birthday, when she greets her guests like a blushing teen?

I think I lost the spark that would let me get angry. It must have been doused by wads of cash. I've never lost that childish fear of the unknown, though. That, I think, is one of the few reasons I do not push my luck, and hence one of the reasons I am still alive at this point. It also explains why, craft knife in hand, I sit away from the half-opened parcel as if it is ticking.

This is a test, I tell myself, like learning to ride a bike by parental betrayal. Can you look something in the eye that makes no distinction between people, that has no eyes, only spreading, pitiless cells that eat and eat and never grow full? Can you look in the eye something you have helped create by sucking up years of tar, the cough of which could have otherwise warned her to stop? Nd if you can't, can you look straight at the girl who would smile as she fades away?

No to all of the above, and she's a cunt and we all have to eat.

Well can you look at Insa then?

Happily all day. Insa the toffee girl, the cynic, the spy. A friend to whom I owe a great debt.

I pick up last week's Zoom, snipped, clipped and ready to be archived. Gilligan's eyes are sunken in. She holds her stomach as she leaves the clinic, like someone pregnant with a clawing changeling. It's pretty advanced, but she probably didn't want to say anything or look in the mirror about it until it became impossible to ignore. Can't say I blame her. Whatever's in that box, swaddled in tissue paper, it's alive.

The noble action at this point would be to swoop upon the parcel and jam the mask onto my belly with a stoic glance at the sky. I am not a noble person though, and so I pour pithy orange juice into a tumbler, down it, throw it back up and flop on the sofa.

Outside a tramp calls out for alms. He'll do anything for the price of a drink, he says.

The mask stares on. I stick my tongue out at it and fall asleep.