Pongo #57

Andaw

I hadn't realised before how much she'd given me. I thought I was pretty much equal cups of every donor I'd ever done business with until now. Mirrors don't lie as such. Lighting disguises, enhances, worsens, flatters, and mirrors can be read under delusion, or denial, but the actual glass is honest, even when cracked. It genuinely tries to process whatever is set before it, however hideous or malformed.

Normally that's me, but today? Today, for the first time in years, I feel not just ok, but incredible. Someone once told me that if you take a tortoise out of its shell, it will run, this jelly of a creature, as swift and skittery as any mouse or beetle. It really is just the shell stopping it. Once you take that away, the tortoise must feel as though they have hit Nirvana or something. Perhaps with the shell, they are straining to run all of the time, straining against the weight of the world. It's only when you take away their most recognisable trait that they can actually see the fruits of their labours, and whizz around, grey, soft and alien, light as a scarf in the wind.

Now, I don't know how true that is, but that's unimportant. At the forefront of my mind right now is that fact that aside from a limped-out right leg, a few greys, two or three faint surgery scars and some minor creping around the eyes, I look like a different person. I can stand up straight without wincing. Most of the muscle definition in my torso has risen again. My breasts have gone. That Most importantly, the frogspawn of cancerous cells around my middle has gone. I feel like a landfill site that has just been torched, filled in and planted with trees.

How long has it been? I just can't remember, and it's not because of any medical condition or enforced blockage. Perhaps it's all of the crap which has swum like a poison fish through my body traveling at last to my brain. I don't think so, though. I think it's just time and a poor memory technique. But it's been over ten years. More than a decade I've been sweeping for Maren, at least.

I suppose that makes this the longest relationship I've ever had with someone.

There is, of course, only one explanation for all this, since I've not been praying or rubbing old lamps lately. Something has been done to Maren. Didn't know this sort of thing happened in any event, that such processes could be reversed. I was beginning to wonder, what with more and more sweepers eager for cash, whether before anything reversed we would be flooded, people rushing this way, then that, segregated into two halves ' the sweepers and the swept. One blindingly beautiful gold majorette troupe, and one twitching heap of live cadavers, dust-boned; an individual occasionally rising to shuffle the streets or collect their next payslip or attend the next appointment to slow the growth of whatever disease they were babysitting for some plump-lunged seraph.

I wish more than anything that Insa could see me right now. That's awful, I know, but I want her to look at me in the way young girls look at Jal Gentherin or Chasey Pollen. A brief but total moment of complete failure to compose. Stupidly, I wish that she would rush in, so apologetic towards the sorry mess of a creature she knows, filled with a rush of pity for my pathetic carcass. I wish she would rush in to find a stranger in my house, demand to know who they were, what they thought they were ' oh my God. For a moment, I think fuck Cadderine. Fuck her, whatever dangerous state she is in. Fuck her and let her sister come to me, to see the miracle and fall in love with what was inside the monster costume all along.

I run my finger along full lips, smooth arms, high buttocks. I sift the golden hair on my head which has fountained from previously long-dead follicles. My God, I think. How old am I? It could be my birthday today and I wouldn't know.

As I look in the mirror once more, I feel a prod of sadness in my belly where the tumour used to be, as I resolve to stop pretending. If this is what I think it is, and Maren is what I think she is, I may as well sit here like a high-rise Narcissus until sleep robs me. I may as well accept it as a dream: a day's holiday for the man who does nothing. Because if I know her and those around her, there's no way that any of this will be here when I wake up.