Pongo #72-3

Casenotes
(discovered beneath subject's mattress)

Rocket pack. The only thing
missing from my back. We'll go
up through the asbestos tiles
that sprinkle sleep
in bad doses, like Oz
poppies. I'm nearly too tired, despite banana
flavoured milkshake after banana flavoured
milkshake, and you
droop, handkerchiefed in a chair.
The dust smuggled in with the clean smell
tells us we are sick and the ones in daywear
are healthy, bouncing, the right weight,
You move less and less, as I grow frisky. Am I creaming off
your stash of muscle spasms? If so, I owe you.
So up. How about it? Can I call you
Boadicea?

Miffy

It's amazing what you find in the cupboard when you think the cupboard is bare. It's also amazing how quickly you get through that once it's been discovered.

I don't know why the phone's still ringing. I guess the bill's not due for a bit yet, and even then the phone company will hold out, sending about five letters of gradually decreasing civility I imagine, so as not to piss you off if they do keep you on, before giving up and cutting you off.

Still ringing. Sigh and over to it.

Pick up. Listen. Hang up. It's getting fairly automatic. They're about the only people who ring me these days. They're just not getting the message. They probably have spies using seismothingies to measure how bad my stomach's rumbling. They know I've probably got to give in at some point and I – God, I'm so hungry. I think my body is gradually shutting down, bit like a shopkeeper who's been working for 12 hours straight and sees the clock hit quarter to hometime. Light off bit by bit, so as to let them know you're not welcoming half hour browsers, but so as not to deter the last-minute snagger of forty smokes, who'll run in like a sugared-up kid, then leave like a pensioner, wetting their pants over the first drag as soon as foot hits tarmac.

Fags – man, it's weird how I don't miss them since enforced quitting.

This place is dust. It's all dust – too much to ever sluice off, or else it would just fur up again in seconds, like something.

They'll ring again in about five minutes, like an electronic cat, or those baby dolls they give teenagers thinking about getting spotty with other teenagers, to let them know how fucking annoying and humiliating having kids is. That's the line one of the studio girls, a mother of two, used to spin me, and she'd definitely know more than I ever could.

Their faces, both of them hang, lantern-like, above me at all times. Danver outwardly hateful, hurt, Fembs confused. The clink of the cuffs.

Hungry hungry hungry. Yes, yes, a half-hour show and I could buy a year's worth of organic hampers. I know, and my stomach beats me up about this every time I put the phone down. I just – I just don't want to see anyone right now. I just want to sleep as much as possible, so I can snip eight hour chunks out of the endurance test of the day. At least in sleep the movies will be interesting.