Wildlife

by Joe Stretch

  Roger opens his door slowly and silently. He reaches out for the parcel and pulls it inside as quick as he can. He unwraps it in a crouching position by the door. He’s excited. Quick movements cause his spectacles to slide down his nose until they cling precariously to its moistening tip.

  Roger Hart is worried about his health. His left foot appears to be turning black and his anus hurts. He’s worried about his inability to sleep, too. The readers of his blog are growing suspicious. A fan recently deduced that El Rogerio couldn’t have slept for more than five minutes in the previous eighty hours, judging by the frequency of his posts. The fan went on to accuse El Rogerio of being more than one person. Of being, in essence, a business. Keen to refute such claims and keen to understand certain deteriorations in his health, Roger has ordered sleeping pills, an anal cream and a stethoscope from an online pharmacy. He lays out the purchases on his bed and returns to his computer.

  Allow me. Allow me. To those of you who accuse me of deceit, I pity you. El Rogerio does not sleep because El Rogerio doesn’t have time. Sleeping is for you. Enjoy it. I am wide awake. If I catch any of you doubting dipshits in Wow-Bang on Thursday I’ll murder you. I have the weapons. If you doubt me, I’ll just shoot you. You will be searching the graveyards of Wow-Bang for your buried body while the rest of us party. Wise up. Allow El Rogerio. Allow me.

  SUBMIT.

  On the computer screen, a pop-up pops up. FINALLY, FROM AMONG US, A DICKHEAD WILL RISE. ARMED WITH OUR FUTURE!

  ‘. . . hiccup . . .’

  Returning to the bed, Roger uses the stethoscope to look for his heartbeat. He pulls up his red-and-black-checked shirt and places the cold circular head in between his ribs. It’s there. I’m pleased. I still have a heartbeat. Although I have to admit that it sounds seriously faint. And where is that whirring coming from?

  His stomach. The whirring is coming from Roger’s stomach. It becomes amplified when he guides the head of the stethoscope down onto his belly. My stomach is making the same noise as an electric fan, or the spinning wheel of a crashed bike. I’m worried. Roger’s worried. He undoes his belt and holds the stethoscope over his appendix. As a child he lived in fear of a burst appendix. There was something about that part of the body that seemed charged with energy. Too much energy. Roger dreads his body’s middle bursting. He listens to his appendix. He presses the stethoscope hard against the area of skin situated north-west from his ponging dick: silence, blood. He hears the distant beating of his heart and the whirring of his stomach. Running blood. The peaceful noise of his body reminds Roger of soft radio static. There is an expectancy to it. A fragility. A need to be broken. He keeps listening. Running blood. Distant whirring. Distant beats. Then, all of a sudden, from the lightless world beneath his skin, Roger hears a bleep.

  For fuck’s sake. (How gay!) Roger takes the stethoscope from his ears and does up his belt. A bleep! (How gay!) What a shame. Roger runs into the bathroom and stares into the mirror. This is so gay, he thinks. His pupils shrink inside his spectacled eyes. His sleepless grey expression becomes even greyer. My bathroom is well lit. My body is bleeping and whirring. This is well shit. I wish it wasn’t. I don’t need my body to be making silly sounds. I definitely don’t. I will never sing and dance on the West End stage if my body is bursting with technology. Is life horrific? Yes, life is horrific.

  Still in front of the bathroom mirror, Roger starts picking his nose. The mission gets tricky. A thumb joins his index finger inside his nostril and the two digits pull hard on a hair bringing tears of pain to Roger’s eyes. He inspects the bogey. It is green and hard at one end and colourless and liquid at the other. The hair which holds the bogey isn’t black. It’s shiny and bronze. It is a wire.

  I’m getting all technical. My poor nose. Roger flicks the wire away, and the bogey. He listens as both land in the bathtub. There is a thin ringing sound as it lands. Bollocks. This would never have happened during the French Revolution. They ate rats. Real men. Real women. Fewer wires.

  Before taking his seat at the computer, Roger presses play on his CD player and skips to track 7 of the Les Misérables soundtrack. ‘Bring Him Home’. This is an incredibly beautiful song. The ageing Jean Valjean pleads with God to allow a handsome and injured young man to survive and to take him instead. Roger sings along with the deep, troubled vocal, momentarily forgetting that he suspects himself to be full of electronic equipment.

  Allow me. Allow me. Instead of hairs I’ve got wires up my nose. No word of bullshit, my cheerful little friends. I’ve got some kind of technology growing out my fucking face. I’m still gonna shag a million girls.

  I can’t be arsed turning into a piece of technology. The idea bores the crap out of me. I heard a bleeping coming out of my appendix and I was like, piss off, dumb bleep. Bleep-bleep. Whatever. Fuck the facts of life.

  I feel like a suicide bomber. Bloody wires up my nose. I might explode. If you hear a loud bang, El Rogerio has detonated in public. Allow it.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger Hart leans back in his comfy black chair. He puts fingers up his nose. He can feel them. The stiff, sharp and interlocking wires that grow in each nostril. He shudders. His whole body wriggles with disgust. He checks his emails. Anka Kudolski, the tit shadow from Channel MANC, has replied. She wants to meet in Wow-Bang. Dirty bitch. What am I thinking?

  I should tell someone, thinks Roger. I should call my mum and tell her about my wires.

  But Roger can’t tell his mum. He wouldn’t know how to. What would he say? I can’t remember when I last fell asleep. I’ve not spoken to another human in a year. I’ve got wires growing in my nose and when I listened to my insides, Mum, I heard bleeping and whirring. No. Roger can’t possibly call his mum. His mum is a pleasant-seeming Media Studies teacher. She is a resident of Lancaster. She wouldn’t like the idea of Roger, her son, bleeping, alone and full of bronze.

  Roger returns to his blog and notices that many fans have already posted comments under his last submission. They want to know if it’s true. Does El Rogerio really have wires in his nose? Roger shudders again. His shoulders shaking. Spasming. He’s really worried. He’s breathing nervously through his mouth.

  Allow me. Allow me. El Rogerio never lies. I swear. I’ve got bronze wires in my head. I’m techno. I don’t care.

  I’ll be off out tonight. Spying on the lagery losers. Probably meet up with one of my fuck buddies and fuck her and fuck her and fuck her. It doesn’t matter.

  People say that just because it’s windy, the Wild World’s coming. Bullshit.

  SUBMIT.

  On the screen, a pop-up pops up: THE N-PRANG IS COMING. HOW TOTALLY INSANE WILL YOU SEEM WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES?

  ‘. . . hiccup . . .’ A painful hiccup. Roger feels vomit in his neck. He screams. He falls from his chair screaming and clutching his backside. His glasses fall off his face and his world blurs.

  Roger’s rolling on the carpet. His massive head with its messy hair, closed eyes and screaming mouth is turning red. Read carefully. On the desk, above Roger, the computer crashes and the screen goes dark. Roger screams again. The focus of his hands alternates between his stomach and his arse. Life is an ache. Roger doesn’t understand. He tries to lose himself in the Les Misérables soundtrack but he doesn’t succeed. His pain is suddenly too great.

  Crawling slowly in the direction of the bathroom, he wonders whether he has, of late, eaten too many crisps. Perhaps I have, he thinks. Lately, I have stuffed my face with little but corn snacks. I can’t remember the last time I drank liquid. This is pretty serious, thinks Roger, through the pain. It feels like fat people with sharp feet are angry in my pelvis. If you just eat crisps, thinks Roger, and you don’t drink water, then maybe your innards become as dry as technology. I’m as dry as crisps and full of electricity.

  Roger gets to the bathroom and pulls himself across the smooth black-and-white tiles towards the toilet. He arrives. He almost wants to embrace the base of his toilet. The cold porcelain. It probably isn�
��t porcelain. He hoists himself up onto the seat, pulling down his trousers and pants as he does so. He says, ‘Ouch.’ The pain is constant. He bends forward extremely until his face is hanging over his kneecaps, staring into his trousers, his boxers and at his bare feet. All smell. Roger hasn’t seen soapy water in a while. His left foot is blacker than ever. Is it bruising? The blackness rises as high as his calf. He feels his big toe. It is impossibly smooth.

  Thinking about it, thinks Roger. I’m thinking about it. A diet of nothing but crisps is naturally going to result in a succession of fairly agonising farts and shits. I’m just dehydrated. I shall pass a few very dry turds and be blogging about them in a matter of minutes. The pain will subside. I need a beaker of water. Roger is considering reaching into the toilet to wet his hand when his arsehole opens fire with such force and ceremony that he finds himself fast-whimpering, straight-backed, gripping the toilet seat tightly with both hands.

  Drip. A liquid drips from Roger after the initial revolting torrent. Where did I find all that water? he thinks, more worried and slightly upset. Where do I get my tears from? They should be bogey-like, squirming like hung-over worms from the corners of my eyes. He peers between his legs. A penis. And through the darkness, past the penis, colourless liquid. A few drops of dark blood. I’m abnormal, he thinks; my droppings aren’t brown. In the living room, Les Misérables ends. I should have played it from the beginning. A glorious orchestral crescendo rises like a church roof in a storm, then goes quiet. Roger is seized again by pain. His bottom exhales. It gurgles. It is starting to expel an object.

  This is disgusting. And it smells. It smells as horrible as the new smells heavenly. It smells like a rotten dream; a cream dream abandoned for decades in a switched-off fridge. The expression on Roger’s face is a lip-curling, blinking one. He realises this isn’t a matter of a few very dry turds. He’s going to crap an object. Roger just knows he’s going to crap an object. He can feel it. The painful contractions begin and his teeth are gritted and exposed. It feels. It feels.

  Knock knock.

  Scratch.

  Should I say, shitting a brick? Giving birth to an adult? Pissing a guitar? With each contraction, with every centimetre that the dry object moves, poor Roger Hart performs a ‘quack’ of agony. This sound, and it is a quack, seems to come from deep in his body. Thin and high in pitch, the noise contains no moisture. Roger’s pain is wordless. His eyes are colourful and foul like prawns on a wino’s tongue. Jesus, just look at this awful Mancunian bathroom!

  ‘Quaaaaaaak!’ screams Roger.

  The terrible toilet next to the stained bathtub.

  ‘Quaaaaaak!’

  The dusty mirror above the sink that Roger could rip from the wall, squat over and peer in horror at the object in his arsehole.

  ‘Quaaaaaak!’

  The bogey in the bathtub, very near the plug. The sharp bronze wire that grew in Roger’s nose.

  ‘Quaaaaaak!’

  The used bog rolls. The numerous grey tubes that clamour round the toilet like insects round their queen.

  ‘Quaaaaaak!’

  The stupid toothbrush. Never used. The foul towel.

  ‘Quaaaaaaak!’

  The lying black-and-white tiles. Nothing but cheap and continuous lino.

  ‘Quaaaaaaak!’

  The pain.

  ‘Quaaaaaaaak! Quak! Quak!’

  Roger Hart dives forward off his toilet and onto the floor. He gasps. The object is no longer inside him. He hears it hit the toilet with a clang as he himself hits the floor with a thud. He clenches his butt-cheeks tight. Shut up shop. He is reminded suddenly of the supposed rapes he’s watched on the Internet. He’s never sympathised much with those girls, only watched and wanked in a clockless trance as they get banged, feeling as guilty as the cameraman. He understands now. I do, thinks Roger. I feel like I’ve been done. An odd, inside-out rape. I feel ashamed and scared. I feel like my anus has gone all wide and gaping like those girls on the web. Poor things. Poor thing. Me.

  Roger climbs into a crouching position, breathing heavily. He crawls back towards the toilet. Both eyes slanted like sword swipes. Lips and cheeks raised, smiling and quivering with shame, he stares down into the bog.

  Roger’s crapped a motherboard. Maybe it’s a hard drive? No, thinks Roger, his eyes fixed on the object, it’s definitely a motherboard. I know a lot about computers. There is a black plastic cube lodged in the toilet, above the dirty water. It’s covered in sockets. Some male. Some female. It’s covered in the normal circuitry. There are yellow bits and red bits and green bits. Roger realises it’s a good model. It’s one of the best and most expensive motherboards on the market. He sighs. Weird to crap it, he thinks. Weird to crap it.

  He thinks about flushing but realises it’s got no chance of getting round the U-bend. He limps to the kitchen, buttocks clenched, to fetch a plastic bag. And it’s as he fishes out the motherboard with the bag that he realises he could try to install it in his own computer. I could see if it works. It would be an upgrade, he reasons. It is better than my existing one. Whatever else, it would be an upgrade.

  Roger Hart yanks the silver handle. He’s sobbing as the dirty waters turn.

  Allow me.

  Allow me. Here it is. Fact. I just shat a piece of computer equipment. Fact. What do you think of that? I told you. Technology just came out of my arse. Fitting, don’t you think? I’m some sort of Second or Third Coming. Which one are we waiting for? Can’t remember. But it’s boring. We are boring. When will we realise? Even when I was straining out the big dry box with the wires and the sockets, I was like, boring, boring, boring.

  Iraq. Afghanistan. Kids in a sandpit. Such a load of.

  Do you know Keats?

  Words are words and words are words.

  Do you fuck?

  I’m joking. Everything is a smooth green bud. Inwardly folding petals of regret.

  El Rogerio no longer drinks water.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger watches as the comments gather at the foot of his blog, like the small shallow breaths that precede death. Someone simply writes ‘Genius!’ Someone else asks, ‘What’s with the gay poetry?’ Others ask what the truth is. Others enquire as to whether El Rogerio is planning to describe his suicide over the web. If he is, then could he be clearer? Internet suicides work really well, the teenagers say, but only when the process is documented simply, not poetically. Yeah?

  (Fuck off.)

  Roger leaves his computer. He takes the anal cream from his bed and applies it in the bathroom. When he’d ordered it, he thought he might have piles. Because of all the time he spends sitting down and typing. But no, his bottom hurts because it was preparing to crap a motherboard.

  The cream helps a bit. Though his fingertips are black when they come back from applying it. Roger returns to the main room and is surprised to find that he’s reluctant to blog. Normally he does so without thinking. But he doesn’t have the will at this moment. He can’t summon words from where words get summoned from. He considers watching his DVD of South Pacific. A guilty pleasure but a great musical. The pain is too great. His feelings too bad.

  Eventually he forces three sleeping pills down his dry throat and takes a seat on the blue sofa in front of the television. He watches a celebrity singing contest on BBC1. One by one the unheard-ofs come out to sing. They try to entertain with funny faces and unserious dance moves. They sing songs from the past six decades. Roger watches each performance carefully. People love people. In a way. Roger sighs. Towards the end of the programme, he picks up his telephone and registers a vote for a former football player. A black centre forward from the 1990s who’d made a decent fist of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’. When a recorded voice tells him that his vote has been counted Roger hangs up and begins to wait patiently for the results.

  9

  JOE ASPEN WAKES to the sound of screaming. His duvet is pulled over his head. He moves it down a little and stares across the bedroom. The turquoise curtain is shaki
ng frantically, causing the hoops that connect it to the curtain rail to rattle. He tries to go back to sleep. Joe always tries to go back to sleep. But before he can succeed, baby Sally has pulled the curtain clean off the wall and her screams have become muffled.

  Joe gets up. He always gets up. He pulls the thick curtain from off Sally’s thrashing little body and takes the child in his arms. She stops crying the moment he points her head over his right shoulder and, with his forearm under her warm bottom, begins to rock her gently.

  ‘There there,’ says Joe, staring from the window down onto a dusky Wilmslow Road. Five men in brown boots and luminous jackets walk south to Fallowfield. They’re pursued by long, tilting shadows. ‘There there.’

  The digital clock tells 16:45 in lines of red light.

  Joe walks across the room. He stands with his back to the full-length mirror so that Sally can stare at her reflection over his shoulder. He’s been doing this since the day Sally was given to him. He figured that as a human, or as a would-be human, Sally should get to know herself.

  Joe waits while the baby stares at itself. He stares at his bedroom, marvelling at the dismal stillness. We pretend time passes, thinks Joe. We meet up with people and stir time into life, like milk into coffee. Really, let’s be honest, nothing is happening here.

  The incident with the bold Wild World guy in the Rolling Stones T-shirt seems like a dream to Joe. But he’s rationalised it: I need love. I loved Life Moberg but she left me. I loved her shit till it was pissed from the porcelain. Nowadays I love Sally. One day I’ll drop dead. Loveless.

  In a twist of something, maybe fate or irony, Sally never shits. Joe changes her nappy each morning like adults change their underwear – for the sheer humane hell of it. Sally never pisses either. Joe’s been filling her with black milk for a few days and has witnessed no evidence of waste disposal. In a twist of something else, probably normality, he has now stopped pissing in the sink and begun using his toilet as before. He pees and poos in it then gives it a flush, like he did before Life abandoned him.