Man Hating Psycho

by Iphgenia Baal

  In the state I was in there was little to be done about the bathroom floor so after dabbing my bum dry I left it in a state of its own and drifted into the kitchen where, overwhelmed from the effort it took to do anything, I slumped down the kitchen counter. I couldn’t believe how fucked I was… My eyes came to rest on my phone. Surely Matey must’ve noticed I’d gone by now. I extended one arm, groaning at the expenditure of energy it took to unplug my phone and slide it toward me. I unlocked the screen but there were no missed calls, no new messages. Matey either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care about my disappearance. For a brief, delusional second I thought about calling him, I even opened Recent Calls and hovered over his name in the list but in my heart of hearts I knew it was pointless. Matey’d either be asleep or still awake and high and even if he wasn’t either of things his behaviour yesterday had made it pretty clear he didn’t give a shit about me. All he’d wanted was his records and a babysitter and he’d got what he wanted. I thought about texting but what would I say? Your rich Spanish girlfriend has hurt my neck? You lied to me about her reading my books? Have you noticed I’ve not been there all night? Did you notice I was there at all or did your records just miraculously appear in time for your party?

  I found myself wishing there was something more wrong with me than just a cricked neck, like if Matey’s rich Spanish girlfriend had broken my arm or something. If she’d broken my arm they’d’ve had to give a shit. I’d’ve had to go hospital. It’d’ve been a massive drama. There wouldn’t have been a party. They wouldn’t’ve just been able to ignore me all night if I’d been screaming in agony, showing bone. But even as I fantasied about worse case scenarios, full-body paralysis and severed tendons, that I could lay at Matey’s and Matey’s rich Spanish girlfriend’s feet, I knew I was wasting my time. I didn’t need Matey or Matey’s rich Spanish girlfriend and I didn’t want their sympathy either. What I needed was information.

  My thumb came down on Safari. Google came up. Watching my trembling hands with a mixture of alarm and curiosity, like they were someone else’s hands, I one-finger typed, ‘can’t move’ into the search bar. A drop-down list of suggestions appeared, the first one was ‘can’t move neck’.

  Taking some comfort from the algorithm’s correct prediction, which made me feel less alone because for ‘neck’ to be the top result it meant there were millions of people just like me, suffering. I scrolled through the search results until I came to the official guidance from the NHS. They’d kept me alive this long, I thought, and clicked.

  The NHS website loaded a short article written in text set at a large enough point-size to ward off complaints from the shortest-sighted. One bullet-pointed list detailed extraordinarily precise ways a cricked neck might be achieved:

  ‘Hunching over a phone or computer’

  ‘A cold breeze while sleeping’

  ‘Vigorous hair brushing’

  No entry for being assaulted by a minor league Spanish aristocrat.

  A second list described symptoms:

  ‘Loss of movement’

  ‘Sharp sensation’

  ‘Stabbing pain’

  ‘Bulge’

  None did it justice.

  Do’s & Don’t’s followed.

  ‘Do: over-the-counter medication, hot compress/cold compress, rest.’

  ‘Don’t: wear a neck collar, do anything dangerous’.

  I thumbed the screen hoping for clarification of what ‘anything dangerous’ might be but the page contained no further information.

  Abandoning the safety of the kitchen counter, I stumbled round the kitchen, opening drawers and rifling through cupboards like a malfunctioning automaton. My awkward movements unleashed chaos. Cutlery flew through the air, the pat of butter dropped into the bin, the stack of important letters got wet but somehow, I managed to neck a couple of codeine and fill a hot water bottle before, cursing Matey and his rich Spanish girlfriend for the third, fourth, maybe even fifth time that day, I retreated defeated to the bedroom.

  But the bed, with its sweaty sheets and duvet peeling out of its cover, didn’t look too inviting, and I recalled reading somewhere that a hard surface was better for bad backs than a soft one. I dropped the hot water bottle to the floor. It landed with a thud, its contents sloshing from side to side inside it. I went down after it, onto my hands and knees then onto my stomach before rolling ungracefully over onto my back. I wedged the hot water bottle under my neck and felt around for my phone.

  I scrolled through Contacts to see if I could think of anyone other than Matey to call. Someone who might be willing to come over and help, maybe bring food… I tried my mum. She didn’t answer. I tried my sister. She picked up to whisper that she was busy but would call me back and hung up. Georgia was at work, Maz was babysitting, JRTC had a foreign ringtone, Su’s phone was off. Angrily recalling all the times I’d dropped everything to help my friends out, gone round their house to wait for a delivery for them while they were out, listened to hours of them crying over cheating boyfriends, brought them soup to make them feel better, brought them flowers to cheer them up, I gave up. Fuck people. My thumb meandered from icon to icon, came unthinkingly down on Instagram. First post was a picture of people crowded into Matey’s living room, followed by a picture of people up on Matey’s roof at dawn. The scene of the crime. Matey and his rich Spanish girlfriend were there and the sportswear wankers and some dude with his cock out who was pissing into the street and loads of my friends. People who hadn’t been there when I left so must’ve turned up later. Iris, Eka, Hannah, Kieron, Ben, Naomi, Jesse, Dan, Victor, Jones, Matty, Eva. Practically everyone I knew. All minutes from where they knew I lived and not one had thought to call me. I clicked through the tags below the post to check people’s profiles. Selfies, sunsets, satirical leftwing memes.

  What a bunch of cunts. Didn’t they know anything? Didn’t they understand? I struck them off one by one, unfollow, block, making a promise to myself that I knew I would have no trouble keeping: that once I was better, if I got better, I’d remember this. The next time someone called me up ill or homeless or asking to borrow money they could sit and spin. They weren’t my friends, or at least not in any way that meant anything, not in any way that could be counted upon. They were just people I knew. People I wish I didn’t. People I wish I’d never let have the privilege of coming near me, of knowing me. Self-regarding, self-involved, self-serving. First world pricks with first world problems. To hell with them and their jobs and their babies and their boyfriends and their mortgages and their discounted gym memberships and their political leanings and their opinions on art and their taste in music and their taking up of fusion cooking and their interest in vintage motorcycles and their vinyl collections and their customised denim. None of it would last! The day would come when their back or their eyesight or their heart or their brain or their bladder or their bowels or their bones would give out, give way, and when that day came it wouldn’t be me that came to their rescue. It wouldn’t be anyone! Because that’s what happens in a world where giving a shit is conditional, where people are only important to other people according to what those people can do for them. Social standing, career opportunity. A world where nobody cares about people as people is a world where nobody cares about you. This is why people had children. This is what they were for. An insurance policy taken out by spineless, shallow cowardy custards so that when the day did come around there’d be someone there to take care of them. But children were no insurance. Children can grow up to hate their parents. Or move abroad. And rightly so! Who wants someone they know holding the bed pan anyway? No, better to go and die in peace. Better to die alone. Find a cave somewhere, crawl in and hope for the best.

  Reaching the end of New Posts, I double-clicked and swiped up closing Instagram. My horrible mood vanished with it. My fucked neck wasn’t any of these people’s fault. I knew that. It was Matey’s and Matey’s rich Spanish girlfriend’s. And it’d already been established that Matey and Matey’s rich Spa
nish girlfriend didn’t give a toss, so why was I even looking at their shit? Why was I even thinking about them? Hadn’t I wasted enough time and energy on people who couldn’t spare so much as thought for me? Let them do their coke and have their parties and climb on their roofs and post their nonsense, what I needed to do was get better.

  Banishing thoughts of Matey and his rich Spanish girlfriend, I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the sensation of heat permeating my body, fixing me. I imagined the painkillers hitting my empty stomach, dissolving in acid, digesting, pain receptor blockers being absorbed into my bloodstream, circulating towards my brain. Dark dots meandered against the orange, veiny backlit backdrop of my eyelids, as slowly and senselessly as bluebottle flies. A blush of static formed. Resonant fractals spiralling like a magic eye. They moved in and out and in and out and were pulling me in and out with them. The static grew noisier. It got so intense I could hear its effervescent hiss. The pulsing in and out got stronger and was starting to make me dizzy and the only way I can describe it is that it was like a head-rush, only reality was the head and I was the rush. It was like being plucked out of this world, a nauseating feeling, like sitting in the passenger seat of a car that has really good suspension. And as I rushed along feeling sick, I was looking back and could see myself in the middle of it all, lying on my back on the floor in my duvet in my bedroom in my flat on my street in my borough in my city in my country in the seas on the continent in the world in the universe in outer space then outside of space and outside of time where I teetered for a non-moment before, helpless to resist the pull back down, I tumbled back into time, into place, only further in than where I’d started. Deep, deep down inside, like that song. What it felt like was that I was someone or something that lived inside my body but wasn’t me. A seldom-seen vole- or mole-like creature peering at the world from within.

  I opened my eyes and peered around the room, taking in the curious new perspective. Disgusting bales of hair matted into the carpet, dust running along the skirting, chipped paint where wall met wall. The hot water bottle’d gone cold, which meant I must’ve been out for a couple of hours. Assuming the codeine had kicked in, I threw caution to the wind and sat up without supporting my neck. My head lolled backwards, making a crunch that seemed to come from the depths of my skull. In a panic, I scrabbled around for my phone. Two o’clock and still no word from Matey. I re-opened Safari. A pop-up window had sprung up, vibrating like an alarm clock. ‘Did you find this website useful?’ I took little satisfaction in clicking the box marked, ‘No’ before returning to Google to tweak my search.

  ‘Cricked neck blurred vision’ warned of spinal meningitis and stroke but both were ‘rare’. Other symptoms included pins and needles. I definitely had those. I tweaked my search again, tried ‘cricked neck danger’, then ‘cricked neck death’, then ‘cricked neck massage’, then ‘cricked neck treatment’. Clicking from osteopath’s blog to chronic neck pain forum, I skimmed concertinaing threads peppered with hyperlinks and medical jargon that warned of bony spurs and herniated discs and spinal stenosis and sudden death following incorrect spinal manipulations and the partial-paralysis of a 34-year-old man that prompted a malpractice suit and misaligned chakras and biblical scares.

  ‘The experience of an illness reveals a mistake that we have made in life so an important aspect of treatment is to understand the message it carries.’

  The mistake I’d made was thinking Matey was my friend.

  ‘The neck signifies that which conjoins the higher things in man, concerning the head, and the communication of the lower things that occur in the rest of the body, so the energy of the neck area is concerned with the energy of communication and expression. A pain in the neck often signifies one is being neglected, or ignored.’

  I thought of all the times I’d been blanked in the past twenty-four hours, from talking to Matey on the phone to trying to talk to his rich Spanish girlfriend, to being left on the roof, to Matey not being there in the first place.

  ‘To put the neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, is to be devastated as to truth.’

  The truth is that we live in a society compromised of self-serving wankers who given the opportunity wouldn’t think twice about treading on, enslaving, maiming, crippling anybody else if they thought there was something in it for them.

  Much as I found reading accounts of the horrible things happening to other people soothing, it didn’t take long for me to reach the conclusion that I didn’t have spinal bifida or early on-set arthritis. All I had was a cricked neck and while trigger point massage and soft tissue decompression sounded swell, maybe the only thing I needed to do was allow it. Allow the hot water bottle, allow the codeine, allow doing anything at all. Just lie on my bedroom floor like a fasting monk. Submit to whatever was happening to me. Discarding the phone, I stared at the cracks in the ceiling, wondering how long I could stay here for. Days, weeks, maybe forever, until I was a crumbly heap of bones. The idea of never moving again, of never having to deal with assholes like Matey or fascists like Matey’s rich Spanish girlfriend or vintage sportswear wankers or social media or shopping for food or checking up on old friends, of just giving up, was delightful.

  MIDDLE ENGLISH BESTIARY

  A wilde der is, that is ful of fele wiles, / Fox is hire to name, for hire qwethsipe. / Husebondes hire haten for hire harmdedes. / The coc and te capun / Ge feccheth ofte in the tun, / And te gandre and te gos / Hi the necke and bi the nos / Haleth is to hire hole. For-thi man hire hatieth, / Hatien and huten bothe men and fules. / Listneth nu a wunder that tis der doth for hunger. / Goth o felde to a furg and falleth thar-inne, / In eried lond er in erthchine forto bilirten fugeles. / Ne stereth ge nogt of the stede a god stund deies, / Oc dareth so ge ded were, ne drageth ge non onde. / The raven is swithe redi, weneth that ge rotieth / And othre fules hire fallen bi for to winnen fode, / Derflike withuten dred he wenen that ge ded beth. / He wullen on this foxes fel, and ge it wel feleth. / Ligtlike ge lepeth up and letteth hem sone, / Gelt hem here billing / Rathe with illing, / Tetoggeth and tetireth hem mid hire teth sarpe, / Fret hire fille / And goth than ther ge wille. / Twifold forbisne in this der / To frame we mugen finden her, / Warsipe and wisedom / With devel and with ivel man. / The devel dereth dernelike, / He lat he ne wile us nogt biswike; / He lat he ne wile us don non loth / And bringeth us in sinne and ter he us sloth. / He bit us don ure bukes wille, / Eten and drinken with unskil, / And in ure skemting / He doth rathe a foxing: / He billeth one the foxes fel, / Wo-so telleth idel spel, / And he tireth on his ket, / Wo-so him with sinne fet. / And devel geld swilk billing / With same and with sending, / And for his sinfule werk / Ledeth man to helle merk. / The devel is tus the fox ilik / Mith ivele breides and with swik; / And mani al-so the foxes name / Arn wurthi haven to same. / For wo-so seieth other god / And thenketh ivel on his mod, / Fox he is and fend iwis - / The boc ne legeth nogt of this. / So was Herodes fox and flerd / Tho Crist kam into this middel-erd: / He seide he wulde him leven on / And thogte he wulde him fordon.

  I never got what X__ saw in J__ but then I rarely got what anyone saw in the person they were shagging. Sometimes I didn’t even get what I saw in the person I was shagging, so it was no skin off my nose that J__ and X__ were going out.

  J__ was short and squishy, with a face straight off the boat from the Isle of Shite. One of the we’ve-been-here-since-1066 lot. The inbreds. He cut hair for a living in a swanky salon in town, charging £200+ a haircut, which supplied him with a steady supply of badly fitted jeans, diamanté t-shirts and single stud earrings. Exactly the sort of numpty you’d expect to step out of a secondhand Porsche. I suppose in a way X__ and J__ suited each other because X__ wasn’t much to look at either. What you might call an English Rose. Face like butter. When they turned up places together I always thought of a pair of trolls who’d been relieved from bridge duty and let loose in H&M.

  They’d been together for a year or two, when gossip started circulating that J__ was cheating.
I listened to the ‘proof’ (leaky theories founded on X__’s reports of J__’s erratic behaviour) with interest but found it unlikely mainly because I couldn’t imagine anyone other than X__ wanting to have sex with J__. But then I ran into J__ on Hoxton Street with this insanely beautiful but obviously insane Iranian girl on his arm. The kind of crazy you can tell on sight. Heavy contouring, hella voluptuous, real fur coat. Made sense. When J__ saw me he panicked and blurted out a lame explanation about them being second cousins. He needn’t have bothered because if my time on the London ʻdatingʼ scene (lots of sex, very few dates) had taught me anything, it was that when it came to other people’s relationships, you mind your business. You know the person sticking his dick in your friend is a slimeball? All well and good. He made a pass at you? So be it. Whatever inside info you think you’ve got, you keep it to yourself. If your friend calls you crying, asking if you think they should dump him, even then you keep your mouth shut. Because, nine times out ten, your friend and the slimeball will work it out. They’ll stay together and instead of the slimeball being ditched it’ll be you, because all the things you said about the slimeball being a slimeball will make you a threat. A threat to their happiness and an exterior factor to blame for the ultimate failure of their relationship. No, the thing to do is to let things play out of their own accord… Which is exactly what I did.

  A couple of months after that, coming up to Christmas when I was due to leave London for three+ months, I heard that X__ was pregnant. Now, I find it disturbing whenever I hear that the news that anyone is pregnant but found the news of X__’s pregnancy no more or less disturbing than I would’ve found it had it been anyone else. I jetted off to Rajasthan and forgot all about it. Arriving back in Blighty in the Spring, full of stories of stoned bubbas on mountaintops with hacked Sky subscriptions who chanted lines from The Simpsons like mantras, I found my travel anecdotes trounced by the latest cataclysm. J__ and X__ had split up and bigger than that, X__ wasn’t pregnant anymore. The break-up had been bad. Other people had got involved and the Porsche’d got trashed. Groupthink eventually sided with X__ , meaning J__ was history. I enquired after the foetus but was met with muted response. I didn’t press the point but doing the maths in my head, X__’d been three months gone when I left, which meant an abortion was out of the question. But, whatever the weather, it wasn’t my business. I accepted the group consolidating behind X__ and ditching J__ in theory but in practise I didn’t make any effort to see either of them.