In a Sick, Sick World

Foreword

So I wrote something today. Back in February I had big plans for this blog, there were gonna be reviews and commentary and special guest stars – it was gonna be fantastic. Then Minecraft 360 happened and left a big square where my brain used to be. I mean my profile isn’t even up to date anymore. I’m no longer 21. And the only book I’ve read is the fourth re-read of Hater.

But anyway. This is still technically a first draft as I knocked it out today; I’ll read it in like a week and edit the living faecal matter out of it. For the time being very interested to hear what people think of this. 

Edit 04/11/12: Some basic spelling and tidying.

IN A SICK, SICK WORLD.

    I wake up with a nosebleed. I stagger to the bathroom to clean my face off and get some loo roll, smacking my head of the doorframe. Ugh, today is gonna be perfectly awful, I can just tell.

   The smell hits me and I just vomit on the floor.

   “You alright man?” Jimmy asks me as I dry heave spastically on the ground.

   “No.” I manage in response.

   “Yeah, sorry I’ve been up since four with the runs, thought the smell would have cleared by now. Left the window open.”

   “You’re – UGGGGHHH – chipper...”

   “Feel pretty good today actually, ‘cept for the usual headaches and dehydration.” He says waving splayed fingers next to his head and taking a swig of water from the bottle he married when this shit first started.

   “I’ll make some toast.”

   “Put some aspirin on it!” I holler after him.

   “Sure thing honey!” He shouts back, all sunny like.

   I get off the floor and manage to wash my face, holding my nose in duel defence against the smell and haemorrhaging to death.

   I amble out of the bathroom taking erratic steps to avoid the sick and maintain my shaky balance, cracking my head of the other side of the door frame on my way out. I grab the wardrobe door and regain standing position.

   Most of my clothes are so covered in spots of blood they look tie dyed. I gave up buying new ones a long time ago; the brown is very fashionable in autumn.

    “What colour should I wear today?” I shout, which turns into a croaking cough. I spit out some bile in to the bucket. “Sunset yellow or, like orange or something?”

    “Dunno, think probably orange.”

   Sunset yellow it is then. I wrap the coloured ban around my wrist. I amble towards the kitchen.

    “Ah sunset yellow it is!” He says spreading some alternative margarine medicine spread, onto the toast. It was white and kinda slimy; the cum jokes never cease.

    “Yeah I’m not gonna drop dead.” I say taking a seat.

    “I didn’t say you had to wear black.”

    “Yeah but I’m not disabled.” He delivers the toast. “Thanks,” I say biting into it, then fighting with my stomach to keep it down. This is misery.

    Jimmy rubs my shoulder and I put my hand on his. We share a smile then he lets out three small farts and his face turns to panic.

    “See ya later.” He says dashing out of the room. “Have a good day at—” there’s a yelp and a thump as presumably he slips in the vomit and falls. For the next half minute or so there’s curses and threats emanating from the bathroom. I fold up the last bits of toast and seamen spread and cram it into my mouth.

    “Have a good day!” I say spraying some crumbs at the wall. I swipe them away with my hand as I open the door to the flat.

    Everywhere sorta smells like a hospital now. The worse places smell like a vet’s. Or so I’m told, I spend so long these days pinching my nose I only ever get lucky enough to smell the very worst things.

    I enter the lift and recoil in horror at the slime left on the ground floor button. It’s like grey, with flecks of blood in it. My hand clasps to my mouth to help fight back the seemingly endless vomit. I inhale through my nose and hear a popping as the blood clot ends up somewhere else in my airway. Naturally the bleeding starts again and I use my other hand to pinch the top of my nose, head back looking straight at some other discharge on the ceiling.

    This is a sick, sick world.

    I realise I have to breathe and decide which orifice is the safest to do that from. If I breathe in through my mouth I can get a lot more oxygen at once but such a large action is likely to cause more vomit, taking out the lift and forcing me to take fifteen lethal staircases to the bottom; breathing through my nose however would let the blood flow and it gets really tickly.

    “Oh hold it, please! Hold it.” The woman in the grey coat squeezes through the closing doors. I don’t really register her due to the internal debate that rages.

    “Sorry,” I cough as I breathe deep through my mouth.

    “Not to worry, not to worry.” She says rummaging in her incredibly small yet seemingly endless handbag for some disinfectant wipes. She wipes the panel, using five or six wipes, while I wait for my nose to stop bleeding.

    “There, that’s better.” She says, placing the last used wipe in an angry red biohazard bag; then placing the bag back in her handbag. “Blimey, you look like a car crash victim!” She says as if she hasn’t said this before and as if it’s still the funniest thing I’m ever likely to hear. In truth she tells me this three or four times a week.

    “Yup, that’s exactly how I feel.” I give her my stock response to which she laughs heartily, her pale skin tinting with red.

    She’s a white band, blessed only with a mild cold or lactose intolerance or anaemia or some other non-condition.  

    “Going to help my mum out today, my day off allegedly!”she fawns.

    “I am going to sell pills to sick people.” My other stock response.

    The gates open and I’m off, striding like Aragorn through the shire I knock my arm off the lift door, sending me in a different direction than I’d anticipated, like a boat with one oar I slam into the wall the next to the lift door, causing further damage to my nose and irreparable harm to my sense of self worth. I spin back quickly trying to make it look like I’d intended to do that for whatever reason and effectively goose-march my way to the front door. I catch her reflection in the glass; she’s smiling politely and offering encouragement with her eyes. Bitch – I hope she dies in fucking car wreck.

    I’m not allowed to drive, I mourn, as I walk across the car park. A few months ago my bleeding disease ended up in my brain and seriously affected my co-ordination. It’s been getting steadily better with some physio and persistence but the doctors severely discouraged me from driving again. And Jimmy sold my car and took me off his insurance plan. What an awesome guy he is.

    I keep walking, through the communal garden in front of the three apartment blocks. In the middle near an empty flower bed the crazy guy has set up shop. Fanatically into his conspiracy theories and autistic, even before the Sickness, he’s quite the charmer.

    “OPEN YOUR EYES STUPID PEOPLE!!!” He bellows into the loud hailer. It must be exactly nine thirty. Handy if your alarm broke, bastard on the weekends. “The black bands disappeared. The purple bands have disappeared. When was the last time you saw a green band? They’re trying to wipe out the sickness.”

   The black bands as he refers to them is a title given, pretty-much retroactively, to the ten or so percent of people who were given aggressive cancers, AIDS and the like when the Sickness arrived. Most of the diseases that are left now actually aren’t terminal, just persistent. Purple bands are for mental Sicknesses; depression, schizophrenia and the sort of thing that frequently ends in suicide. It’s not like they were just left to their own devices either; but there was a lot of confusion in the early days and the a lot of the health care systems couldn’t cope with the sheer numbers. Tragic yeah, but nobody rounded them up and incinerated them. Green bands are for people who’ve lost one or more of speech sight or hearing, due to whatever they got. A recent UN bill encourages “green communities” places for green bands to help each other out with some trained white or pink bands to help keep things running. It kinda sounds nice.

   Fuck that guy makes me angry.

  

   I’m on auto pilot as I hold my hand on my nose head to the sky, looking down occasionally to make sure I’m not gonna walk into traffic. I cross the road the pharmacy just ahead of me. I walk in the bell going off. Directly ahead of me Danni is stacking pregnancy tests. Like me she’s a sunset yellow. Skin condition; puss builds up in the skin at her joints, elbows, back of her knees and fingers. She wears gloves a lot. She looks at me, a smile breaking across her face.

   “Jesus Robb, you look like you’ve been in a car wreck.” I’m stunned; I’ve never told her about grey coat lady. Normally I’d have bounced something back at her by now.

    “You alright?”

    “Oh usual, liquid shit, vomit, blood, cum on toast. Wonderful morning.”

    “No puss? I’m offended.”

    “I think there was some in the lift, it was on the ceiling though.” I say going behind the counter and taking of my jacket. “Does it, like, erupt like a volcano?”

    “I have found it in weird places before.” She nods, pensive.

    “So yeah, sorry I was late this morning. Did I miss anything?”

    “You know fine you did. The zombie was in. You’d think he’d get less gross but no. Fresh waves of disgust. I left a bit of him over there for you.” She nods to the corner. I look and see a pile of yellow skin and blood. I think it’s looking back at me.

     “That is unsanitary.” I say aghast.

     “It’s also not my job. Besides, who cares about sanitation anymore?”

     “Is ‘sanitation’ a word?” I ask getting the dust pan and mop.

     “Santryness... sanitaribility...” She mumbles under her breath as I make my way over to ground zero. “Yeah, sanitation. Definitely.”

     I put the dust pan on the floor and push it towards the skin puddle. It doesn’t quite go underneath and instead pushes it further along the floor. I chase it until it hits the wall and manage to drag it up wards. It then flops back into the pan. Holding my nose I take it over to the bio-bin. On my way back I feel a little dizzy and lowering my head to face the yellowy lymphatic fluid I promptly vomit.

    A slow clap erupts from behind me.

   It was a quiet day. I was sitting behind the till beside the helpful chart showing the different coloured bands and what they meant. I’d memorised it a long time ago, though they’d occasionally update it with a new shade like a B&Q paint mixing chart. Danni was restocking the deodorants. She suddenly pipes up.

    “What’s the best thing you remember about being healthy?”

    “Um, not vomiting all the time. That was a lot of fun. You?”

    “Erections.”

    “You used to get erections? Danni you never said I always thought you were born this way.” A part of me hated that sort of pun. Another part of me was really impressed at the genius I clearly am.

     “No you spastic.” She says, irritated that she gave that one to me.

     “Do you spell your name with a Y?”

     “No I mean Martin’s.”

     “You spell Martin’s name with a Y?”

     “Oh give me a break, please?”

     “Yeah, sure. Sorry. What’s his thing again?”

    “He’s a dark red. Random blood clotting, organ failure and things. Needs dialysis a lot. Early on his dick got starved of oxygen. They managed to save it but it hasn’t really worked since, something in it died I guess.”

     “So have you thought about opening it a bit?”

     She looks at me horrified, “I’m not a surgeon.”

     “The relationship.” I say dumbfounded.

     “Oh fuck yeah, of course.” She says going red. “I couldn’t do that to him. We’ve got some good toys and that.”

     “So what’s the problem, then?” I say with some trepidation hoping not to sound too insensitive.

      “I think he might be going black, you know?”

      “That doesn’t happen very off’en.” I say putting on my funeral voice. “Usually you just get some halfway debilitating disease for life.”

      “Yeah...”

      “Have I told you ‘bout conspiracy theory guy? Stands outside my apartment block yelling about how the whites are trying to wipe out the Blacks the Reds, the Yellows... As if there could be a bigger metaphor for racism.” I start cackling.

      “Oh you are so fucking tasteless! Really!” She throws a box of something at me.

      “Oh ho! What’s this? Disinfected condoms – let’s get this party started!”

      She cracks a smile, breaking the crusty corner of her mouth, forcing some puss out. She wipes it away with a minute shake of her head.

     “Pills here!” I said cheerily, shaking the paper bag and gesturing to the pale stick of a girl with long white hair who was waiting by the sunglasses. She takes the bag from me, glaring her gratitude and leaves silently.

     There’s a chubby, boil covered teenager in the isle I can see in the mirror, boldly filling his pockets with skin cream.

     “Hey mate! You gonna pay for that?” He looks up and around frantically. He clocks me in the mirror.

     “Kleptomania is a disease!”

     “Uh-hu pay for it or put it back.”

     “I can’t.”

     “Hands sticky?”

     (“Jesus you sound like my dad...” Danni mutters behind me.)

     “I can’t afford it.”

     “Put it back and fuck off then!”

     He does as he’s told, slamming the door behind him.

     “Some people, eh?” I shake my head.

     “You were a bit harsh, actually.”

     “Nah, he was a white band. Those boils’ll fade.”

     “Do I smell prejudice, Robert?”

     “I’m not prejudice, but people like me and you,” I gesture with my fingers, “Are half crippled and actually work for a living. What the fuck’s he shoplifting for?”

     “He was like thirteen, where’s he gonna work a sweatshop?”

     “Are you giving me cheek, Young Lady?” She laughs, swaying her head, her puss sacks cracking again.

     “You’re an asshat.”

     “Go to your room!” I say pointing at the ceiling, feeling nauseous at the sudden animation.

      She gives me a look of mock desperation. She’s forgiven me.

     The walk home was largely uneventful, apart from fending off some potential muggers by vomiting blood into the gutter. I get in and head to the bathroom to brush my teeth and find angry red biohazard tape criss-crossing the door.

     “Really wouldn’t if I were you. The place is a write-off, I’m gonna get the incinerators in tomorrow. There’s some buckets out on the balcony. How do you feel about dolphins?”

      “Ugh, gross.”

      “Starfish?”

      “No, the buckets again. What happened?”

      “It backed up,” he said every word very deliberately. “It was like a geyser when I tried to flush; there’s shit on the ceiling and your puke is setting up home, it’s got a white fence and one-point-four on the way.”

      “Vomit and shit, eh?” I say giving him a hug.

      “Like yin and yang.”

      “Jack and John.”

      “Like Jack Bauer and the Law”

      “I’ll give you that. Buffy and Angel.”

      “Daphne and Celeste?”

      “Daphne and Celeste!?” I laugh, aghast, looking him in the eye. I think I win this round.

      “Ok, but you have to be Buffy.”

      “No no, I’m definitely Angel.”

      “Oh piss!” He says pulling away from me and running to the balcony.

      “We haven’t had piss today, really. Do you wanna just piss on the couch and end it well?”

END