Ding-a-fucking-ling went the doorbell[1]. It was the first time in a long time that had happened. I pressed the pause button on the remote and got up from the sofa and immediately I felt woozy. I put it down to what I’d been drinking, some tar-like substance I couldn’t remember the name of just then, not that it mattered (nothing ever does, of course). The doorbell went again and I told whoever was ringing it to hold their expletive horses. I felt too woozy to walk, so I crawled out of the living room and along the hallway.
When I got to the front door, I hoisted myself up using the iron chain suspended from the ceiling. After unbolting it, I tentatively opened the door. For a moment, I thought whoever had rung the doorbell had buggered off, but then I saw that a pygmy was standing at the bottom of the steps and I guessed that he had been the one to ring the doorbell. I raised my eyebrows, or what was left of them, by way of a greeting. The pygmy was wearing an old-fashioned donkey jacket with a flared collar and his face had more than a passing resemblance to a prune. Can I interest you in some dried mushrooms? he said in a sonorous, movie-trailer-voice-over kind of a voice, which for some reason I found surprising, perhaps because of some sort of cognitive bias that predisposed me to think of pygmies as having high-pitched nasally voices or perhaps not. Maybe, I said cagily, how much? Forty-two Vietnamese đồng for 10 grams, which is more than enough if you know what I mean. The pygmy winked as he said this, as if I should know to what he was alluding. More than enough for what? I enquired of the pygmy. You know, he said, winking again with a fervour that I had rarely, if ever, encountered before. I didn’t know, but I pretended like I did. I said I’d take 20 grams off his hands, but that I only had British pounds on me and could he take those in lieu of Vietnamese đồng. He said yes but that he would have to charge me a fee for having to exchange those British pounds into Vietnamese đồng at a later date, as well as a fee for hedging the foreign exchange exposure until then. I figured that was reasonable enough and gave him to understand that I was still desirous of entering into the transaction, which we duly completed right there on the doorstep. After that I wished the pygmy a good day and he did likewise and then I went back inside.
I was peckish, I realised, so I decided then and there to eat some of the mushrooms I’d just procured. I grabbed a fair handful from the polythene bag and shoved them greedily into my mouth as if I hadn’t eaten in a long time, which almost certainly was the case in fact. They tasted like I’d expect the rotting mulch on the floor of a dank forest to taste. Not good in other words. But not so bad that I couldn’t get them down, although I did dry retch a few times.
Strangely enough, as soon as I’d eaten the mushrooms, I needed a poo exigently. There’s no time to lose, I either thought or said out loud. I immediately got onto all fours and made my way, spiderlike, through the maze of my house to the WC. By the time I got there, however, I didn’t need a poo anymore. Nonetheless I went through the motions, which is to say I pulled down my trousers and got into the crouching position over the hole and I squeezed and squeezed and then squeezed some more, but it was useless, nothing would come. Strange, I thought, how capricious one’s colon can be. And then, wouldn’t you just know it, I suddenly had a bowel movement without any effort at all. I sighed after that and kind of went all limp as if I’d just had an orgasm or suddenly become a rag doll. But then I started to feel a cramp in my legs, so I quickly sprayed my anus with the bidet sprayer thing and stood up. That’s better, I thought. I pulled my trousers up as high as they would go and then fastened them into position by tying a knot in the hemp rope I happen to use as a belt, but which could easily be used for a variety of other purposes, for example to make a noose or a lasso. I didn’t feel like crawling now, so I walked back to the living room, which took a while because I kept getting lost in the maze. I plunked myself down on the kidney-bean sofa and put my feet up on the toadstool pouffe. Sighing like an old man who’s frittered his life away on slot machines and vapid daytime talk shows and who has no friends or acquaintances or family members that will admit to being related to him, I pressed play on the remote and resumed watching the movie I’d just started when the pygmy knocked on the front door.
The movie was about a guy called Stan who suffers from debilitating anhedonia, drinks copious quantities of alcohol and hasn’t left his house in years. Stan is in a co-dependent relationship with Melanie, a beak-nosed woman who works in a call centre for a rogue insurance firm taking calls from aggrieved customers who she feels vaguely sorry for but nonetheless has no qualms fobbing off on behalf of the rogue firm.
Stan and Melanie have a son – Elijah – a brooding goth of a teenager who starts every day with a bong, reads and writes extreme anarchistic poetry, runs various scams on TikTok and rarely emerges from his basement bedroom, the walls of which are daubed with occult symbols. That’s the background plot to the movie anyway, which is all laid out in a split-screen montage as the opening credits are rolling.
As soon as the credits stop rolling, the prelude to the inciting incident happens. Melanie is driving home from the call centre at the end of a hard day’s fobbing off of innumerable irate callers. It’s raining hard and the car’s wipers are swishing furiously. Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” is playing on the car stereo and Melanie is singing along to the chorus in a somewhat maniacal fashion. Suddenly, an animal – a deer perhaps or wild boar – runs out into the middle of the road. Melanie sees it late, swerves, hits the animal, a large badger as it turns out, which rides up onto the bonnet and thuds into the windscreen, shattering it instantly. The car rolls several times and ends up in a ditch. Melanie is stuck in the wreckage of her car, bloodied and pulped. Help me, she cries feebly before losing consciousness. Moments later a man drives past in a mud-spattered pickup truck, sees Melanie’s upturned car in the ditch, stops, reverses, pulls over. Using a variety of power tools, he cuts Melanie out of the wreckage and then lays her down in the back of his pickup truck and covers her with a tarpaulin. He gets into the cab, looks at himself in the rear-view mirror, adjusts his combover, smiles in a cocksure manner. He starts the engine and drives to a nearby services where he fills up with petrol and orders a cheese-and-onion pasty and a cappuccino. He tells the attendant he doesn’t want the chocolate sprinkled on top, but the attendant either doesn’t hear or chooses to ignore his request and goes right ahead and sprinkles chocolate powder over the cappuccino. The pickup-truck man is about to remonstrate with the attendant, but then he decides it just isn’t worth it and he takes the cappuccino without even a murmur of complaint. He drives to a remote location, a swamp with a stand of knobbly beeches in the far distance. There is a corrugated metal shack off to one side that looks like it could fall over in a stiff breeze, a shack that the pickup-truck man happens to call home, the inside of which is surprisingly spacious and well decked-out.
Meanwhile, Stan has been getting a bit worried about Melanie’s whereabouts or as worried as it’s possible for a depressed person to be about another person. Eventually, his anxiety overcomes his lethargy and he phones her mobile. The pickup-truck man answers. Yes? he says. Who the fuck are you? says Stan after a long enough pause to register shock. Where’s Melanie? says Stan. Melanie doesn’t want anything to do with you anymore, says the pickup-truck man, sorry to have to tell you, but that’s the way it is now. That’s the way it is now? repeats Stan. What the? Who the? Let me speak to my fu – The pickup-truck man hangs up the call. Stan phones back immediately, but the call goes straight to voicemail. Stan listens to his wife’s pre-recorded message, which sounds like she’s reading from a script, a script that is supposed to be funny, funny in an ironic sense, the worst, most repellent sense in which something can be funny, or that’s how it strikes Stan at that precise moment.
From this point on the movie is formulaic. Elijah becomes an internet Svengali, Stan becomes a recovering alcoholic, Melanie becomes a prostitute, the pickup-truck man becomes her pimp and occasional lover. The final scene, which takes place on a sun-slathered Mediterranean beach, engenders hope, albeit a hope that is shot through with melancholia.
Or that’s how it struck me as I suddenly became aware of myself again. Inexplicably, I was naked from the bellybutton down. My trousers must have somehow come off during the movie, I thought, which was kind of strange, but strange things did happen in life, probably far more frequently than I cared to admit. My chest hurt, I realised. It had been hurting on and off for a long time and I had every reason to think it would continue to do so and that I was perhaps perilously unwell. It worried me, of course, which is why I had turned, and in all likelihood become addicted, to the black liquid I couldn’t remember the name of (I couldn’t remember the name of it because the black liquid was, I fervently believed, slowly erasing all of my memories).
The fact of the matter was I didn’t want to die. I’d spent a long time thinking I did, but when it came right down to it I didn’t. Any kind of life, even a shitty one like mine, was better than no life at all. I fell asleep then, descended down into my unconscious where monsters dressed as people from my past came at me in unrelenting waves. Gamely, I fought them off with a truncheon, but it was no good, there were just too darn many of them: friends or so-called friends, occasional acquaintances, erstwhile colleagues, people I used to exchange glances with on the train to work, cousins, aunts, nephews, people I’d fucked once and never seen again, people I’d masturbated over, people I’d hated, loved, envied, admired, pitied, deplored, denigrated, betrayed, belittled, bullied and bamboozled. In the end, the volume of people from the past overwhelmed me and I found myself being ineluctably crushed into a pulp under the sheer weight of them.
At which point, I woke up – with a start and gasping for air, as if I were Uma Thurman in the most iconic scene of the most iconic movie of the 1990s and John Travolta had just plunged a hypodermic needle full of adrenaline straight into my heart. Reflexively, I reached out and grabbed a bottle of the black stuff and took several sedating swigs. Ah, I said smacking my lips, that’s better.
The news was on the television, some guy with a block-of-wood hairdo was saying something about the government doing its best in straitened circumstances. For some reason, I found myself agreeing that the government was indeed doing its best, even though I believed the government was in fact congenitally incapable of doing anything but a mediocre job of whatever it set its mind to. That was just how it was with governments, I’d always thought, and yet here I was agreeing with the rather querulous sounding man on the news, a government flunkey through and through, an oily, obsequious and downright odious man now I came to think about it. The kind of man who, I reflected further, would stop at nothing to achieve his nefarious ends, who reminded me in fact of myself at a certain stage in my life, a stage in which I seemingly had it all, as they say, a promising career, a bountiful sex life, an art deco pad in a culturally superior part of town, a neatly trimmed beard, a snooker-ball-red sports car, a legion of admiring or envious acquaintances etc. And for a moment, I became nostalgic for that stage of my life, saw myself back living it without a care in the world, or okay not without a care in the world exactly, but without undue concern for the things that one day would come to preoccupy me to such an extent that I could think of little else or if I am being honest nothing else, a state of affairs that persisted to this day in fact and which for all I knew would continue to persist indefinitely into a future that struck me then as being devoid of hope and coloured grey, a future in which I would become more and more lethargic and cognitively impaired and less and less dignified and capable of redeeming myself.
Fuck it, I thought. I grabbed the bottle of black liquid and I drained it of its viscous dregs, and then I crawled around the house like an arachnoid for a while and when I got bored of doing that, I reverted to lying on the sofa and watching the telly, channel hopping indifferently until I alighted upon a documentary that grabbed my attention, a documentary about a pregnant heroin addict living on the streets of some rundown seaside town, who, after giving birth and having her progeny snatched summarily away by social services, submits herself to the hideous travails of detoxification and manages to get herself clean, only to relapse after being kicked in the face, not literally but by the overbearingly bureaucratic system, a relapse that results in an overdose and the heroin addict’s demise at the tender age of just twenty-three. I felt sick to the stomach after watching that, inconsolable with grief or maybe it was outrage. Not long after that I died. On the sofa. Of a heart attack, which hurt like hell.
Once I was dead, I felt relieved. I was still conscious and I always would be, I realised, only I no longer felt like shit and what’s more, I was certain I never would do again. And then I realised with a zing of joy that the heroin addict wasn’t really dead after all, that like me she was suspended in this strangely reassuring void, only she wouldn’t be a heroin addict anymore because there was no heroin in the void to be addicted to, so maybe the moniker ‘heroin addict’ was no longer appropriate.
- 1 Someone I happen to know very well, perhaps too well, pointed out to me recently that doorbells go ding-dong rather than ding-a-ling. I don’t know if I agree with her or that it much matters quite frankly. I mean ding-a-ling, ding-dong, who gives a fuck, right? ↩