Drivel

I am 44 years old and have almost no friends to speak of. I am unemployed, voluntarily so (if, that is, you believe in free will, which isn’t something to necessarily take for granted these days). The truth is I’ve had enough of paid employment, for now anyway. Luckily for me, my wife takes care of my material needs (and the dog’s). I spend a lot of time in my garden office, which is painted seaside blue, although the door and window frames are painted white. Inside my shed there is a tatty old rug with some sort of geometric design just about visible through the caked-on dirt, a director’s chair, a desk, a Mac of some sort on the desk, an electric element heater and a printer (which is broken). My passwords for everything are written down on a piece of paper stuck to one of the walls with blue tac. The doors and windows are double-glazed. One of the windows looks out onto the junk I’ve been piling up behind the metal shed: guttering off-cuts, roof tiles and sheets of plasterboard leftover from the extension we had built last year, concrete posts (left by the previous occupants), chicken wire from the chicken coop that I dismantled last summer, bits of old wood, some bricks, a broken lawnmower, a rusted wheelbarrow, tree clippings, grass cuttings and God knows what else. The other window and doors look out onto the garden, which is very long (maybe 150 yards long) and quite thin, made thinner by the tumescent conifer hedge that curtains off our garden from our neighbour’s, which my wife hates (the hedge, not the neighbour’s garden). There is an apple-and-plum orchard on one side of a block path which runs all the way to my office. Next to the orchard there is an oak pergola, which my wife bought me for my last birthday to fill in the space left behind by the dismantled chicken coop. It looks very bare at the moment because the creepers I planted haven’t taken yet. On the other side of the block path is a lawn with some Californian Lilac shrubs bordering it at one end and a gigantic Black Lace at the other.

When I want to masturbate, which is quite often, I shut the blinds on the doors and windows to the shed. Otherwise, I leave them open to let the light in. Sometimes when I am writing I listen to music, although this is normally only when I am editing, not when I am writing a first draft (an endeavour that requires the utmost silence and seriousness, of course). I listen to ambient electronic music mostly. Sometimes jazz, but rarely these days. I’m not very musically literate. I hardly know the names of any famous contemporary musicians, although I do know the names Ed Sheeran, Stormzy and Billie Eilish. But then, who doesn’t?

I am currently writing a story about a therapist who uses a cutting-edge machine to go inside his patient’s consciousness and change it from the inside out. Weird things happen to the therapist’s reality as a result of using this machine, or what he thinks is reality. The novel is called the Weirdo King. It’s supposed to have this otherworldly yet quirky (or noirish) quality, kind of Murakami-esque, but it doesn’t seem to be panning out that way. Actually, I think my novel stinks so bad I feel like you need a gas mask just to be able to read it. So far, I have spent seven weeks on this latest attempt at writing a novel. I don’t know how much longer I can go on for before I pull the plug, maybe another week and a half, two weeks tops.

Drinking wise, I limit myself to three large cans of lager every night, or I try to, sometimes I get some cans of pre-mixed gin and tonic and pre-mixed Jack Daniels and Coke to supplement the lager; or sometimes I buy a bottle of Prosecco and pretend it’s for my wife, when I know she’ll only have one glass (which she somehow manages to make last the whole night) and that really it’s all for me.

Last night I drank three cans of Stella whilst watching some original Netflix drama that barely occupied my attention to begin with, but by the end had me riveted. Probably it helped that I was a little bit drunk by then. It was about two drug addicts who live in Skegness and spend their days getting high and into scrapes with other addicts. The tone of the drama was melancholic, interlaced with irony. In fact, there was so much irony, I am now starting to wonder if it wasn’t a drama at all but rather a comedy (to be fair to me, it can often be hard to tell the difference these days).

After I had drunk the cans, I watched the last twenty minutes of the episode I happened to be on at the time, an episode which was partly a surreal animation of a druggy dream that was going on in the head of one of the addicts and partly a thriller revolving around the apparent suicide of the other addict (who it is revealed at the end of the episode has been faking his own death in order to avoid having to pay a particularly thuggish dealer he is in hock to). Then I checked the back door was locked, checked the oven was switched off at the point, checked the back door again. Then I went to bed. My wife was already under the duvet and had her back to me. I could see over her shoulder that she was reading a book on her iPad. I sucked in some vape on my vape pen, which made that crackling sound like faulty electrical wiring. My wife tutted at that. “Can’t you smoke that thing somewhere else?” she said. “It stinks.”

“Vape that thing,” I corrected.

“Vape that thing somewhere else then,” she said. To which I said I wouldn’t be sucking for much longer and if she could just grin and bear it that would be good. She didn’t answer. I sucked three more times and then put the vape pen under my pillow (you never know if you’ll need it later).

After that I laid my head down and almost immediately I thought a sexual thought about my wife, so I sidled over surreptitiously and put an arm around her. Immediately, she put her hand around the wrist of that arm in a sort of defensive gesture that I, of course, chose to ignore and proceeded to rub my stiff cock against her lower back or maybe it was her bum I was rubbing it against. “Bonobo, I’m not in the mood,” said my wife. “Why don’t you ever just hug me?”

“I do,” I said.

“Yeah, but then you always want more.”

“So?”

“So, not all of us want to have sex all the time.”

“Fine, have it your way, but don’t say I didn’t offer!” I rolled back to my side of the bed.

“And now I need a pee,” my wife said then. Like it was my fault she needed a pee? She always needed a pee. She got out of bed and went to the little toilet-cum-shower-room-ensuite. I heard her pee, which was a gushing one. I looked over. I watched her taking one of those winged sanitary towel things out of a packet and then I shut my eyes, sighed and shoved my feet out from under the duvet to cool them down a bit. After however long I fell asleep. I dreamt I was working in an office. For some reason, without any prompting, I immediately realised I was working as an auditor again, which was how I started my career, if you can call it that. I was sat midway along a bank of hot desks. Around me were colleagues I recall working with from various jobs I’d had in the past. Two of my colleagues were bantering with each other on the far side of the bank of desks, next to the vast rectangular window, through which I could see the branches of trees and above them a blue sky with clouds scudding across it. Now that I looked more closely, I realised that these bantering auditors were a pair I knew back in my Salisbury days, when I first started taking Prozac. They played rugby and drank a lot and one of them was Welsh and acted the fool, whilst the other one was as dry as a biscuit and a perfect foil to the fool. They were both affable and I remember enjoying working with them; I even went out carousing with them a few times. “Hey,” I shouted, waving to them in my dream, but it was as if they didn’t hear me, or if they did, that for some unknowable reason they weren’t able to communicate with me. Either way it was disappointing to say the least. Never mind, I told myself. I looked down at my desk. I had a file open. I was preparing a lead schedule for the profit and loss account. I started adding up the figures, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to get to the bottom line and ascertain whether the company I was auditing had reported a profit or a loss. I felt myself sweating in my dream and breathing rapidly. Come on, come on, I told myself, I can do this. But I couldn’t, the numbers just kept on coming and coming and coming and coming and in the end, I said fuck this for a game of soldiers and I threw my calculator at the wall.

I got up to stretch my legs. Everyone looked at me as if I was naked, which I wasn’t. I was, in fact, wearing some sort of misshapen flannel suit, which smelt like it hadn’t been dry-cleaned in a long time. I walked away from the desks. I passed a giant potted plant with leaves that drooped mournfully. I passed a mirror. I saw myself. I looked ridiculous in my suit and my head was too small, as if it had been compressed on all sides by an unseen force. I carried on walking, past the coffee vending machine, out of the fire exit, down the fire-escape stairs and then pushed the bar thing on the exterior door. An alarm thingy bleeped, but didn’t go off. Fresh air hit me like I’d dived into a frigid pool. I took out a packet of B&H and popped out a fag. I lit it, inhaled. It tasted good. I suddenly recalled I’d quit smoking, but it didn’t seem to matter to me in my dream.

When I’d smoked the thing down to the filter, I went back into the office. This time as I walked along the office floor, past bank after bank of hot desks, I realised there were glass cubicles all around the perimeter. Some of them were empty, others were being used for various business purposes. I passed one with a woman sat at a desk industriously typing away on a MacBook Pro, a dwarfish woman I remembered from my trainee days, back when I hadn’t yet discovered SSRIs and I was forever hyperventilating and sweating profusely. She was a partner, or had been, a managing partner as well. She didn’t like me, I’m pretty sure of that, hardly anyone did at that company. It was just the way things were. As I walked past her office, she looked up from her MacBook Pro and stared at me as if she faintly recognised me and then she did the facial expression for definitely recognising me. She got up from her chair. Uh-oh, I thought to myself in my dream. Hey, she shouted across at me, or it looked like she was shouting because in fact I couldn’t hear her. The glass cubicle must have been soundproofed or something. I waved. She waved. I walked over. She motioned for me to open the door, which I did and walked in. Sit, sit, she said. So I did. On the art deco chair on the other side of the desk. Then she sat down on her executive chair. Immediately most of her body disappeared from view, just the top half of her face and her hands, which were on the desk, were visible. She started tapping on her MacBook, as if she was no longer even aware I was in her office. I thought it weird, but I wasn’t in a rush in my dream, so I went with it. Having said that, I get bored easily, even in dreams, so after however long of just sitting there like a lemon, I coughed in the manner of someone trying to get someone else’s attention. At which point the partner shot me an apologetic look and said, Almost there, almost there, as she carried on tapping, more furiously than before, which I suppose was on account of my hurrying her along. Then, quite suddenly, she stopped, leaned back on her chair and momentarily her head disappeared and all I could see were the soles of her pumps, but then she pushed herself forward and half her face was visible again. You have to be careful with these chairs, she said. Then she swivelled the Macbook Pro around so that I could see the screen Then she moved her finger along the touch bar until she got to the mini screenshot of the Safari tab she wanted and, hey presto, that tab was on the screen. Now I was looking at YouTube, scrolling down the right-hand side of which were thumbnails of YouTube videos all featuring me in the act of committing suicide: me shoving 40 pills in my mouth at once, me with a plastic bag over my head, me slicing my right wrist with a razor blade, me swinging from the branch of a baobab tree and so on. If this weren’t bad enough, there was a YouTube video playing in the top left quadrant of screen, in which I was sitting at my desk in the garden office holding a pistol (with a silencer screwed onto the end of it) to my left temple. I was saying something, something like I can’t go on, I’ve tried, believe me I have, but it’s just too hard et cetera et cetera (with subtitles, which I thought was weird, I mean my diction has always been bad but not so bad you can’t understand what I’m saying, or no one ever mentioned to me that they couldn’t). I told the partner to turn it off. I’ve seen enough, I said. Okay, but you understand why I had to show you this, right? she said. Not really actually. Maybe you will one day, sometimes it takes a long time to realise something, like months, years, in extreme cases whole lifetimes. Then I woke up and immediately realised I didn’t have a job or any friends to speak of. I felt a momentary sense of terror, as if I’d left the gas hob on by mistake in the kitchen and was already a half hour away by car, but after a while I calmed down; so what, I thought, if I don’t have a job or any friends to speak of, there are worse things in life (what they were I couldn’t think of just then, but it didn’t matter, the main thing was that they existed).

Today I went to Tesco’s in Guildford. I’d been to the dentist’s and it was on my way home, so I popped in to buy a wrap and some crisps. As I was deliberating whether to have a hoison duck wrap or a southern fried chicken wrap, a guy called out my name. I recognised the voice but I couldn’t place it. I turned around to find a guy I used to work with smiling across at me. For a moment, I couldn’t remember his name, but then I remembered it was Alex. Not that it mattered. I smiled back, wanly I imagine. He wheeled his trolley over to me. “Noah,” he said, “long fucking time my man!” I agreed that it was. Then in a jokey way that wasn’t jokey at the same time, he berated me for not going to some barbecue he’d invited me to the previous summer. I repeated the excuse I’d given at the time, or I think it was the same excuse. Then he asked me what I’d been up to since leaving the company. I gave him a vague response, something about working as a consultant, taking on private clients here and there, doing a bit of this and a bit of that in other words. As I said these things, I could tell from Alex’s facial expression that he thought I was bullshitting him, which I was. Fortunately, however, he kept his thoughts to himself.

“So what about you?” I said, “how’s things at work?”

“Pretty good,” he said, “pretty good.” I could tell he had something else to say, so I let him say it. “I got promoted actually.”

“That’s great,” I said, and I meant it, I think. Then Alex explained in more detail than I felt was necessary the nature of his new role, which seemed to me to be just like his old job. I told him it was nothing less than he deserved, which sounded like a strangely formal thing to say as I was saying it. Not that Alex seemed to notice, in fact he agreed with me that it probably was, although he said it in different words. There was a pause then as we both struggled for something else to say. Since I was still vaguely thinking about my not having gone to his barbecue, I apologised again (or was it the first time?) for missing it. I felt genuinely sorry about it. I couldn’t remember why I hadn’t gone, but I was pretty sure there was no good reason. And maybe because the blood was rushing to my head, I said we should definitely catch up soon.

“Yeah dude, we should definitely do that.” I’d forgotten his proclivity for the word dude. It vaguely irritated me, but I knew equally that it shouldn’t irritate me, that I was the one with the problem, not him. Then Alex started on about his job again, about the pressure, the deadlines, the responsibility, things that luckily the pay-rise compensated for. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. He was that sort of guy. Deadpan delivery whether he was joking or not. But when he started smiling, I knew he was joking and I laughed, at what I’m not sure. After that we both agreed, without it needing to be said, that the conversation had concluded, and we said goodbye. Actually, I said goodbye and he used the word ‘cheerio’, which immediately brought an image of the eponymous breakfast cereal into my mind’s eye. Then Alex wheeled his trolley away down the fruit aisle and without knowing quite why I picked up a prawn sandwich, which I enjoyed but probably not as much as I would have enjoyed a wrap.

During my meditation, I started thinking about my encounter with Alex and obsessing about the fact that I hadn’t gone to his barbecue. Like you have so many friends, I told myself, that you can afford to turn down an invite. But, I told myself, I’m not sure if I even like Alex. Doesn’t matter, I told myself. An invite’s an invite. Yeah, but surely it’s not a big deal? There’ll be other invites. But will there? They don’t just fall out of the sky, you know. You actually have to go out into the world and meet people to get invites to barbecues. Fine, I told myself, as soon as this meditation is over I’ll text Alex and arrange to meet up. After resolving this, I sat there reminding myself what I’d resolved until my iPhone made the Tibetan singing bowl sound and I knew the meditation was over. Immediately, before I had the chance to forget, I sent Alex a text saying something along the lines of: it was great to bump into you today, would be cool to meet up for a beer, let me know when’s good for you.

The truth is I was distracted by the fact that James Sneider hadn’t pinged me a text back to say thanks for wishing him a happy birthday. I phoned my wife. It went straight to voicemail and I didn’t leave a message because I never do. She phoned me back whilst I was peeling potatoes for the shepherd’s pie I was planning on making for our dinner. She sounded harangued, not up for talking at all. I explained to her about James Sneider not replying to my text wishing him a happy birthday. Don’t be ridiculous, she said, he’s probably busy. People take time replying to text messages. I said okay, so I’m worrying needlessly is what you’re saying? Exactly, she said. Okay. Then we hung up the phone on each other, her first I think, by a microsecond, and I got on with peeling with potatoes.

I feel worthless. My wife is insisting that three days is still too soon to conclude that he isn’t going to reply to me. I often take a week to get back to people at work, she said last night as we were lying in bed. I told her that that’s different, that work emails are a different ball game entirely and also that it isn’t something to be proud of. Taking a week to get back to people, I clarified. Think about what your tardiness might be doing to their self-esteem. My wife agreed that she would try to respond to people quicker in the future, although she admitted it was different with work emails.

I am disappearing or it feels like I am. I fell asleep muttering to myself last night. Several times my wife told me to be quiet and I would be quiet for a while and then start up again. Not good.

I am still not drinking, which is good, great even. And no vaping. Even better. Now comes the test. We are going to Bestival tomorrow. My wife booked it ages ago (as a treat for me, not that I deserved one) and I can’t not go, even though the idea of being at a festival stone-cold sober fills me with dread, as does the prospect of spending time with the Goldsteins, who my wife arranged for us to meet there. Fortunately, I have some mushrooms left. I will make an exception to my rule of only taking them for spiritual purposes just this once. Also, I will have to hope that they don’t give me a cluster headache this time. I just don’t get it. Mushrooms are supposed to be a cure for cluster headaches, so why do they actually have the opposite effect on me? It’s a mystery.

We don’t have any of the things you need to go camping, so we’re going to Halfords later to get them. Seems like a complete waste of money to me. We’ll probably never use any of these things again and end up taking them to the dump. Unless, that is, my stepdad gets there first, which he probably will, which is fine by me.

The stewards directed us along a road consisting of boards until we were finally allocated a parking spot about a mile from the camping field. The parking spot was at a steep angle, maybe 35 degrees or thereabouts. It made me nervous. What if the handbrake failed, I thought, and the car rolled down the hill and mowed into a crowd of passing children. It could happen. I told my wife it could and she told me to stop worrying about nothing. “Okay,” I said, “but you’re responsible for the handbrake.”

“What do you mean, ‘I’m responsible for the handbrake’?” said my wife with that exasperated tone she gets in her voice all too frequently these days. “I mean you check it’s on properly before we leave the car.”

My wife proceeded to check the handbrake was on by grabbing it and pulling it as far up as it would go, only it wouldn’t go any further because I’d already done that. Then she said she confirmed it was on properly. “You’re sure?” I said. “Nutjob alert, nutjob alert,” said my wife, making a little circular motion with her index finger by her right temple. “I can’t help it,” I said, “you know that.” She did, but it didn’t make it any easier living with a nutjob, I knew that. Still, I really couldn’t help it. As far as I knew anyway. Maybe I could and I just didn’t give myself a chance to help it. It was possible. Anything was.

I got out of the car. I told myself that the sense I was having the handbrake wasn’t on properly was just an uncontrollable thought arising in awareness and that the thought wasn’t true and that it would soon pass out of awareness and then be nothing. I told myself that the thought that I might later worry about the handbrake was just a thought as well and that if I did end up worrying about the handbrake later on that I would simply acknowledge that that was a thought if and when it arose and that it too would pass out of awareness soon enough. I wasn’t sure if thinking like this helped me or not, but eventually I stopped worrying about the handbrake, although I wasn’t aware that I had. If I had been aware, I probably would have started worrying about it all over again. Sometimes I think the only thing that saves me from being totally consumed by obsessively and compulsively worrying about catastrophic events happening is my bad memory, which is something I suppose, although as everyone knows a bad memory is probably an indication of early onset dementia. God help me. God help my wife too.

We unpacked our stuff from the car. I looked around. I saw other people unpacking their vehicles. They seemed to have a lot more stuff than we did. Also, they seemed to have brought their own trolleys or wheelie trailers or whatever the hell you called them to transport their stuff in. It annoyed me. It always annoyed me when people were organised for some reason.

“We could do with a wheelie thing,” I said to my wife.

“You can hire them,” she said.

“How do you know that?” My wife pointed at a sign at the foot of the hill that led up to the campsite. Sure enough it seemed to indicate that trolleys were for hire there.

So I hired one and we loaded our stuff into it. I resisted the temptation to check the handbrake one more time and wheeled the trolley away.

Fuck me it’s warm, I said repeatedly as I schlepped our stuff up the hill in the trolley whilst my wife bounded on ahead carrying her tiny little backpack thing. We queued for a little while at the barricades. When we passed security they weren’t one bit interested in what was in our trolley and I couldn’t help wondering how easy it would be to deal drugs at Bestival if one wanted to, which I didn’t, but still, it was worth knowing maybe.

Once we’d unloaded our stuff, I took the trolley back. Since I was ten minutes inside the allotted time for usage of the trolley, the man gave me a full refund of our deposit, although he did so grudgingly. Then it was another schlep to get myself back up the hill, not that I minded, since it was all useful training for my body.

After a few false starts, I managed to erect our tent, which in fact pretty much popped out of the bag and put itself together. Piece of piss, I said to my wife as I stood there by our tiny two-man bubble tent admiring my handiwork or the tent’s own handiwork. My wife pushed her bottom lip up against her top lip and did that curling mouth look she does when she’s not sure about something. Seems a bit on the small side to me, she said. “So you’re saying size does matter then?” I said and she couldn’t help tittering at that, although she also muttered something about how puerile I could be sometimes, which I didn’t disagree with. Then in a moment of genuine vulnerability, I said, “But I have got a big one, right?”

“Yes,” she said, “a fucking huge one actually.”

“That’s what I thought.” We laughed some more. When we stopped we realised there was nothing to do but wait for our friends, the Goldstein family, or actually my wife’s friend and her husband and their twin boys, to rock up. To kill some time, we had a scout around the camping field and found a place to get some food by the shower cabins. We got two bacon rolls, a can of Coke (for my wife) and coffee (for me) and then went back to our tent to eat and drink, only we couldn’t find our tent, not for ages anyway and by the time we did find it we’d eaten our rolls and drunk our drinks already. Not that it mattered that we had.

We sat down on the two foldable camping chairs that had come with the tent in a package that also included a mini gas stove and an LED torch. I read an essay by Carl Jung on my Kindle for a bit. The essay described the general behavioural traits of neurotics. I kept recognising the traits he was describing in myself. It made me feel neurotic to read about how neurotic I was, but I carried on regardless, thinking perhaps that to do so was in some way an act of stoicism, that I could at least be stoical about being neurotic. Or something.

My wife’s friend turned up. I went and said hi to her husband, Leonard, who I’d met a couple of times before but only when I was drunk or not sober anyway, so I didn’t really know anything about him. He looked harangued. His eyes had yellow flecks and his skin was mottled. He asked me how I was doing, then before I had a chance to answer he said he was looking forward to sinking a few ales with me later. He winked in what I suppose was a display of camaraderie. I didn’t bother telling him that I wouldn’t be drinking for the entire festival, that I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol in three months as a matter of fact. The timing wasn’t propitious. Instead, I said hi to Gertrude, who offered me a cheek, which I kissed, and then I said hi to the twins, who looked at me like I was a paedophile for even talking to them.

For some reason, probably to do with how tight-fisted he is, Leonard decided against hiring one of the trolleys, so he had to make lots of trips to and from the car. I offered to help him, but Gertrude told me not to worry, that Leonard could do with the exercise. She laughed after saying that and so did I, although I felt slightly as if I was betraying Leonard for doing so. Then again, I barely knew the guy and he was a big fat fucker and the truth is he probably could do with the exercise. I picked up my Kindle and got back into the Carl Jung essay, trying my best to ignore the twins who were making horrendous high-pitched shrieking sounds and running about all over the place and kicking something, maybe a football.

After Leonard had erected their tent, which was so large it encroached on our pitch on one side and another pitch on the other, Gertrude made chorizo and eggs for her family using a variety of appliances. I politely declined when she offered me some, as did my wife. “We’ll probably grab something to eat from one of the food places,” I said. We watched them eat. The twins wolfed theirs down and then demanded dessert in whiny stereo. Gertrude opened a bag of Madeleines and gave them two each. She offered us some and like with the chorizo and eggs, we both said no thanks. I reiterated that we’d probably grab something from one of the food places and Gertrude shot me a look that seemed to suggest disapproval or envy, I couldn’t be sure which (although deep down I knew it was envy of course).

Inevitably, after stuffing his fat face (he had three servings, probably devoured enough chorizo and eggs for a family of six in fact) Leonard cracked open a beer, which he retrieved from a cool bag stuffed with nothing but cans of Tesco’s own-brand lager. He offered me one. I said no thanks. He asked me if I was sure and I felt awkward saying I was sure and leaving it at that, so I explained that I wasn’t drinking at the moment. “Trying to give up vaping,” I explained, “and beer and vaping kind of go together in my mind. Can’t have one without the other basically.” Leonard shrugged. I could tell from the look in his yellowy eyes that he wasn’t impressed, that he hadn’t come all the way down to Dorset to hang out with a teetotaling killjoy. I felt like telling him not to worry, that I was planning on doing plenty of mushrooms instead and that I wasn’t a complete teetotaling killjoy. But of course he wouldn’t have understood, so I kept that to myself.

Later we all went for a walk. It took a long time to find our way out of the camping field. Since it was Thursday night, there were no acts on, so we just kind of wandered around. Lulworth Castle was lit up and kept changing colour. The twins went on a few rides and we all pretended to enjoy watching them going round and round or up and down, or I pretended to enjoy it, and I strongly suspect Leonard was pretending too, whereas I think Gertrude really was enjoying it and my wife was somewhere in between pretending and actually enjoying it.

At some point, my wife and I bought falafel from a food van with a large clapboard sign that read: REAL FALAFEL sold here. I kind of assumed it would be, but maybe the sign was reassuring come to think of it. Anyway, it turned out that the falafel, which was served in a tortilla wrap with cucumber, lettuce, red onion and lashings of tahini, was delicious. The twins demanded something as soon as they saw us eating, of course, so Gertrude got them some churros dipped in hot chocolate sauce, although she didn’t seem pleased about having to do so and I couldn’t help feeling as if we were being judged as a bad influence on the twins for not eating our own food back at the campsite, not that we had any, not that she knew that (yet).

After a bit more perambulating, we went to a tented pub with large, quilted sofas that were all occupied and a muddy floor covered in empty plastic drinking vessels and plastic food trays and bits of uneaten food. We stood at the back for a while watching some woman swinging on an acrobat’s swing in the next tent long. Leonard offered to get a round in. I said I was fine. My wife said she wouldn’t mind a glass of prosecco if they had any. Gertrude said she fancied a stout, which I thought was weird, although why I thought it was weird I don’t know. When Leonard came back he informed my wife that there wasn’t any prosecco unfortunately. He’d bought his wife half a pint of stout and himself half a pint of lager. Stingy bastard, I thought. Then I went to the bar and bought my wife a white wine spritzer, which is what she drinks if there’s no prosecco I explained to Leonard, who didn’t seem remotely interested.

When I got up the next morning, I felt damp and dirty and there was a whiff of something fetid either emanating from inside the tent or coming in through the air vents. I hated camping, I remembered that now very vividly. I got into my running gear somehow crouched on the ground sheet, which was sopping wet, and then went for a run. I ran around the camping field five or six times. The security guard sitting by the entrance stared at me each time I ran past him with malevolent or mordant eyes, which made me feel a bit self-conscious, as if I were somehow a freak of nature for running around the campsite, which maybe I was. The sky was dark blue, just on the cusp of dawn let’s say, and the grass was wet. My shoes got soaked. After the run I had a shower. Even though it was half past six in the morning I had to queue. The guy in front of me said something about the weather turning tomorrow and then something about wild horses not being able to keep him away from Bestival. I nodded as if I understood what he meant, which I probably did, although I thought it was laying it on a bit thick for a pretend festival. Glastonbury on the other hand, now that was an actual festival, I thought to myself. One that I had snuck into not once, but twice, without buying a ticket, back when I used to take a lot of party drugs without paying any heed to the consequences, back before I became aware of how truly screwed up I really was, a blissful time in a way, although not without its more emotionally fragile moments.

When I got into the shower cubicle, I took my clothes off and hung them on a hook. I saw that there was a piece of chewing gum in the shower tray and already there were lots of other people’s pubes. No thanks, I thought to myself, I’d rather be dirty than step into that shower tray. So in the end I didn’t shower. What I did do was I sprayed my armpits with my wife’s deodorant, since I’d forgotten my own. As I was spraying a woman smoking a cigarette and dressed in a tie-die t-shirt walked past. The t-shirt went just far enough to cover her private parts and I could see she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath. She looked at me and smiled and blew out some smoke. I blushed, or I felt like I was blushing. When I looked up she was already walking away up the hill.

I went back to the camping field and watched as the Goldstein family ate a full English, cooked by Gertrude on a camping stove that looked more sophisticated than the hob for our oven at home. Then, naturally, the Goldsteins had to take showers. All of which took bloody ages. I tried not to let it fuck me off by throwing myself into a novel I’d recently bought by a guy who sounded a lot like me, which I thought was an auspicious sign or at least it didn’t put me off, which it maybe should have actually. The novel’s beginning had a cynicality that I liked, or maybe it was a whimsicality. After a short while I realised the sun was burning my back and I vaguely thought about the moles in the hairline at the nape of my neck and whether I should put some factor twenty on, but in the end I figured that the moles were covered by hair and that pretty soon the burn would become a tan and so I just carried on sitting there without putting any sun lotion on.

At least two hours went by, or long enough anyway for me to get to page 88 of the novel until the Goldsteins were finally ready. Hooray, I thought to myself. But actually the Goldsteins weren’t ready as it turned out because there was still the whole business of having to get factor fifty smeared all over their exposed flesh and then Gertrude had to make sandwiches. As she made them, Leonard sat and watched her whilst slapping at his neck every so often (the gnats or mosquitoes seemed to like sucking on his fat neck for some reason) and telling me how well his aircon or cladding business was doing. I pretended to be interested, but it was hard work and I was glad when Gertrude gave us all the green light to get up and get on with the day.

We trundled across the camping field and into the main festival area. The twins immediately began clamouring for something. Can we? they kept shrilling in unison. Leonard went to join the queue for whatever the twins were desperate to do, something involving a trapeze it looked like. I shot Leonard a glance of empathy, but I’m not sure he noticed or if he did, he wasn’t in the mood to appreciate comradely gestures just then and he ignored it. Either way it was fair enough as fas as I was concerned. Gertrude and my wife conversed for a while about work. Gertrude was a high-up in purchasing and my wife was a high-up in finance, although it seemed to me the way they were talking about work you’d think they were just a couple of old gossips, a couple of gossips you had better hope weren’t gossiping about you. I turned my bad ear in their direction and whatever they were saying became a series of muffled mumbles. That’s better, I thought. I looked around. Kids everywhere. No one offering me drugs. No fucked-up people puking or shitting themselves. What sort of a festival was this? More like a village fete than a festival, I thought. I’m off to get a drink I mimed to my wife. “I thought you weren’t drinking, remember,” she hollered. I pointed at the coffee van and she mimed ‘oh, right!’.

After the trapeze thing, the twins wanted their faces painted. Again, there was a queue. Again, Leonard joined it. I offered to get him a drink this time and his face brightened. “Yeah, I could go for a beer right now. I mean we’re at Camp Bestival, right? Why shouldn’t I have a beer?” I could see no reason why he shouldn’t and I told him so. “And you?” he said. “And me?” “Yes, are you going to have a beer with me?” “Er no Leonard, I’m trying to give up vaping remember?” “Er, yeah I know that Noah, but drinking isn’t vaping. Vaping is vaping.” He had a point. What was he looking for me to say: that I had a drinking problem and not just a vaping problem? I stuck to my guns, didn’t give him the satisfaction, who the fuck was he to me anyway? Who the fuck was anyone to anyone? “Lager?” I said. He nodded. I went and got him a pint of lager and took the ladies over a couple of glasses of Pimm’s, which Gertrude barely even said thank you for, not that it mattered. I got myself a can of Coke and told my wife I was going to the loo. The portacabin already stank of excrement and there were slops of sodden tissue paper on the floor. Good fucking God, I thought, as I crouched down to retrieve the bag of mushrooms out of my sock and got a bit of slop on my finger in the process. I wiped the finger on my jeans and stood up. I opened the bag and tipped about six or seven dried mushrooms onto the palm of my hand. I put those mushrooms in my mouth and chewed for as long as I could before the taste made me want to puke, which wasn’t long. I swigged liberally from the can of Coke and swallowed the putrid filth of the mushrooms as best I could, but there were still bits of unchewed mushroom caught in between my teeth. I worked them out with my tongue in a systematic manner and kept swigging on the Coke until it was all gone. Then I suddenly thought, what if the mushrooms I swallowed happened to be the weak ones and I hardly felt anything, that wouldn’t do at all. So I took out another four mushroom stalks and three good-sized caps. This time I didn’t chew, I just tried to get it down with one firm swig of Coke. I belched. The taste and smell of dank hideous mushroom came up from my stomach. I put a hand on my chest and breathed deeply a few times and the feeling of nausea receded as if it were a wind that had suddenly forgotten how to blow or lost the will to do so.

I stuffed the mushroom bag back down into my sock. I opened the portacabin and the light streamed in; it was joyous to behold. I walked away past the open-air urinals. As I was looking over the barricade a man dressed as an elf with a large cock in one hand and a pint in the other smiled at me, which I thought was either weird or gay, but I smiled back anyway in the spirit of Bestival. I joined my wife, Gertrude and Leonard on a grassy knoll and watched the twins do one swing each on the trapeze. After that the twins wanted to watch some show with motorcyclists going round and round a circular wall so fast that they defy gravity or that’s what the guy in the ticket booth said they did. Leonard asked if I wanted to do it and I said no. “It’s my hearing,” I said pointing at my right ear. “Too loud,” I clarified, this time pointing at the entrance to the show. It didn’t make sense I realised. Given I was deaf in my right ear, surely it should have been easier for me to put up with the racket of the motorcycle engines, which is exactly what Leonard said to me whilst expressing a look of severe disapproval in his countenance. I clarified again, this time explaining that the ear, nose and throat consultant had advised that I protect my good ear against loud noises. (You’re down to one ear now effectively, the doctor had said, so you need to think about that going forward. Gee thanks doc, I remember thinking, tell me something I don’t know.)

“But you’re at a music festival,” said Leonard, “the whole point of which is to make lots of loud noise.” He had a point, I had to admit, but I wasn’t prepared to concede it. Then Leonard just kind of shrugged and threw his hand forward, as if to say, I’ve had enough of this killjoy. As he did that I saw a trace of his arm follow his actual arm, or maybe it was the other way around. Fuck, I thought, I’m coming up. Immediately, I knew – at the deepest level it was possible to know something – that it had been a terrible mistake to ingest the shrooms.

What the fuck was I thinking? I said to my wife as we waited for the Goldsteins to finish watching the motorcycles going round and round.

“I told you not to take any mushrooms,” she said.

“What good does that do me now? The horse has bolted.”

“Sorry Noah, but what can I do about the horse bolting?” And I didn’t have an answer to that, so I didn’t reply. Then my wife shook her head sadly and a few more times she repeated that she’d told me not to take any mushrooms, which wasn’t helping I told her, but it didn’t stop her saying it.

A short while later the Goldsteins emerged bleary-eyed from the motorcycle show. We walked on. Everything felt as if it was moving fast around us in cycles of light. I kept close to my wife, hanging on to the crook of her arm like a blind person. Leonard attempted talking to me at some point. I told him I was okay, that it was a nice sunny day. I had no idea if these words made any kind of sense in response to whatever he’d said. He looked bemused. I must have used the wrong words, I thought to myself. I pointed to my right ear. “Hearing,” I said. After that Leonard didn’t say anything else to me for what seemed like a very long time but probably wasn’t. When he finally spoke, I think he was offering to buy me a coffee. I laughed. “Coffee?” I asked. “For me?” Leonard nodded, befuddlement in his eyes, in every twist of his blubbery face. I got a grip then. I said: sure, sure Leonard, you can buy me a coffee. A cappuccino, no sugar, thanks my man, thanks. Leonard said something to Gertrude on his way to the coffee van about me and she turned to give me an appraising stare. I pretended at that moment to be talking to my wife, even though she had her back to me. My wife heard me saying something and turned around to find out what was going on with me. This is bad I told her. Very bad. Don’t be stupid. You look fine, she informed me. “Of course I look fine,” I said, “doesn’t mean I am, does it?” My wife snorted derisively and turned her back to me again. Leonard arrived with the cappucino. I noticed he’d bought himself a cider.

“Cheers,” he said, holding his plastic pint aloft.

“Cheers,” I said, holding my cappuccino aloft.

The mushrooms were really coming on strong now. My eyes were smarting. I was shivering. I felt cold, I realised, even as I felt the hot sun burning me to a cinder or a crisp. I farted a few times and I could smell the mushrooms in my farts. People were everywhere, moving in any which direction. A cacophony traced their movements like an unconscious shadow beast.

We walked on. We stopped at a shop that seemed to specialise in tail appendages. One twin got a crocodile tail and another twin some sort of mammal’s tail, let’s say a dog’s tail for the sake of argument. The twins rushed around us in a blur of shrieks, whacking each other with their tails. At one point, one of the twins pulled his crocodile tail up between his legs and it suddenly looked like a giant penis, a giant crocodile-tail-shaped penis. I laughed and pointed at it. Look, I think I said, look at what he’s doing. Gertrude and Leonard pretended not to understand what I was getting at, whilst my wife glared with ice or otherwise with white heat. It didn’t matter what she thought, I thought, or what Gertrude and Leonard thought. I was laughing so hard it was bending my abdominal organs out of shape. “Oh my God, it’s too funny, it’s too funny,” I gasped. Then quite abruptly, unnaturally so, I stopped laughing. Fuck, I suddenly thought, they’re going to think I’m not well in the head after today, they’re going to tell all their friends about what a fuck-up I am, what a fuck-up Nata is married to (my wife’s name is Nata, not sure I mentioned that). But when I looked across, I saw that Gertrude and my wife were busy gossiping about something and Leonard was staring longingly at a woman taking a bite out of an afro of candyfloss (I think he was staring longingly at the candyfloss not the woman, although who knows) and that the hysterical laughing thing seemed to have escaped their attention, which was weird, almost as if it hadn’t happened, which maybe it hadn’t now I came to think about it.

The twins ran on ahead in streaks of light. The clouds scudded across the blue sky like surveillance drones. People swarmed everywhere. I felt cold, I was shivering. I had the pains in my arms and legs, felt weak. My wife sauntered over. “We’re going to the insect circus museum,” she said.

“The what?” I said. But my wife had already walked back over to Gertrude and couldn’t hear me or chose not to respond if she could. The three of them moved off in unison, like a mini pack of rugby players mauling (or rucking, is it?). I followed furtively, like a stalker stalking its prey, or a shadowy spy engaging in the act of espionage. People glanced past me. Their faces looked distorted. Some of them had skin, others didn’t, just bone structure and hollow dark patches. Others seemed to have more eyes than necessary, although now I came to think about it, I wasn’t sure how many eyes were (strictly) necessary. I tried not to gawp. It wasn’t easy.

I watched the Goldsteins disappear inside the insect circus museum (a modified van type thing with vaudeville signage) with my wife. Two people dressed in centipede outfits were blowing iridescent bubbles using giant bubble blowing rings. I popped one of the bubbles by walking into it. “Sorry,” I said to one of the centipede guys (who was glaring at me as if I had broken a sacred moral code), “it was an accident.” Which it was, although the thought occurred to me that it was maybe my unconscious self acting quite deliberately, but if that was the case then I, whoever I was if I was anything at all that is, couldn’t be held responsible. Not that I explained that to the centipede guy because it would have taken too long and he didn’t look like the sort of centipede guy who would be interested in my piffle (I’m not even sure I’m interested in all honesty, but I don’t got a choice in the matter).

I walked up the ramp and into the van. Inside there were glass cabinets with insects performing circus acts. I walked straight through the circus museum in two seconds flat and exited, leaving the gawping Goldsteins to gawp. My wife was waiting for me. I started telling her again about what a big mistake it had been to ingest the mushrooms, but she cut me off mid-sentence. “I’m starving,” she said, “let’s grab something quickly whilst they’re still inside.” We bought hot dogs. I nibbled at mine. It tasted of sulphur or what I thought sulphur would taste like. I told my wife it didn’t taste right to me and that I was going to chuck it away. My wife tutted about waste not want not and took the hotdog off me. She pushed it into her mouth, all the way in, chewed a few times and swallowed. I was impressed. I told her so and she gave me one of her withering looks. The Goldsteins walked over, all fake smiles and dumb praise for the insect circus museum. They wanted to eat they said. So we went over to sit by the science tent and they laid out a plaid rug and ate their sandwiches whilst sitting on it. My wife and I sat on the grass. We watched a show or I thought it was a show, but it was so odd that I couldn’t be sure. Several times I asked my wife whether it was a show, but she kept raising a finger to her lips and admonishing me with me a hiss, so I gave up asking and just watched whatever it was that the guy on the stage was doing. He was dressed in a tin-man outfit and kept on creating small explosions at various locations on the stage. Or I thought he was creating the explosions, although every time they went off, he seemed surprised, or maybe he was feigning surprise. The explosions gave off a sulphurous smell that reminded me of my hotdog. The sun was unremittingly hot. From time to time I got the impression Leonard was saying something to me, but I was too fucked to speak to Leonard at this point, so I kept staring fixedly at the tin man and clapping along with the kids when an explosion went off. It felt like I was doing this for a long time. Staring, clapping, staring, clapping, until I realised someone was tugging at my shoulder. I turned to see who it was and to my surprise it was one of the twins, who immediately on getting my attention smacked me across the face with his crocodile tail. The thwack of the tail stung my facial skin. Simultaneously an explosion went off. Then I heard Gertrude languidly telling the twin off. I got to my feet. I said something about going for a walk, but it wasn’t clear if anyone was listening. I walked away rubbing my face where it stung. I walked away from the shitty kids’ field and towards the main stage. A band was playing. I had no idea who they were, but they were shouting rather than singing I felt. I walked away from the main stage.

Once everyone had settled back into position a rotund guy with a perfectly bald head started talking, explaining that today’s forum would be about the three poisons, that we would listen to a talk on that topic for twenty minutes, then break up into groups to discuss the topic amongst ourselves, then we would reconvene and present out findings to the wider group. It sounded like a work thing, not at all what I was expecting, although I’m not sure what I was expecting. Before the talk we all meditated together. I barely noticed the time going, which either meant I’d been meditating very well or very badly. The talk was given by a thin bespectacled woman who was extremely articulate. Her husband, she said, had died in a car accident not that long ago and if the group was okay with it, she was going to talk about the three poisons in the context of her bereavement. The group was, of course, okay with it, but as it turned out she didn’t really say that much about her husband’s passing or her grief, other than that it had been difficult to deal with and that she was glad to have a test of her commitment to Buddhism, a religion she’d been adhering to for well over thirty years. She explained what the three poisons were in what she described as non-technical language; it felt strange to me to think that a religion could have a technical language to describe anything. The three poisons apparently are attachment, aversion and ignorance, and taken together they form the root of craving, which as any Buddhist aficionado knows is the cause of all human suffering. The speaker gave plenty of examples of each poison and then it was over to the bald guy to split us up into discussion groups. I ended up in his and we all went outside. We went to the very spot I’d been sitting in earlier. Since there was only one bench, I helped a few of the others carry some benches over from elsewhere. We arranged the benches in a triangulated fashion. After a faltering start, we started discussing the three poisons in earnest. In my keto state, I couldn’t help but talk for too long. I found myself critiquing the validity of the three poisons as a concept, or as three interrelated concepts. I could see how they might make some sense, but equally I felt that they should be debatable, like any other concepts describing human behaviour, not that I said that as such, but that’s pretty much the mindset that underpinned the way I discussed the three poisons. Since I’d recently been reading a book of essays by Schopenhauer, I also didn’t hesitate to bring him into proceedings, even though I realised at the same time that I was shamelessly namedropping a philosopher for whatever benefit it conferred upon me by way of association (which was probably none). The guy with the bald head, I could tell, was finding my contributions annoying. He had this superciliousness about him that rankled not just me but a few of the others in the group. It was as if he were saying once you’ve practiced for as long as I have and seen into the truth of things as they really are, then, and only then, will you understand the significance of the three poisons. A woman with grey hair sitting to my left felt that attachment, in the sense of desiring things in life, was not in her opinion a bad thing necessarily. A life without desire seems to me to be a very bleak life, she said. I agreed with that. And the idea that we are confused if we think otherwise seems somewhat tyrannical in my opinion, she added. I nodded vociferously. Then we went back to the wider group and one or two of us fed back our thoughts, less the more controversial elements. I felt cowed by the wider group and didn’t say anything.

After that, tea was served. I ended up chatting to this woman who’d been sitting near me. She’d been staying as a visitor with the nuns for the weekend (they live separately from the monks in their own quarters), she told me, which I couldn’t help but be interested in. She worked in HR for a large financial institution, she said, in London, which I found very surprising, why I’m not sure. I really enjoyed talking to her. She had a discernible mien, not many people do in my experience. Unfortunately, I think I must have come across as too intense because I found her trying to get away from me after a while. Although I pretended to myself that she wasn’t. I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t always so chatty, that it was keto-diet mania that made me like this, but I didn’t think she’d understand or probably care. After she left, so did I. I put my shoes on and went out the back door. She must have exited the building through the conservatory with the big golden Buddha because we bumped into each other on the gravel path that curls around the dharma hall. It looked like I was stalking her and she seemed scared. I wished her luck in her life again and walked away from her at speed to show her that our bumping into each other was merely coincidence and that I wasn’t a stalker. I got into my car and drove away. I was agitated in the car and drove too fast around a bend and nearly hit an oncoming car.