Triptych

Playing Chicken

I itch when I see them; their clucking and scratching and flapping and strutting makes my skin break out in hives. I hate the way their movements are so twitchy - all stop and go - no interim of speeding up and slowing down just a sudden walk/not walk, turn/not turn, peck/not peck - mechanical somehow, sinister. But still, fascinated, I have to look - little dinosaurs, do they remember us..?

I've been working in the battery chicken farm for the last seven years. A hundred thousand saw-beaked birds all squashed into one great hanger sized building, the air heated by their own scrawny little quill-bristled bodies; the air filled with the phosphate guano-stink of chicken shit and rusty cages. It gets under your nails and into your skin you know, rubs itself into your bones over the years, that greasey chicken stink.

Sometimes I practice strutting in the mirror: cranking my head back on my neck, jutting my chin out and folding my elbows and wrists back on themselves like a spastic, kicking my knees high and scraping my clenched-up toes on the carpet. Sometimes I can't help it. I sit up nights and I wonder how much chicken DNA I've got messed up with my own. My periods stopped months ago and now sometimes it feels like I've got something like a stone in my womb. I try to push it out, but it just doesn't come. I'm not a good layer, they'd probably toss my carcass in the bin and grind me up for cattle food.

I practice: One hundred Kegels a day - clench the muscles at the base of my pelvis like I'm trying to stop myself weeing real hard, then release and push down - just like it says in the text book I stole from the library. The egg still won't come though, so I massage my belly, in case the egg is in the wrong position - crosswise, stuck, hard shell grating on the submerged bones of my hips. I eat Rennies by the handful for the calcium, so my baby won't break inside. I cried when big sister's kid came round and put on that cartoon of the nursery rhyme. So sad they couldn't fix him. So now I sleep on my back just in case, and take great care not to fall.

My freezer is filled with frosted breasts, jam-packed with rock-hard thighs and rendered fats for sauces. I've taken to stealing a chicken a day from the bird-floor: tucking their heads under the stumps of their wings until they get sleepy and then tucking their malnourished little bone-bag bodies under my coat. No-one misses them. My Mother gets worried about my exclusive poultry-based eating habits. "You'll turn into a chicken one days" she says, and half laughs as she turns away to escape out the door, her words still hanging there in the gloom of the hallway long after the door has clicked shut and she is gone, just a tick-tock hickory-dock noise of heels on the staircase. I rub my belly and pomise to be better when the time comes; sometimes I almost feel the egg rocking in response.


Talking to myself

No offence, but I've never liked people that much. Especially when they talk. I can't bear it. All that air coming out that's been inside them. Filled with germs and half eaten stenches. Filled with words. Words to make you do things. Words to Make you feel things you didn't want to. Dirty things. Terrible things. Often I just have to walk away before my hands find something sharp to hold. These blown-up balloon people so full of air, so prickable - and me a pincushion-man barely able to hold my needles out of sight. Wretched and damned, I shut myself away.

No-one missed me. I shopped without a word online, and silently took packages from bored delivery guys - my credit cards doing all the talking for me. No TV no DVD no CD no cassetes no records no radio no newspapers no books no people no mirrors. I breathed open mouthed, so as not to hear even the faint bellows of my breath. Without my glasses I'm a blur so I smash them in the sink. Nothing to betray the stench of humanity. Quiet. Peace.

Urges. Instincts. My body is lonely. The internet is full of middle-aged perverts masquerading as girls. Lonely-heart columns filled with emotional train-wrecks. Gum-cracking, dirty-nailed prostitutes with vaginas full of disease. And they talk, they all want to talk. Spitting their inanities at me with great banana lips blown up with silicon and coated in grease the same colour as old clotted blood.

And then I found Chloe. I found her cruising the net. We approached eachother carefully from behind multiple blinds of faked e-mail accounts and lies about age and district and profession. A photo was sent. I found it pleasing. Some money changed hands anonymously - a number simply moving from one digital set to another. I got an e-mail telling me she was on her way. I cleaned the house until my fingers bled and my eyes streamed with chlorine tears. Everything had to be perfect for her arrival. Gleaming.

Like a vampire-bride she arrived under cover of darkness, in a box. Like some techno-Venus she emerged naked and perfect from a surf of polystyrene twists. She smelt like a new car. Unridden in. Virgin. Mine.

I read her manual. She was in delicate health my love, she needed treating well. Just like real people, she came with no guarrentee.

I lie her torso down in our narrow bed. It takes a while to work out just how to joggle and twist her arms into place and connect her legs without damaging her. Stressed, exhausted, we almost have our first row. And then finally she lay there. Inert. Speechless. Expectationless. Uninvolved and uninvested. Not selling anything, simply waiting to be used.

Her skin is as cool and slick as a snail's backside but I don't care, the manual says I can warm her in the bath if I wish but I like her this way; all loves have their bumps to ride over. And later, spent, talking to myself, I lean over her sleeping form and brush my lips against her ear and speak the words that I have wanted to hear from someone, anyone, for so long.

And in silence she shouts her love back.

Wreckage.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't disappoint them again. My Dad with that knowing wink of his and his desperately hopeful "Don't do anything we wouldn't do eh son..?" as they left me alone that weekend. I often wondered if they were blind my Mum and Dad. They looked at me through some strange natural mixture of parental LSD and smashed dreams and saw this successful, personable, popular kid, when the truth could not have been further.

I mean I okay, so I wasn't a total spaz. I didn't wear specs with tape or have spots like volcanoes. I wasn't very short, nor very tall. Not especially bright, not dumb. I picked my nose, but not in plain view. Average. Save in one respect.

No-one really liked me.

The car pulled out of the drive; balding tyres skating over uneven gravel. I sat, the television on but muted, and watched my knees jump and bounce and jitter in front of me. I couldn't sit still. The clock on the mantlepiece ticked away the seconds. My Dad would come in first, bearing the suitcases, holding the door ajar for Mum with his foot or an elbow. He'd look about the place, its pristine state, the light going steadily out of his eyes and ask me what I'd got up to in their absence, what larks, what shenannigans. Always wanting stories.

What did you do today..?
Nothing.
Who' d you meet today..?
No-one.
Where'd you go today..?
Nowhere.

Each negative rubbing me out until they were left with no choice but to make me up again, invent a son to relate to. A tulpa-child, dreamed up and believed into being; sprung fully formed from their foreheads.

Determined not to disappoint I climbed the stairs, unzipped my pants and pissed a streak all the way across the landing. I ate Cheetos by the bagfull and gulped salty water to fill the vases with puke. I tipped half a bottle of whiskey over Dad's prize amplifier. I threw some coats I'd stolen from school half under Mum and Dad's bed. I wanked into some condoms and left them floating in the bowl. I smoked and ground the butts out on the carpet. And in my head I saw the party, catalogued the incidents, drew up the story board. To admit, to tell.

If I could not be the son my Mother and Father wanted, then I could at least collude in my own fictionalization, I owed them that much.

...Continued...