Read by Katy Darby (fifth story in podcast, here)
“In our language we have this word ‘wetico’ which means cannibal: one who eats not literally the flesh and blood of another, but who eats the life of another”
– Jack Davis, Professor of Native American Studies, University of California.
The wire quivers, the wrists and ankles flick, the head jerks upright, the arms rise, the legs dance. The string winds round the world, conducting ten billion bodies and me. Black holes open in our palms; a thin blue line manifests where our mouths used to be. We no longer speak. We reach, we eat. Consumption consumes us. But didn’t it always?
She doesn’t look at me when she groans through stitched lips. Her ghosted eyes rove over racks of clothes as she pulls down ten articles at a time, the tongues of her palms slavering over the fabrics, the teeth in her hands cribbing the hangers. When I rub my hands down my jumper and jeans, the drool forms a hoarfrost-sort of lacquer, like a dry hound-lick. I’ve spotted designer boots. I leave her swimming in a pile of cashmere cardies.
His mobile chimes, and he slides his hand across the screen. A sell-off advert appears – “Bargains Abound!” – and he rushes away, with us so close on his heels we’re like sweaty cling-film. But he’s ambivalent to his shadows.
Six thousand pounds and as many items into our spree and we’re sated. For the moment. We must be. We simply can’t carry any more without additional arms. The slobber with which it’s all slickened makes it that much heavier. I’m unbalanced, a bag of cosmetics in one hand, a bag of exercise equipment in the other. I don’t know why I bought so many lipsticks, lip glosses, lip liners, lip tints, lip stains when my gob’s sewn shut. I don’t know why I bought so many pairs of heels when I only have the one pair of feet. I don’t know why I bought dumbbells. You are what you buy? I put down my bags to pull out my bejeweled mobile – not diamante, diamonds – and text her, “How many pairs earrings 4 1 pair ears etcetera, etcetera, etcetera?” She puts down her bags within bags – leather purse sale – and stows her handbag in one of her shopping bags and texts back, “Don’t be daft.”
I’m knackered. That’s never happened during a shop. Both our mobiles ding at once. He’s just forwarded us a discount flyer. I text, “Cheers!” and off we go like piss-artists to an off-licence. Shopping is the new hunting-gathering. In seeking, we’re a new brand of sot.
We have to buy rucksacks to put our purchases in because evolution is fobbing us off with regard to arms. We need more. We always need more. Always.
We take the usual route back, past queues of shops with people loitering, or living, outside on the pavement. I never noticed them before. The people. Or the buildings between shops. Prisons mainly, where debts are worked off. One rundown shelter that’s shut its doors. An ugly little boy and girl play outside it, like they don’t know it’s closed. Mostly people just pay, one way or the other. One journo said, “As for Parliament’s ruling against relief: tornadoes are kinder to Kansas.”
We clatter back to our six hundred square metre flat, clamber over the wall of bric-a-brac and objets d’art – yesterday’s haul – and, for some forgotten reason, six spare tellies, and dump our loot onto the floor – or rather, the furnishings already cluttering the floor. We climb through a menagerie of rolled-up rugs and tapestries and carpets into a galley kitchen that’s more a galleria of unused appliances. We’re not sure why it’s here, but we like collecting applicable things to fill the space.
I can’t find a place for my new art prints. The walls are completely papered by same. And by clocks. All tick-talking. Time to find a bigger flat. We work three hundred hours a week between us, so we should be able to afford it. I lug my new linens to the bedroom in the meantime. This mauve comforter matches my new lip pencil exactly. I’m not entirely certain why I purchased so many wrinkle creams. Oh well. That’s my sixties set and sorted. Well done me. Better to have and not need than to need and not have.
She follows me in, dragging a mesh tote full of particolored nail varnishes. I text her, “U bought 16 blues.” She texts back, “Sky Blue, Baby Blue, Arctic Blue, Royal Blue, Navy Blue, Powder Blue, True Blue, Midnight Blue, Periwinkle Blue, Phthalo Blue, Tory Blue, Indigo Blue, Cornflower Blue, Azure Blue, Cerulean Blue, Angel Gabriel Blue.” I text, “Brilliant!” and grin at her like I’m thick. It’s a wonky sensation, smiling, like a hanger’s in my mouth. I stop. She spills a bag of sequined clutches onto my bed. She can’t get into her room for the pile of stuff blockading it, all of it supported by the column of a grandfather clock. Tick-talking. Time to invest in another storage locker.
I ferret through the yellow polishes, ranging from ochre to neon, with names like Back in Flax, Golden Girl, Material World, Midas, Radioactive. Then the purples: Ultraviolet, Mulberry Wine, Lady in Lavender, Time of the Lilacs, Plummy Mummy. And the reds: Maroon Six, Frankly Scarlet, Red Letter, Infrared, Cherry Bomb, Bloodshot, Great Fire of London, Ruddy Studdy. I start wondering why anyone would buy a black nail polish in the shade Bubonic. I’ve never wondered that before. Why anyone would buy anything.
It’s the International Economic Defense initiative: IED. It started in the U.S. and whirlwinded across the U.K. and abroad: “We need YOU to defend our flagging economy.” The BBC ran “Buy or Die” news items predicting the end times. The papers forewarned what The New York Times called “a fiscal apocalypse.” Hoardings read things like “Earning nothing? You’re a dosser! Spending nothing? You’re a tosser!” Quite sure some cheeky American came up with that one after typing “British slang” into Google. We all remember the headline “Yank Breaks Bank” and the cartoon of a caricatured head with a dollar bill for a mustache. Very Hitler meets Got Milk. We took the piss out of them; they pissed down our backs and told us it was raining. When it pisses, it pours.
She’s unpacking a floral hold-all full of scented lotions and paraffin candles and bath salts and body sprays. Naturally I have to smell the lot as she hands them to me. “Tahini Bikini” – mmm, nutty. “Sex in the Settee” – it actually does smell naughty. After “Soy to the World,” which smells nothing like a Happy Christmas, I lose interest. That’s never happened before. “Need air,” I text. She texts, “What 4?” I shrug and scale the mountain range of my bed and squeeze past the furniture for the door. He stops me.
He texts, “F.C.U.K. U?” Autocorrect inverts this a bit. Never mind that we just cleared out French Connection yesterday. He’s stashed all his high-street gear in the shelving units we installed last night after a home-makeover-show-inspired binge. Normally I’d be tempted to fetch the mess down and maul it. But suddenly everything tastes the same. He shoves me a little. “Need air,” I text. “Nutter,” he texts back with two greasy grimaces. Autocorrect doesn’t edit what he texts next. Wanker, I say with my eyes.
I leave our flat, sucking hard through my nostrils. My lips try to cut themselves on my teeth like a tin opener, the better to breathe. I put my palms out but the mouths just gum bone-idly, absorbing nothing of what I need.
Below me there’s nothing but car parks with abandoned trolleys, tarmac and breeze blocks like tiny block islands, the scaffolding of a shopping-centre-in-progress. Nothing but fury and fumes from the motorway. I suction harder through my nose, like the new hoover we bought last week because it was marked down sixty percent and so we positively had to have it, and I have one of those horrible impulses – the sort where you know you’re about to have a massive cock-up on your hands but you just don’t F.C.U.K.-ing care.
I sprint back into the flat, grab Bubonic and smear the black polish over my mouth. It’s the goo, the hue, the pungent odor of Marmite. I paint a runny barcode then drop the bottle – it shatters, splatters its contents over my sparkly Manolo Blahniks – and run my palms over my lips. At least they weren’t my Christian Louboutins with the signature red soles. My hands bite my face. It’s like a shark attack.
They chew a bloody crater that crusts, pusses, dribbles, looks a little less dodgy every day. I don’t go to hospital, not even to the local surgery. I find a use for the balaclava collecting dust in the cupboard under the stair, buy a cream from the chemist’s, watch two shoppers ahead of me collapse under all the things they carry. She texts, “Barmy,” but buys herself a woolly hat in every style and shows them to me. He texts, “Certifiable,” and comes back with half the shop. In private, I paint my new lips ruby red and smack them together, speaking for the first time. Suddenly, the eye of the storm shuts behind me. Suddenly, life is in three-strip Technicolor.
Almost everything I sell. What can’t be sold I give. What can’t be given I stuff in bin bags, only to find her scavenging, him rooting through my rubbish at three in the morning.
My flatmates hate my quitting jobs even more than my moving out. I’m devolving into a minimalist lay-about, unmotivated to make a difference; I’ll become a “dole-lard,” she texts me. He doesn’t text at all. They don’t realize the dole is passed. They’re still voting to put it there, where all the real things are.
I invite them to mine but they won’t come. There isn’t room enough, they say, for their lives, not even for an afternoon. I give her my storage locker and him my estate car which is much larger than his saloon. I think they’d call this enabler behaviour. I am, rather. They won’t let me be anything else.
I walk the old way, past the shops and the prisons and the one shelter with the ugly little boy and girl outside it. She watches workmen unloading a lorry. He peers at the merchandise in next-door’s window. A third child appears and tries to play with them, but they’ve since forgotten how. The child turns and waves at me, like we’re meant to know each other. I wave back because we do. The cavities in my palms are scabbing over. I don’t need holes in my hands to save the world. We never did.
(c) Jennifer Gaboury, 2019
Jennifer Gaboury is a speculative fiction writer and volunteer instructor with an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction and an MA in English Literature. She facilitates the teen science fiction & fantasy workshop and the adult writing programme at her local library in Pioneer Valley, Mass.
Katy Darby won the Ronny Schwartz scholarship to the Oxford School of Drama and has appeared in over 30 productions in Oxford, Edinburgh and London. She’s a novelist and short story writer, Director of Liars' League and has directed several Fringe plays including Time Out Critic's Choice comedy Dancing Bears. She prefers backstage obscurity, but sometimes steps into the limelight.
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