Inventory
(first published on weareorlando.co.uk in October 2017)
All the food is gone. Time to slowly brush your hair. Put the brush back neatly in the drawer. Your stomach bulges out, pushing against the elasticated sweatpants. What you can see: the scarlet flowers from J, medicinal vomit on the floor. Your own white feet. Jumping lioness in the wallpaper. The nautical keyring. The two flounder fishes in their tank to the right and next to it mother’s landline number on the cloud-shaped leaflet from the new Chinese place.
The phone, which is about to ring: it always does when an answer is unlikely. Your facial features aren’t exactly blurry but somewhat nebulous for sure. As if addiction could show as a smothering patina on the skin and eyes. The person in the mirror doesn’t quite look back.
First binge of the day was:
a tub of sliced chorizo
two sweetcorn cobettes a pack
of organic rice cakes, 200 grams of unsalted cashews, 3/4 of a jar of peanut butter, a green
smoothie.
Only a superhero, a virtuosic professional, someone debased would rush back to the cupboard. Rush: with great velocity. A frightening or unpleasant dream.
Time for granola and milk, and not much time at that. Consider this. Yesterday night I dreamed of you, we were fucking against a tree. You wore a tiara. I felt light.
Time to get to the big spoonfuls in front of Netflix, lights dimmed, the pretty actress in the process of resuming her jumps on concrete, concrete climbing bourbon glasses clinking. A thick glob is sliding down the throat, milk and matter. Binging that is done and made alone. Food + people = safe, verdant no-binge land, fun for the entire family, bodies which don’t leak.
To be a minor addict, so lush. Fantastical how life gets compartmentalised. More of the food is now gone, extinguished, pop! Time for this long labor of love to immobilise the body. Time to swallow two more Loperamides. To turn painfully, inflatedly to the side, in a bed of raisins and almond specks. This is my cake, life. Time to fart. One of your eyes is full of tears; the other dry.
—
I love it when ghosts take care of me. I read about Kathy and Connie in New York, then I have to run to the toilet and throw up. Waves of fragmented unsalted peanuts in a globe of coconut milk yogurt, out in three gushes. The toilet splashes water back at me, is there a right way of being sick? My nose shuts down, blocked for good measure. I pant, move to the kitchen to do the dishes, light a candle in the toilet, wipe it clean too. On the radio people are crying in Mexican. Mexico City as a theory of collapsing buildings: the brutal earthquake. A cloud of blood and dew that hovers over land, rains over land week after week. The Southern parts seem to be dropping off, plunging into the sea or at least ducking for cover when I look.
See Naples and die. Moor Court smells of popcorn and armpits. I walk it up and down on my way in. I listen to a podcast on the Sexual Revolution. Juxtapose it to my monoliths, my house-making desires. Girl who has a lot of sex is always secretly looking for the right person to settle down with. You either are a boss or you are an oversensitive employee.
__
The ghost is in the kitchen again. I say her name twice to make her stay, she is often persuaded by this. I repeat it at a slightly higher pitch (B flat?).
Holly Bebop. I describe the scene to her. Holly, I say, you have blue nail varnish on, thick short fingers. You stand nude next to the radio. I suspect she cannot see. I spy her features to check she’s ok with this. She narrows her eyes like cats do so I continue. You’re wearing clothes that make me think of a doom poster I saw; you are slender and shaved. You are always shaved. Holly Bebop says nothing. Her clitoris points down like a minuscule tongue. Thinness that still seems to me to be the only way for a body to partake.
Holly Bebop, I say, I think you’re here because of my dumbness once again, because I made myself float up again, creaking flotsam. So you might be a beacon of light? Holly? Holly tilts her head ever so slightly.
I put OA, Overeaters Anonymous, in my calendar twice; told friends I was going to go to the meetings and that, really, it was going to be research for the book, albeit a real necessity also. I tell Holly that an Indian woman lost her speech in a stroke five years ago, and that her speech is now back but only intermittently. I wonder if Holly had sight when she was alive. I ask her questions cause she always listens to me: in order to be a better person do you make a fairytale home in Inverness or do you contribute to the soul of the world? Cairo, Rome and Paris all seem to be caked in the same dust to me, which is why I don’t live there. Perugia was drier and darker, but we stayed only for a short while, just up the road from via della Pergola 7 where Meredith Kercher was horribly murdered. We walked into town the morning after and felt the feeling of something having gone horribly wrong. Holly Bebop’s eyes are black, not covered in no gelatinous ghost patina, but she doesn’t seem to have pupils. I am not too confident that she is my ghost, that she’s here to take care of me. I think she might be visiting my neighbours too. And how can I be sure that she wasn’t here, enjoying the show earlier, nasty reclining bitch? She doesn’t look like any of my female relatives or ancestors. Does true salvation come in the form of non-related blood only?
