Undead #3

Monday is D-day, dole day; the form for claiming my allowance comes every fortnight and I'm supposed to fill in the jobs I've applied for and take it down to the nearest Social Security office, which has recently started calling itself something even more euphemistic and making copious use of green and orange toner. Every Monday I have an appointment with my GP, a softly spoken Greek man whose office walls are a patchwork of kids’ paintings on butcher’s paper, pap smear reminders and black lungs. His practice bulk-bills and is just a few blocks from the hotel, which is one of two reasons why I go there. The other is that Alex knows, for the most part, how to mind his own business. Each fortnight he writes me a medical certificate saying that I’m too sick (“depressed” is the word he uses) to look for work. Usually I go straight from Alex’s office to the dole office, which means I’ve rinsed my mouth out but not much else. I can’t afford shampoo, but can hardly be bothered anyway; a bit of liquid hand soap every couple of weeks is enough. I keep my hair, or what’s left of it, hidden under a black scarf, which I don’t wash, because it shrinks. So it stinks. Like most of my clothes.

“How’s your drinking?” Alex asks, perfunctorily. He smelled it on me the first time I saw him and I denied it, but of course he’s not that stupid. I’m never quite sure how to answer him; in a world where more is better, only a response like Great! Really going great guns. A whole bottle of gin in one sitting! seems fitting. I mumble something about not sleeping and feeling uncoordinated, that I’m having difficulty negotiating the narrow passage between my room and the toilet. He’s been over the options; AA, detox, rehab, and I’ve been over being a misanthropic atheist without private health insurance.

He doesn’t mention the last time I saw him, the day I was woken by a searing pain in my sternum, and a sense of chemical suffocation, as if I were an asthmatic trapped in a perfumery. My face bloomed scarlet and I began to panic, thinking now I’ve done it, my luck’s run out and now I’m fucked. I threw on my smells and smalls and began the agonizing trek to Alex’s office, head down and mind out, taking one step for my mother, two for my father, three for my sister, four for the white walls, five for its time to get up, six for the six weeks, seven for the standard drinks, eight for the hate, nine for the nightshift and ten for the ten fucking years it took the first time and will probably take again. I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record, Peregrine mocked me; I shook my head clear of the memory. In the waiting room I cradled a kidney-shaped bowl in my lap. I heaved and spat, expecting to see blood, but there was only pain and more pain.

“You have indigestion, basically,” Alex told me, as poker-faced as ever, when I finally got in to see him. I rocked back and forward, which by then was the only way I could table my disbelief. “No, I mean it. How much did you have to drink last night?” Well, I’d blown the last of my dole money on a bottle of Vat 69, which was my idea of drinking in style. That much I remembered. Earlier on, there was something about a can of deodorant – Impulse, I think – that Dawn was spraying around the TV room to neutralise the cigarette smoke, and the smell of it grabbed my face like a giant hand, hooking its fingers into my nostrils as if my head was a bowling ball, and slamming me to the floor. Then there was no use my being there because she had her lines crossed with someone else's and it wasn’t her fault that the message didn’t make sense. So I went upstairs to my room but the Impulse followed me: not only had it invaded my sinuses but it had got past the blood-brain barrier as well, having been transmuted from a saccharine mist into a set of associations. There were no thoughts, no words, only a feeling, the smell of Impulse feeling, and images; the crossed lines now scratches on film stills, stitches on a skin graft. My memories are like Frankenstein's monster, and Dawn had inadvertently breathed life into them. Footsteps on thin carpet over loose floorboards. Impulse sprayed in an arc down my torso under my t-shirt as the door is flung open. It’s warm in here. My arm hurts. Just stop it, I say, you’re getting boring. My voice is tired. Perhaps I don’t really care that much. But not caring is like body temperature, there are only a few degrees separating imperturbability and death. So wine me, dine me, Vat 69 me. Make me care, make me scream and yell and get it all out of my system. You're all not-so-innocent bystanders. The sunrise of the glass over the golden sea is a warning; you can never fully rely on anyone or anything. You’ve got to go out and fend for yourself.

“I had a bottle of scotch. And, uh, then, I think I had a couple of beers – to help me get to sleep, you know.” I smiled sheepishly. My purported insomnia was something of a motif of our circular conversations: he would take great pains to point out that alcohol makes insomnia worse, when it was just a red herring, something to complain about in the absence of a hangover; in reality I felt safer staying awake as much as possible.

“So, we’re looking at about 25 standard drinks, over how many hours? Six? Twelve?” I shrugged. “You’re lucky you’re not in a coma. What’s happened is that you’ve had so much to drink that a fair bit of it is still in your stomach being digested. And the pain in your chest is caused by the fumes from the alcohol floating up into your oesophagus from your stomach. And you can fix that with some over-the-counter medication.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, that’s all. For now.” Nose clean, but not always subtle. Today, Alex tells me that my drinking might be affecting my cerebellum, and that the damage could be irreversible. This is merely remarkable to me; soon it will become something interesting that someone said to me the other day, and he knows it. He hands over the medical certificate; as I said, he knows how to mind his own business.