Digestive Press

So this is spontaneity. Like spontaneous combustion. There we are in our pyjamas, sitting in the car and up there is the flying thing, something lit-up and travelling through the night sky. A balloon or a blimp or some other kind of craft. We watch the road and we watch the sky as we chase the flying thing sailing above the town, traffic thrumming with more and more people driving out to see this thing. No one knowing exactly what they are looking at and why, and where they are going this late in their nightclothes and slippershoes. Are we being serious? We’re all too tired to work it out. All these people out in their cars chasing this airborne thing we’ve suddenly noticed – happened to look up and see, we did not read about it on the internet, we were not alerted by text message. It was not on the television. This is what is so exciting. It could be anything. It could be what we’ve all been waiting for. And as we reach the edge of town we ask each other whether we should go any further, i.e. how far do we take this spontaneous chase on which we have embarked, about which we know nothing? Are we being serious? Some of the other cars are stopping and turning around, the people have given up and are heading back home to their beds. But some – including us, the pyjamaed two of us in this car – press on, suddenly full of sincerity. Past the edge of town and up into the hills. We have come too far now to give up on this thing. If we turned back now what would have been the point?  That thing up there in the sky could be something real, our hearts swell to the point of bursting with the thrill of discovering or not, our hearts swell to the point of bursting just with the sheer thrill of chasing.  We drive on, thinking about the people that have given up and turned back. Are we somehow better than them because we carried on going? Does it show determination or desperation? Maybe they didn’t really need to know, maybe we are weaker because we need to find out about this thing. We argue this point back and forth until the words are quivering wrecks vibrating in the air between the driver’s side and the passenger side, and then they just combust and the night breaks into spontaneous laughter and the realisation that we probably won’t ever find out what this thing in the sky is, no matter how far we follow it.

The first item that morning was about the sudden and unexpected death of the previous newsreader the night before, but no one really believed it.  They believed that she was dead but they did not believe it had happened the way they said.  And then it cut back to the studio and we saw the replacement newsreader, who was almost an exact replica, only slightly prettier.  And it felt like there should be somewhere for everyone to go so that they could talk to each other and say that they had noticed this thing, to feel better about it and maybe even do something.  Maybe get together and complain to the television station, or round up a protest in the name of the old newsreader and some kind of truth, ask some questions of the authorities.  But it felt like it was a time in which protesting wouldn’t do any good – it had begun to feel like a time in which everyone was too busy making their own noise to listen to anyone else.  So we got on with eating breakfast.  The new newsreader was wrapping up the programme now, moving her slightly-superior lips as she formed words, coaxing us all forward into a never-ending time of escalating expectations, futureproof progress and unquestionable perfection.

And they agree to go out for dinner together.  Neither of them have interesting jobs so they do not talk about that.  All he will say about work is:  “I was too hot all day because I had to wear a jumper to cover up the fact that my shirt was really, really creased.”  She laughs as though he has actually told a funny joke and he just looks confused and uncomfortable.  Neither of them are hungry so they share a sandwich and then go for a walk in the city.  They find a bench in the park and they sit together with their eyes closed, and tell each other fake truths – long and detailed secrets which they describe in such earnest tones that it doesn’t matter whether they are being dishonest with one another or not.  She tells him about the time that:  “My parents left the country, abandoning me in the care of some mutually disliked neighbours, and it was only ten years later during a walk home from work – I had just walked past the house that sells the eggs in a little stall at the end of the drive, and the house next door which had the dogs, whose garden I always looked in to see what was happening because first there were no dogs, then there were dogs, and then shortly after there was a small fence because the dogs were getting out of control and had to be kept in, and then soon after that the fence was taller, and then even taller, and then one day the fence had come down and there was no sign of the dogs and just some children standing on the roof of the kennel, whooping and hollering and carrying on like the whole world was going to the dogs, so I was interested to see what would happen next – and anyway, I was just walking along on my way home from work when my parents drove past and it turned out they’d been living in the next village along for the last ten years.”  Their accounts are not as dry and humourless as their lives – they make bleak jokes and hollow puns to illustrate their tales, though these are not the important parts.  The stories wind deep into the night and the city changes around them, growing darker and deeper and more real and.

Toast-flavoured soup, served with toast.  Toast with toast-flavoured butter, or toast-flavoured butter spread on bread to create a toast illusion, eating it from a slice-shaped china plate.  The toaster carefully calibrated to brown within a millisecond of your exact taste, kitchen walls painted to match.  Locked away for days concocting toast-flavoured tea and a toast-based breakfast cereal, staying up all night with crumbs accumulating around your eyes, getting under your fingernails, toast smoke in your skin until it comes out in your sweat, you fill the tumble dryer with toast to infuse your washed clothes as they dry.  The family intervene and give you an injection to try and get you to stop but you counteract with a prepared potion that is pure liquid toast.  And then you’re away, overdosing on toast, sinking into an endless golden retreat where you lie for days on a bed of freshly-buttered toast, you eat toast, dream toast, breathe toast-scented air into your toast-shaped lungs.