A Short Affair by Simon Oldfield

Author:Simon Oldfield [Oldfield, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

CIVILISATION

Will Self

Artwork by Eddie Peake

CIVILISATION

Will Self

I have been confined to my apartments by a condition at once debilitating and embarrassing: at periodic intervals my body disgorges somewhere in the region of a cupful of matter, which is both colloidal and mercurial – quicksilver and stodgy. I never know for more than a few moments in advance when the discharge will come, or where from: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, urethra or anus. This gooey stuff smells at once excremental and aseptic – a bouquet of shit and detergent. I am reminded of the time before I was so sequestrated, when I prowled the city with fierce abandon – my quarry all the sensations it has to offer. So I scaled the stepped-back skyscrapers precipitately, ledge-to-ledge – and on one occasion, using a key I bought in an ironmonger’s, I opened a manhole and descended into its stygian sewer system. Clambering down, I grabbed the rusty old ladder’s rungs with my rubber-gloved hands, palms gripping then slipping on their thick lagging of ancient toilet paper.

I sloshed along the subterranean drains, feeling amorphous blobs sickly vacillate against my toes, shins, thighs, through my rubber waders. My torch blade struck feeble beams and gleams from the uvular walls – I swallowed hard. I heard the chirrups and squeals of the rats – but never saw one. At length, I reached the confluence of several tunnels: a chamber, perhaps five storeys high, into which they disgorged liquid sewage that gurgled and swirled in a mephitic whirlpool as it drained into some yet deeper chasm. I inched along a slimy walkway projecting out into the putrefying millrace, intent on confronting the monocular stare of this great and ineluctable process – the evacuation of everything humans deem anathema to the civilised life: their bodily waste, and the residue of their efforts to eradicate its faecal stain. My torch beam flickered over a greasy-brown boil that rose up from the morass, capturing a scrap of newsprint poised on its revolting surface tension. Around and around it went.

As I believe I may’ve said: I’ve no way of anticipating when, or from which orifice, the silvery goo will be voided – at most, there’re a few seconds of plenitude, followed by a piercing pain which lances through the relevant duct. Sometimes it’s only a few minutes between these episodes – others, hours. A week or so ago, when nothing had happened for an entire morning, I risked an outing to the local park. A child’s model yacht caught in pondweed seemed a suitable opportunity for a good deed – but as I dabbled in the green water, freeing the keel, a cupful slopped down onto its deck. The child came running and looked on, appalled, as I submerged the yacht again and again, muttering fervidly, ‘The ducks – they did something mucky. Yes . . . very mucky.’ I haven’t risked a repeat of this sort of thing – the consequences could be disastrous.

Instead, I remain behind the multi-density fibreboard

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