bibliophile kid (excerpt) - "lunch"

I took lunch to the lakeside to relish what little sun there was. Though it was high summer the cloud was thick and the lake had risen far above the recreational jetties that fringed it, that lay now completely submerged beneath both the water itself and the fluffy seedlings that had fallen over a period of a week or two from the surrounding foliage and that were gathered upon its surface like a dusty corner in an empty house, condemned to an eternity of non-existence. Joggers passed in vibrant colour schemes, iPods strapped to their flabby biceps, faces red and acutely pained, gasping as though fallen prey to some serial strangler, the last gasps of a life snuffed by high impact exercise, the great regret of it, the sound of trainer soles scuffing into gravel bits, as divorced from pleasure as it was possible to be, the mythic enlightened release of the endurance runner still an incredible distance from the grunted dismal ache of its reality. There was group of them, fifteen to twenty joggers, running in a kind of staggered unison a couple abreast and of vastly imbalanced expertise. Every half-circuit or so a flushed Chinese female in knee high socks groaned “stop” and they did so obediently, caught their breath for a moment or so and then recommenced the self-abuse at the sound of a barked “go”. Some kind of lunchtime club I presumed, very appealing to the need for an ethically motivated masochism that was so prominent in the higher education sector. On the few occasions I heard any of them speak – most far too exhausted to do so – it was to exchange condolences, consolations on a below-average performance that might well have been a fluorescent mourning party, some circle of grief set up specifically to address bereavement in the public arena, fresh air counsel done en masse, unified by the shared trauma of the exercise and liberated from the awkward need for conversation, listening, emotional revelation, which struck me as a better idea than most. I found them pitiable, if I’m honest, as I’m sure they did me. These small niche communities flourished through silence and constant motion – speak and stand still and the whole thing falls apart, a perfect microcosmic symbol of the ills and failings of our own.

I unwrapped a couple of layers of cling film from around a corned beef sandwich, a handful of thick oblong slabs of the stuff caked in gelatinous yellow fat, the food itself mirroring the arteries of its eater with an almost anatomical level of precision, a perverse prophesy of ones impending doom of the kind displayed on fag packets, slices of raw onion that made it reek like a compost bin, deep yellow mustard smeared into thick cheap butter substitute. I was aware of the monstrosity of the sandwich, my sandwich, God knows, I’d made it, sliced through that granular, muscular block of meat-ish product like a seasoned killer, admired the consistency of its compacted structure, garnished it, dressed it, but aware or not, monstrous or not, now I was to fucking eat it. The sandwiches in my head were works of beauty, ingenuity; reality fell short by some considerable margin, but the form of the sandwich, the Platonic form, what it could be, the sheer possibility in those leavened encasements was foremost in all of my hopes for the future. I devoured it so quickly I almost fainted, struggled for breath as cloying wads of unchewed food coursed agonisingly slowly down my gullet, my body reflexively hiccupping in a lame attempt to source oxygen past the blockage, my vision blacking out, and thinking for what felt like minutes that I was to die, there, by the lake, alone, eating a sandwich of which I was terminally embarrassed – corned bastard beef! – and that I would want no female to see, that my last moments would be spent eating the same, that as listed next of kin it would be my wife they would call when they found my cold corpse after an hour or so, with carefully delivered news of my futile demise, and how her composure wouldn’t falter and just a fragment of grief would be replaced almost instantly by sweet freedom and by the blessed absence of agency, it just happened!, and she would respond appropriately and say the correct things as were expected but inside would be whooping, thigh-slapping, hard-drinking delighted, and could energise her encounters immeasurably with the alluring archetypal addenda of widowhood, for little stirs the loins like desperation, am I right?, constant raw sex being one of the few true lights at the end of any long tunnel of even insignificant loss. Free of me and mine she could find some peace, ever indebted to the power of a shitty sandwich.

I espied a regular dog walker who I’d eyed before approaching my bench from the western tip of the lake. She was far older than me and was highly tanned and mean and exhausted looking but desirable nonetheless. The fit of the jeans they wear today demands attention, makes a fantasy of all, bodies poured slick like mercury into the riveted denim and fit to leak lethally. She wore heavily branded wellingtons. Though we hadn’t shared so much as a smile I assumed, or hoped rather, that she would approach me, proposition me, that this would be the day, after all these months, that we’d enter the trees and angrily go at it for no other reason than we might as well, that that kind of thing must and did happen, that she’d wipe the spillage from her thighs with her bare fingers and rub it down the bark and then pull her jeans back up in silence and leave to make dinner for her family, but instead her dog – a beautiful slick arsehole with boot coloured fur and eyes sodden with regret – pranced up to my bench and snaffled at the stones at my feet for corned beef crumbs, slurping them up with a twenty-pound tongue and then turning his attention to me.

“Ha ha, sniffing my dickhead, ha ha, how adorable, ha ha, he’s a friendly fella, ha ha, she is it?, ha ha, look at him – sorry her, ha ha, look at her going at it, ha ha, at my dickhead, ha ha, one track mind the dirty bitch, ha ha, look, ha ha, really sniffing at it, what can she smell eh, ha ha, giving the game away isn’t she, ha ha, could you maybe, ha ha, she’s drooled on my, ha ha, my unmentionables, ha ha, makes me look like a perv, ha ha, or an incontinent, ha ha, should suit the Leave camp, ha ha, incontinent, ha ha, no no no look she’s really nuzzling it, ha ha, that’s a bit uncomfortable really, ha ha, wrong actually, ha ha, shit she’s left a great wet slurp, ha ha, can’t you just, ha ha, maybe you could ask her to, ha ha, look could you, ha ha, look just FUCK OFF DOG.”

I slapped the dog in the jowls without thinking – I had never expressed cruelty to animals, apart from the reciprocal bullying of my own cat which I felt to be acceptable as she bullied me too – and it jolted some distance and bared its teeth but retreated and I was left with the woman’s horrified face.

“You pig,” she said. She was tearful with disgust. “You lonely pig.” She slapped the remaining sandwich out of my hands and stamped her wellington onto the bread. It curled around the soles like a salted invertebrate. She walked quickly away saying “come on boy”, to the dog, I presumed.