My name is Clive Johnson, and I am fifty-three; I am not long for this world. There’s something inside me: it’s not a child; it’s much smaller and much harder than that, but it grows just as voraciously as one. I want it out of me.
It’s not the sort of thing to rise on a churn of bile and part-digested food: it is embedded in there, like a little pearl, slowly killing me.
When I was nine, my mother had an abortion: my father beat he like an animal skin, making her go a deeper colour; she would dismiss the bruises to her friends as caused during sleep – she had a fanciful story about being an erratic sleeper. After my younger sister and I, and the regular fists and threats of knives, she refused to put any more children through it.
My sister would stand in front of me when my father would come home drunk. Don’t hit him, she would say: hit me, you coward. And he would lay into her. I often wonder what my younger brother would be like if he were here; I swear I can sometimes hear him calling me from the back of my mind; I swear there’s a voice telling me that he deserved life.
They said it had gone into remission, but it’s back. At the moment, it is the size of a pea, in the soft lining of my left lung. It has started to spread: it will soon move to my bronchus, my throat, then who knows where.
I always missed my lost sibling – could it be that I am the host for a long-dead thing? A loose bundle of cells, and a loose bundle cells; dividing every twenty-four hours, dividing every few hours. I will not give it a name – it is not soft. It is a hard bastard. It is a hard bastard which I am forced to call my own.
I’m back on the cocktails: my hair has been shed in a soft chemical violence. I feel tired. I cannot eat. I want some marijuana. I want the little bastard out of me. I tell myself it was never my fault: the guilt I lay at my feet has always been dead and lifeless. I wish my mother hadn’t done it – I wish she’d had the other instead.
Things could’ve been so much better.
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