birthed a baby, an actual baby, an actual child, and named it something beautiful and interesting and unique, and now every time you try and see them now they are like ‘yes well but: but my child’ or ‘yes I suppose Tuesday at 7.30 on the absolute dot could do it, although I shall have to leave again at around 9 p.m., to feed as aforementioned my child’, and sometimes they hand you it, the child, and expect you to know how to hold it (I don’t!), and then they talk to you about child things – the child has teeth now, it can hold up its heavy torso, it grunts and makes noises. And you ask: how can you do it? How do you hold a child? And they explain: sometimes, they say, at night, when they feel at their absolute lowest – it is a full-time job, they say, on top of another full-time job, and then so of course we also need to fit that in with our actual, they say, full-time job – and they say that in the depths of these despairs, all those nights of staccato sleep, all those months without sex or friendship, all those pills and injections and doctors’ appointments and nappies and schedules and sometimes, the child, the child will just piss on you – in amongst all that one time there will be some moment of marvel, often at 2 a.m., they say, where the child is taking feed, and it is a quiet moment, just you and the child and a small sterile bottle of milk, both of you just cooing in the lamp glow (the lamp is a special child-friendly lamp, soft orange light, you cannot expose a child to a normal lamp, the lamp cost £49) and for a moment the child will look at you, up at you, and it will realise that it is you, who they are, that you are they and they are you, and you are the caregiver and the lifegiver too, and there will be this pure perfect moment of recognition, and the child will giggle, a little, and at once every hard edge in you erodes, and every moment you doubted who you were has gone, and you know, now, what it is you were put on earth to do, it is to raise this child, make it strong and wise and give it every opportunity, and love it so hard you grow to love yourself too, and they turn to you (you in this scenario being me), and they say, like, so when are you going to have one?, they say, any lucky ladies on the horizon?, and you have to admit that you ran out of Super Likes on Tinder this week so you haven’t spoken to a human woman in six entire days, and no it’s not going very well actually, life, though I don’t really want to talk about it—
XII.
You know like will I ever find someone to take on half the burden of my very specific mania, that sort of thing—
XIII.
Rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, or essentially any small animal that it could be said ‘scurries’—
XIV.
Actually perhaps I fear the uneasy motion of scurrying – all those arms, those legs, whirring away, hands meet feet meet hands meet feet – than the actual animals themselves, though rat tails I’m not particularly a fan of either, those long rancid worms—
XV.
I read once that every muscle in your body has the potential energy to break the connecting bone it rests on – every muscle is primed with absolute strength, or something, and the only thing stopping that muscle clenching the bone within it to dust is your own brain – and that made me not just worried of every time I cramp up or over-clench a thigh muscle while stretching at the gym (although I am, deeply, afraid of that: how embarrassing would that be? To concurrently break every bone in my body while trying to plank at Fitness First? All the musclebound weightlifters around me wondering why I start screaming and collapsing at the same time? I just go down like someone deflating a sex doll? Nobody calls for help?) but also made me very aware that my body is essentially a high security prison that contains my brain and skeleton, and one fuck-up from me – if my brain malfunctions or I get too scared and just clench my entire body too hard – and I will kill myself, instantly, my legs, arms and ribs all clicking in two like twigs—
XVI.
Consider major surgery for a moment. Major surgery is this: medicine puts you into a deep and painless sleep that allows doctors in masks to open your body up with knives. Are you kidding me. At this point, I don’t even fear major surgery, I fear any illness or accident that might lead to me having major surgery, because I know already I’m going to have to explain in a plain and unwavering voice to whatever doctor offering to peel my body open and fix the mess inside of it that no, actually, at this point I think it’s going to be a lot easier for me to just die, rather than this, thanks very much for the offer though I appreciate it, but the entire concept of what you are offering to do to me – ostensibly for my wider health! – fills me with such an overwhelming dread that I literally consider death a smoother and more hassle-free option—
XVII.
You open your eyes in the shower and there is a figure in there in the bathroom, with you, either standing in the shower or just standing in the room, reflected gauzily in the steamy mirror, and they are cloaked, the figure, and holding a knife of some sort – either a to-the-point sort of hunting blade or instead a curved hook or scythe, and they raise it, and for a brief second you wonder which part of your soft naked flesh they are going to slice into first – and sometimes that is a fear, irrational as it is, one that has me with my eyes tightly wound while I shower, afraid to open them and see, as if the figure there is lurking and waiting for me to recognise them before slashing my throat open, to death, that is a fear, I suppose—
XVIII.
That one day my bank will phone me and in a stern voice tell me exactly how many consecutive days I have been in my overdraft.
I recently lost three-and-a-half stone, 22 kilos, and in doing so went from an Adult Size Large down to an Adult Size Large. This pissed me off enormously: fat melted from the wattle around my neck, my torso leaned out and became slender, my entire waist melted down through two (two!) entire jeans sizes, and my top half inexplicably remained the exact same dimensions according to the t-shirts I was buying in every single store on earth. Reader: what the living fuck.
My friend Sam is an Adult Size Large, and yet he is at least 60% more lean than I am through the torso, perfectly proportioned limbs and body, BMI so immaculate it could be holy, perfect example of health and beauty, capable easily of fitting into anything down to a size S and up to an XL. He is essentially a shop mannequin model with kind human eyes. He wears the same size t-shirt as I do, and I feel like I am staring at a blackboard full of calculations that lead to an equals sign followed by a question mark. Here is my central thesis: how is this man the same size as me according to our tee? I am like twice as wide as him, torso-to-torso. It makes no sense.
Or, so: my sister came to me recently. My sister, like yours, has got into exercise lately. Everyone’s sister eventually gets to this stage. Everyone has a healthy sister. Perhaps your sister is a brother, or an aunt. It does not matter: they are running a half-marathon this autumn and want your support. My sister, like yours, got into triathlons, then just cycling and swimming, and now just swimming. She went insane at a running store and bought a load of unused all-black exercise wear. Would I like it, she says, to sit around the house motionless and typing. ‘It is Adult Size Large,’ she says, and offers me the pile. There is some good stuff in here, man. Nike and et cetera. I take the running gear, which fits me like a glove.
One night I came home drunk off the back of an exceptional Arsenal win and found my then-girlfriend like a tiny long-limbed creature in my bed. ‘Put this Arsenal shirt on,’ I said, staggering into my wardrobe. ‘You know I have lingerie,’ she said. ‘Like: loads of lingerie. You never get me to wear it.’ It does not matter what lingerie you have: the single sexiest thing a naked woman can put on is i. a man’s work shirt, with the half smell of the day still on it, rendered flower-like and fragile by soft
