Hi everybody. I feel I have written the quintessential novel of my times. Here is another extract. NB: this extract is only for the courageous! With malevolent voices for company, you are lonelier than before. You become so agitated you cannot sleep in spite of the anti-depressants you are taking. Your capacities constrict. Pedzi looms more of a threat, and your fear of what all this means causes further deterioration. Frantic, you spend more and more time curled up on you leather sofa in front of your TV being more distressed by the local programming and ending up watching South African broadcasts. You doze off there, and as the weather is warm you often wake up on the couch struggling to recall where you are in the small hours of the morning. One evening you watch some programme or other until late. You fill the long advertisement pauses with a bottle or two of wine. After a while, you are not sure whether you have dozed off or not, but you find you are lying in the street by a bus shelter. A troop of ants scurries over you as though you are dead, already decaying. You jump up, shaking them off carefully to avoid any parts of your decomposed self falling. Dogs bark from far away, drawing closer. You are meat, beneath rotting skin red flesh exposed, for the taking. Your eyes fly open. You are awake. Your dream continues. The ants are no longer marching over you. They head into the passage. You lumber to your bedroom, pulling your blouse off, wanting to be in your bed, the covers pulled up over your head, curled round like a foetus. You cannot retrieve your pyjamas. A head lies on your pillow. You switch off the light. You switch it on again. The head nods and grows. Now it has a little, separate body. The body’s bowels, restrained in their abdomen and buttocks, bulge at the other end of the bed. Its legs cross and uncross as they dangle from the mattress. The apparition is incoherence, there an arm, here a finger. Everywhere are portions that might well have had bodies attached to them. Now they are separated into grotesque and unnameable lumps. The legs convulse. They skip, hopping in one way, then another. Finally, straining in every direction at once, they burst into a multitude more of appendages. Excrescences form and burst, releasing form until each primordial part is a small human member of a frantic and indignant throng. As though seeking refuge, all of these creations jump, wriggle, crawl up into the bowels. The irate flesh in its narrow passage trembles with mortification. Forward over the convolutions that contain it the crowd plunges, defying peristalsis, gaining on the end, on release, running now, knowing how, their smallness fitting into the cylinder that seeks to metabolise them. Forward they push with their awful desire to avenge. Theirs is a lust for ransacking choreographed by pure rage. At the beating heart there is a roar of dismay, like the barking of a pack of dogs, and you realise it was these dogs that woke you. But the rib cage descends lightly with shallow breath so that the crowd turns and rushes up to converge at the throat. Their anger is the sunbeam, the moonlit pool, the portal that brings this multitude surging and battering forward. Your stomach contracts like a delivering womb. You know only the plug in your throat stops the horde from flying forward. Yet you have no power over it. Your throat is a birth canal., after a retching and an almighty compression, as though the multitude has become this one individual, with an awful heave, your mother pops out. A thing you notice immediately, with trepidation and unholy joy is that she is minute. Your mother slips and clutches and scrambles amidst the mess. The wrinkles in the sheet are to her mountains and valleys. When she cannot reach you she scowls in a magnificent rage. She hugs her slippery palms beneath her breasts and pumps those hands up and down so that her frail breasts flaps defiantly as she opens her mouth. Yet before she makes a sound she chokes on the remnants that caused her excretion. Compassion suffuses you. You bend over and pick the diminutive women up.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 12:32:36 +0000
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