I’d just sunk a cheeky 5ml of Resurrection Fluid into a bashful elbow-vein, and tossed the syringe out the bedroom window onto the compost heap, when the doctor phoned, unannounced, to ask if I’d ‘done much bleeding recently’. I said no. She said, ‘Not even a paper cut, or a shaving nick, or an accident with knives?’ I told her I tended not to misplace my liquids, that I was not the type of person who oozed, and asked her whose pants she thought she was shitting. ‘I’m looking at the graphs from your last blood test right now,’ she said, ‘and you’ve got the haemoglobin levels of a recently stabbed goth.’ Her needle-voice sailed into my brain, neck-and-neck with traffic noise from her consultation room’s half-open window. ‘Am I approaching death’s door?’ I asked. ‘I’m afraid we might be witnessing the emergence of our old nemesis, the side-effect,’ she said. How were the noises and voice sounds flushed into my earholes by waves of mouthy signal, and labyrinths of info-duct, and tiny electrified portals? Would my beloved regime of injections have to end? How much haemoglobin does a troglodyte need? ‘More than you have currently, Mr. Sinclair,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to stop the medication yet, but it’s time for me to tell you to stop eating like an absolute fanny.’
~
She arranged another blood test to occur in two weeks, and instructed me to ‘fortify’ my ‘dismal bulk’ by ‘consuming shitloads of iron’. Resurrection Fluid was the best-selling product from Chemical Desserts, a ‘research patisserie’ who’d collaborated with a medical technologies manufacturer and grown immensely pharma-big through the sale of experimental syrups. Something in the sugar helps the body to absorb the other stuff, the non-sugar, that alleviates my fritzes and abolishes my numerous pains. After the injections you feel a warm clench spread from your heart, across your chest, up your throat to the tongue, and you taste sweet ghostly eclairs. But also lots of people say it ruins your blood. But then my doctor always says you should never think about the side-effects of a medicine without comparing them to the side-effects of the illness. But now if she’s concerned about these test results, I thought, I’d really better upgrade my buffet habits. If I failed to accrue enough haemoglobin, I’d lose the Fluid prescription, and have to endure a dramatic fall in raving standards. I’d be cast back into the lower circles of autoimmune woe: broiling agonies in my knuckles and hips; an excess of gravity in my ankles and elbows; and a dreadful susceptibility to dietary advice.
~
I’d never bought a ticket to the Karnival of Kale. No organic local leaf-tycoons ever felt my hot bald coins in their Saturday morning market palms. I tended towards and insisted upon traditional carbs, honest gluten, niche creams and battered chunx. I told the doctor I’d ‘update my intake,’ then worked a wobbly late shift. On the way home I saw, on the rain-spritzed screens of a hostile bus stop, the animated advert for a new kind of bread, every slice of which was ‘sealed in a crisp-spangled crunch-garment’. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a food that looked so pleasurable receive such a big marketing budget. I pointed my phone at the flamboyant loaf, and purchased an introductory subscription.
~
In bed that night, I told my hard-boiled companion about the doctor’s call and my bus stop encounter with these new exquisite rectangles that I envisaged we’d consume, from now on, like the old exquisite rectangles, weekly. She raised a blade-like eyebrow to the brim of her night-time trilby, and began an educational bollocking. She kept saying things like ‘your nutritional cowardice’ and ‘the tyranny of the baker’ and told me I needed to ‘snack wise’ at work. I cancelled the bread subscription, and promised I’d keep leaves of rainbow chard in the pockets of my uniform if she’d stop issuing instructions, and she promised she’d stop issuing instructions if I kept leaves of rainbow chard in the pockets of my uniform.
~
But then I only lied about, never actually did, the surreptitious snacking wise. And we rarely found the opportunity to eat meals together. She worked daytimes for a medical marketing agency called Lymph, and I worked evenings at The Cunt Factory—a bar-and-escape-room that wanted its customers to ‘experience the benefits of unsafe spaces’. So they could only exit the premises after they’d demonstrated ‘freedom from self-censorship’ by various permitted methods, such as using ‘previously banned words’ to verbally abuse a man with rheumatoid arthritis.
~
I was that man with rheumatoid arthritis, and I wore a clinical onesie and a snorkel while I sat in an Ikea armchair on a small stage at one end of the slate-topped bar. There were four of us on that stage, lined up like Mastermind contestants from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. every weekday, with the names of our various ailments and conditions spelled out in pink plastic Helvetica on lightboxes by our feet. Most customers just had a couple of Jägerbombs and called us ‘lazy twats’, but some would stand straight in front of you and say things like, ‘Tired, princess? Run out of spoons have we, you fucking feeble slut?’ While Fibromyalgia, Lupus, and Depression looked at their phones, I worked my way through a side-tabled stack of New Left Reviews. As time’s harpoon dragged us towards last orders, and paying customers threw spittle-flecked freedoms at my multi-deficient body, robust paragraphs of class-conscious literary criticism hauled my mind out of that uncomfortably curved chair and into a realm of ecstatic doubt. Most of the customers, wanting to make themselves presentable for their bouts of liberation, were thoroughly showered and aggressively fragranced, so they emitted a nose-boggling array of florid reeks. Thus I was never in the mood to eat, since if I opened my mouth for long enough to admit a leaf of green snack, I’d taste that botched humidity—the vapourised screams of perfume-workers in Dante’s infernal Debenhams. To be at work was to be in permanent recoil from the airborne, dank, electrifying evidence that the kind of world I thought I was living in was indeed exactly the kind of world I was living in.
~
My plan, instead of snacking wisely, was to gorge wisely on iron-rich restaurant meals in the week leading up to the blood test. I did see glitches of suspicion in the crackle of my companion’s sea-green irises when I told her I wanted us to eat every day at a restaurant called Beef Or You Die. They’d just opened a branch in our tense and expensive postcode—part of a national chain created by mammal carcass evangelists who’d quickly won a lot of zealous custom with a troublingly whimsical marketing campaign. Part of their introductory offer was the early-bird special—a ‘flesh sesh’ that began just when my companion finished work, and just before I started. We could meet there and ‘treat ourselves a bit,’ I said. ‘Treats,’ she said, and lifted her trilby off her centre-parted bob, to hang it upon its wall-mounted antler. ‘Will you ever get your mind out of the tuck shop?’ she added, and clicked off the bedside lamp.
~
We sat opposite each other at one end of a four-metre long trestle table. My elbows felt strangely warm where they rested on the laminated wooden surface. Beneath the lamination was a photo-realistic image of mahogany-coloured muscle fibres, layered in meshy waves. My companion said, ‘It’s like being inside a leg.’ She slurped at the navy-blue rim of a white enamel mug full of sturdy Argentinian Malbec and prodded through the menu on her phone. The matt black restaurant walls had white phrases pasted across them in a quasi Comic Sans typeface. Every letter was two notches larger or smaller than its immediate neighbour. Everywhere you looked you read an infuriating slogan that didn’t even make sense, like ‘first-degree burger’, or ‘we’ll meat again’, or ‘haemoglobin, she-moglobin, we-moglobin’. In the centre of each wall was a looped projection of a rosy-cheeked, gleamy-toothed, tweed-wrapped family. They swooned through HD meadows, romped through honey-glazed villages, and aimed their dilated pupils straight into the camera as they praised, in the vocal tones of tired bishops, ‘the statuesque integrity of a cow’, ‘the reverential atmosphere of an abattoir’, and ‘the spiritual impact of a steak’.
~
A quiet symmetrical family sat next to us at the table. The two adult sons wore plain polo necked T-shirts and the two undivorced parents wore rainbow-coloured jumpers. At the table’s far end, a squad of office colleagues cackled over the soundtrack, which was Spotify’s This is J Dilla playlist. My companion had introduced me to that music at the start of our frenetic courtship, just before I’d manifested my disease. ‘Not heard this for ages,’ we said. ‘So good,’ we said, ‘so wonky, so meticulous,’ very slightly nodding our heads as we added the same items to our baskets: hanging steak, tongue tartare, and crispy maple shins. I also ordered a bowl of ‘green magic’. My companion asked, ’Haven’t you had enough of that?’ I said, ‘Not yet,’ and saw the frequencies of doubt sweep across her iris patterns again. The plates and bowls of food arrived, less than a minute after we ordered them, on a robotic silver trolley that wished us a ‘happy sesh’. We filmed a clip of the first mouthful: my companion made a beak-shape with her hand, plucked a tuft of shin-meat from the peak of a steaming heap, and placed it into my already-gaping face. At the end of the meal, thirty-five minutes after we’d entered the restaurant, the robotic trolley returned, to tell us to make space for ‘another pair of fucking losers’.
~
‘The vibe’s not right for me,’ said my companion. ‘It’s just not what the moment requires.’ So for the rest of the week, I dined alone. The joint account slumped into its overdraft, and my piss began to smell of gravy. When other people mentioned the odour—in the beige communal bathroom at home, in the raucous workplace toilets, at the bus stop when I nipped out to relieve myself against the nearby war memorial—I didn’t feel the ‘mineral pride’ that the restaurant’s robot had suggested I might. We’d chatted, the robot and I, after it asked me how I could afford to keep coming back, and I explained that my companion and I had full time jobs and occasionally sold gob clips to a couple of hundred discerning enthusiasts. ‘Well, fuck my stainless-steel flanks,’ it said. ‘You need all the fine dining you can get.’
~
I had blood samples taken at the Post Office and sent, Slow Track, to the pathology lab. I stopped eating the beef, since everything depended on the test, not the actual ongoing presence of minerals in my pipes. I carried on injecting my Fluids and chucking the syringes into the compost heap, which began to look like a muck-and-plastic hedgehog sculpture, crammed into a three-sided hutch made of half-rotten pallets. I resubscribed to the new loaf, had it delivered to work, and shared it with my colleagues at the bus stop, where the long chewy carbs released our knackered mouths from their obligations to contribute to language.
~
In the early days, people told me my disease disgusted them. They didn’t say it in those words—they used phrases like ‘I hope this email finds you well,’ but the implications were clear enough. My companion said, ‘I hope you are thinking healthily’ in her break-up message. ‘It’s obvious you’ve not been snacking wise,’ she also said. ‘And that’s one too many red flags for me.’ We pressed the yellow rectangle labelled ‘amicable blocking’ on our relationship app, and she removed her antlers from my room.
~
The doctor said the test results were ‘really fucking ambiguous’. My haemoglobin had risen slightly, but was still in the ‘underzone’. ‘We’d better try again in a couple of months,’ she added, in a softer voice than I’d heard her use before. She asked if there were any ‘holistic factors’, and I told her about the break-up, and my loaf subscription. Buses honked and trams screeched. Single-person gob clips earned less than half of their two-person equivalents. I’d have to think of another revenue source. ‘If I’m really being honest, there are side-effects for everything,’ said the doctor. ‘There are simply never not side-effects.’ I was sat up in bed, surrounded by pillows, feeling too warm and too cold, wishing for a portion of smooth, refrigerated, blameless orange juice. Would I always be lying in the midst of whatever this is? Would there ever be a respite from all the ongoing continuity? Do middles ever end? ‘There are so many sides for effects to develop on,’ she said, in a tone of voice that descended a whole octave. ‘So many geometric clangs where the infinite planes of complaint meet.’ My breath abandoned my nostrils and emerged in her room and drifted out through her window into a dark throng of roadside pines. She hung up. I held the hole of the phone’s speaker against the hole of my outer ear.
