Getting it in the Head Read online

‘I give up,’ she said. She had enjoyed the little game.

  ‘Well,’ he began, ‘it was very strange. I was the only act of my kind in the whole of Ireland. England too if I’m not mistaken. I used to eat things.’

  ‘Eat things,’ she repeated. ‘What things?’

  ‘Everything,’ he grinned, springing his surprise. ‘Bars of soap, small toys, metal, glass, timber, anything.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Yes, anything. Oh, it’s not unheard of. People eat swords, frogs and so on. I’m even told that in England there is a man who over the space of a lifetime ate a small aircraft. Still, though, the range of my consumption was something else. There was nothing I could not digest. Can you believe that towards the end of my career I was working on a way to eat a house?’

  It may have been all a joke but she doubted it. He was too earnest, too obviously proud of his amazing craft.

  ‘How did you start?’

  He threw up his hands in a gesture of unknowing.

  ‘I don’t know. How does anyone start anything? One day you’re here and the next you find yourself in the middle of something else. I remember thinking as a child that it was strange and funny that people should limit their intake to simple foodstuffs. I knew that the world was full of things waiting to be eaten. So I asked myself what would happen if I tried some of those other things. One day I sat down to a piece of timber, a piece of softwood. I wanted this first piece to be something organic, something that would not be too much of a shock to the system. I remember it well. I can see myself to this day under the caravan, tearing strips out of that piece of timber with my teeth like it was a piece of meat. Three days it took me to finish it. But I kept it down and I knew then that my vocation had presented itself. I progressed on to metal then, small kitchen utensils that I sawed up into little, chewable pieces. It took me two weeks to eat my first saucepan and a further two months to digest it. But again I held it down. It was then that I set my sight on glass. You see, there is a precedent for eating metal. Copper and iron are part of our make-up. But glass is different, glass is taboo. Glass is a killing substance, not for internal consumption. I felt therefore that if I could consume glass I would be at the peak of my craft. Glass was to me what Everest was to Hillary. But first I had to prepare my constitution, toughen it up so to speak. It was at this time that my act became part of the circus repertoire; bleach, soap, timber, metal, that sort of thing. “The Rubbish Man”, that’s how I was billed. People flocked to see me. But in all that time I was only in training. I never once lost sight of my true goal – glass.

  ‘One evening when I felt that my system had been toughened up enough I took a small piece of glass and ground it up real fine, like talc, and spooned it down with a glass of milk. I walked around with it for a few hours and then put my fingers to the back of my throat to see if I was bleeding. My vomit was streaked slightly with blood but not to a worrying degree. I was pleased. However, the trick was no use as it stood. Spooning down a white dust in the middle of a three-ring circus at thirty yards would never work, it lacked spectacle. So I had to work at consuming bigger and bigger pieces so that it would have the necessary visual impact. When the trick was finally unveiled I had graduated to the point where I could eat a four-by-eight-inch piece of unlaminated glass in under two minutes. People were amazed and shocked. In a few towns I was not allowed to perform. Priests denounced me from the pulpit and so on.’

  He raised a forefinger into the sunlight and began to hack the air like a zealot. ‘In the words of the Old Testament – in body and in Spirit and in the image of God was man created. Therefore it behoves us to act as God himself would have us act towards that which is his temple. Such mutilation is contrary to God’s will.’ He lowered his hand and continued. ‘You know, even when I thought those Bible bashers were right my audience never failed me. Night after night they turned up to see me. People seem to find gratification in other people eating shite.’

  He suddenly brightened.

  ‘Do you know that over the whole of my career I calculate that I have eaten enough glass to build a good-sized glasshouse?’

  She would be late for work, very late. But it did not matter. She was now in thrall to this strange man and his extraordinary story. She wanted to take him home and listen to his tale forever, this tale which she was sure was for her and her alone.

  The sunlight lay on them now like a dome and the day was so bright it seemed as if through some magic the air itself was polished. Already the square was emptying of people like herself who had to return to work. High on the side of the cathedral, prising out the infant Jesus, she would remember this as the moment when she should have said goodbye and walked away. She could have walked away and been saved, retaining nothing of this incident but the memory of a strange old man with an extraordinary story. But she did not move. Instead she turned to him.

  ‘So what happened? What do you do now?’

  ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘audiences fell away in the seventies – television and all that. Our circus broke up in the mid-seventies and we all went our separate ways. Some even went as far as Eastern Europe; circus is a recognized and subsidized art form there. But I was too old so I drifted from town to town getting menial work, living hand to mouth. By then I was in my sixties so it was difficult to get work; there is not much call for a redundant glass eater. One day I was sitting here on this very bench, no work and sleeping rough, when a young man who recognized me came over and started talking. I told him my story, that I was out of work and so on. He told me to hang around the city for a few days till he saw if there was anything he could do. He was a student and the upshot was that I was offered a job by the university as a resident guinea-pig. The university is contracted by pharmaceutical firms to carry out tests on drugs and other substances. Sometimes they find it hard to get volunteers for the more dangerous experiments. So that’s where I come in. Seemingly I have built up an almost total resistance to poisons. I’ve even become an object of study myself. Sometimes they cut out parts of my stomach and digestive tract for examination. And,’ he held up his hands in another gesture of resignation, ‘that is how I get by.’

  This was strange testimony and she felt weird hearing it. She had the eerie feeling also that it was meant especially for her. She imagined that this old man had held his tongue the whole of his life until this day when he had walked into the square and saw her, the perfect listener, the perfect receptacle for his story. For a short moment she thought about returning to work; the square was by now almost totally deserted. But she wanted to know more, she was convinced there were things she should know before she left. It would not do to leave with just a partial image of this old man. She turned to him again.

  ‘So what’s it like?’ she asked. ‘Eating glass?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say. It’s dangerous if you haven’t got a vocation for it. It can cut up your stomach as easy as that and you won’t feel a thing. One moment you’re walking around and the next you feel light-headed and sit down. Then you keel over dead. You’ve been bleeding away internally all the time, unknown to yourself. Therefore any nourishment you gain from it is offset by the danger and poison of the thing. In short it’s not much fun. I myself had to go through a long training before I could eventually handle it. Many a bottle of bleach and bar of soap I had to eat and puke up before I could handle it. It’s like some sort of spiritual training, I suppose.’

  He was obviously struck by the clarity and truth of this last formulation and he furrowed his brow, presumably to make certain that he was not deluded. He seemed satisfied.

  ‘Yes, that’s what it’s like – like doing some sort of penance or spiritual training that leaves you in a condition where you are capable of experiencing something momentous. But the experience is a dangerous one. If you survive it you know you have arrived at some limit within yourself and are almost God-like. But if you fail, it brings death and disaster and you are as well never to have started. I doubt that there are to
o many people in the world who would be able to survive it. It’s a real discipline, an affliction, a thing of inspiration.’

  It made her smile to hear the old man explain his gruesome talent in such mystical terms. Did he truly believe that this was what lay at the centre of his craft? She did not dare ask. Now that he had found sense and reason in it, it would be nothing short of wanton vandalism for a complete stranger like her to start picking holes in it. If he was happy with his explanation, and it seemed that he was, then so be it. Suddenly the old man seemed flustered. He began doing something complicated with the hem of his coat. She wondered had he forgotten something, had he told her the full story? Was there one more detail to reveal, probably a shameful one, before the story was complete? He rose up to look at her and he was very agitated, wringing his hands.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I am sorry but I could not help it.’

  She was startled. A premonition rose within her that a pleasant experience was going eerily wrong. If it was going wrong then something of it had to be rescued so it could be remembered with joy.

  ‘Don’t say sorry,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ve enjoyed myself. Don’t let it end like this.’

  He nodded his head with what seemed to her an odd type of respect and turned to make his way over the grass. She followed his thin back with her eyes until it disappeared off the grass and around a corner into a side street.

  That night, for the first of many nights, her dreams were covered, structured and dominated by glass. Beneath her feet the ground had the cold, intractable feel of a synthetic surface. Overhead the sky curved like a piece of engineering and her cries bounced back from it without release. Food was placed in her mouth but it splintered and crackled treacherously. It made her mouth bleed and the droplets fell and clicked onto the ground as beads. But what terrified most was the feeling that she herself was made of glass, a glass that was warm and molten and pliable and that would continue that way until the day of her death when it would solidify and she would be struck rigid in that unyielding and unchanging topography.

  She woke the next morning exhausted from a profitless sleep and when she faced her breakfast her whole being baulked in revulsion. At work, the nausea continued all through the morning and at midday on the bench she gagged on the first mouthful of her sandwich. When evening came she pushed away her plate in disgust and decided to go to bed. A twenty-four-hour bug; come the morning it would be gone.

  That night her dreams were more complex. Some of the fragmented images from the night before had coalesced into a decipherable narrative. She was attending some religious ceremony in a church which had the polished sheen of obsidian. A priest of some persuasion was berating his congregation from a pulpit, exhorting them to recognize the sacred in all about them and in the least among them. He harangued his congregation on this theme for a while and when the Eucharist came he raised the flesh of Christ into the air not as unleavened bread but as a scarlet disc of stained glass. He put it in his mouth and brought his teeth down hard to fragment it. He raised his head to the roof while swallowing. He then distributed similar discs to the faithful who came to the rails to receive the flesh of our Lord. All of them returned from the rails with blood seeping between their lips or trickling down their chins. When it came to her turn to receive, the priest bent over her and told her in blood-flecked words that it was not for him to give her anything. She would receive in another way and when she did it would be not just for herself but for the whole world.

  Next morning, after refusing her breakfast again she made her way along by the canal to work. So early in the morning it seemed as if the colours and textures of her dream had carried over into the morning light. The sky was streaked with vermilion and the gold of the early sun was giving way to an all-pervasive blue. Passing by the cathedral she was struck by how queerly it was lit at this time of day. It seemed lit from within by some numinous presence and the light fell from its windows in great shafts which seemed to converge upon her. She wondered how the windows of the western nave seemed to be suspended there in the morning light, standing out from the stone structure, vibrant like elongated stars. She could see the Christ Child, the Virgin and Joseph. The Child seemed to luminesce there in the silence with a life of its own. It seemed to reach out to her with some command, some imperative that would brook no avoidance. With an effort she wrenched herself from the spot but for the rest of the day she was haunted by that image of the infant saviour. It seemed to have scorched itself so deeply on the front of her mind that she could not get a focus on any of her work. Her indexing went badly. Nothing she touched fell into alignment and her mind wandered so much it was a relief when the day ended. But before leaving, on a dark intuition, she went to the reference section and took down a book, The History and Origins of Glass. She flicked through it and read how stained glass was manufactured and installed. She read for an hour and on her way home bought a hammer, a pliers, a mortar and pestle.

  That evening, for the second day, her body refused food. Looking in her cabinets at the boxes of food a nausea rose within her and she had barely enough time to make it to the sink. Her stomach was so empty she suffered acute agony in retching. She sank to the floor in a foetal position, lathered in sweat. It was at this moment that an awareness formed that she was suffering from some sort of inverse inspiration. She could feel a hollow running the length of her whole being, waiting to be filled. Two days without food and she could already feel her strength ebbing from her, a tide that would leave her stranded like a dried fish if it continued. She would have to do something fast or she would be soon totally lost to this hunger.

  She rose from the floor like one who had been felled, and gathered up her coat and tools and made her way into the night. She reeled through the streets like a drunkard until she came to the cathedral. In the grey streetlight coming off the nearby bridge she saw Joseph in the stained glass window offering out the Child to her with both hands.

  She would have to be quick. Cars whizzed by on the bridge and it would be disastrous to draw their attention. How could she explain this excruciating hunger that had her refusing food and craving something fatal. She grabbed a down-pipe that ran in the shadow of a buttress, offered up an abortive prayer for its solidity and began to climb up hand over hand. It was easier than she had imagined and she knew instantly that this new-found agility was part of the whole neurosis. In the darkness and her heightened condition she moved confidently, hand over hand, finding toe-holds in the sheer limestone wall. She stopped for a moment on the ledge to draw breath and then moved at a crouch over to the window. She straightened up and was at last faced with the Child. It seemed now that in climbing the drainpipe, the concentration and physical effort had sapped away an essential part of her resolve. Either that or it was just shameful awe in the sight of the Child’s gaze that persuaded her to avoid Him totally and remove marginal pieces instead, doing as little damage as possible to the window. She took out her pliers and began to prise out the lead strip from the framework close to the stone. Once she had a grip on the lead it tore out easily and she quickly managed to remove four lozenge-shaped pieces. Through the hole she could see into the dark interior of the church where the red sanctuary lamp glowed and the faint aura of the tabernacle door. But she did not wait, her hunger was crying out. Feeling the eyes of the infant on her back, burning his rebuke, she moved over the ledge and with the glass and pliers pocketed, shinned down the pipe to the ground. Once hitting the ground she loped homewards like a released animal.

  In her kitchen she laid out the pieces on the table. They were all one colour and shape and with a scream surfacing within her she knew they were not what she needed. She swept them from the table in a quick frenzy, dashing them against the wall, and set out again into the night. This time, in front of the Child, she did not flinch. She set the pliers into Joseph’s abdomen, gripped the lead and prised it out carefully, trying not to let any of the Child fall to the ground – she felt bad enough violating the wind
ow without committing needless vandalism. Eventually, through the sweat that had begun to sting her eyes, she saw that she had wrung the Child totally from Joseph’s grasp. All he had left now was a gaping hole in his abdomen and the lead came like dried veins curving outwards from it. For the second time that night she pocketed the glass and the pliers and crawled along the ledge to the down-pipe. At the base of the cathedral she was consumed by a shaking fit. She squatted down in the shadows with her arms wrapped about her, flicking the darkness with her eyes as she tried to get a hold of herself. She saw the bridge opposite her and the cars upon it, ploughing on into the night, and she wondered about the drivers. Did any of them ever have such a fixation as she had now? Did any of them suspect that so close by there was someone strung out on such an obsession? If one of them knew would they try to help? Would one of those drivers walk over to her in the darkness and say, it’s OK, I’m your friend and I am here to help. Come with me and you will come to no harm. She continued to speculate like this until she felt steady enough to move off.

  She is at home now, in her kitchen, and she is tempted to lay the glass pieces on the table and spend a few moments rearranging them into the image of the Child. But she cannot bear to look the Child in the eye. Besides, her body senses a nearness and has begun to cry out. She knows what she has to do. She empties the pieces into the dishcloth, lays it on the floor and begins to hammer it methodically until she has a crude multicoloured rubble. She turns the little pile into her mortar and grinds the debris until it is as fine as talc. It is difficult. Despite its lowly origins and ubiquity, glass is one of our more intractable materials. By the time she finishes her arm aches and her brow is sheened with sweat. She now has a little pile of powder in the mortar that looks for all the world like one of those similarly illicit powders that can be had for a price in the underbelly of any city in the world, patented for people like herself who have been ignored, cast out, shortchanged or are just plain unable to cope. Somewhere within herself she can hear a counterpoint to this errant thought; yes, but this is the flesh of the Saviour, the divine fix, the high without comedown. She lifts a spoonful to her mouth and something within her rises greedily to it. With a jerk of her throat it is gone. She spoons back the rest of it hurriedly and washes it down with milk. She stands still, waiting for some reaction. It does not come. She walks to her room and all the exhaustion of the evening comes to rest upon her. She falls face downwards on her bed fully clothed and already she is asleep.