The Diary of Manny Swindle (part Two)

London, UK - a disturbed young man - Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 : goo

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Carla says I should chill out. Chill out? It's not all that bad right? She says I have friends. Who? Alan? I really don't think he likes me. My local healthcare professional is a very tedious man. The girl in the convenience store? Sure she always greets me with a wide toothy smile. She has one of those mouths with a high gum/tooth ratio, I can tell from the way she conducts herself in my presence that I make her nervous. They say babies only really smile when they're scared. A sort of defence mechanism. Perhaps the same is true of some adults. I would not care to be friends with the blonde, gummy girl from the convenience store, though I am glad to have made her acquaintance.

Last night, as Carla was leaving, she revealed to me that she was upset about something. It appears she accidentally mainlined an undetermined quantity of brown, after which she had consented to group sex with three unknown men. I told Carla that she will die from AIDS by the time she's forty. She just burped and shuffled past me.

I’ve always had a thing for schoolgirls. It was raining this morning, the day is grey and lifeless. A metaphor for my soul you might say. Spots of rain still cling to the windows, splitting this dull panorama into a hundred thousand microcosms of tedium. I spent most of the morning surreptitiously pondering the merits of pleated versus non-pleated skirts, whilst observing the groups of young girls arriving at the Convent of Mercy Catholic Girls School across the road. My eventual conclusion was that the more important issue was that of length rather than that of pleats. Less is definitely more.

My mid-morning reverie was eventually broken by the ringing of the phone. The ringer on my phone is defective and sounds like a bird being strangled. I answered, still deliberating the merits of knee socks and PE knickers. It was Carla. It seems that everyone’s favourite genital healthcare professional had found out about Carla’s little Menage à Quatre and wanted nothing more to do with her. He doesn’t know the half of it. Carla said she was coming over.

Carla showed up around noon with big black panda bear eyes, her lipstick veering wildly across the carriageway of her lips like a drunk on a motorway; Carla was somewhat distant. I thought I might lighten the mood a little by airing my theories on physical educational attire. Carla said that skirts are a chauvinistic construct of an outdated patriarchal society in demise. I told Carla that she’ll wish she had flaunted her youthful figure more when she’s fat and forty, and what was she? a lesbian? She just cried.

But Pandas are not bears. They are marsupials (or something). And if they won’t fuck, surely that’s their own fucking problem.

Carla and I spent all day yesterday sitting in my darkened living room. She is depressed. I am depressed, but this you know already. My life has become a perpetual carousel of the dull and mundane from which I cannot escape. I am the horse shackled to my humdrum existence with rusty carriage-bolts, my non-regulation lead paint paring off to reveal my worm-ridden wooden torso; Slowly decaying as I gallop aimlessly into eternity. The music plays on.

Carla say's I’m in a world of my own. A law unto myself. She say's I should get out more. Go clubbing with her or something. Me? Clubbing? I told Carla she drinks far too much. I told her she’d die of liver failure before she's thirty. She just laughed and collapsed, unconscious, onto the sofa as one of her blancmanges gently erupted from beneath her flimsy, floral summer dress. I watched her perfectly round sepia brown nipple contract and become erect as it met the tepid air of the living room. I thought about touching nay licking it. But didn’t.

Carla stayed the night. She took my bed and I slept on the red velour sofa in the living room, which is remarkably comfortable considering it’s condition. I bought it five years ago at an auction in Clerkenwell, it was in bad shape even then, with a big tear down one side, peppered with cigarette burns and miscellaneous stains like the craggy, weathered face of an elderly war veteran. Time and tide, not on his side but with more than a handful of anecdotal tales to recount. I’ve been awake since 6.30AM. Carla’s still sleeping, quilt dashed to the floor, naked as the day she was born. In the morning sunshine she looks almost angelic. The soft light caressing her smooth skin, the shadows accentuate her boyish curves, drawing my attention to a distinct lack of pubic hair. My local health worker was a lucky man. I need to take a shower.

The sounds that come from my cheap Taiwanese power shower are somewhat alarming. It hisses and growls like a wild caged animal. Desperate for freedom from it’s damp and mildewed glass prison. I sometimes imagine it might explode, showering my wet naked form not with warm cleansing life giving water but with a heady onslaught of shrapnel; Plastic, steel and circuit-board fragments, horribly disfiguring me for life.

But it never does.

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