#48

London is under blue skies but there are clouds building up on the horizon. The atmosphere is damp, like there is rain in the air. Nothing seems very real today.

I am sitting in the green chair dressed in a plain cotton shirt and tight, very tight jeans. I am looking down at my hands and wiggling my fingers. It's hard to believe that I have control over them, that it's me who determines their every movement. It's like my limbs and digits are somehow disconnected from ME and are behaving independently of any external control. For a moment I feel like a consciousness just hanging in the room, observing a body that I'm told is mine. Control of one's actions is a very delicate thing.

In an hour or so Verity will turn up in her red Classic Mini Cooper. We'll drive down to the hospital, pick up John and then come straight home. I hope it doesn't rain. Being cramped inside a Mini Cooper in the rain is the worst thing in the world. Water manages to get in through every possible place: the windows, the door handle, the dash-board, the roof. Drip, drip, drip, rain speckled windows and freezing cold feet. Those are my memories of Mini Coopers. Dad had one during my early years, but his was green. I'd sit in the back all scrunched up and cold, the leather seat eating its way through my trousers and numbing my backside. That car seemed huge, like three times as big as any other. But that's it, all lonely spaces are bigger than what they are... That's what's so fucking lonely about them.

Another lonely space thats too big is the crotch of my jeans. I give it a little pat. Still no life on Mars. My mammoth hard-on has relaxed and retreated into an inch of wrinkled skin; a nervous little lump that refuses to do anything other than piss. Damn! These last days I've imagined nothing but this afternoon, me in the hospital doorway, leaned back against the frame with my feet a little crossed and my bulging crotch stuck right out for John to see, a 'whatcha-gonna-do?' leer on my face. But Reality is forever disrespecting fantasy. Either it happens too fast, smells too much or doesn't happen at all. Mine is the latter. Anyway, if anyone thinks that they can fulfil a fantasy by performing it, they are wrong. It will only change shape and warp into something new... something ever more unattainable and perverse.

But I don't want to think about these things, not now. We'll just have to see how it goes. All I know is that it will be a little strange having another person in the apartment again. Me in the kitchen sensing a moving shadow along the hall. It will be weird, but a good weird. The other strange thing will be the bed; there is only one. Until now I've not really thought of it, but until the air is smoothed maybe John will not want to come straight back to the bed. For sex; yes, but will he really want me sleeping and farting besides him? My dream movements imposing upon his space? He's always hated body contact in the heat, sticky arms across a sweaty chest, and we're moving right into that period now. But maybe it will be different? Maybe his breakdown and the time he spent alone out on the fringes will have given him a new appreciation of life and the people within it who love and care for him. If not there is either the floor, the shower unit or the kitchen table.

I pop my second Diazepam of the day, take a mouthful of water and stare down at the floor. “It wouldn't be so bad down there” I suppose, “a few pillows and a blanket.” From outside I hear the turning of a car engine and the slight rattle of a metal bonnet. Then there is a beep, then another. I look at my hands, look at my watch, then look at Jaws. Just like me he is slightly trembling and just like me he knows the time has finally arrived...