This was sitting as a draft for a second post on this blog, which I wrote approx 20 years ago. So I thought I'd publish it now.

(originally posted as part of sixabortedblogs)

The train jerks to a halt and you wake up, where the fuck?

Open your eyes for a second.Get a flash of light in from the left, light and colour, indistinct, harsh, too much, too much, clamp them closed again.

Not feeling to chipper, not too clever, eh? Seen better days, you can tell that much straight away.Rough, rough as a bears arse, as rough as fuck. Your mind shrinks into itself, shrivels, a fat slug in saltwater and then stretches out again, toughens, grates against the inside of your skull as all kinds of aches and pains, twinges, twitches, spasms, stabs and clenches kick in

You probe your mind gingerly around them like a kid tonguing loose teeth.

Man, oh man, what doesn’t hurt?

Sick.

That’s the next thing that hits you.

That green sickness, roiling and rising up from your harrowed gut, that deep, sub-molecular sickness that seeps into every nook and cranny, that poisons your smallest particle, that seeps and keeps seeping, deeper and deeper, until it feels less like the sickness is something inside you than something you’re sunk in.

Immediately, you know that you’re dying. You are, you must be. No nausea can be this profound, this enervating, this dense, this invasive, this all consuming, without it being a sickness–unto-death. This is sickness as an element, a consciousness that has supplanted your own, a terrain you have to navigate, a world, a hostile, inimical world.

Your head is against glass. Your head burns against glass and sweat is streaming from your pores, your armpits piss perspiration by the pintful, your back, your buttocks leaking, the backs of your thighs streaming, your feet pulse in stale, saline baths. Sweat blooming and sluicing, tickling rivulets and scalding flash-floods. Sweat both needlecold and needlehot. Sweat like a second skin, the skin of the sickness, sweat that dries on you in whorls of scurf and nacreous swirls.

Your tongue clacks glueily at your alveolar ridge, adheres, retracts, your throat contracts, an attempt to milk some spit from the dead glands, and cracks, sheds patches, dry and brittle as parchment.

Water.

You need water. But even the thought of it how it would sour and turn brackish in you mouth, how it would swill stagnant and scumshot down the long parched passageway to your guts and float there, oil-water on the bitter, sea-brine of your sickness, is too much, too much to think about now.

In a moment, in a moment you’ll move. Wade waterlogged through the sickness, the sickness without, the sickness within, in your suit of sweat.

You move your head minutely.

Bad idea. Bad fucking idea. You’re dying, you stupid fucker. Do you think moving is going to help. Just lie here and die, curl up in yourself and fucking die.DIE.

Justdiejustdiejustdiejustdiediediediediediediediediediediediedie.

But, no, YOU have to move your head.

Neck hurts. Of course. You begin to unstick your raw forehead from the glass. Here comes the headache, barreling in, red in tooth and claw, feral and furious.

You bite your lip, grit your teeth, gird your loins, marshal your resources.

You put your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel, and shift yourself round somehow from slump into sitting position. Your hands sit useless, fat and tingling in your sodden lap.

Have you pissed yourself in your sleep?

Fucking pissed yourself?

Haven’t pissed yourself since you were a kid. You retch, wretched. Nearly puked then.

The headache hunkers down, claws ripping up your backbrain, fangs sunk into your frontal lobes, bristly belly chafing away.

Where are you? How did you get here? WHO are you, even? That would be a good start.

You open your eyes for an instant, they bulge from their sockets, the optic nerve throbs, stretched taught like catgut. Tears splash your cheeks, you bat your eyelids, try to focus. It swims and settles, there, tiles, posters, you see the familiar creamy grey, flickery drabness of the Underground.

London.

London underground, oldest in the world, world’s first. Your eyes search for the stop sign, that most famous of all signs, immediately identifiable, that has blazoned a million tourist’s t-shirts, world-renowned red circle bisected by a blue bar.

There it is.

London.

But where? You squint. What does that say? No, it can’t…. can’t be.

You close your eyes. Open them again. Close them. Feel dread surge like a squirt of jet-black squid ink then lay like basalt to line your veins.

Guess what?

Yeah, you guessed it. Smart as ever. That’s right, it’s the worst of all possible news.

You’ve arrived at Sixabortednovels.