A few days ago, I was walking alone along Tuna Street, and there, rising towards me like a tsunami of land, was the ground. Not the ground beneath my feet, the ground about twenty steps in front of me. Tipping up on itself like the world was a piece of paper, folding away. The grey of the pavement, with lines of houses either side, the green wheelie bins, a red car on the road, all rising. It collected into this huge object in front of me, not made up of its individual parts anymore but one threatening mass. The sky bent down behind me out of view, and I was just a word on the page, smashing into another word from the other side.  

I had just then been thinking that if I were a character, if I could choose who I was, then I would just stop feeling. All the little cries inside my head would go away, and I would be in a world of my own, you know, like everyone else, not caring about stuff. If I wanted to be beautiful or brave that wouldn’t make it true. You can’t just make up who you are. But wanting to not care anymore, could that be true? Maybe I could change the way I thought if I thought about it enough. I wondered if everyone else must want to not care or if they ever even considered it.  

Of course, we could all be lying to each other in some universal conscious conspiracy. How do I know I don’t feel like everyone else if I don’t know how everyone else feels?  

I guess I just know. After the ground folded in on me, I reappeared on the other side of the page, and I was thinking, is fighting to fall asleep harder than fighting to stay awake? I decided falling to sleep is harder, I can always stay awake. But I don’t know why. Surely the dream is the desired state, where nothing matters because it’s all inside your head.  

Anyway, I walked on Tuna Street and back to my room on Capelin Field. I’m sure I heard once, somewhere, that they used to be called Morrab Road and North Parade. I don’t know when the names changed. In my mind, some tidal wave had turned all the streets into migrating fish, using some mystery of nature to find their way back to the exact spot they were hatched. I think they use taste or smell. Or they listen to the earth’s magnetic field in ways we don’t understand. When I arrived home, to Capelin Field or North Parade or whatever you call it, I realised I didn’t know how I’d got there. I’d just followed my feet without thinking.  Perhaps that’s what the fish do.   

No one was home. I had locked my door to keep the kid inside, which, as you know, is an unusual thing to do, so I made sure no one was around as I found the key to unlock it. Most rooms don’t even have keys anymore, they have been lost or forgotten about. I guess since nobody has any wealth or possessions that are not freely available to everyone else, it’s not necessary to lock things away. We earn our credits during givetime and can have whatever we want during metime. I was three days into a period of eighty-eight days of givetime. A refuse collector. I’d done it before and didn’t really mind the mess. It was kind of helpful in a way that no one’s life depended on. Since I was fourteen and it became mandatory, I have been in twenty-four periods of givetime. I’ve been a hairdresser, a carer for the elderly, a telephone operator for the national grid, a machine operative in a cider packing factory, a taxi driver, an electrician, an optician, an administrator for the distribution of accommodation. All sorts of stuff. Like everyone else. I just watch the instructional video on day one and then give time to it.  

But, anyway, I was lucky my new room still had its key, so that the kid couldn’t escape. I unlocked my door and opened it, with a big smile and friendly hello, all exaggerated like you do for kids. He was sitting in the far corner, didn’t look up or acknowledge my entrance or anything, which was not unusual.  

‘What you got there?’ I said as I crossed the room. He had unthreaded the carpet at its edge and was running his fingers along the separated fibres.  

‘Wow look at that.’  

I knelt beside him and he turned. He didn’t look at me but back towards the bed. I waved a hand before his eyes which stayed perfectly still, like he didn’t see the world at all.  In this slow, almost mechanical movement which he has, he picked up his arms and squeezed them around my neck. My heart whispered something to me, and I wrapped him up tightly, forgetting what amount of time passed, holding onto him. And that’s what people just don’t do anymore. Whether they don’t hear those whispers or they don’t have them, I don’t know. But I read about it once and it used to be a thing. It was called love.  

Later that evening, when I walked into the communal kitchen, I thought I saw a sort of black fuzz across the window and the table. The kind that appears when the signal is failing. Like something wasn’t quite connecting properly.  

Jake was stirring his tea in slow little movements, staring into the whirlpool with blank eyes.

‘Hey,’ I crossed the kitchen and opened the fridge.

‘Oh hey,’ he looked up at me from the dream in his cup, ‘how’s your givetime going?’ 

I knew that by asking me, what he really wanted was to tell me about his own givetime. He has no interest outside his own head. So, I gave him some mandatory response that allowed him to just keep talking.
‘Did I tell you I’m a doctor now? It’s pretty unbelievable. Like, last time I was a cashier! Can you believe that?’

He didn’t wait for my response. ‘So, I’m a gastro surgeon and yesterday I actually cut out a gut! Well, just a section of it, you know, the part that was infected. But can you imagine how that felt for me? Seeing all that mass so intense and so red and just cutting it. I was thinking as I was doing it “this is going to be really weird for me,” but I just did it anyway. Can you believe that!’

‘Is the person ok?’

His face was alive with his own sense of excitement, his projection of himself. He was watching a movie inside his head where he was the star, and he was thinking what a great movie it was.

‘I always back myself. Like, he was just this thing, just body parts, but you can’t really see the face, the eyes are all taped up and there’s a tube down the throat. It was just me and the gut.’ He held out his hands in front of him, to demonstrate where the gut was.

‘Did he survive? The guy?’

‘What? Oh, the guy. I have no idea.’ He removed the teabag from his cup and tossed it into the bin. 

‘I’m doing waste removal.’

‘What? Oh yeah, this is a big one for me. Like, I knew someone who was a doctor before, but until you actually see it- I feel like- it’s going to change me, you know, give me a greater perspective on the human body, like I’ve seen the inside of it.’

‘Oh yeah, no, I’m sure you’ll do a great job.’

‘What?’ He searched my face for something, like he was looking for a word in a wordsearch, lines of letters that made no sense to him, so he gave up and said, ‘bet you’re glad to be rid of that kid now you’re in givetime.’ 

‘Yeah. Well. He was OK.’  

‘Yeah, he was quiet at least, a bit odd though.’  

‘Yeah.’ I thought all the kids were getting quieter.  

‘Do you want to hook up? I’ve got to be in the hospital for six, but we could do an hour or so if you put some lipstick on?’ He was stupidly good looking.  

‘No thanks.’  

‘Ok, see you later.’ He left the kitchen with his tea and a little smirk on his face like he was really impressed with his tea making. I mean, I was glad he didn’t suspect I had kept the kid. I guess he didn’t have enough interest in it to suspect anything. But all I could think about was the guy with his gut cut away. Where was he now? This slab of a man was just a story for Jake to tell, he was nothing but fiction. Sometimes I think we are all just stories to each other. And that’s why I couldn’t give up the kid, even though you’re not supposed to keep them in givetime. Because I didn’t want him to be a story from the past, I wanted to have him with me and watch the things he was doing and make him laugh and stuff. I know it’s stupid.  

That night, the kid and I had eaten bread and butter and giggled at the tiny pictures we made from the crumbs. He was sleeping in that innocent way kids do, by my side on our single bed. His mouth was open, and I could hear his breath collapse on itself in the dim light of the night lamp. His ears stuck out and I stroked his hair behind them. I thought about how there was something sweet about his little ears, especially from behind. It made him look real. Like he was this real little person with sticky out ears or something. He didn’t look like Malcolm, not at all really. Malcolm had the kid when I met him, but I don’t know where he got him from.  

Whenever I thought about Malcolm I got a cold chill, like the air of a silent night was running right through me, and I was just a passage to nowhere. I wasn’t angry. How could I be? When he met Trisha, who was more beautiful and experienced than me, they’d asked if I wanted to stay on. Lots of people have multiple partners, using each to satisfy different aspects of themselves. Its healthy during metime to prioritise mental health through the achievement of pleasure. And coupling up was never about being exclusive. I wished I could have stayed. But when I saw her touching him, exciting him, it made me feel sick. My stomach would just roll over and over, a lost ball bounding down a never-ending hill. I didn’t even know why at first. I’d go on long walks with the kid along the promenade. Watching the cold ocean churn on the sand, holding the grains in its mass then throwing them away again. Birds dotted about like confetti thrown over it, in some sort of tiny celebration of the oceans continued ambiguity.  I’d think ‘why can’t I be normal?’. 

 One day, after a long walk where I’d tried to let the wind blow away my thoughts and carry them over the sea, me and the kid went back to our rooms, all red faced and fresh. We entered the lounge and were hit by the thick air of desire, heavy in the room like it had its own crushing presence. Trisha and Malcolm were curled together on the sofa, limbs mingling with one another.  

‘Join us.’ A long, reaching arm. Stomach-bile in my mouth.  

‘Erk. She’s still got that kid. I thought we were getting rid of it?’ Trisha stroked Malcolm’s mouth; his lips reached for her finger.  

‘We could.’ His eyebrows raised and he looked at me from inside his own anticipation of pleasure. I had a little picture in my head of when it was just me, Malcolm and the kid, and the kid was laughing, and I was smiling at Malcolm, and he seemed to know everything there was.  

‘I feel like we’ve had him long enough, let’s just enjoy each other a while.’ The long arm outstretched towards me again.  

‘I’ll take him.’ I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I left the room with the kid, put everything I owned in a backpack and never went back. As we left the house, I heard the shrieks of Trisha’s pleasure. And I knew. I knew I was different. He would never think about me other than as a story. But I thought about him as a place. A place inside me.  

I watched the kid sleeping and thought about Malcolm. Then I scrubbed the thought away as if it were a stain, which I knew would never come out. I kissed the kid on his sticky out ears and fought to fall asleep.  

The next morning the kid wanted to come with me. He kept grabbing onto my arms and trying to force himself out of the door beside me.  

‘I’ve told you, you can’t. You have to stay, or they will take you away forever and I’ll never be able to find you.’ He let out this wailing sound. I slipped and fell into it until his cry was all around me. The sound had a million colours, like a rainbow in water, pressing against my eyes. I looked hard into them and saw myself as a kid. Alone. I didn’t know what I wanted when I was a kid. But I knew I wanted something. Some unspeakable thing that had lost its place in language.  

I used to think that I had never been hugged. The thought bothered me. I’d never had someone’s arms around me to hold me in place, so sometimes I felt kind of ungrounded, you know, like one of those balloons filled with helium that just go up and up. I mean, people hugged. I saw them on the street. Rapid little motions that drew apart quickly, as if each other were a virus. Just mandatory, meaningless embraces. I used to think ‘why don’t people hold onto each other’, but I never asked anyone. Everyone seemed like they were happier than me, so I guessed it was my problem. 

Anyway, I kept falling into the kid’s cry until I saw Sean. He had coupled up with the woman who watched me for a while when I was a kid. He had a large head and this sort of nervous energy, like he was a balloon too. ‘You’re like me,’ he had told me. ‘You’ll never be happy because you care too much.’ I just looked at his huge head and the sorrow in his eyes. Eyes that looked real against a world that was painted. He told me he’d found out about stuff that no one talked about. He said people didn’t always prioritise themselves, people weren’t always disposable to each other. He said people felt things all the time, and at one point they were encouraged to, but it drove them crazy. So they needed more and more metime to deal with all the feelings. But then nothing got done and a lot of people got sick. So givetime became mandatory for society to carry on.  Kids became separated from their biological parents because everyone had to do givetime. And he said people used to need each other to look after their kids, but now they didn’t. Anyone could pick up a kid when it suited them and give them away when it didn’t. You could cut out a guy’s gut and it didn’t mean a thing to anyone. And you could have a partner and have another, and it was only about your own pleasure, your own journey. You could give away a kid. No one missed anyone. No one was lonely. Everyone’s world was only themselves; other people were just characters in their story. Years later, I came across the woman that watched me and asked if she still knew Sean.  

‘What? Oh no, he’s dead.’  

I cried for a week, and everyone thought there was something wrong with me and tried to give me tablets and stuff. I told them I was fine and decided never to think about Sean, or his lack of being. I put it all in a box and moved to new a room. But that box was there, inside the kid’s cry. 

When I fell out the other side of the cry, I bent down and took hold of the kid’s shoulders. I looked into his eyes. ‘You’re like me,’ I told him. He looked back at me for the briefest of moments before his eyes did this crazy flicking thing they do, like he’s in a fast car trying to focus on something out of the window and it keeps moving away. Maybe he was trying to make sense of the world, but it’s just a stream of colours with nothing to focus on. I tried to follow the flicker, but it moved too fast. ‘You are like me, aren’t you?’. He moved away from me and started to touch the wall at the end of the bed where the paint was peeling away. He picked at it, revealing the plaster underneath. I kissed him on the top of the head before leaving the room and locking the door. I’m sure I locked the door. 

Then, after twelve hours at work, I was walking alone along Tuna Street on my way home, and everything was quiet; the end of the world quiet. I looked at the rows of houses and tried to imagine the people inside. Beating hearts and inflating lungs, sending impulses down their spinal cords to cook their evening meals. Touching things. Looking at other people and processing what they saw. I wondered if red was red for everyone. Like, how would we know if when someone else saw red, they really saw blue. And all the things that were red in the world, in their head were blue, but that was normal. How could I ask them if their red was really blue? I could try to describe the colour, like its hot and intense. But to them blue would be hot and intense, because all the things that were red to me had always been blue to them. And all the things I think about red, they thought about blue.  

The quietness seemed to break, and I could hear my feet on the ground and my breath hitting the air, like I had just woken up. A door on the left-hand side of the street, about three doors ahead of me, opened.  I had this feeling of anticipation; some demon was going to come out of that door, and I would have to run.  

I looked up and down Tuna Street and I felt there were eyes watching me and watching the door. Some huge invisible eyes that were curious as to what was going to happen. They were pushing me. I listened and thought I could hear a ticking sound. A tick that’s trying to track time but has lost count. You know that phrase, ‘lose track of time’, I always wondered what that meant. Like time was a track you could fall off, and where would you be? I looked back at the open door and the tick became my heartbeat.  

 And then I thought about these curtains I used to have with flowers on them. And how sometimes, late at night, they didn’t look like flowers, they looked like heads. They were all just crammed together on stalks, fighting each other for space. And I used to think if I opened the curtains, there would be a face in the window too. Behind all these struggles in the curtains, it would just be there, like the other side of the veil. Lonely.  

But it wasn’t a demon who came out the door. Or a face behind the curtains. It was Malcolm. He was smiling and touching a woman that was not Trisha.  

‘Hiya,’ he flicked his eyebrows towards me as they walked past. He had no idea that I was thinking about red and blue and the end of the world and some curtains I used to have. I don’t think he even recognised me at all.  

I thought my feet were stuck to the ground, but I managed to free them by running. I just started running as if there was some imaginary finish line that I had to make it to. If I stayed where I was nothing would happen, and the story would never be over. And I thought I must get back to the kid and tell him what love is. And I didn’t care about my givetime, I would break the rules because I didn’t want to lock him away. I turned onto Capenlin Field and that’s when I saw all the police cars and people standing around.  

‘What’s happened?’ I asked someone in the crowd.  

‘A kid’s been run over, I think. They say no one was watching him.’ 

I wasn’t different after all. I had only thought about myself. And the ground started to fold up again, like the page. This time it was from behind me so I couldn’t see it, but I knew it would close and what would be.