Idling away an afternoon with your mother in the far past you hole-punch the silence. Oi mummy what’s your death row meal. If you were about to get electric-chaired, you clarify. A brow furrows. A pause long enough to see shadows move across the wall. A throat clears. Well… she says, releasing you from a reverie that has moved through 12 proceeding junctions.
If I was about to get killed, I don’t think I could eat a bloody thing.
No munch til Brooklyn.
Not a bloody thing.
*
A 15 day water fast is an odyssey.
Water fast means strictly H20. You cheat. Bosh electrolytes. A teaspoon of mineral salt in your sodastream. Espressos slammed with abandon. You take down reams of pukka tea, think about soliciting a sponsorship. Apple and cinnamon trumps three ginger. Two magnesium gummies at bedtime for the cortisol. You sleep like a professional insomniac. Stomp zombie-like to the loo, you smash a third, fall back under before the chewing’s done, wake up with a gumful of gummy and a mouth like treacle.
These are your peccadillos.
Only thing to look forward to.
When you were 21 you stayed in bed from January til June. 21 year cycle coming back round. This year was darkstyle. Your world felt so scary, so intimidating, the most focused bit of research you did all year was the positioning of your pillows for sleep ultramarathons, to give you the best cocoon.
Womb return.
Kept hearing this voice, fast.
Will solve everything. You couldn’t do it though. Your willpower was business class to St Lucia, you were locked in the loos in departures. The furthest you got was an early lunch, like all hurdles set too high the self-imposed defeat hit harder than if you’d just gone easier on yourself in the first place.
Christ was no ifs or buts. He gave us the memo for when we fasted. Like a requirement, like picking your kid up from playgroup. Sooner or later, it had to get done. You’d always been intrigued by Jesus in the desert, Satan on his shoulder. Turn that rock into bread homey, if you are who you say you are.
Last year you went full Jarhead.
21 days on the rack. Your mother circled like a vulture, prodding your rib cage brow creased, way you might jab a carcass with a stick. You’d railed. This is a private contract between me and the Big Man but if you MUST KNOW I’m doing it for spiritual reasons. I don’t have a problem, I mean I have loads but not that one. LET ME BE.
Out of the flesh, into the spirit. Speaking elvish to the Doors of Durin, Moria had opened up. Started going to mass every morning cycling through streets as the plane tree seeds caused havoc in the sprawl. The fear and self-consciousness, evanescing kudos, the certainty you’d become a chump, usurped by something far louder. All-butter croissant pushed to one side. This is my body, which will be given up for you.
It was like a marvellous medicine. Aches and pains to the dogs, gums like a toothpaste ad, synapses popped, focus like a kestrel, worked all day at the library til closing and you’d never made it to closing. Dates were a no-go, your breath was halitosis central, but this was no time for working magic, the Lord’s magic was working on you.
2026 had gone awol.
Last resort. Only thing that could snap you out of an UberEats platinum loyalty discount was some hardpound depravation. Took on the advice from the Martian, about simply beginning. At some point everything is gonna go south on you, everything. You can either give up, or you can get to work. It’s that easy.
*
You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. The best place to go was the Luxembourg Gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat, and in the museum all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow hungry.
Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Ignition.
A girl in the garden below sounds the same three syllables over and over, a friend’s name, a lost cat, baah-deeh-DAH, bah-dee-DAH, syllables grow louder, sing-song, echoing through the cobbles. You approach the window, try make it out but you jinx it. You wonder if she is lost in time, if you’re hearing something not of this place.
The seeds of what we will do are in all of us. The first two days are like the Apocalypto assault course. Spears and tomahawks raining down from all angles. You cancel UberEats but it will take a month to shut down your account, Satan clears his throat.
Man abhors a vacuum. Your stomach abhors it too. 72 hours in you are at your wits end, your mind is the table in Hook. Any glimmer of food you start projectile drooling. Hummous on corncakes, touch of spicy Calabrian. Ella’s Kitchen beef stew, shaolin style.
The fuzz on your tongue becomes unmanageable. You hit up Medicine Chest, inquire about a tongue scraper. The girl calls the manager. They look at you and frown. Stay in your cell, said St Anthony of the Desert.
Your cell will teach you everything.
You watch Triumph of the Heart. Maximilian Kolbe the Franciscan friar who was Sainted, martyring himself in the camps to save a fellow prisoner, warning them to not fall foul of the devil’s snares.
Jung thought all addictions were a way to get closer to God. It was a reaching out with arms extended to touch the Divine, just looking in the wrong place. The attempt to shortcut the separation in a bogus way only created more pain.
As the days draw on, the spirit realm that has played you close attention leaves you be. It is a battleground. You pray at night to rebuke the spirits. Am I going crazy, you ask your mother once. Nobody has that vivid an imagination darling. He’s mad, a fairweather friend tells a mate. Something of the serpent in him.
Your boos mean nothing to me.
I’ve seen what you people cheer for.
Rick and Morty
Back from the library you stop by the rusted gates of Copenhagen Fields, overgrown by thickets, something out of Edward Scissorhands. The cows pastured here before being led down the hill to Smithfield.
Peering through the railings imagining the moos and cud you get hungry again, think forward to your bedtime gummy.
The new flats north of the park that went up faster than it took you to change your sodastream twinkle like fireflies in the glow. Mr Motivator appears. You clean out cupboards, take a scrubber to the mould by the sink. Don Ramón gets a tickle from a bamboo toothbrush dipped in 70% isopropyl, he looks healthy and new like he wants to crack a mescal and offer up the worm.
Everything is good, too good, too delicate, you tickle the handle of the espresso all featherlight. What is the feeling. Containment. Smugness. Or novelty. It’s been a while. You’ll take it.
Cherophobia, the fear of impending doom, a rejection of happiness. Flat-lining in bed for days your thinking was always why the rush. But this endorphin beatdown, fending it off with shield and sword, you feel can’t all last forever.
You sleep so little.
Wake at half two, the foxes are screaming, run a bath, read. Sleep an hour before dawn. For ten days now you’ve slept three hours at most. Every morning is like the first day of creation.
Same same, better than yesterday.
The hungry ghosts feel more full. Less food, less YouTube, impulsivity, less crappy thoughts and condemnation, less bile, less I want what I want when I want it. Deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me.
The world is beating. Colours sharp, air clear, all is dawning possibility. Don’t feel hunger at all. Better friend, brother, son, bit of cheeky banter for everyone.
You remember walking the church yard after she ended it finally forever feeling so lost it was deafening, now it is the opposite, something so full, held. You give Mary a bowed cross with a heart in it where she can put her thumb if she’s worried.
You cycle the streets to mass every morning through the dawn. Tunes make you squeal. Peace be with you bums you out, timid, turn this way and that to the parched congregation, overegg your smile, same one that scared the crap out of the UberEats guy.
A little cactus from the shop, to keep Don Ramón company. You repot it and drop it and it goes everywhere. What if it’s the enemy, what if it’s possessed. What if you’re taking this a bit far. What if you get some sleep.
You think back to Great Eastern St and the lorry, and the wind that blew you backwards as the lorry passed full throttle an inch from your face, and the man in his car behind who saw the whole thing and held up traffic for two minutes with his hands on his steering wheel, head buried in them, white as ice, you wondering off in a daze.
Lewis sends through a text. You don’t know what to do with it. How it applies in any way to a bearded guy from Nazareth. There are many truths. Thoughts of double pepperoni two-step through your dome.
Your only chow is the Eucharist. The sweet lick of wine is a party. Is that blasphemy. Praying in your room something fills your every pore. You almost faint getting up from the sofa. Strange bones find their way to the surface of your skin and press against it.
Job doesn’t help.
Two chapters later you’re thinking about olive oil still.
Snatched sleep is impatient for morning. All year you dreaded the mornings. When life is Eeyore time goes Roadrunner. Now in your presence you soak it up, sleep is boring, morning hurry up. Sun let’s keep it moving fam.
Jasmine swiped from the bush en route to the shops, you take whiffs from the kitchen island, bump Jai Paul, pump it loud. Whisper sweet nothings to Don Ramón, assurances, mi numero uno siempre.
These fasts are like miracles. The hungry ghosts are muted. Demons, say the Orthodoxy, hate you fasting. Dilutes their ability to subsume you to their will, makes them impotent.
List of things that are better
1. You feel like the guy in the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes ad who you could set your watch by.
2. You don’t feel the need to get in the braised beef burrito with that nummy dip from Tortilla on the nightly.
3. You text your mother with abandon.
List of things that are worse
1. You can’t sleep.
2. Don’t remember your dreams.
3. Things seem a little too orderly, like your life is going too well, and a big wave in an endless ocean is stirring and gathering swell and will wash all of this to ash.
*
Strange double life, this faith stuff. All you really think about. All you want to write about. A girl so different league you can’t see straight, somehow she’s paying you attention and you see her in the spaces in between, the queue for the library, in the infinite black that exists when you close your eyes. You wonder if this will turn people off reading.
Your mates couldn’t be more supportive, angry with you for not committing. If you like her, grow some cojones and make a move. Maybe your task, slurred a mate under the influence from the atria of his heart, is that. To explain all this in a way only you can, for us to be able to relate to it all.
*
Fifteen days.
Did what it said on the tin.
Fast track to the skies.
A marvellous medicine is right. To get one closer, to centred, to the place before you were lead astray, to duty and truth and the Big Man, to cycling the city at dawn screeching out in warbled soprano at the top of your vocal fry, ruining the pigeon’s cypher on the corner. To fridge raiders splayed out on the table, winking at you.
You remember the big day last year. Lunch, day 22, divide the days by seven said the doctor, just liquids. When they liberated the camps survivors who’d made it through died from overeating. Sat there lifting the soup to your lips your mother cackled with glee. Look at you darling, just like the Carracci painting of the Beaneater!
You scowl.
She runs to get a phone. Parents. Can’t take them anywhere.
So that’s the famine.
Where the feast.
I set the bone broth down on the island, two egg yolks of fine provenance, chopped coriander, lightly cracked black pepper, smash out a spoon solo on the cement.
One year on, same same but different. Further along. Renewed, made new.
I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit in you.
Ezekiel 36:26
Hold tight fasting crew.
Hold tight JayCee.
Passin thru.
