Acid Tongued

Morning. Alarm blaring, silent curses and thrown sheets. He is up and shaking and naked and cold.

Late for work too. The shower is put on, though he still stands there for 3, 4 minutes hoping

the warmth of the water will heat up the room. It doesn’t, but it does make him more late. There is

awful half cooked watery porridge for breakfast, with bits of chipped pan included. Indigestion strikes

early, and the bus is missed and given up on as he clutches his side, trying not to look too pathetic

as he races along the street. He trips up. Bumps into pregnant teenagers, homeless alcoholics. A

passing bird decides to shit on his creased shirt. A nosebleed starts for the first time since his early

teens. He trips up again. A taxi is hailed which then passes him by. Another taxi ignores him. White

van men shout at him when passing. He carries on running towards work. He trips up a crippled old

man. Middle-aged women stare with furrowed eyebrows. Apologising, and helping the man, he is

angrily told to fuck off. He runs again. It rains heavily. Thirty minutes late for work and he is fired on

the spot from the call-centre job he has worked for 7 years. No-one comes to say goodbye as he

packs his belongings from his desk – one pad of post-it notes. His nosebleed starts again and he

cries on his old desk while other employees look away in shame. He is told to move, his desk is

needed by a 17 year old boy with shaved eyebrows and sovereign rings starting today. The boy calls

him a twat as he leaves. He is on the street again. A phone call, his mother has had a stroke. He

gets in a taxi to the hospital which goes the wrong way for 20 minutes. Another phone call, his

sister has been in a car accident. At the same time, his taxi is hit by the bus he usually gets to

work. Ambulances arrive and attend to the injured but the paramedics ignore him, despite his broken

ankle. Another taxi is hailed which goes the wrong way again, charges double fare and fines him for

bleeding on the seat. He arrives at the wrong hospital and the taxi leaves him. Passing kids call him

a paedo. A child with a burnt face cries as they make eye-contact. Another taxi is taken but he

doesn’t have enough money so is beaten up by the side of a supermarket. Bloody and limping, he goes

to the cash machine but is removed by security. He leaves with both his card and pin entered into the

ATM. The homeless alcoholic from earlier withdraws all his money and takes his card. Six hours of

limping later, he arrives at the hospital to find his mother is dead but had written a note. It reads ‘you

were an accident and I regretted having you’ and nothing else. Outside, he pleads with a paramedic

for help, who spits on him. A doctor puts out her cigarette on his arm and calls him a cunt. He is helped

hours later by a racist junior doctor. His ankle is repositioned into an angle that hurts more, and will

cause irreversible damage in years to come. He is given crutches and one snaps. In the mirror in the

toilets he notices a bald spot and a line of freckles that look increasingly like a swastika. His sister calls

and asks for him. She is in the other hospital. He hobbles for another six hours in the dark on the side

of the motorway to find her dead from internal bleeding. He is told that if he’d arrived earlier his blood

could have been taken to save her life. But he was late and now she is dead. Calling his father to ask

for a lift, his wife answers who confesses they are running away together and taking the kids with them.

It takes around seven hours to get home during which he is attacked 4 times by separate packs of drunk

men. His house is on fire when he gets home. The firemen only turn up when the roof and first floor

collapse. Police arrest him on suspicion of arson. He is kept in the cell for 12 days and misses both his

mother’s and sister’s funeral. The only call he receives is from the insurance company who tell him the

contract on his house is void. When released, he walks to his grandparents’ house to find the house for

sale and a note explaining they had moved to Australia 4 months ago. He breaks in and is arrested again.

A week later he is released once more. From the station he heads to the highest building in the city. He

gets in the lift which stops halfway between floors. He is trapped with a claustrophobic cage fighter who

beats him to relieve the stress. They are in the lift all day and it is closing time when they are helped out.

He sleeps outside the building and is kicked in the night by the homeless alcoholic. Waking up, he finds

that someone has been sick on him as he slept. He tries to enter the building but the security guard hits

him with a baton. Trying a different entrance, he walks up the stairs. On the 82nd floor he trips and bites

the end of his tongue clean off. He bleeds heavily and makes his way to the roof entrance, slipping on his

blood as he goes. The roof door is locked and he breaks his arm as he tries to force it open. He keeps trying

and breaks his other arm. After trying the handle again, the door opens. Swinging his cracked arms on either

side of him, he walks to the ledge of the building and jumps. He lands on a group of nuns raising money for

AIDS-infected orphans, killing them all. He never loses consciousness and is fully awake throughout the pain

of having every bone crushed and snapped. The ambulance picks him up this time, after the nuns have been

taken. In hospital they declare him brain dead and paralysed but he is fully conscious. Painkillers aren’t

given as they would kill him. He is moved to a care unit 3 months later and placed in front of a TV. He finds

that the media have labelled him a terrorist and is compared to the worst dictators of the world. The Church

of England brands him the devil. Unable to move, he is forced to watch hours of TV berating his existence.

After two and a half months of being in the same chair in front of the TV being fed by a drip, he is moved to a

room and placed facing away from the window. The next 50 years pass by as he stares at the grey wall in

front of him and listens to the air conditioning rattle. Nobody comes to visit. One day, the racist junior doctor

arrives, now a senior geriatrician, and pronounces him dead. He isn’t. They cart him away and put him in a

badly painted coffin with the word “twatface” etched into the lacquer. He almost suffocates but instead is

killed by the flames that burn him alive during his cremation. Nobody comes to the funeral and his ashes are

thrown in a dogshit bin in a park no-one visits.