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.I looked into the bathroom mirror, at my gaunt, ashen face, and knew there was to be no deliverance.Until Sam had got home, I’d sat in the dark lounge room, shivering and listening to the growling metamorphosis of my blood.I knew now that it was indeed my blood that was transforming me, making me ill.It was as if the very fluids coursing through my body were thickening, ballooning so that they could not be contained by the thin walls of my veins and arteries.It was as if my blood was resentful that I was refusing to feed it, and was deliberately spiting itself to force me to nourish it.It was not seeking mere food and water.In a terror, a vacant torment, I had allowed my nose to lead me through the house and up the narrow stairs into the bathroom where on all fours I crawled, seeking the odour that my senses had convinced me was in this very house.I was led to a small wastepaper basket where I clawed through tangles of hair, cotton and dental floss until I came upon two strips of bloodied bandage.I suckled on them as relentlessly and as intensely as a nursing baby would at its mother’s breast.Throwing the bandages back in the wastepaper basket, sitting back against the cold bath tiles, I found a moment of peace and contentment.It did not last long but it allowed me to present a composed face to Sam when he arrived.He had wanted to ask me endless questions about my photographs.I told him curtly that they were a response to Europe.But he wanted to know how I had achieved my effects.I pretended that the bodies were grafted from pornography and the vileness of the internet, and this explanation seemed to satisfy him.Of course, he exclaimed, they’re montage.Yes, I answered, glad that he had remained ignorant of the intricacies of digital photography.You ignorant sad old fuck, I was screaming inside, it’s film, it’s real, this is not digital.I grinned at him.He must have assumed a thousand depravities about where I had found the models for my work.The only question he posed was of the dubious moral worth of using such traumatic real subjects.I answered that what I was doing was akin to what samplers did in utilising fragments of other people’s work in their own creation; I also answered that, unfortunately, these very images were free and public on the convoluted garbage dump which was the internet.I was convincing myself as I spoke.The inert fear that had taken hold of me when I first glimpsed the photographs had now left me.Instead, I was delighted with them, aware of their disturbing evil, excited by their ability to move and confuse people.I was proud of them.This emotion swelled and met the ravenous call of my blood.I was famished.Wishing to feel only this ecstatic swoon of pride, on the way back to the hotel I tried to lure a small ginger cat that was sunning itself in the last faint pools of sunlight.It was stretched across a slender windowsill and at first it eyed my tender crooning with just suspicion.But it raised its nose and moved to my outstretched hand.I was not at all clear about what it was that I was intending to do.I had a whiff of its vivid carnal smell.My intention was to grab its neck, break it, and to immediately bite into it and drink the dying blood.I don’t believe that there was anything rational or conscious in this intention.It was an instinct.But as soon as the animal approached my hand and sniffed, it recoiled, raised its back and fur in brittle aversion and hissed at me.It disappeared, fleeing through my legs and out into the street.I asked for directions to the bar.I knew that Zivan was working and I did not wish to bother him.He had told me that he would find me in the bar.It was mercifully empty except for the ponytailed young woman who was waitressing and an older stiff-backed couple sitting in two lavish leather armchairs near the back wall.They were both smoking cigars, each immersed in reading; he a newspaper, and she a novel.Behind the cigar smoke I could smell something putrefying, something deathly upon him.She smelt empty of anything but weak animal flesh.No sweat, no sex, not even a trace of excrement; unlike the young woman at the bar, who smelt strong and alive.I asked for a whisky and I lit a cigarette.I held the glass of oily amber liquid close to my face, so that the alcoholic fumes would dull the smells of the world around me.The first glass of whisky was lead pellets straight down to my gut.The taste was medicinal, not pleasurable, but the second went down better and by the third I could manage to ignore my hunger.Within fifteen minutes the bar had filled up and there was smoke and discordant conversation all around.Some football game must have just finished because a group of young men in bright soccer shirts had formed a half-circle of leather armchairs by the empty fireplace.They were yelling at each other, a mind-numbing drone.At a small table not far from the bar, a group of five effete gentlemen had ordered a bottle of wine and were hunched in close to each other, occasionally raising a disapproving eye towards the football crowd.From the snatches of conversation I could overhear, they were discussing an exhibition they had just been to.The man with the loudest voice was in his late fifties, overweight, and with ridiculous coils of black hair jutting out like islands across the bald dome of his head.He was dressed completely in black, a thick poloneck top, and reeking limp woollen trousers.I could smell the residue of semen and piss and shit on those trousers; I would wager they had not been washed for months.The four men sitting around him were younger, all nervy and sallow, as if they were enemies of the sun.One of them had lank blond hair that hung lifelessly around his bony shoulders and as if to deliberately offend the footballers, was constantly fumbling with a pair of reading glasses that fell from a chain around his neck.Their conversation, that which I could make out, sickened me.It was pompous, overly educated, punctuated with bons mots and disparaging, catty remarks.They were discussing art but there was nothing about aesthetics or politics or ideas in their repartee.There was only gossip.Even though the youngest was barely into his twenties, there was something menopausal and jaded about these men.They smelt of mould, of something distasteful and decaying.I turned and looked at the footballers.These men were burly and loud, with ruddy skin and shining eyes alive with bright Celtic hues [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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