Seven Past Seven - JLG Clift

It is summer. I am 15 years old. The grass is long in my back garden and it’s been dip dyed back to its dull dying tinge. The beige of sunburn is creeping down through the day as the shade shifts away. It’ll be at the root by sundown. I sit in my room, my box room, my little box room with red walls that have only been painted half way up and a green carpet that can barely be seeing between my drift wood bed and my desk that houses a formerly silver TV/VHS that breaks my childhood favourites whenever I put a video in and press play. A scratchy vinyl of Microcastle is the only constant sound in my life and today that is fleeting. I can barely hear it anymore. It just keeps skipping but I don’t have it in me to just pull the plug. There’s nothing in me anymore.

A Tesco own brand fan from 6 years ago whirs barely blowing at the furthest end of the room on a stack of books that I’ve never read but say I have if anyone ever ask but no one ever asks me.  Dust spirals in clumps around my room from the baby blue blades that have never been cleaned; I can trace the air current if I watch them for long enough, I know, I’ve done it before. The clumps would be bigger but the rusted grey grill of the fan thins them down but it doesn’t stop them. Dust is the closest I’ve come to pollen all July, longer maybe I don’t know. I don’t leave the house and I took the calendars down and broke my clocks. I didn’t want to judge things by time. I didn’t want to live another day enslaved by it after everything but my chains still remain and keep getting heavier with every tick. I never want to see another 11:09 as long as I live. I hit the wall sometimes when I realise that the time comes and goes no matter what I do.

It is the middle of the day and through the static of a shoddy signal I am watching a Countdown rerun upstairs. I don’t leave the room until mum’s gone to work and Rachel’s left to do whatever Rachel does. No one sees me anymore. I don’t leave; I’m not sure whether you can even call yourself alive if no one’s around to see you living. I’m not living, I just happen to be here. The walls are collecting moisture at their corners, the house is sweaty and sick and even though I haven’t been outside today I know the house looks sad. It always does when the sun’s out, something about the way the shade gets thrown at it. My hair is long and greasy and the drops of sweat slithering down my scalp make it feel like my hair is crawling from its roots and raking down my back and into the coils of my stained bed sheets: peroxide hook worms that used to hang on my crown now roam my room. I’ll never see my hair again. My nails are starting to corkscrew into where my finger prints used to be before they burnt away.

I call around, no one’s home; no one’s around to come round to mine. I forget what happened sometimes, just for a minute. I want to get up, I want to move, I want to wash and eat and run and do all those things kids on daytime television do in good weather in their Californian gardens with their care free friends from good neighbourhoods. No I don’t. I just think I should want those things. I don’t want anything anymore. I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to breathe but I don’t want to drown. I don’t know that I’m able to want anymore.  That's a part of it all.

The floor’s splintering away beneath my feet on the plain between my room and the bathroom, I drag my soles across ash wood shards but I don’t feel much. I barely bleed. My mirror is still shattered in the sink; no one’s cleaned it up. I still feel that, I still feel the reflection of the person I didn’t recognize splitting my knuckles as it disappeared into a dozen reflections of the ceiling then the window then the light bulb then finally the underside of the faucet rocking back and forth at the bottom of the mildew laced basin. I did it so I wouldn’t remember, but I remembered anyway.

It’s 3 in the afternoon. I have been lying in an empty bath for a while now silently. I don’t sleep, my eyes just close and then they open again. I don’t sleep, and I don’t dream. I just remember. Remember the class of boys in black blazers and grey slacks with tartan ties and boiling eyes and bubbling lips and leaking cheeks and sizzling skin turning into puddles in a mist of accidental mustard gas that my oldest friend had made in science class just to see if he could.

He’d been talking about it all year, talking and talking, Dennis gnawed my ear off talking about how amazing it’d be to make some. Not to use, never to use, Dennis wasn't crazy like people said; he just to know he could make some. Dennis wanted to know what I felt like to do something he really, under no circumstances, was never supposed to do. He told me that less than 1 per cent of people will ever know that feeling; Dennis always wanted to know everything. He wanted to know what everything felt like, he wanted to feel everything the world had to offer, he didn’t care whether it felt good or bad, all that mattered to Dennis was that it felt.  Dennis was just fooling around, he never thought it’d work, he thought the wiki recipe was bogus for a start and so did I; I wasn’t at the other end of the room because I thought it would work, I was just buying a tens off of Messai while Miss was out.

There was a hiss and a fizz like someone had dropped a couple of Mentos in a bottle of Coke, only it was more aggressive. I turned just in time to see the student most likely to do anything turn to nothing on the spot. I watched his bones turn to stew in his cheeks; I saw his blonde undercut become a steaming broth on his crown as his face slipped down his chest down his trousers to the floor.

They said the fact that I managed to ball myself up in the incubation chamber saved my life. I told them I didn’t see anything, but I did. I saw it all. To dodge the slew of sensationalist journalists I  said I closed my eyes, but I had them wide open. I told them everyone died quickly at the funeral where there was nothing left to bury because anything that got put in the coffin would just have been absorbed into the sheets. I never told them I had to hold the glass panel down with bubbling hands as my science class came charging towards me for sanctuary their palms peeling away into pastel pink paste on the pane with every swing they took to break it open. I had to hold the glass down, through all the screams, through all the begging, until my friends became nothing more than mounds of sludge around my incubator. Dennis was the last to go.

I still see his scream, the vocal chords pranging like plucked strings through his vanishing Adam’s apple and between the strings I remember the clock face and I remember the time. 11:09. It only took a minute for it all to happen, maybe less; break started at 10 past. At 11:09 I stopped being a child with friends, I became the Joseph Merrick of Muswell Hill suburbia; I became the major piece of evidence in a borough wide lawsuit against AQA; I became a piece of prime quick buck journalism: the burns victim survivor of a disaster in a secondary school science lab brought about by negligent teaching and a dangerous syllabus. I stopped being handsome, girls stopped looking at me and left the room when I so much as breathed. I stopped being called Jackson. I stopped being called anything. I stopped playing sports, I stopped talking, I stopped being. I can still hear all the gasps as the firemen carried me out. No one knew who I was; my own mother didn’t believe the doctors until I told her myself. She’s never been able to look at me since, she just leaves for work and comes home and stays downstairs. She doesn’t speak; she never comes up to my room. She leaves my meals half way up the stairs and then runs for safety behind a locked door. I’ve forgotten what she looks like nearly, and she’s tried her best to forget me.

I don't remember what she sounds like anymore, I think there was a northern twang to her voice but maybe that's just something I made up.

It is seven. I am smoking the tens I got from Messai, the tens that I was buying for Dennis.  I haven’t smoked once since Dennis dissolved. There’s no tobacco to cut it, I roll a purey as someone on Deal or No Deal gets the crowd to chant YOLO increasingly aggressively as the seal on the last box is broken. It's almost tribal. The player swapped out at the last minute. Everyone’s on tenterhooks. The zoot tastes like ash and gives me nothing but a cough.

It is seven past seven. I am tying the school belt that I will never wear again around my neck and I am pinning my belt to the ceiling with a nine inch nail I pulled from my shelf that housed unread classics. The leather tenses and cracks, cold, tight. I jump from the bed I used to bounce on when I was small and the box room felt bigger. The whole room thuds and ripples in my rolling eyes and in my double vision daze the rouge of the red rambles up the walls all the way to the ceiling and the room looks complete. I realise the room isn’t sweating anymore and that the beads have turned to shards of permafrost on the walls. Mum is sobbing in her sleep. This is the time she doesn’t want to live through again. My feet are drifting down towards the carpet. I can see the carpet through my soles and the carpet is bare apart from the dust. The belt thrusts through my neck, lynching nothing but air because I’m not there to hang; I’m not anywhere. I’m a suicide hiding from the light in the darkness of my last Summer day. I forget that too sometimes.

The player got the penny. I think. Can’t remember, catch it tomorrow. Same time, same place.

It will still be Summer. I will still be 15 years old. And the clock in the lab will continue to cycle. And everyone will be moving on by doing the same things over and over again. Time repeats. Time repeats, so we do.