Truth, Lies, Dreams
We arrive into Kuala Lumpur by night train. Ahead of us a different train, blue with a Wild West chimney stack, is blocking our arrival, unloading first. Then once emptied of passengers, our own train finally pulls forward, gently hits the dusty posts of the railway bumper.
We step down onto the tracks. A couple, with baby, step down behind us. The young woman unpacks a well-worn suitcase, also from a bygone era, misty camera view of a small case neatly packed on muslin sheets.
Staying at a château adjacent to the Lac Leman, gold trim and chandeliers.
We are having a party, lots of wine, beer, on the TVs are football games. England is playing Portugal, and across the front of the blue and white shirts of the England team is written “DOWNING”. The Portuguese also have a name.
Another crowd, of Americans this time, shows up. I don’t know this crowd, but one of them comes over, points to a TV.
“Who’s playing?”
“Portugal,” I reply.
But he says, “No, it’s Turkey.” And close up, I see he’s right.
I go over to a table to get more alcohol.
Siobhan and I are at a hospital. We both have a disease. Cancerous? Siobhan has psoriasis, she has it spread across her bare chest and towards her arms and shoulders. You cannot see it on me.
The nurse leads us to a waiting room, more like a shower changing area with a curtain. She tells us to sit on the swimming noodles, one each.
When the woman I was making love to turned into a pig I knew that I had become too cynical. I watched her face fill out, her cheeks lose their definition and her nose turn up at me to form a perfectly cylindrical snout. Her skin became rough. It became pockmarked and covered in fine grey hairs and then her mouth widened and opened up to reveal a coarse and unclean set of teeth. Then her ears retreated, grew longer into sharp points that flopped over like a dog’s ears. And her eyes too lost their shine and their beauty. They contracted and sunk into the skin and they became red and as fired as a madman’s. I watched her and I laughed and cried for atop of this perverse metamorphosis was her hair, untouched by the transformation and spread loosely across the pillow: a wig on the head of a pig… It was the one hope for my salvation.
A woman spells out her name clearly but in a whisper, before she writes it down in block capitals: E-L-S-P-E-T-H.