‘Raw and dirty, raw and dirty, just the way I like it’, I shout defiantly, and I gesture menacingly at the wall with my clenched fist just to make the point. ‘Raw and dirty, just the way I like it!’ With this I snorted up another big fat line of Harpic. Life was trying to escape from out of me, it was trying to get loose and for a moment or two there it actually looked as if it was going to escape. I watched it blankly for a while and then decided to keep it bottled up a bit longer. A bit longer won’t hurt, I said, I’ll keep it bottled up a bit longer.
A bit longer won’t hurt, a bit longer won’t hurt, I muttered. I had banned myself from freedom – I would never allow myself to be free, not ever. ‘As long as I live I will never allow myself to be free’, I swore. I just wasn’t allowed. I was under a ban and that was all there was to it. I wasn’t in the real world at all and I never would be. I had created a special place for myself, a special place with no freedom in it. It was called ‘my life’!
A bit longer won’t hurt, I tell myself. No sense in rushing things. No sense in being hasty. Who knows what might happen if I do that? Bad things might happen. Frightening things. Fear came to visit me then. He pulled up outside my house in his flashy sports car and started knocking loudly on my front door. Beads of cold sick sweat stood out on my pale, blotchy face as I tried to find somewhere to hide; some new hiding place that fear didn’t know about.
Fear knows all my hiding places though. Fear knows all my hiding places and I ought to know that. I’ve been down this road many times before, after all. It’s a dead end, as you might imagine. It’s always a dead end. I invent magical words to save me, as I have done so many times before, as I have done so many times before. My hair is white with fear, just like my face. It couldn’t have been whiter. I’m haunting the corridor like a ghost. I’m running through all my options, babbling away idiotically to myself as I do so, and all the while fear is knocking on the door.
Where to fear hide when fear comes a-calling? That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the question we would all like to see answered. We all wait with bated breath. That sudden moment of panic where you rush here and there pointlessly, knocking over the kitchen furniture in your mad counterproductive rush. Where to hide, where to hide. That sudden unspeakable shock of panic – fear rapping smartly on your front door, making you jump out of your skin. That sudden moment of panic as the car pulls up outside your house. You have been caught unprepared and you’re trying to run away with your trousers down by your ankles.
‘There’s nothing more evil than the Evil World which we ourselves have created’, you tell yourself morosely. Nothing more evil, nothing more evil. If the Evil World didn’t exist then we’d have to create it. To be sure we would, to be sure we would. We would have to create it straightaway! You are berating your internal robot for getting you into trouble yet again, the same way it always does. You’ve got a 10 KG vanadium steel crowbar in your hand and your belting that robot for all you’re worth. You’re belting him and belting him, putting great big dents all over his shiny body. Nothing more evil, nothing more evil, you’re muttering under your breath as you get on with the job. Your arm hurts from wielding that heavy crowbar. It hurts like crazy, but you can’t stop what you’re doing. You haven’t yet realised that your internal robot is you.
