Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormack

into little, chewable pieces. It took me two weeks to eat my first saucepan and a further two months to digest it. But again I held it down. It was then that I set my sight on glass. You see, there is a precedent for eating metal. Copper and iron are part of our make-up. But glass is different, glass is taboo. Glass is a killing substance, not for internal consumption. I felt therefore that if I could consume glass I would be at the peak of my craft. Glass was to me what Everest was to Hillary. But first I had to prepare my constitution, toughen it up so to speak. It was at this time that my act became part of the circus repertoire; bleach, soap, timber, metal, that sort of thing. “The Rubbish Man”, that’s how I was billed. People flocked to see me. But in all that time I was only in training. I never once lost sight of my true goal – glass.

      ‘One evening when I felt that my system had been toughened up enough I took a small piece of glass and ground it up real fine, like talc, and spooned it down with a glass of milk. I walked around with it for a few hours and then put my fingers to the back of my throat to see if I was bleeding. My vomit was streaked slightly with blood but not to a worrying degree. I was pleased. However, the trick was no use as it stood. Spooning down a white dust in the middle of a three-ring circus at thirty yards would never work, it lacked spectacle. So I had to work at consuming bigger and bigger pieces so that it would have the necessary visual impact. When the trick was finally unveiled I had graduated to the point where I could eat a four-by-eight-inch piece of unlaminated glass in under two minutes. People were amazed and shocked. In a few towns I was not allowed to perform. Priests denounced me from the pulpit and so on.’

      He raised a forefinger into the sunlight and began to hack the air like a zealot. ‘In the words of the Old Testament – in body and in Spirit and in the image of God was man created. Therefore it behoves us to act as God himself would have us act towards that which is his temple. Such mutilation is contrary to God’s will.’ He lowered his hand and continued. ‘You know, even when I thought those Bible bashers were right my audience never failed me. Night after night they turned up to see me. People seem to find gratification in other people eating shite.’

      He suddenly brightened.

      ‘Do you know that over the whole of my career I calculate that I have eaten enough glass to build a good-sized glasshouse?’

      She would be late for work, very late. But it did not matter. She was now in thrall to this strange man and his extraordinary story. She wanted to take him home and listen to his tale forever, this tale which she was sure was for her and her alone.

      The sunlight lay on them now like a dome and the day was so bright it seemed as if through some magic the air itself was polished. Already the square was emptying of people like herself who had to return to work. High on the side of the cathedral, prising out the infant Jesus, she would remember this as the moment when she should have said goodbye and walked away. She could have walked away and been saved, retaining nothing of this incident but the memory of a strange old man with an extraordinary story. But she did not move. Instead she turned to him.

      ‘So what happened? What do you do now?’

      ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘audiences fell away in the seventies – television and all that. Our circus broke up in the mid-seventies and we all went our separate ways. Some even went as far as Eastern Europe; circus is a recognized and subsidized art form there. But I was too old so I drifted from town to town getting menial work, living hand to mouth. By then I was in my sixties so it was difficult to get work; there is not much call for a redundant glass eater. One day I was sitting here on this very bench, no work and sleeping rough, when a young man who recognized me came over and started talking. I told him my story, that I was out of work and so on. He told me to hang around the city for a few days till he saw if there was anything he could do. He was a student and the upshot was that I was offered a job by the university as a resident guinea-pig. The university is contracted by pharmaceutical firms to carry out tests on drugs and other substances. Sometimes they find it hard to get volunteers for the more dangerous experiments. So that’s where I come in. Seemingly I have built up an almost total resistance to poisons. I’ve even become an object of study myself. Sometimes they cut out parts of my stomach and digestive tract for examination. And,’ he held up his hands in another gesture of resignation, ‘that is how I get by.’

      This was strange testimony and she felt weird hearing it. She had the eerie feeling also that it was meant especially for her. She imagined that this old man had held his tongue the whole of his life until this day when he had walked into the square and saw her, the perfect listener, the perfect receptacle for his story. For a short moment she thought about returning to work; the square was by now almost totally deserted. But she wanted to know more, she was convinced there were things she should know before she left. It would not do to leave with just a partial image of this old man. She turned to him again.

      ‘So what’s it like?’ she asked. ‘Eating glass?’

      ‘It’s difficult to say. It’s dangerous if you haven’t got a vocation for it. It can cut up your stomach as easy as that and you won’t feel a thing. One moment you’re walking around and the next you feel light-headed and sit down. Then you keel over dead. You’ve been bleeding away internally all the time, unknown to yourself. Therefore any nourishment you gain from it is offset by the danger and poison of the thing. In short it’s not much fun. I myself had to go through a long training before I could eventually handle it. Many a bottle of bleach and bar of soap I had to eat and puke up before I could handle it. It’s like some sort of spiritual training, I suppose.’

      He was obviously struck by the clarity and truth of this last formulation and he furrowed his brow, presumably to make certain that he was not deluded. He seemed satisfied.

      ‘Yes, that’s what it’s like – like doing some sort of penance or spiritual training that leaves you in a condition where you are capable of experiencing something momentous. But the experience is a dangerous one. If you survive it you know you have arrived at some limit within yourself and are almost God-like. But if you fail, it brings death and disaster and you are as well never to have started. I doubt that there are too many people in the world who would be able to survive it. It’s a real discipline, an affliction, a thing of inspiration.’

      It made her smile to hear the old man explain his gruesome talent in such mystical terms. Did he truly believe that this was what lay at the centre of his craft? She did not dare ask. Now that he had found sense and reason in it, it would be nothing short of wanton vandalism for a complete stranger like her to start picking holes in it. If he was happy with his explanation, and it seemed that he was, then so be it. Suddenly the old man seemed flustered. He began doing something complicated with the hem of his coat. She wondered had he forgotten something, had he told her the full story? Was there one more detail to reveal, probably a shameful one, before the story was complete? He rose up to look at her and he was very agitated, wringing his hands.

      ‘I am sorry,’ he stammered. ‘I am sorry but I could not help it.’

      She was startled. A premonition rose within her that a pleasant experience was going eerily wrong. If it was going wrong then something of it had to be rescued so it could be remembered with joy.

      ‘Don’t say sorry,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ve enjoyed myself. Don’t let it end like this.’

      He nodded his head with what seemed to her an odd type of respect and turned to make his way over the grass. She followed his thin back with her eyes until it disappeared off the grass and around a corner into a side street.

      That night, for the first of many nights, her dreams were covered, structured and dominated by glass. Beneath her feet the ground had the cold, intractable feel of a synthetic surface. Overhead the sky curved like a piece of engineering and her cries bounced back from it without release. Food was placed in her mouth but it splintered and crackled treacherously. It made her mouth bleed and the droplets fell and clicked onto the ground as beads. But what terrified most was the feeling that she herself was made of glass, a glass that was warm and molten and pliable and that would continue that way until the day of her death when it would solidify and she would be struck rigid in that unyielding and unchanging topography.

      She woke the next morning