Everything You Need

From the beginning of EVERYTHING YOU NEED: Things could be worse. Alone on Foal Island and waiting, Nathan Staples turned on his bed. He forced his chest flat to the mattress with a mild flex at his hips, then settled and calmed his breath. A familiar lack was stitching up his arms and then climbing further to jab at his brain. All psychosomatic, he knew, all self-inflicted, but all inescapable just the same. He exhaled with care, sidestepping the start of a sigh. Audible despair depressed him, most especially his own. But things could, most assuredly, be worse. The Persian Eye Cups, for examplethey were particularly unpleasant, quite turned my stomach when I read about them, as I recallthey would be worse. The Persian Eye Cups, yes . . . Person, or persons unknown, but presumably Persian, might whip out a pair without warning and fit them on snug. They'd prise back my eyelids and bed the cups right down against the nice curve of my eye and then they'd buckle all the necessary strapsI imagine they'd use quite a few straps, to stop me clawing. I would try to claw. But then I'm quite sure that they'd have their way with me, irrigate each cup with the correct corrosive dose and watch it bite. I would naturally scream and jabber while my eyeballs both subsided into froth and the acid gobbled up my optic nerve. Tip back my head and my frontal lobes would swash about like hot, grey margarine. I'd be totally fucked. Eventually, all I remember would gargle clear out of my ears in two repellent streams and that would be that. Which would be worseof course it would. He was waiting and didn't like it. Never had. The wait, this par- ticular wait: it was always so demanding, so predictably calculating and lecherousgive it an inch or a moment and it closed on him in a tingling swarm to his warmer parts. It bit round the cartilage lip of his ears, breathed close to the bare of his neck, it was brazen at his armpits and the quiet joints of his thighs, it made him sweat. His body weight stung down unfairly against his tensing prick, while his thoughts sank and dressed to the left with a stocky tick of blood. Rubbing an opened wound with living wasps. My wound. My wasps. Worse. Or stapling my scrotum to the flesh of my inner thighs and then performing Scottish country dances until I feel my socks congeal. I think that would be worse. This was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. A figure of no fun at all, waiting for something which would not happen, could not happen, which should not be considered and surely to God had been set and settled a pathetically long time agoput to rest on the much larger island near which his was fixed. Surely to God this was over with now, surely she was over with. Being sodomised by an ill-tempered man using a plaster model of my own grandmother's arm. That would be noticeably worse. He lurched himself up and off his bed. The bare board floor gave the standard, gritty shove at his naked feet andnow he was paying attentionhe found he could hardly see. He couldn't remember the sunset, but against the window, here it wasalready night. He felt for the doorway, the slope of the open door, and then stepped through and into the other room, peering and wary. Nathan was, as usual, far more accepting of imagined injuries than actual, factual knocks at his elbows or toes. Five steps to his left and he'd avoided the usual vicious clip from his table top, another two and he could safely shuffle forward to palm the wall and find the switch and then sway dumbly under the violent impact of instantaneous light. His dog twitched in its basket, but stayed asleep, eyes ticking and chasing behind closed lids. Outside,Kennedy, A. L. is the author of 'Everything You Need' with ISBN 9780375407918 and ISBN 037540791X.