The Wanderings of Cedric Slip

I balanced on that delicate wire of life.

I definitely was not dead.

But I wasn’t quite alive either.

I stirred from my dank room of dreams. The Great Puppet Master flicked my eyelids open. Strings tugged and dropped at my stiff joints, dragging my body with them. Wilted, I sat limp, positioned on the edge of the bed as my brain pulsed images of the night’s dreams through to my state of wakefulness. It was the same dream. Again…

I tried to remember exactly what the point of getting out of bed was. It had been a long time since anything convincing had come to mind.

My bladder wound itself like a noose around my hips. Good enough. I rose, bathroomed, dressed, brushed, locked and made my way to yet another day at work.

I had taken the same route to work everyday, for the past 9 years. My legs would drag a block around Queens, catch a bus for another 3 (Inner, Union & Boundary) and then walk Hazell, until I sniffed out the fumes of slow death leaking out from under my office door.

The bus was an unnecessary habit adding an extra 18 minutes onto my route but this way I didn’t have to walk through the botanical garden and question myself as to why I was not counting my blessings and appreciating whatever it was that glass people appreciated about flowered places and rerun mornings!

Instead I chose to suffocate unnoticed within hundreds of other indistinguishable bodies in the congestion of morning hooters and exhaust fumes. Nine years of taking the same bus at the same time every weekday, I got to know the regular faces. This was my pathetic way of extending myself, my way of being part of something bigger. On ‘good’ days, I would indulge in a bit of ‘head banter’ with my bus family. Almost friendly exchanges would be passed with my pasture family; I had given them names and filled their invisible lives with details that suited me. It took me years to realise that I had never rolled off of the comfortable sofa in my head and actually even so much as said “nice hat” to Molly Hatstand, let alone offer a ‘good morning’ or permit a smile slide over my lips.

Unbeknown to the Great Me, Today would be the day that I would slip on the Great Big Banana Skin Of My Life.

As I had stepped out of my door this particular morning a fly caught onto the smell of my musty thoughts. It was a thick, buzzy, sticky black thing. It kept flying into me and ricocheting off the side of my head, splitting any logical thoughts I had left, into a thousand punctuated pieces. I frantically swatted at the torpedo like a drunk palm tree in a tropical hurricane. A little inner-voice, hardly heard now after years of either being shouted at or ignored, whispered pleas to remain calm. By the time I approached the bus, a full-blown autistic Kung Fu epic between Master and Enemy had ensued. Verging on being classified as out of control, I slapped my own face as I ducked the punches of my magnetic opponent as I was being sucked into the vacuum of the bus.

The sheep all stared, shallowly breathing in their R2.80c air.

The Great Comedian in the Sky directed from his cloud, “Roll cameras. Cue ‘Slippery Banana Skin’ And…action!” From stage left, the buzzy, sticky, black fly landed bang in the centre of my forehead. With one blinding flat hand, I belted myself between the eyes. The heavy fly fell to the floor in his lead suit of defeat.

And then it happened.

As I stepped forward, I felt myself step out of my body. I separated into two as my extracted self reached out from behind with a rubbery arm and took hold of my powers of observation from the quiet causal place in the back of my head. My consciousness shifted as I watched myself find my usual seat. To my dismay a thin old man with years of disdain wiped across his face, had filled my place. I slumped into the seat opposite him. As I looked across at the man I could feel the warm grimy upholstery of the his bus seat under my own weight. I seperated and stared at back at myself.

My eyes, instantly cleared of denial, I saw the withered tree that I had become, root-bound in my existence that I watered daily with mediocrity.

I watched, as not one of my ‘friends’ even looked my way. Spliced reruns of previous conversations with these people played back in my memory and as I searched their empty faces, I realised that I had never actually spoken out loud to any one of them. I had filled my invisible life with their non-existent friendship. All of my conversations had been acted out on a stage where only barefoot ghosts had danced. The volcano in my head began to rumble as I realised that I was of absolutely no consequence to these people. Even colder than that was the fact that the molten blood that coursed warm through my veins was of no importance to anyone, anywhere...

I sat silent in my black hole as the bus rolled through the city, only the red thump of my forehead reminding me that I existed.

The eighteen minute bus journey took us through 2 sets of traffic lights up Inner Street and then round one of the biggest traffic circles in the city. Five lanes of motorbikes, cars, buses, bicycles and taxis took turns yielding to their right. My eyes looked down onto the traffic as it twisted round the island monumented ironically to dreams of freedom within the city, built by the taxes of cheap labour. The grey statue of a man gazed skywards as a bird took flight from his up-stretched left hand, giving with the hand that he should have been receiving with. He too had concrete eyes.

My club of regular ‘Turbine Goers’ passed below. I saw these people five days a week, but they never saw me, as I bussed above their awareness. There was Puffer, dying slowly and never without a smouldering cigarette hanging from his lips, his car window only slightly ajar.

‘Dolly’ in her blue station wagon with her little Maltese who would, without fail be bulleting about like billy-o, in the back seat, apparently trying his best to explode through a window and bring down the first car that he could sink his poodle teeth into. Go for the jugular Mitzi! Tsiek em!

There was ‘Flexor’ in his black convertible, peak cap and sunglasses, looking like it was a Saturday afternoon every day of the week. Bastard.

And then there was Angel. Always tapping her fingers on her steering wheel and mouthing the words to a silent song. She reminded me of the possibility that there might be light behind the crack in this dark universe. A faint taste of hope, almost undetectable, hinted at my senses that there was something I was not seeing. I just wanted to hear what she was listening to, and then maybe I too could be carefree like her.

We all drove around the great turbine, disguised as a traffic circle as it powered the city with a workforce. Skills and hard work fuelled profits as they drove to and from work everyday. And the City silently sapped the people of their energy, always hungry, always wanting more. We in turn sucked at the earth’s resources through as many products that we could buy in the hope that life could maybe be better than the day before.

I wondered if anyone knew where they were really going. It was as though everyone was trapped in the tide of exhaust fumes and hooters, never to escape the vortex. Where the hell were we all going? Or was it just me that had strayed from the meaning of what life was about?

...to be continued...