Note

The day had begun without particular note.

A drizzly mist welcomed him when he left his house but had developed into heavy, plump drops. Using reflections from streetlights as a guide in the darkness, Fib tried to stay out of the puddles, but the damp was already in his socks and he knew the chilly clamminess between his toes would now be with him until he got home that evening.

Shoulders braced against the slicing cold, he shuffled slowly up the hill and through the town. The skinny grey light of the new day wouldn’t start to paint the sky for another two hours.

Arriving at the market hall, he nodded to the familiar faces of the straggle of fellow early starters. These were people who, like him, often only saw daylight when they left for home at the end of the day. He walked slowly through a maze of closed stalls until reached number 510, unlocked the door and pulled open the wooden hatch from inside.

Fib moved less well and looked older than someone of his age should. His clothes hung loosely off his body, and there were red marks on his nose and cheeks where the metal frame of his thick-lensed glasses sat heavily on his drawn face.

The cough he’d had for months was getting worse. He winced with the sharp, dry stabs that now accompanied every bark.

In the damp air inside the stall, Fib opened two large sacks and scooped oatmeal and flour into a large white plastic bucket. He added some yeast, milk and water, and whisked it all together. He put a lid on the bucket and placed it on the ground with a slosh. With his foot, he pushed it next to a blue bucket under a bench at the side of the stall.

Pulling the blue bucket from under the bench, he peeled off the lid and inhaled deeply. The overnight fermentation had given yesterday’s batter the yeasty sourness that gave his oatcakes their distinctive bubbles and savouriness.

From a fridge, Fib took out several blocks of cheese and bags of fat, pink sausages. Opening a cupboard, he pulled out tomatoes and onions, and laid it all on the countertop.

His skin itched. The pale skin of his forearms and hands were criss-crossed with raised scratches from when he couldn’t help himself. He knew he shouldn’t though. It wasn’t a good look for a food stall.

Fib chopped his way through the vegetables with well-practiced efficiency, and then started grating cheese into a tub.

After so many years, he worked like a machine and probably better. Over the last few months though, he’d noticed he tired faster, and his wrists and fingers ached earlier each day than they used to.

Fib’s stall was a market fixture, but the town was changing around him. He was finding it harder to keep pace with cheaper, more convenient food. He looked with powerless envy at the queues at other stalls and the speed they could pump out things like nuggets, chips and samosas.

His oatcakes were a simple, regional dish, but sadly part of fewer and fewer people’s food memories. The young people who got food from his stall were mostly those on a day out with their grandparents.

For each oatcake ordered, he carefully ladled a spoonful of batter into a pan, swirling it until bubbles started to appear. Keeping it simple, he offered fillings of melted cheese, fried sausage, bacon and onion. They were delicious, but each one took about five minutes to make, which was too long in an impatient world.

Each night in a small black notebook, Fib tallied up his expenses and sales. The difference between the two was getting slimmer by the month.

He wasn’t someone whose life had ever really changed, and he thought most things through slowly and thoroughly before making any decision. His slow walk home each night past a bleak and decaying town, illuminated by the light of neon takeaway signs, gave him time to ponder.

The back of his notebook was filled with pages of ideas about ways to reverse the downward trajectory of the stall. It was his one place to be honest, creative even, and think about a different future. His ideas centred around doing things differently, faster or cheaper. Each was accompanied with calculations, but he could never find anything he could afford that would accomplish all three.

The fear of making a mistake and wasting the dwindling money he had saved crippled him, but equally set him ever more firmly on the path of smaller and smaller profits and failure.

Around him, most of the other stalls were starting to open up for the day.

After the breakfast crowd had thinned out, Fib repeated the process of chopping vegetables, grating cheese, and preparing sausages for frying.

Thinking about another morning’s slow sales, Fib dragged his knuckle on his right index finger hard along the metal cheese grater. Instinctively, he pulled away his hand, less any blood got into the food, and sucked hard on the wound. Angry with himself at his lack of concentration, he opened a small drawer and pulled out a first aid box.

Sitting down, he began the awkward ballet of trying to attach the band aid one-handed. Peering closer to see how bad the cut was he noticed that despite the hole being quite large, there was no blood at all. Not even a drop. Odder still, something pale was peeking out of it.

Fib’s stomach shifted as he let the band aid drop,. He wondered if it was some kind of infection, which would at least explain his lack of energy and strength recently.

Bringing his finger right up to his glasses to have a better look, Fib saw the sliver poking out had an almost fibrous texture. He touched it lightly with his finger, but there was no sensation.

Pulling a pair of tweezers from the first aid box, he cautiously poked at it. It shifted, felt numb, foreign.

Emboldened rather than fearful from the lack of pain, he gripped the pale object with the tweezers and pulled. There was a shifting inside his finger. Pulling harder, Fib’s eyes widened as out came a sharp fold of paper with the unmistakable pattern of money.

Like a tissue from a box, part of a banknote was sticking out of the hole in his finger. He stared at it for a few moments, then pinched it between his forefinger and thumb, and pulled with a wince for the pain he expected but did not feel.

The note came out fairly easily, the hole in his finger stretching wide to let it through. It was scrunched tightly into a ball, as if someone had stuffed it in there in a hurry. Opening it out, Fib saw it was an American ten dollar bill.

Carefully, Fib laid the note on the countertop next to him. It was dry and lacked any trace of blood or anything else you would think might be on something you’d just pulled from inside you.

He pulled the stall’s hatch shut. Careful not to use his right hand, he reached across his body to get his phone from his right pocket. Clumsily, he turned on the phone’s torchlight and shone it through the hole he was holding open with the tweezers. It was hard to hold the light in place and see inside, but there was more in there. Reaching in further, Fib pulled out a second bill, then another and then a fourth. Forty dollars. In his shock, Fib wondered how American bills had got in his finger when he’d never been overseas, as if that was any reason for any kind of money to be inside you.

His finger was now a loose sack of empty skin weighed with a nail at the tip. There was no sign of a bone inside at all. Numb, Fib felt his stomach shift slowly again.

Instinctively clenching his fist to hide the sagging finger skin, Fib took his coat. It was still damp from the morning, and he pulled it on awkwardly with one hand. He then neatly rolled his finger skin and covered it with the unused band aid he’d dropped on the counter.

Putting the four notes in his pocket, he locked up his stall one-handed and left.

The walk home was blurred. Fib felt detached, one step removed from reality, and dared not look at the hand he’d stuffed in his pocket. Several times he had to stop and suck in the damp, grey air to keep a growing nausea in his stomach at distance.

By the time he reached his front door, he’d arrived at a vague notion of what to do.

He closed the curtains and stripped his clothes. Walking to the kitchen, he took out a small, black handled paring knife and lay it on a chopping board. Placing his hand next to the knife, he removed the band aid and unrolled the empty skin.

Fib took the knife in his left hand, and poked it into his second finger on his right hand. There was no sensation, and no blood. Prising open the hole with the tip of the knife, Fib could see notes in there too.

He repeated this with each finger, before moving up his hand and then arm. It was all tightly stuffed with money.

Fib then tried his other hand and arm, to the exact same effect. He then carefully poked the knife into his stomach. The pain coupled with the sight of blood dripping from this hole brought a mixture of horror and relief, and served only to highlight the oddness of the other two dozen holes Fib had put into himself so far.

Feeling somehow calmed, Fib methodically worked his way around his torso, shoulders, neck and head, before moving on to his thighs, knees, calves and feet.

After he’d finished, he took his black notebook from the kitchen table. Flipping past pages of sales figures, Fib took a pen and scratched a list.

Hands

Arms

Legs

Feet.

He wasn’t sure what to do next. He had money in him, but no idea how much. After sitting thinking for a few minutes, Fib walked to his fridge and took out one of the large packs of sausages that filled the lower three shelves.

With the same knife he’d used on himself, he sliced open a sausage, squeezed the meat onto a plate and fashioned a finger about the same size as his.

For the next hour, Fib opened dozens of sausages and made replicas of various sections of his body with the raw meat. He weighed them and noted it all down in a new, more detailed list in the notebook.

When he’d finished, he threw the meat and empty casings away, washed his hands, and cleaned off the table. He then started to make calculations using the forty dollars he’d taken from his finger as a guide. Finally, he turned back a page and updated his original list.

Hands $500 each

Arms $3,500 each

Legs $5,300 each

Feet $700 each

$20,000

He wouldn’t take it all of course. There were parts he couldn’t live without. He’d use some to get a machine to make the oatcakes rather than having to do it by hand himself. He’d see about hiring someone to help him for a few hours a day. He knew he was thinking narrowly, and that he wasn’t being very imaginative. He knew he should be able to think beyond the stall, but it was all he could envisage.

In time, maybe he’d even make enough money to be able to start refilling himself with his profits. Maybe.

Fib breathed quickly and shallowly as he rested his foot on a stool, picked up the paring knife once more and made the first incision along his little toe.