Death of Childhood

Do not drink the water. Do not eat the food.

Your stomach is so empty, when it growls the echoes bounce around your innards. There is no-one to speak to, but if there was, speech would be unavailable to you. Your throat cracks.

The impatient hunger you felt before dinner as a child. The greedy thirst on school sports day, sweating under the sun. Mouth parched before exams. This isn’t like those faraway times.

Do not drink the water. Do not eat the food.

But why? There it is, laid out in the party room, cherries on top glistening under the dim light. Water jugs spread evenly along the table for the benefit of imaginary guests. Party pies, fruit cups, fairy cakes of all sizes, the ones mum said were “only for your birthday!” Perhaps it is your birthday; there is no clock to divide the time and you have no notion of when you arrived.

You know that when you reach for it, unease will grow with every centimetre your desperate fingers close in. It isn’t fear or dread, black in your stomach, but an unfamiliar sense of veiled agitation that starts at the base of your skull, and spreads gradually into your chest. Your hand comes to a standstill seconds before claiming its prize, as it has every time before.

Scratched into the wall above, perhaps with long nails like yours, the message: Do not drink the water. Do not eat the food.

You walk away from the banquet table, the eyes of the cartoons on the tablecloth follow you accusingly out of the party room, foil streamers in the doorframe catch on your skin.

You head for the ball pit, finding it the best place for distraction. Submerging yourself in the cool plastic provides relief from the humidity, and the weightlessness eases hunger, for a brief period of time.

There’s no boredom here, or loneliness.

It’s not that the play centre still excites you, but more of a general apathy united with the pain of starvation. You move around as if pushing through viscous liquid, everywhere looks as though your vision is filtered with television static.

You remember the people in your life before. Parents, siblings and friends, you cannot seem to regret their absence, and you miss the part of yourself that would have.

Exit signs glare out from dark corners, revealing empty walls. You managed to climb up one of the slides once, the one shaped like a snake, made to eat children. It has no visible top entrance within the room, instead feeding directly into the soiled, yellow wallpaper. Hoping, logically, that it might lead someplace else, you climbed, often sliding back to the grainy carpet due to the moistness of your skin. When you had reached slightly deeper, it became a very claustrophobic undertaking. Like everything else in the play centre, the slides are child sized. You imagined yourself as a spy inside an air vent to distract yourself from the fear of being embedded in the snake forever.

Eventually, the gradient eased, the darkness lost it’s depth, and you felt that you had reached the top. You were disappointed, not surprised, when you emerged from the bottom of a different slide, the one shaped like an elephant’s trunk, and back into the play centre.

You felt as though something had been lost in the tunnel. Possibly the name of your first friend in primary school, or it could have been the special ingredient in Grandad’s favourite stew. He had made sure to tell you before he died. You did not try to climb back up the snake’s throat.

In the ball pit, you try to feel something other than your appetite. One of the few things you know for certain, is that you have been hungry since you arrived. It has built to starvation in increments, but there has never been a time when you have felt satisfied here. Your legs, stretched as you are, hang out of the pit. You turn each coloured sphere over in your hands. Most are dented, caving in on themselves. You choose a cheerless blue and turn it over. On the other side, a messaged carved: Do not drink the water. Do not eat the food.

Cartoons from your childhood play on a glitching television box propped up in a corner of the room. There is no sound, only subtitles which appear after a slight delay. You wouldn’t be able to hear it over the constant buzzing anyway. The noise is probably leaking from the deceitful exit signs.

You’ve studied the walls around them meticulously, hoping there might be a trick, a secret door, or possibly something hidden behind the decomposing wallpaper. You Ignored the little messages gouged in and occasionally cut off abruptly.

There’s something odd about the running man on the radiating sign that you can’t place, almost as though he’s in less of a hurry than usual. He could be reluctant to leave, or resigned to the knowledge that he can’t. It’s not something you can be bothered to think about for long.

The buzzing isn’t loud, but everything else in the play centre is lifeless and silent. It has induced a sort of continuous migraine. The headache was sharp at first but is now fading in comparison with the pain in your throat and stomach. It has become merely an annoyance, as though a slothful bee is bouncing off the walls of your skull with little motivation to escape.

The area around the television is littered with bean bags, the kind where the floor seems harder when you sit on them. Above the television colourful block letters spell “quiet corner”. As a child you would have frequented this often.

You have a vague memory of trying to count the time that passed here by estimating the length of each cartoon. It didn’t take long to realise that focusing on the figures bouncing around the screen was impossible. It began like reading the same sentence in a book repeatedly, and then the characters started to blur and distort in ways that forced you to look away.

It’s the same with names. Names of the things you loved. People, pets, musicians, books. They’re all slippery and dark in your mind. When you try to grasp them, they overwhelm you, all trying to push forward at once. Hopelessly longing to be the lucky thing that you remember.

But you haven’t lost yourself entirely. You cling rigidly to self awareness as though it struggles desperately to free itself. It is the only consolation to the burning in your stomach, the churning of acid in the empty bowl. The pain of hunger is a living thing, so the play centre cannot be death.

You are not ready to die.

It is a sentiment that returns your mind to the party room and it’s forbidden delicacies. You’re unaware if it is even possible for you to starve, but you feel the increasing pain does not bode well.

Dropping the ominously carved ball, you decide to try again. Climbing out of the ball pit is almost as difficult as you remember it being when you were small. The harder you struggle the deeper you sink, same rules as quicksand. Luckily you’ve long outgrown these things, and you can hook your legs over the side and use them as anchors to pull you upwards. You shake off pins and needles, you’ve found they form as soon as you stop moving.

You move towards the party room, as fast as the atmosphere allows. The feeling of weakness only consolidates your determination to feast. Doorway streamers are ripped from their station by the force of your longing.

As if sensing your intention, the corners of the party room seem to darken, only the food and glistening liquid set on the table are illuminated. You admit to yourself that it all looks fake, chemicals and plastic. No water is that clear, with thick droplet’s running slowly and individually down the side of the jug like in a summertime advertisement. Even the plastic looks wrong, lacking copious amounts of grubby, little fingerprints. No strawberry is so heart-shaped, at least one of the grapes should be shrivelling.

But the smell is enough to convince you. Like the cartoons on the television, saliva hangs from your jaws when you enter the room. Is the scent increasing or are you just hungrier every time you enter?

The room loses more of it’s light with every step you take towards the table. The static in your cranium intensifies, and through it you think you could almost determine a muffled voice. As you reach for the water jug the air seems to thicken, the familiar uneasiness begins to manifest, the message carved into the wall stretches and gapes at you. Do not drink the water, it pleads.

Your clutching fingers feel as though they are moving through wax which is rapidly solidifying. Shadows seem to move excitedly in the corner of your vision. “Not yet, not yet,” is that what the voice is saying?

Perturbation encloses your rapidly pulsating heart and you pull back. A defeated cry escapes painfully from your broken lips and echoes around the room. With each reverberation it sounds more like a mockery. The flickering overhead light pervades the room again, shadows retreat and settle, the buzzing returns to its usual frequency and leaves the disembodied voice behind. A strange sense of guilt replaces the unease. Why did you try again?

The feeling dissipates as your belly remembers its emptiness. You had come closer this time. For no reason in particular, you are certain of it.

You stare at your empty hands. It surprises you that there is still flesh on your fingers. This isn’t what you expected starvation to look like. There are no mirrors or windows, you can’t really remember what you look like, but the body that you can see shows no sign of its internal struggle.

Skin full of hydration, veins fat and blue beneath. You wonder if someone might enjoy eating you, if facing the same predicament.

You turn away from the table, disgusted with yourself. The streamers are a caress this time, you feel pitied.

There is a crack in the wall of the play centre. It isn’t big, it doesn’t stretch very far. But it is new, and nothing is ever new here.

It glares at you from it’s illuminated space beneath the closest exit sign, reminding you of the mouth of a Jack-o’-lantern, specifically the plastic bucket type they sold in the supermarket as soon as September had arrived.

You are cautious as you approach it, feeling somehow at fault. Were you the cause of this fracture?

Up close you can see that it isn’t deep either. There is still no evidence of there being somewhere on the other side of the wall, you can only imagine a continuation of crumbling plaster. You pick at the edges of the fissure, hunger momentarily wiped clean by curiosity. Wallpaper snaps away under your scrabbling fingers, reminding you of the bark on an old tree in a school playground.

After some futile minutes, pain returns, gradually dampening the medley of guilt, wonder and hope in your mind. Your efforts have left you weaker, more parched, emptier.

But something else is different. You feel a certain capability to miss someone, although you haven’t decided on who. Mum? You know you miss her cooking at least.

There is a brief fluttering. You turn away from the wall in time to see the door streamers dance in an impossible breeze. Like an invitation. Your new sentimentality is suddenly irrelevant. You stumble on your way over and glance briefly downwards. Words have been scratched through the carpet, revealing wooden panels beneath and creating an unstable surface.

Do not drink the water. Do not eat the food.

You don’t let it slow you, feeling determination that surpasses anything you’ve ever felt for previous endeavours. You were closer before, maybe you have been closing in further each time without realising.

The carved words, the crack in the wall, the hungry snake, the exit signs are all dismissed by your shrinking mind. Driven by instinct more than anything, you arrive at the table. There is nothing to explain the sudden draft that had drawn your attention back to the party room. The rift in the wall has been completely forgotten.

The room is dark, the overhead light must have flickered out. The white plastic chairs clustered around the table reflect the light from the candles now burning on the cake in the centre (did you ever have that many friends?). You take no time to ponder the new attraction. There is a slice already cut for you, you reach for it.

The uncomfortable feeling begins to spread again, but it feels diminished somehow. The hairs on your skin forget to prick upwards, sweat has dried up. The survival tactics of your nervous system have failed under the shadow of your resolve.

The disembodied voice filters through the static like last time, but the words are inconsequential to you. Your only drive is to eat the food, drink the water.

With extreme effort, your arm pushes through the thickening atmosphere and your fist encloses the cake. The icing slides between your fingers, it’s colder than you expected.

The buzzing has stopped. The room seems to be waiting.

Resisting the urge to cram the entire slice into your exuberant mouth, you allow the first crumbs of sponge to stumble past your lips.

It’s not your favourite flavour, but surely it shouldn’t be tasteless? In desperation your tongue pushes the food to different locations on it’s surface, but your tastebuds encounter nothing. In your confusion you don’t realise that the table is now empty.

Whilst the food was devastatingly insipid, it seems to have done something for your hunger. It’s becoming less pronounced, a slight nagging, you can’t believe you ever thought yourself on the brink of death.

There’s a shape in the doorway. It made no noise but something alerted you to it’s presence. Its form is hard to determine in the gloom but it gives the impression of being emptier than the darkness that surrounds it. The atmosphere is full of hunger again, but it isn’t coming from you.

Without ever showing signs of movement, the shape creeps closer and takes up more space, blocking any chance of exit. It isn’t a mild discomfort that fills you now, but dread, fully fledged. There’s nothing to do except wait. You sit down on one of the plastic chairs.

There’s no pain when it engulfs you, it doesn’t seem to be feeding on your flesh. Instead, it takes your memories.

You don’t notice at first, as it begins with the small ones that you didn’t know existed. Plucking them away like they’re a bowl of nuts before the main meal. It’s mass isn’t substantial, you can still see the tablecloth where your hand is resting, with its eerily staring cartoons. You retain the hope that this might not be the end.

But as the void starts devouring the bigger things, things in your past that have made up who you are, you begin to panic. You body is ineffectual, so you push vainly against it with your fading mind. Everything slips away from you as easily as if it was coated in oil.

Realising you’ve lost you use your last efforts to scratch a warning through the tablecloth, it is the only thought you can summon with any clarity. The shape takes your willpower, your hope, your sense of identity. Your vacant eyes see the hand on the tablecloth blur around the edges and then melt away into a fine mist, revealing the scratched message.

Do not drink the water. Do not eat the food.

In the room beyond, the crack in the wall slowly stitches itself back together.