Joe
JOE

First published 'Agog' 1989

Joe lived someone else's life. Or so he thought.

He convinced himself that he could not really be such on individual, working in an office factory from 9 to 5: surely he was not that boring. Mind you, he religiously followed the channels of the destiny laid out before him, with glances to neither side. Well, until now...

The wife told him that she loved him but how could anyone love a zombie? It didn't stand up to reason.

One day, he decided to wake up as the real person he felt he truly was. He went to sleep, not before bashing his head seven times on the pillow (a trick that worked better than an alarm clock set for seven in the morning). However, that was the last routine he carried out as the old self.

Waking up had always been a struggle into renewed existence via the bleary regions of brainache, but that particular morning, it was somewhat different. Everything seemed fresh, effervescent, renascent ...

The wife he did not recognize, for she was someone else's. Mind you, she did not recognise him either: and they both made love, as if it were the start of an illicit affair.

Their kisses were searching, their foreplay an extended version of teenage exploration (with the backwash of prurient froth upon the roof of the mouth), ending not with premature ejaculation but in a mutually stunnirrg slowmo orgasm that lasted even beyond the fuel that fed it.

The breakfast she then cooked for both of them was a feast fit for a banquet: jacket potatoes that had been gently simmering in the oven from the evening before, generously knobbed off with butter; rare gammon steaks upon a bed of under-coddled eggs; toasted doorstops smarmed with a marmalade so thickly cut it was tantamount to a whole-orange bob game at the fair; and finally, a breakfast birthday cake where the candle flames seemed to burn upon the seeping fuel of the cake mixture itself, layered jumbo currants, molasses, long- and shortbread and oodles of rum...

He did not understand why there were so many candles on the cake. Surely this was the first day of his life. A ready-born . . . Not tarnished by emerging through the channels of a woman's body ...

But there was something very diminishing about not being able to blow out one's own birthday candles.

He got up and went to work . . . but found his desk occupied by someone called Joe, plugging away at routine tasks, the simplest of which would be beyond him, anyway. He then lost himself in the city, where he would never ever find himself again.

His wife did not even bother to look for him, either, because she did not know he was lost. And never again did she rustle up bumper reward breakfasts for Joe...