Read Online Half Broken Things by Morag Joss - Free Book Online Page B

this extra battle could, as it had this time, delay him by several more days.
    He was even thinner, because eating, like washing, was another thing that required unimaginable effort. When he absolutely had to, he would manage to trudge up to the shop and buy a half dozen or so cans of soup and a packet of bread. Over the next few days, as and when he became aware of a need to put something in his stomach, he would eat soup straight from the tin, cold. Neither the sweetish, half-rotten vegetal smell that came from it, the sticky feel of the soft lumps in his mouth nor the message his stomach would afterwards send, of being sickened rather than satisfied, seemed to have much to do with him. Nor did the accruing pile of opened and unfinished tins by the side of his bed, whose metallic stink soured the room.
    As if bitterly half-in and half-out of an affair with death, he lay for days waiting to see if it would come to him, in the belief that he would let it. Uninvolved, he would put up no resistance, but nor would he seek it out. So he thought about being dead without planning suicide, which would have required of him a degree of inventiveness and purpose of which he was incapable. To engage with the problem of his body for long enough to bring about an end to its improbable beating, breathing, filling and emptying seemed overwhelmingly effortful; even the smallest deviation from habit required what felt like impossibly original thinking. And it was that, rather than pride or even a vestigial notion of decency, that made him get up when he needed to pee. Dimly he realised that a wet mattress might eventually force him to get out of bed and stay out, but his torpor was so deep that he would put off the moment until he could barely stand up straight and then, with a nearly bursting bladder, he would stumble to the bathroom.
    This time he ate his soup perhaps once a day, and slept off and on. At intervals, over the top of his bedclothes, he stared at the television with the sound off. Because he did not have a television licence and guessed (for he had no idea how these things worked) that a detector van must pick up the noise somehow, he was in the habit of watching in silence. And as he was anyway unable to connect with anything he saw, the silence was also a protection against the incomprehensibility of what was happening on the screen. He watched faces: listening, talking, laughing, shouting, weeping; seeing not just strangers but beings whose functioning he observed but could neither understand nor imagine sharing. He watched and half-wondered why it was that he was so different, for it was obvious that he lacked some fundamental understanding that bound all of them together, and excluded him. Where they had opinions, hopes, ideas, peculiarities, quirks and eccentricities, he detected in himself neither feature, form nor preference. He was unbearably flat and weightless. When he slept he sometimes had dreams in which he was not a person at all, although what he might have been instead was never clear. In other people it seemed that a river flowed, some animating liquid seemed to bubble and burst along their veins whatever they were doing. His were dry, still, and silent. If he was filled with anything, it was dust. Michael sensed in himself an empty space that in other people was occupied by any number of reasons for living.
    Early one morning before it was light, on the way back from the bathroom, he picked up his copy of
Heidi
from the floor and took it back to bed. It lay there next to him unopened for several more hours, but he touched the cover from time to time, and thought about the story. It was one of his favourites, along with
David Copperfield, Oliver Twist
and
A Little Princess;
books that he had been given years and years ago, in special editions for children, by Beth. She had been no reader herself so she had given them to him just to encourage his apparent interest in reading. In order to dislodge the thought of