Pure O by Daniel Payne

The cashier asks me if I want the receipt and I picture a cat locked inside a washing machine. The terrified cat tries to stay upright as the drum fills up with water and starts to rotate. It is too late. He scratches at the door. I have to make a grunt and a gesture with my hand to cancel out the thought before saying out loud I’m sorry.

The cashier (who’s been waiting for my reply for a long time and still wants to know whether I want the receipt or not) thinks that this apology is for him but really it is for the poor cat. I’m so sorry that I cannot free you from the washing machine. I don’t know why I created this horrible death for you.

Sometimes if my grunt is powerful enough the cat might evaporate into the moon, so at least that is something. At least there is a way out of the washing machine so long as I make the right noises and move my hand in the correct way that only I know how. It is a great burden being as powerful as this. I love my boyfriend very much.

He is at home with a surprise planned for me. An invite to somewhere new in East London. I am worried it is going to be something trendy, but that doesn’t sound like us. He said it is something unexpected. He can’t possibly know me if he thinks I like the unexpected. But I guess I’ve never known anyone and neither have you.

As I enter the block of flats where we live somebody’s daughter runs underneath my arm and barges in. Her mum calls out: Sorry! Amy, slow down! I smile at them. My arm carries on holding the door open for the mum to catch up. A huge tumor starts to grow in my armpits. I get in the lift and squash my arm up against my sides to cancel out the beginning of the disease which I have accidentally brought into existence by thinking about it. This squashing technique should work for now. That’s probably how cancer works. I should let Macmillan Cancer Support know about this.

Are you ready? says Jack. He is wearing a smart shirt and is smiling the way I smiled at the mum. I change into a smart shirt too. Sometimes we look more like brothers than boyfriends. I carefully select the right clothes to please the people around me, since I am only the sum of things other people desire. Once you’ve taken everything else away, what even are we, me and Jack?

We take the overground without holding hands just to avoid the scenario in which a straight person smiles acceptingly at us and we have to feel grateful. We get off at Hackney Wick and I am picturing myself and Jack being dead because this will one day happen. I picture our slumped bodies lifting up from wherever we died as we both fly to the moon. Our tired bodies land at opposite ends of a long table, a black lake behind us made of all the dissolved nightmares I have had in my life.

Jack will say something like: I never had any idea what was going on in your head for most of the time, and offers me an apple pie that I’ve said a thousand times I don’t like. I think that might end up being our final conversation. Something stupid about what we didn’t become. More disappointed about that than being dead. A wise black dog used to come to my parent’s garden when I was little and I’d feed him crumbs from a custard cream. He was called Merlin and I loved him and he loved me. Now Merlin notices I am thinking of him. He is mostly maggots. His disembodied head swivels towards me and says: How much do you miss me, on a scale from “nothing” to “completely”?

* * *

Anyway, welcome to my short story. I hope you are doing as okay as can be expected in these difficult times. I am not doing okay, although some of the cat imagery has probably got you thinking that already. We’ve made it quite far and there’s no going back now, which could be a metaphor for my relationship if only I can find a way to work it into the text naturally.

I had planned this story about a kebab house that you’re reading when my boyfriend was at work and I had to piss in empty plastic bottles because I couldn’t face seeing our housemates. I can’t take the piss-bottles to the toilet to tip the piss away in case somebody sees me. I could throw them in a bin in the street but someone will get murdered around the corner and then as a result of the search for evidence they will find my bottles of piss and get my DNA and after about five days there will be a news conference where the inspector she’ll say something all sullen and stern at the camera in a Scottish accent like:

we
have
found
the
murderer’s
piss


and then there will be a volunteer DNA testing scheme in the local area to rule people out and I’ll be too scared to bring myself forward but then I will be the only one in the postcode that didn’t volunteer so by process of elimination they’ll get a court order to test my DNA and because it would be just my luck I would have brushed passed the victim accidentally whilst in Tesco buying Marmite the night before the attack.

So they’ll match my piss with the dead body and I’ll be in an interview room trying to say no I did not murder him in a way that sounds believable, and there’ll be a police GP lingering outside waiting for the interview to be finished so he can pop in and tell me that they found inside my piss a rare and incurable form of armpit cancer with just days left to live. I never should have left the door open for that mum. She would have had her own key. This is what you get for being kind to people.

“Are you alright? What are you thinking about?” says Jack.

Instead of telling him that I am fantasising about being arrested for a crime I have not committed by the accidental discovery of my piss near an imagined crime scene, I say that I am fine. He points at the entrance to the kebab house where we have arrived. He passes me his phone and shows me the invite:

You are invited to the Kebab House Confessional!
East London’s brand new hangout
Where everybody says what’s on their mind...

It was even trendier than I had feared. Why are we wearing smart shirts for a kebab house? We step inside and there are several two-person tables placed in a circle around a rotating meat stick in the middle. A handsome bearded man carves off chunks of meat and passes them to the waiting staff. They take the meat to a buffet cart and add pitta and salad. I don’t eat meat but apparently there is a vegetarian option. I hope it’s a roasted red pepper stuffed with rice because I’ve never had one of those.

Jack takes his first bite and garlic mayonnaise drips down his arm. I try a falafel which is greasy and delicious. I always thought of us as hedgehogs, me and Jack. When we say too much or get too close our prickles end up stabbing each other. So we shuffle backwards where it is safer. And then the cold drives us back towards each other, longing to get stabbed again. The weird dance of hedgehogs in love. What is the best distance between one person and another? How much of yourself do you share and how much do you keep private?

I wash my falafel down with a diet coke. Now I imagine the children that I don’t have stuck in the washing machine. Their screaming faces. I make an animal noise which I disguise as a cough. For now the children are safe. In the kebab house confessional, everybody says what’s on their mind, whispers a sinister man in a black hat who has appeared at our table.


We turn away from him, but wherever we turn, he reappears. This is the Kebab House Confessional where everybody must say what’s on their mind. The washing machine fills with blood. It leaks onto the floor and drips down into the flat below who call the police. The handsome man carving meat accidentally carves a bit of his own finger off and says Fuck!

“You know,” I say, “I don’t like your family”. Jack turns red. My socks feel soggy. My skin starts to loosen. I hear a low drum beating in sync with my pulse.

“I already knew that,” replies Jack. “And I never want to get married. It’s just not something that interests me”. I feel an internal lurch. It’s as if something inside me has turned into something else. The handsome bearded man is now deliberately slicing his whole arm off.

“I once stole a packet of crisps from the newsagents. I pretended I have a university degree but I don’t. I have intrusive thoughts that are horrible but must be pleasurable also somehow, since I made them up. Today I am haunted by a cat stuck in a washing machine.” I take another bite. “Sometimes I hate you”.

I feel my voicebox start to slide out of my throat. I look down to see my legs are missing.

* * *

And so our clothes fall off in the kebab house. Our bodies melt into our meals. Jack’s lips on the floor try to explain that it isn’t good enough between us and that sometimes he imagines being with someone else. Then Jack’s lips disappear. I say they are his worst feature before mine disappear too.

“Iflepb lglub yglgb,” I say.

“Mflpblebub tflblb,” Jack says.

We are both scared now but can’t express it. What’s left of my hand tries to hold his but from your perspective it just looks like a splashing puddle. We spill out onto the street and try to evaporate into the moon. It isn’t warm enough, so we slip down a drain and become the sea.