Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormack

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      ‘No.’

      ‘Knife thrower or animal tamer. They were my favourites.’

      ‘No, none of those.’

      He was smiling at her now, having teased her along like a favourite child. In all this there was something benign, something protective about him.

      ‘I give up,’ she said. She had enjoyed the little game.

      ‘Well,’ he began, ‘it was very strange. I was the only act of my kind in the whole of Ireland. England too if I’m not mistaken. I used to eat things.’

      ‘Eat things,’ she repeated. ‘What things?’

      ‘Everything,’ he grinned, springing his surprise. ‘Bars of soap, small toys, metal, glass, timber, anything.’

      ‘Anything?’

      ‘Yes, anything. Oh, it’s not unheard of. People eat swords, frogs and so on. I’m even told that in England there is a man who over the space of a lifetime ate a small aircraft. Still, though, the range of my consumption was something else. There was nothing I could not digest. Can you believe that towards the end of my career I was working on a way to eat a house?’

      It may have been all a joke but she doubted it. He was too earnest, too obviously proud of his amazing craft.

      ‘How did you start?’

      He threw up his hands in a gesture of unknowing.

      ‘I don’t know. How does anyone start anything? One day you’re here and the next you find yourself in the middle of something else. I remember thinking as a child that it was strange and funny that people should limit their intake to simple foodstuffs. I knew that the world was full of things waiting to be eaten. So I asked myself what would happen if I tried some of those other things. One day I sat down to a piece of timber, a piece of softwood. I wanted this first piece to be something organic, something that would not be too much of a shock to the system. I remember it well. I can see myself to this day under the caravan, tearing strips out of that piece of timber with my teeth like it was a piece of meat. Three days it took me to finish it. But I kept it down and I knew then that my vocation had presented itself. I progressed on to metal then, small kitchen utensils that I sawed up into little, chewable pieces. It took me two weeks to eat my first saucepan and a further two months to digest it. But again I held it down. It was then that I set my sight on glass. You see, there is a precedent for eating metal. Copper and iron are part of our make-up. But glass is different, glass is taboo. Glass is a killing substance, not for internal consumption. I felt therefore that if I could consume glass I would be at the peak of my craft. Glass was to me what Everest was to Hillary. But first I had to prepare my constitution, toughen it up so to speak. It was at this time that my act became part of the circus repertoire; bleach, soap, timber, metal, that sort of thing. “The Rubbish Man”, that’s how I was billed. People flocked to see me. But in all that time I was only in training. I never once lost sight of my true goal – glass.

      ‘One evening when I felt that my system had been toughened up enough I took a small piece of glass and ground it up real fine, like talc, and spooned it down with a glass of milk. I walked around with it for a few hours and then put my fingers to the back of my throat to see if I was bleeding. My vomit was streaked slightly with blood but not to a worrying degree. I was pleased. However, the trick was no use as it stood. Spooning down a white dust in the middle of a three-ring circus at thirty yards would never work, it lacked spectacle. So I had to work at consuming bigger and bigger pieces so that it would have the necessary visual impact. When the trick was finally unveiled I had graduated to the point where I could eat a four-by-eight-inch piece of unlaminated glass in under two minutes. People were amazed and shocked. In a few towns I was not allowed to perform. Priests denounced me from the pulpit and so on.’

      He raised a forefinger into the sunlight and began to hack the air like a zealot. ‘In the words of the Old Testament – in body and in Spirit and in the image of God was man created. Therefore it behoves us to act as God himself would have us act towards that which is his temple. Such mutilation is contrary to God’s will.’ He lowered his hand and continued. ‘You know, even when I thought those Bible bashers were right my audience never failed me. Night after night they turned up to see me. People seem to find gratification in other people eating shite.’

      He suddenly brightened.

      ‘Do you know that over the whole of my career I calculate that I have eaten enough glass to build a good-sized glasshouse?’

      She would be late for work, very late. But it did not matter. She was now in thrall to this strange man and his extraordinary story. She wanted to take him home and listen to his tale forever, this tale which she was sure was for her and her alone.

      The sunlight lay on them now like a dome and the day was so bright it seemed as if through some magic the air itself was polished. Already the square was emptying of people like herself who had to return to work. High on the side of the cathedral, prising out the infant Jesus, she would remember this as the moment when she should have said goodbye and walked away. She could have walked away and been saved, retaining nothing of this incident but the memory of a strange old man with an extraordinary story. But she did not move. Instead she turned to him.

      ‘So what happened? What do you do now?’

      ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘audiences fell away in the seventies – television and all that. Our circus broke up in the mid-seventies and we all went our separate ways. Some even went as far as Eastern Europe; circus is a recognized and subsidized art form there. But I was too old so I drifted from town to town getting menial work, living hand to mouth. By then I was in my sixties so it was difficult to get work; there is not much call for a redundant glass eater. One day I was sitting here on this very bench, no work and sleeping rough, when a young man who recognized me came over and started talking. I told him my story, that I was out of work and so on. He told me to hang around the city for a few days till he saw if there was anything he could do. He was a student and the upshot was that I was offered a job by the university as a resident guinea-pig. The university is contracted by pharmaceutical firms to carry out tests on drugs and other substances. Sometimes they find it hard to get volunteers for the more dangerous experiments. So that’s where I come in. Seemingly I have built up an almost total resistance to poisons. I’ve even become an object of study myself. Sometimes they cut out parts of my stomach and digestive tract for examination. And,’ he held up his hands in another gesture of resignation, ‘that is how I get by.’

      This was strange testimony and she felt weird hearing it. She had the eerie feeling also that it was meant especially for her. She imagined that this old man had held his tongue the whole of his life until this day when he had walked into the square and saw her, the perfect listener, the perfect receptacle for his story. For a short moment she thought about returning to work; the square was by now almost totally deserted. But she wanted to know more, she was convinced there were things she should know before she left. It would not do to leave with just a partial image of this old man. She turned to him again.

      ‘So what’s it like?’ she asked. ‘Eating glass?’

      ‘It’s difficult to say. It’s dangerous if you haven’t got a vocation for it. It can cut up your stomach as easy as that and you won’t feel a thing. One moment you’re walking around and the next you feel light-headed and sit down. Then you keel over dead. You’ve been bleeding away internally all the time, unknown to yourself. Therefore any nourishment you gain from it is offset by the danger and poison of the thing. In short it’s not much fun. I myself had to go through a long training before I could eventually handle it. Many СКАЧАТЬ