Tag / sketch

by Isla

Pills

In which I experience a difference of opinion

Pencil sketch of a Chinese lion by Isla Kennedy - Medically Unexplained

‘I never take pills,’ she says, with a look of constipated pain at the very thought.

We were in the bomb shelter of the GP, walls so plastered in paper notices that it’s beginning to look like a serial killer den.

She chose the seat next to me – ignoring the holy rule that thou shalt always attempt to leave a gap between you and any other occupant (a rule obeyed throughout the land in public toilets and transport services).

She also ignored my headphones and the ‘Vacant’ sign I keep plastered across my forehead when I venture out into the world.

It wasn’t entirely clear why she thought it was a good idea to advocate against pills to someone seeking medical assistance, who would surely statistically be more likely to be taking pills than your average person. Loneliness? Evangelical calling? Verbal diarrhoea?

My non-committal ‘hm’ has no effect.

‘I like to only put natural things in my system, you know what they say -‘ cue gurgling laugh, ‘- you’ve got to treat your body like a temple!’

I feel marginally affronted. I do treat my body like a temple. It’s just one of those temples with giant plates of milk on the floor surrounded by hordes and hordes of rats. Or one of those abandoned ones that’s all dusty statues, cracked floors, and inadvisable man traps.

Oh, and pills. Lots and lots of pills.

I tune back in.

‘… And I get this fantastic health tonic from that Chinese acupuncture place by the station, you know the one?’

I do know the one. It has a real focus in its window displays on curing male genital droop. 

‘It tastes foul of course,’ she continues, ‘but it’s just fantastic for skin!’ 

She runs eager eyes over my face in the hope of finding a skin condition at which to advertise. It’s one of the few times I’m cheerful about the ‘invisible’ part of invisible illness. She bucks back up, undaunted.

‘And it’s all natural of course. No pills. And you know, the Chinese are very smart and wise.’

Ah the sweet, sweet taste of reductionist racism. I find it amusing that traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in China are busy turning liquid medicine into nice white pills in order to increase their reputability. Here, the more eye of newt people can see staring back at them, the better.

‘And I just think that people really shouldn’t take so many! It can’t be good for the body, you know?’

At this point, my tolerance gauge blows a gasket. 

I finally turn to look at her and weigh my words.

You don’t take pills because you are well. I’m really pleased for you. That’s really lucky.

People who are not well sometimes have to take pills. Pills can help them manage their illness.

Pills do not generally cause their illness in the first place. Sometimes they have side effects, but these have to be measured against the impact of the illness.

I open my mouth to speak –

– Her name gets called.

‘It’s just ridiculous how long it takes to get a Pill check here, isn’t it?!’ She scoops up a pale pink bag and heads down the corridor.

When she walks past five minutes later, she wags a prescription slip in my direction as a goodbye.

Exit, pursued by a scowl.

by Isla

The Truth

In which I ponder the importance of being earnest

Pencil sketch of a crab by Isla Kennedy - Medically Unexplained

The kids I taught were obsessed with The Truth.

A poem on mixed race identity.

‘Yeah, but is it real?’

A novel on the Great Depression.

‘Yeah Miss, but is it real?’

An entrail sucking demon from another realm.

‘Yeah, but -‘

They’re a Greek chorus with a brain-liquefying song.

I still wonder why it was so important

That the world be carved into truth and lies.

Why reality held such value,

And fiction was Fool’s Gold.

‘Anyone can say anything, isn’t it.’

‘And, like, if it didn’t happen then it don’t mean nothing.’

I fumbled for justifications,

Explanations of allegory and escapism,

Imagination and interpretation.

I cautioned that reality was often subjective,

And that ‘based on truth’ was not truth.

I was petrified by Medusa stares.

(I took the coward’s way out:

That demon and its fiery realm were definitely real,

That’s why they spell it ‘Real-m’.)

I suspect my former charges continue to split the world asunder,

And eye fiction with suspicion.

But in a world such as this,

With reality so surreal,

I hope they’ve come to detect

The lies that lie in The Truth.

by Isla

Calliope speaks

In which we go down to the woods

Pencil sketch of a hare by Isla Kennedy - Medically Unexplained

*No muses were invoked in the writing of this piece

I find her in a shed. The directions I’d been given back in the town had been about as useful as a raw sausage with no fire, but it turns out endless ambling has won the day. 

The shed stands beneath a slumping holly tree, its walls scarcely visible beneath a mass of determined ivy in mortal combat with a trumpeting morning glory.

I left the footpath over an hour ago, giving in to an unwise spurt of hanger-born bravado, and I’ve been regretting the decision with every thorn/sting/mud-slide/spider-ridden step. 

Glimpsing the shed hadn’t exactly raised my spirits (I think my thoughts may have run along the lines of, if I see one more bloody shepherding hut, I’m digging out the matches). But beleaguered hope is restored when I see the sign hammered out front.

It reads:

‘Stop thinking so loudly.’

After ten minutes of tentative knocking that I tactfully escalate to a crescendo of hammering, I hear her voice for the first time. With the dulcet tones of a rusted car door, melodious as a corvid, Calliope speaks: 

“Can you not take a hint?”

The door shudders open. She stands taller than me, arms folded into taut cords across a wiry body, all angles and lines. Her skin is a papery brown and hangs loose around the strong bones of her face, the long arch of her neck. Old she may seem, but weak she is not. Power is writ into every inch.

It takes over fifteen minutes to convince her that I’m not a) a salesperson, b) an Instagrammer intent on advertising her location, or c) a desperate writer. She pointedly drags the door closed and leans back against it, standing in silence for a long moment, one leathered hand tapping against an elbow.

“Back in the day, we took our pick of the desperate idiots clamouring for attention, all of them with too much money and time on their hands. ‘O Calliope, make me the world’s greatest poet!’, ‘O Calliope, do not forsake me!’” Her simpering falsetto rings with contempt.

“I’d spend a month, maybe a year with one, and find another when the spark dampened. They all made a bit of a racket, sure, but there weren’t too many overall so it was doable. Sometimes I’d hear someone so full of fire and raw talent that we’d end up working together for a lifetime: mutual inspiration, joy, creation.”

Her mouth twists.

“And then times changed. You know what it’s like to have millions of writers out there screaming for inspiration? The journalists, now, ha! Multiple articles each day and it never stops! I haven’t been able to hear myself think since the birth of the bloody internet!”

She stops. Forces her shoulders to relax. Huffs out a breath.

“It’s the same for all of us, of course. Well, except for Urania, she’s got a manageable flock of astronomers with the sense to use a bit of elbow grease rather than cry out for divine inspiration. She can actually live near people, just avoids the ones with telescopes. Me, I’m stuck out here in the bloody woods so I don’t get woken up at 2am by next door’s teenage daughter writing werewolf fan-fiction. Or her dad when he writes his Mills and Boon books while his wife is asleep.”

She gives a hoarse sigh.

“Gods, I miss the old days.”

Her gaze moves back to me. Hardens.

“And you. You come here with your I-was-just-curious line. But you’re just going to go home and bloody well write something, aren’t you? You can’t just keep it in your own measly skull, you have to go and get it all out there.” Her arms uncross to wave in exasperation. “You’re all the same! Wanting something for nothing, no effort, no learning, no time spent on the craft. Gods forbid you actually think before flinging wishes into the aether.”

Dark eyes bore into me.

I drop mine to the mud-splattered toes of my boots. 

The door scrapes open.

Slams shut.

by Isla

S.H.A.M.E

In which we journey to a future far, far (and hopefully further) away

Pencil sketch of a cat by Isla Kennedy, Medically Unexplained

They brought in S.H.A.M.E four years ago.

It stands for System for Health and Monitoring Efficiency, and it took the government years of bullying, bribes and blackmail to force companies into implementation. It was going to ‘transform productivity’, ‘improve stakeholder engagement’, and had to be ‘actioned immediately’.

Workers are pretty damn engaged. But mostly because they’re scared shitless.

It works like this: sickness and absence stats, start and finish times, and hours spent on productive tasks are all monitored by a national system that ties data to your National Insurance number and Health Service number. Everyone – from the CEO to the handyman – has to wear a digitised display badge with stats and rankings, and it emits an ear-piercing bleep every time your numbers slip. Teams get rewarded or punished based on collective performances. Productivity is the only thing that matters.

Once your stats drop too low, you can’t work for a company in the same tier any more – you have to move down to a lower tier company. Less pay, same badges. The sleep at the factory kind of deal with no-break shifts, no daylight, and no real money.

If your stats slip too far, there are no jobs. No one can take on a dud in case they have to fork out for rehabilitation training. S.H.A.M.E Central Services take the offender somewhere for a few weeks and drill into them that they need to be less shit. Then they get their badge numbers bumped up just enough so they can work in the lowest tier. “Rehabilitation” costs way more than most people can afford, and more than most companies want to pay.

No badge means no money and no health services.

The government says that measures are in place for S.H.A.M.E to work for everyone. It says that those with a confirmed diagnosis receive an allotment of extra points on their badge. It says that you can get a badge with larger font displays. Or with digi-braille. It says that anyone who’s fallen out the bottom has chosen to ‘not be part of a successful system’.

The government says a lot of things.

They’re launching S.H.A.M.E in America now, and half of Europe is a S.H.A.M.E zone. Apparently the UK’s been an astounding success case.

It’s like they can’t even see all those people sleeping on the streets.

by Isla

And so it goes

In which I venture forth

I emerge from my chrysalis. It’s daylight and the sheets have transformed into a hitherto undiscovered substance during my time inside them.

The chrysalis stage involves me, the floor, and the bathroom. I usually stop bothering to eat solids after a while so I can promote myself to vomiting in the sink instead of the toilet (pro-tip). Plus it’s hard to appreciate the colour of bile in a loo.

The final chitterings of cramp have quieted down, prompting the cracking of the sheet walls. A twitched curtain gives a blinding indication that the weather (rather selfishly) has stopped providing an excuse for extended pupation.

My butterfly transformation equates to having a shower, my hair no longer being scraped into a grease-sheened lopsided lump, and my skin making First Contact with Not Pyjamas.

It turns out my nine-ish days of sleep-vom-don’t-bother-rinsing-repeat has led me to forget how temperature relates to my wardrobe (I’ve been meaning to make a Dummies Guide to the coats I own and the temperature bands they function in). Still, I understand that a healthy glow is desirable?

In the words of Pratchett, I am glowing like a pig.

I find myself faintly surprised that the outside world actually looks familiar. It feels like the rest of the world should surely have undergone some sort of metamorphosis as well, but there’s the same old pavement with the same old malformed Lucozade bottle and faded ruin of a Quavers packet.

Home, sweet home.

Life outside my chrysalis scrapes the ears and eyes, but also contains delights such as non-frozen or tinned foodstuffs, and other people – some of whom I actually like. (I might not be deemed the most social of butterflies).

There are queues to stand in, the Tube to be delayed on, inconvenient misunderstandings to have with pharmacies, piles of ignored messages to respond to, and those oh-so-delightfully crunchy sheets to wash.

Today is a good day. It might not be long before my butterfly self catches alight but, on the plus side, a caterpillar always crawls from the ashes.