Chewing the Cud by Andrew Kirby
It was with only mild surprise that Brian registered the fact that he had absolutely no idea how old he was. It seemed such a long time since things like that had even mattered that he absently wondered why he happened to be thinking of it in the first place.
Whatever age he really was, he was certainly too old, he thought, to be taking up chewing gum. It was a disgusting habit; so uncouth, so noisy, so not like him.
‘But at least it won’t kill you,’ the nurse told him, in that annoying sing-song voice of hers. Whenever Brian tried to remember something important, he always remembered it as though that damn nurse was saying it. Her voice annoyed him so much - with her elaborately Scottish rolled r’s and funny colloquialisms like ‘oaksters’ for armpits – that it somehow lodged itself in that part of Brian’s brain which still remained quick. Oh, his temper was alright, thank you very much. While his legs now moved as though they were struggling through an atmosphere of moulded jelly, while he couldn’t even remember mundane things like what day of the week it was, or when he had to put the bins out, or how to stop the damn microwave from beeping, his temper remained quicker on the draw than John Wayne on speed.
She handed him a small packet which looked like all of the other vitamin and tablet boxes she’d previously peddled. Brian turned it over in his hands, hoping that the disgust he felt would be written across his face. Just to reinforce the message, he spat the word out at her: ‘disgusting.’
The nurse, who was pretty until she opened her mouth – well, pretty if you like that kind of wild ginger-haired look of the young Highland Cow – leaned back on her chair a little in order to avoid the flecks of spittle which flew out of Brian’s sneering mouth.
‘Try one,’ said the nurse, a look of insistence in her watery-blue eyes. She seemed over-keen; perhaps she was on commission from one of the pharmaceutical companies, thought Brian. ‘They’re just like your Extra Strong mints, only you chew them, not suck them.’
‘Hmmmn,’ said Brian, who could suck like a damn Hoover now he’d had his teeth fixed. ‘What about my dentures? Won’t they get stuck in them?’
‘Not if you’re careful,’ said the nurse, impatiently, he thought. ‘You don’t chew them all the time; you tuck the piece of gum just up here and let the nicotine seep into your gums.’
She pointed to one of her own rosy cheeks as though to indicate where Brian should store his half-chewed food if he was a good little hamster. It sounded disgusting.
Brian was still examining the packet of gum as though he’d just been handed a vial of poison. More than anything, he wanted to be out of this claustrophobic, sterile hell-hole and down the Duck and Drain dragging on a snout. Only – and he remembered it as though the damn nurse was telling him – ‘you can’t smoke inside now, Bri.’ Oh yes, that was right; you had to go into the beer garden to smoke these days didn’t you? They were making it harder and harder just to keep up the habit these days. Especially for pensioners like him.
‘Look; they’ll help you break the habit,’ said the nurse. ‘Chew one of these pieces whenever you feel the urge to smoke and Boab’s your uncle.’
‘Who’s Boab?’ Brian had asked, just because he was feeling particularly pedantic.
‘Your father’s brother,’ said the nurse, mirthlessly. ‘Do you want to crack the addiction or not? If you do, then I’m here to help you…’
‘Whoa there missy,’ said Brian, for some reason in the style of a Texan ranch-holder talking to one of his herd – maybe it was the Highland Cow hair. ‘Now wait a minute there; I never said I was addicted!’
‘Brian, you told me that you’d been smoking for the best part of fifty years…’
‘Yes, but I’m not addicted. I just like the feeling of a nice fag after my tea, or with a pint, or with a coffee.’
‘And when you’re walking the dog and after sex?’ said the nurse.
Brian had never felt so embarrassed in his life; how had she known?
Here’s one thing Brian knew: he was damn well old enough to be able to say ‘I’ve got pairs of socks older than you,’ to the young whipper-snappers outside the post office who teased him about the constant chewing, and old enough for them to believe him. They shouted things about him ‘chewing the cud like a cow’, which he thought was actually pretty observant and inoffensive compared to some of the other things they came out with.
Another thing: Brian was certainly old enough for pals down the Duck and Drain to say to him: ‘You look like you had a long paper-round when you were young ‘un. Is that how you pay for your chewing gum habit?’ But the last laugh was on his pals, of course. While they were outside freezing their nuts off, catching all kinds of diseases from being rained on all the time, he was tucked up inside with his newspaper and his pint, chewing on the cud.
It hadn’t taken him long to wean himself off the ciggies. Kim had banned him from smoking in the house; he couldn’t smoke in the pub; people looked at you funny if you tried to spark up near kids. All the fun had been taken out of it, and, after all, like he’d always told everyone who’d listen, he hadn’t been addicted in the first place.
Of course, it was annoying having to go down and see that damn nurse down the clinic every Monday to get his nicotine gum on prescription, but who cared? He wasn’t spending a fiver every day on the tabs. Sure the gum was fairly expensive – the company that made it were onto a killing there – but just give it a few more weeks and he’d cut down, maybe limit himself to a couple of sticks of gum a day.
But Brian chewed and chewed; repetitive motion of his jaws waxing on and waxing off making his clenched jaw muscles stronger than they’d ever been, even when he had teeth. And sure, he had always had an underbite, but the more he chewed, the thicker the bottom side of his face started to become. He felt that it gave him the kind of aggressive look that meant he wouldn’t be approached any more. His habit was starting to pay off in ways that he hadn’t anticipated.
Kim had a habit of her own which, in its own way, was more annoying than cigarette smoke. She had a habit of ‘just doing a bit of tidying’; she was always throwing half-full packs of tabs that he’d left on the arm of the chair overnight into the bin. Now, with the chewing gum, she was always hiding it away in the medicine cabinet or putting it under the sink with the cleaning products. Brian had the sneaking suspicion that the woman didn’t really know what it was or why she kept finding packs of it lying about the house.
What was particularly annoying for Brian was when he’d come downstairs of a morning and not be able to find a single piece of gum. He found himself becoming irrationally angry, as though Kim had somehow, in the middle of the night, withdrawn his nose and left him without the correct equipment to breathe. Only when he’d thrown out all of the tablets in the cabinet and found that elusive gum could he relax and set about the day.
‘What’s all the fuss about?’ said Kim, upon finding him wedged underneath the sink one morning, up to his elbows in the mop bucket in desperate, dishcloth-grey hope.
‘Where’ve you put it?’
‘Put what? If you told me what you were tearing the place apart for then I might be able to help…’
But something in Brian told him that he wasn’t to tell her; that something used a predictably lilting Scottish accent. For some reason he didn’t want her to know about the gum. It was his thing; his precious.
‘Are you looking for your chewy?’ asked Kim, and it annoyed Brian beyond comprehension that she’d referred to his precious as ‘chewy’.
‘Nicotine-replacement,’ he corrected, voice echoing off the pipes of the sink.
‘Look at you, Bri; wallowing under the sink like some… some junky,’ said Kim, sadly.
Brian walloped his head on the underside of the cupboard in his haste to get out of there and… and… and… He’d been going to give the woman ‘what for’, hadn’t he? He suddenly realised that her silent unwillingness to understand his precious was the kind of detail which could be described in lawyerly circles as a deal-breaker. If that was how she felt about things, then surely he had grounds for ‘unreasonable behaviour’ on her part. Instead of raising a hand to her, or even exchanging sharp words, Brian sloped out of the room and climbed the stairs. He was sure that he had an old suitcase in the guest room in which he could pack his things.
Looking at himself in the mirror in the guest room, Brian couldn’t work out if he was in his seventies but looked rather old for his age, or rather whether he was an octogenarian who had shrunk into his age well, like those old cowboys who used to bath in their jeans so they’d get a tight-fit. There were only two problems, so Brian could see, with his face. The first was his jaw-line. The second was his damn cheek-bones. For some reason, they’d grown absolutely massive, as though he had some kind of dormant deformity which had only bothered to wake itself up when he’d reached the age of… eighty?
Or maybe it was something else, he suddenly thought. Maybe it was the fact that his jaw was hammering away like a piston, up into those cheek bones, chewing on the cud all day long. He was turning into a monster.
The thought alarmed Brian more than he would have ever let on to anybody. He was genuinely scared of these over-sized cheeks and Desperate Dan jaw-line that he had developed. He had the sudden image of the Scottish nurse as some kind of demonic drug dealer who’d been so worried that she was losing a good customer that she’d introduced him to some other fix so he could get his kicks. If only she was a dealer, thought Brian; then at least he’d be able to buzz her on her mobile and get her to drop off some more gum. God, he needed a piece of gum.
ENDS
Comments
There are no comments for this entry yet.