They had laughed.
“Truth is, I’d be proud of a sporting son. Being able to do the things I never could.”
“You should be proud anyway.”
He knew Angelina was right. His own father had tried to make a sportsman of him. It had caused of a parting of minds that was never resolved—unless Johnson’s sporting failure could be considered an end to the matter.
He’d stroked her hair as they lay half undressed on the sofa.
“Rebecca will be an astronaut.” He’d announced.
“She will not.”
“A fighter pilot, then.”
“Baloney.”
“A mime artist?”
But Angelina wasn’t laughing.
“She’ll be a woman before we know what hit us.”
He’d squeezed her to him.
“I know it.”
Johnson had been able to forget for those few hours, not completely but enough, about the grind and increasing pressures of his accountancy job. The sheer anonymity of his contribution to the turning of the world scared him at times, but on that night he was, for a few snatched hours, almost content.
He was not used to drinking—occasionally, he had a beer or two at the weekend—so the wine gave him a headache. It also caused him to rise earlier than he normally would on a Saturday morning to take a leak.
In the bathroom he flicked on the dimmer of the two lights. Standing in front of the toilet, he squeezed the head of his penis to unglue the opening of their dried-on sexual fluids. He knew better than to cause Angelina extra work by sending his first squirt all over the bathroom.
It was at that moment, his eyes becoming accustomed to the dull glare, that he felt a movement from the top of his head. It was as if someone had very softly pulled a few hairs. He turned around expecting to see Angelina but he was still alone. The tug came again, slightly harder. As he pissed, he reached toward the bathroom cabinet and pulled open one of the mirrored doors. That was when he saw the tube for the first time.
In a moment of frankness, had he been asked off the record, Johnson would have said that until it had started to ‘pull at him’ he’d never really been aware that it was there at all. But, now that he was looking at the thing, a black pipe about half an inch in diameter that protruded from the top of his head and extended upwards beyond his mirrored reflection, he felt as though it had always been there.
It looked very…familiar.
It was that single fact that mitigated any initial horror he might otherwise have felt. His head aching slightly, he’d put two Alka-Seltzer’s in a glass, added water, drank the bitter fizzy result and went back to bed where he snuggled up to Angelina and fell immediately back to sleep.
He awoke alone in their bed to the smell of bacon, eggs and coffee. His head was clear and he felt refreshed. In the bathroom brushing his teeth, he remembered the incident from the small hours.
Glancing at the mirror, he saw the tube was still there. He must, at that moment, have made some kind of muffled grunt of exclamation.
“Everything all right in there, Bob? Breakfast is on the table.”
He spat pink paste froth into the sink.
“Sure, honey. Just fine. I’ll be there in a second.”
He heard the swish of her robe as she approached and pushed the door open. He didn’t have a chance to stop her.
“You find a grey hair, babe?”
She was looking at him and smiling. He still had the toothbrush in his hand, a foamy mouth. Not sure what to do, he smiled back.
“No, but I think I may have put on a few pounds. My face looks fatter, don’t you think.”
She looked at him, at his face. He waited for the shock to register, the disbelief, but it never came. She took his face in her hands and kissed his mouth. When she stood back there was toothpaste on her lips.
“You look better than ever,” Angelina said.
It was his own face that registered shock, although he hid it by turning away and rinsing his mouth out with water.
His wife had a black tube protruding from the crown of her head.
Chapter 3
Johnson tried hard to ignore the tube and most of the time he managed to. He chose not to look at the tubes of his family. He chose not to see the tubes of his colleagues. He ignored the thick cables that showed above every cubicle in the office, cables that extended upward.
The pulling, however, he could not ignore. Every subtle twitch drew his attention back to his discovery. The temptation to touch his tube was strong but the desire was mixed with disturbing feelings of fear and revulsion. What if someone saw him do it? What if he hurt himself?
Other questions followed like plague rats; did anyone else know? Was it something normal that he just hadn’t noticed until now? Why did the kids never ask about it? Was it something that everyone knew about that remained an impenetrable taboo? If so, why
He surfed the net for hours trying every combination of words in every search engine he knew. He found no data at all.
There was one other question too, of course. The one that scared him most. The one he never asked himself.
Chapter 4
Robert Johnson moved rapidly from a condition of enforced avoidance to a tube- obsessive state in a matter of days after the first little tug on the top of his head. He couldn’t help it; tubes were attached to every person he saw. He was prepared to admit to himself that he might have been imagining how the tubes looked—even whether they were there at all—but the tugging, the persistent plucks and twitches were no hallucination. Averting his eyes from the obvious became harder each day and concentrating on anything else was practically impossible. Everyone had a tube but only his was…moving.
“Aren’t you feeling well, babe?” Angelina asked him one morning at breakfast. She put her hand to his forehead to see if he had a temperature and he flinched, the touch a little too intimate.
She’d recoiled, hurt by his reaction.
“What is it, Bob?”
“It’s nothing. Just a headache is all.” He could tell she didn’t believe him. He sighed as if he was about to betray a secret about himself. “I’m not sleeping.” That much was true. “It’s work, Angie, it just keeps getting worse. I feel like I’m doing three people’s jobs and being thanked for nothing.”
“You should resign. That bastard Shuckman treats you like dirt.”
“It’s not him.” Johnson actually liked Shuckman, he was one of the people who understood the inner workings of the company and always cut him slack when things were tough. “I can’t leave. I’m
