Buzz Kill

It was only a mild irritation as I rested on a bench in the Phoenix Park that late summer afternoon when the blue bottle came to land just above my right knee and would not move. I swatted lightly at it with the back of my fingers expecting him to take wing. And yet, the fly remained. How many times had my hand swept away an insect or a wasp that came too close? Who would ever care enough to count?

Nobody likes flies, not even I suppose those who study them. If a spider or bee finds its way into a kitchen, a person might try to catch it in a glass and release it to safety in the back garden. But I never heard tell of anybody doing the same for a blue bottle. Swatters, glue traps, electrocutors, smushed beneath a rolled-up newspaper – that was their destiny.

I was a little repelled too by the fly’s presence on my leg. This unremarkable specimen of Calliphora vomitoria seated there, waiting, resting. Looking at its strange preternatural eyes, its short antennae twitching, the spine-like hairs upon its body, and its translucent wings, my mind began to canter, then gallop with thoughts of what bacteria it might be shedding on my thigh.

I was a little warm, with my road bike propped up behind me. I’d been cycling in the Strawberry Beds, zig-zagging my way up and down the steep riverside lanes until my legs were left like delicious jelly. Had the blue bottle been attracted to my perspiration, I wondered? Was that something that normally drew them?

I tucked my middle finger into the fold of my thumb like I was about to play Subbuteo. I placed the knuckle of my thumb a centimetre from the fly and flicked as hard as I could. The insect took flight this time, or most of it at least. Its legs and a strip of the abdomen remained rooted to the skin, a small dot of yellow goo on my fingernail.

I wiped my nail against my bike shorts, and I must have rubbed it up and down half a dozen times. Craning forward, I examined my leg. I didn’t want to touch the residue, so I used one of my sweaty cycling gloves like a shield to pull it away. Even still, the fly’s legs remained, stuck, or embedded, like six newborn strands of body hair. I poured some of my drink over it, brushed so vigorously with the glove, that when I looked again, all trace of the blue bottle was gone.

My great weakness has always been catastrophising and I can’t pretend I didn’t have thoughts of the fly having secreted something beneath my skin. A horrible presage of maggots squirming out through my pores began to form and I could sense the foreshock of a looming quake of panic. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I whispered to myself, breathing in through my nose, exhaling determinedly through pursed lips. Exactly like my cognitive behaviour therapist had told me. A slow mental count to sixty. Even still, the adrenalin effervesced.

I took my mobile from my rear pocket, turned the camera towards my thigh, and zoomed in as close as I could. It took a moment for the image to come into focus on the iPhone screen. There was nothing there but for a web of the same soft curling hair that covered most of my body alongside some tiny freckles.

This was supposed to be my favourite part of a cycle. Sitting on a bench, a bottle of diluted orange in hand, looking down over the War Memorial Gardens, a podcast playing on my earphones. There was that mental ease that came from hard exercise, the satisfaction of a light crust of salt on your brow, the sun and breeze drying you. But I was unsettled. And as I climbed onto my bike, clipped in my shoes, and began to pedal again, all I could think of was buzzing blue bottles and wriggling milky white larvae.

I had nothing much to do that Sunday, or any coming Sunday for that matter. There was a half-formed thought of going to the Lighthouse cinema. But I knew it was more likely I’d remain at home, drinking a few bottles of Leffe, watching Vertigo or Rear Window for the fifty-third time. My girlfriend Michelle had moved out three months before. We were both glad to see the back of each other. I was still enjoying the relief of not having somebody to remind me of myself. At least I think I was.

When I got home, I flopped on my Chesterfield couch. I had always wanted one, loved the way they looked. But it wasn’t comfortable, and it looked out of place in the sitting room. I dozed so that when I went to stand up, it seemed like my skin had adhered to the red leather upholstery. Raising myself up felt like peeling clingfilm from a countertop.

I walked to the small shower room of my two-bedroom cottage. The house was so compact that the bathroom had a sliding door. As I stripped off my clothes, they felt sticky too. And beneath my cycling shorts, my flesh was red as if a sadistic schoolteacher had caned me. ‘Should’ve washed when I got home,’ I muttered to myself as I turned the water on.

Of a normal day, I would have stood a while under the warm gush, feeling it soothe the back of my head and spine. I would have taken the shower head, turned the water as hot as I could stand, and sprayed it direct against my lower back and hamstrings. But something felt amiss so that even the Radox shower gel seemed to congeal a little and was slow to wash away. The water stung the red skin of my upper legs and hips as well, and I was glad to get out.

I didn’t dry myself too hard with the towel so as not to aggravate the rawness before dressing myself. The couch beckoned to me. But when I went to the fridge, there were only two bottles of beer, and I knew I would be looking for more later. ‘Fook it,’ I whispered to myself. ‘I’ll go for a pint.’ There was a pub below on the quays that served draught Staropramen, and I grabbed my Kindle on the way out the door.

It was a pleasant evening, one of those ones where a jumper was too hot, but a t-shirt was a little too cold. I left my arms bare though, telling myself I’d warm up as I walked down Manor Street and Blackhall Place. It was the time of year as well where midges would swarm over the Liffey. I remember my hand sweeping like a fan to keep them at bay as I crossed over the James Joyce Bridge. The bridge was in a miserable state of repair, two broken panes of glass, white paint peeling, and graffiti on its arch. Did any other city ever pay Calatrava to design something and then leave it go to rack and ruin?

I walked up along the south bank of the river past the ersatz Georgian apartment blocks and an overgrown derelict site on the corner of Bridgefoot Street. The midges seemed most active there and as I rubbed my brow, my hand came up smudged like the windscreen of a car after a long journey.

Inside the pub, I approached the counter, almost drooling with thoughts of the beer I was about to consume.

“A pint of Star,” I said.

The bartender looked at me, a second or two longer than seemed normal, like he was judging whether he should serve me or not.

“Sorry, what did you say?” he said.

“A pint of Star,” and I pointed towards the tap.

As he poured the drink, I could see his eyes glance back and forth between the filling glass and me. But no sooner would he look towards me than he would avert his gaze again.

“I just need to run to the jacks?” I said, “I’ll be back in a second to pay for that.”

He nodded.

The air inside the men’s toilet smelled of lavender and I peed in the urinal trough, aiming at one of the small blue soaps. As I approached the sink to wash my hands, I could see there was something wrong with my face, as if it were Ash Wednesday and there was soot smeared across my forehead. I leant in to take a closer look. And I could see my skin was alive with tiny midges, trying, yet failing to escape, like they had landed on Sellotape.

I washed them away as best I could with the soap from the dispenser. It took me three minutes at least before the last trace of them was gone. Back at the counter, the barman looked at me once more.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “I was working in the garden.” Hoping that would explain things.

My pint of beer was waiting for me. I drained it in five large gulps and ordered a whiskey chaser to go along with a second one.

“Can I get a menu?” I asked.

“No bother.”

By rule, I only ever ordered a burger and chips in a pub. It was difficult for even the most indifferent chef to get wrong. But it struck me that evening as a little too stodgy, and I ordered sweet and sour chicken instead. When it arrived, I took a bite, but it wasn’t nearly sweet enough and I poured ketchup over the meat and rice. Two tables over, there was a young couple sitting and I could see her knocking her knee against his, encouraging him to sneak a glance. I picked up the bottle of Heinz sauce again and squeezed it until it was empty.

When I finished it all, and after licking the plate dry, I was still hungry. There was a selection of five desserts on the menu, and I ordered two of them – a tiramisu and an Eton mess. Normally, the final course for me was cheese and crackers, accompanied perhaps by a brandy. But even as I walked home that evening, the midges gone to wherever it was that they rested, I still wasn’t sated. In the Centra in Stoneybatter, I bought a large tub of Häagen-Dazs, and began to eat it even before I made it home to my cottage.

I slept well that night, my belly full, but when I awoke the next morning, my skin was itching. It was a peculiar sort of itch too because it wasn’t just in one location but in at least a dozen separate places. It was difficult to know where to scratch first. I wondered if I was having some sort of allergic reaction, so I started to take off my pyjamas.

At each site of formication, there were six or seven ants. Every one of them was motionless. All dying or dead. For most of the invaders, you could see only their heads and trunks; their legs had been absorbed subcutaneously. And as I looked more closely, I could see that each was slowly submerging so that millimetre by millimetre they would disappear beneath my skin. As each platoon of insects disappeared, the itching would ease. And my flesh afterwards seemed otherwise unblemished although the texture was a little different – rougher, pasty, sticky even.

I remember too how I had woken with a deep hunger and how the drawing in of the ants seemed to lessen that feeling. Even still, in the kitchen, I put cornflakes in a bowl, and I couldn’t help but pour eight spoonfuls of caster sugar over them. It was curious how vigorous I felt then, like I had just drunk a double espresso and washed it down with a can of Red Bull. 

I rode my Trek bike in through the gates of the Phoenix Park, crossed over to Knockmaroon, and then down past the Angler’s Rest. My power meter was showing wattage fifty per cent higher than anything I’d ever done before as I raced up Rugged Lane and Somerton Hill. At times, I looked down to see if somebody had not added a battery. I had filled my two bottles to the brim with orange cordial, to which I added only a handful of ice cubes and no water. And back down where the Liffey slithers its way towards Lucan and Leixlip, insects swarmed around me, landed on my body, and then vanished one by one.

When I arrived home, there were two emails from my boss Simon wondering why I had not attended “an important Zoom conference” with a major law firm we had been trying to woo. The messages had that passive aggressive tone he specialised in. And in that moment, the words ‘important’ and ‘Zoom’ seemed ludicrous; and thoughts of sitting the rest of the day in front of a computer, jabbing at a keyboard, absurd.

“Sorry ‘bout that Simo,” I wrote, knowing he hated any diminutive, and closed over my laptop.

Down at my local supermarket, I put a one-euro coin in the slot and took a trolley. In the fresh foods section, I searched for the blackest bananas and softest pears. At the meat fridges, there was a section of cheap produce with fast approaching use-by dates. I filled the rest of my trolley to the brim with biscuits, chocolate, and ice cream. I’d hardly drank cider since I was a teenager in the woods getting ready for the local disco, but I added a 24-pack of Bulmer’s to my shopping.

“Having a party?” the lady at the checkout asked me as she scanned the items through.

“Of a sort,” I said.

“You know this fruit is on the way out.”

“That’s the way I like it.”

I’m in my kitchen now, my chest bare, wearing only a pair of light tracksuit shorts. The radiator and cooker are turned on to full heat, but the back door and the windows are wide open. I have just opened my seventh can of cider though I do not feel in any way drunk. The pint glass stays in my hand because each time I go to put it down, it’s like I am trying to unfasten Velcro.

On the trays and dishes in front of me, the mushed-up fruit is putrefying while the pork chops and chicken breasts, now past their sell-by date, spoil. The smell might once have sickened me, but my olfactory system seems neutered. The scent of cologne smells no better or worse to me than a blocked drain. The blue bottles come from east, south, west, and north in search of the rotting feast. They come buzzing. But they soon fall silent at my insectile banquet.