2003-06-09 12:19 pm

Madmen

While delivering the post today I came across an open door. There was a man inside the house, sitting on the floor of a gloomy kitchen.

He was quite fat, with a bushy beard and long, wild hair. I think he was about 50 years old. He only had one leg and he was naked from the waist down. I could see the rubbery pink stump of his leg, and his grey penis drooping amongst a tangle of pubic hair.

"Hello!" I said brightly.

"Hello!" he said.

He made a half hearted attempt to pull his t-shirt down over his groin. I looked away.

"Post!" I said, holding out his bundle of letters.

"Ah right," he said. "Would you mind just putting it on the floor?"

"No problem."

"Thanks."

"See you!"

"Bye."

Later on at work I joked about the poor devil. One of the other guys on my sector referred to him as the Shite Arsed Cunt - apparently because he found him smearing himself with his own shit one day. I laughed at this as well. I genuinely found this monstrous description amusing. It was funny precisely because it was so monstrously cruel.

At my meeting there are many people with mental health problems. Perhaps I am one of them. There is a man who is perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic. He is one of the most unutterably beautiful people I have ever met.

Yesterday a Chinese man got onto the bus and I stared at him, suddenly wondering to myself: "Where did you come from?"

And as I did not know the answer, I decided that the Chinese man did not exist.

And as he did not exist, I reasoned that it would be mad to tap him on the shoulder and ask him where he had come from.

You cannot tap someone on the shoulder if they do not exist.

These thoughts occurred to me very quickly and then I laughed at how mad it all seemed. I felt a bit relieved, as well. That I could laugh at it.

Laughter, I remembered, is a sign of horror as well as humour.

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