Cake Pops and Nosebleeds

“Listen up guys, forget everything you thought you knew ‘bout health insurance. I’ve got some really exciting stuff to share with you today.”

‘The worst part’, thought Tash was that he genuinely did look excited.

His face flush, mouth dry, eyes popping out of his plump muffin of a face, he was bursting at the seams to tell them about health insurance.

“Done,” she said without emotion.

She hadn’t really noticed she’d spoken. It took no time for her to forget ‘everything’ she knew about health insurance, given that during the time she had ‘worked’ there she’d actively done her best to learn nothing, sell nothing and make no improvements. No one laughed. Nobody ever got the joke, no one else ever recognized how ridiculous it all was.

Tash narrowed her eyes to better inspect the ‘Steve’ before her.

Maybe he wasn’t named Steve, but eight out of every ten times they were, and those other two times it was usually a Johnno (and once a Megan).

He wore the standard grey suit, blue tie combo, though this particular Steve was wearing black and grey Nike runners.

‘Quite the rebel,’ she thought, usually it was black square-toed shoes all the way for ‘Steves’.

She stared at his face. It was fat compared to his thin frame. Tash thought he looked like one of the ‘Cake Pops’ he would undoubtedly dish out at the end of his seminar, or whatever the fuck this thing was.

Cake Pops, by the way, are balls of cake on a stick. Someone broke the mold and started handing them out after business seminars a couple of months ago and the suits went crazy for them. Now they’re so commonplace that it’s created a sort of Pavlovian connection between PowerPoint presentations and Cake Pops.

Tash guessed Steve’s background was English or Irish. These guys were almost always Anglo’. His hair was thinning on top. He couldn’t have been more than 30, but he looked like shit. She figured he was probably a drinker.

Then, she pictured him having sex.

Tash always pictured men she met having sex. Not necessarily from the perspective of them being on top of her. Sometimes it was just a few close-ups of their faces in horrid ecstasy or the shape of their back from across the room. It was a peculiarity which had developed in her long ago with the planting of a single idea. At some point in her early teens, it occurred to Tash that every single man she ever met, from classmates to friend’s dads, to priests, teachers and even sweet little old men on the tram, any and all of them, who laid their eyes on her for more than a few seconds, would inevitably imagine her in a sexual way – they couldn’t help themselves. The revelation had made her feel so vile, so often, for so long that she wished every day since that she hadn’t thought it, but wished even more that it hadn’t been true.

As a response, she accidentally trained herself to do the exact same thing back. Not that she ever enjoyed it, it was simply an evening of the scores.

Now bloody Steve was ‘at it’ in her mind. Sweating, all awkwardly placed elbows, hairy shoulders, and grunts. Her eyes rolled involuntarily up in her skull. She tasted old spoon metal and the image passed.

Back in the boardroom, Tash looked at Steve and his assembly of vacant-faced contemporaries and pondered;

‘Who the fuck are these people? Who pays them to come up with this drab shit? Pointless graphs, mnemonics, and models? Oh god! And the acronyms! The endless. Fucking. Acronyms!’

Behind Steve was a poster that read ‘C.A.R.P’

‘Snappy name.’

She figured Steve would tell them what it all meant soon enough.

Or maybe he already had.

It was a gloriously warm, vivid, summers day outside. So they had done all they could to mask the windows. Black blinds blocked out all but thin slivers of blue sky near the floor. The room was white walled, grey carpeted and devoid of any embellishments. It was just like every school, hospital, and jail Tash had ever been in. She figured these sorts of spaces were deliberately designed without character. As sterile surrounds were known to subdue dissidence. Just outside her office building, across the street, was a park filled with old avocado trees and lush green grass that nobody ever sat on. The park was surrounded by offices and office employees who took lunch at their desks. Tash wanted to run out of the room screaming, kick off her shoes and sink her toes into that cool, itchy grass.

It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to determine the difference between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behavior. It was ‘wrong’ to be trapped and shelved in office buildings without sunlight and freedom, it was ‘right’ to have a job. It was ‘right’ to be true to yourself, it was ‘wrong’ to sing on the tram or slap your boss across the face.

The pressure was building in her skull.

She looked around at the bored faces of her colleagues.

‘You couldn’t have found an uglier group of people if you had tried,’ she thought to herself.

‘Maybe they’re all morons. Maybe that’s why this sort of thing doesn’t make them want to dig their nails into their thighs. Maybe that’s why they can’t see what’s happened to them? Or maybe they just don’t care?’

She felt dizzy, there was a knee in her chest. Her head was filling with steam.

‘Ah!’ If only she could give herself a nosebleed.

Tash had never had a nosebleed. She’d hit herself in the face enough times as a kid that if it were physically possible for her to have one, she would have by now. She often thought of the ‘nose bleed kid’ from her first primary school. A lucky, shaggy-haired boy named Ryan Davies, who’d seemed to get one every day. There was usually ‘a nosebleed kid’, ‘a shit-their-pants kid’ and ‘a vomit kid’ at every school. Anyway, there were so many things that could set this Ryan kid off that he could practically have a nosebleed on command. He once even claimed to have gotten one from touching velvet. Tash and the other girls were all banned from wearing the fabric to school. Which was a real bummer, because it was the mid-nineties, and velvet was tre’ chic. Tash used to love watching him. So. Much. Blood. And from his fucking head! Everyone else would just throw him a tissue, scoot over a seat and go on with the important business of colouring. As if someone’s skull hadn’t started leaking! Tash would ask him about it, if he enjoyed it, if he ever stared at himself in the mirror and just let it drip, if he’d ever collected it in a cup to measure. She can’t remember if he ever answered, or just gave her a weird look. Probably the latter. It seemed so incredibly unfair to Tash that this kid, this Ryan kid, who didn’t care about anything, who didn’t feel the way she knew she was able to feel, got to indulge in such a spectacular release whenever he pleased. Tash once mixed up fake blood (she found the recipe in a book called ‘movie magic’- it was just corn syrup and food colouring) and filmed herself as she shoved it up her nose with her head back and then tilted forward to bleed for her camcorder. She’d had to go to the supermarket with her mum in order to sneak the corn syrup into the trolley. For years after the corn syrup sat hiding amongst the jams and spreads looking as odd and pathetic as the entire attempt to create some somatic emotional release had been. At some point in her 20s, it was finally thrown in the bin, one of her parents (after over a decade) had finally noticed it. She looked up one day and it was gone. And all she could think was that after all those years, she wished she’d been there when it went.

“We at A.G.N recorded a 20% increase across all K.P.I’s after introducing C.A.R.P at A.A.M.I…”

She had made the mistake of tuning into Steve’s voice for a moment and instantly had to fight a very real need to run screaming from the room.

If only she could will that nosebleed.

She tried to imagine a situation, a time and a place where the room she was in, the words she was hearing would have sounded as absurd to everyone else as they did to her. In her mind’s eye, she conjured someone with whom she could share what she was seeing and feeling. She settled on a Somali refugee who she’d probably seen in a commercial as a kid.

A girl, younger than her, barefoot, with a kink in her back and a jug on her head, now stood in the corner of the boardroom. Impossibly thin, flies sucked the water from her eyes, but yet she managed to stare at Steve with an expression that was half quizzical, half disgust. The girl clearly felt as Tash did, that this was absurd and gross, its own type of horror. She narrowed her shimmering black eyes at Steve, the air between them vibrated as though she were willing something to happen, anything.

Tash breathed out slowly.

‘That’s better.’ She thought.

She knew she was usually alone in thinking the way she thought, yet never doubted that she was correct in feeling the way she felt. She knew that even if she had been able to, she never would have trained herself to think any differently. She hadn’t fallen victim to the hypnotic effects of routine, or this illusion that there was a ‘normal’ way to be. She’d never stopped questioning and distrusting what need not be believed as truth. Her mum had described her as belonging to a subculture of one- and she had learned to accept that loneliness and anxiety were symptoms of deep thinking.

Tash was a vegetarian. She first heard the word ‘slaughterhouse’ when she was six years old and found out what it meant. She decided she didn’t like it and would rather not be a part of it thank-you-very-much, and, just never ate another animal ever again. Upon discovering this fact about her, people would make fun of her, or worse still often want to argue. As a child, it was other kid’s parents more than anyone else who seemed to take issue with her eating habits. She thought it strange that what she did and didn’t eat should be anyone’s concern, mainly because she knew it really shouldn’t. Ultimately the conversation would always go the same way;

“why don’t you eat meat?” Random kid’s mum or dad would ask;

“Why do you eat meat?” Tash would ask, knowing full well the answer she would get.

“I like the taste,” they would chort.

“Does it still taste good even when you think about the fear and pain of the animals? How unnecessarily filthy and disgusting their lives and deaths are? Does it still taste good then?”

She would then stare up at them with her big green eyes, blink her long lashes innocently and patiently wait for their answer.

“Well… I don’t think about that,” they would respond, smile gone.

“Well, I do. And if you could think beyond what’s right in front of you, you wouldn’t eat that shit either.”

She’d stopped bothering with this and other similar exchanges by the time she was eleven years old or so, it wasn’t a conversation anyone wanted or needed to have, least of all her. She figured dumb people could save their breath, she wasn’t a child anymore and what little chance anyone had ever had of making her feel like she was wrong to think and do as she did, had long since passed.

Her vegetarianism had become an allegory for the way she thought about the world.

‘Why should she pretend to be ignorant of the reality of something just because everyone else did?

Why would people train themselves to not feel and think less?

Just to make their daily life a tiny bit easier.

Just so they could enjoy slamming that disgusting ‘Maccas’ burger in their mouth like a fucking idiot’.

Tash didn’t like it. But that’s just the way things were.

‘Don’t think, don’t feel and go with the flow.

Oh, and don’t forget to attack anyone who’s different’.

It’s was simply more important to people for them to look ‘normal’ than it was for them to be real.

‘Grim’.

Steve was still talking. Tash realized it had been a while since she had escaped to the bathroom. So, without a word, she stood up and left the room. When she had first started this awful job, she had found it near impossible to sit for any real amount of time at her ‘pod.’ (Not a desk, more like part of a desk sectioned off with a foot high partition- presumably so she and the other employees couldn’t peck each other’s eyes out.)

She found it uncomfortable to stay podded, for many reasons. The main one being that it was horrible. As it was a call center, her headset had to be worn at all times. She’d look down and see cords leading from her face and connecting directly into a computer. It would make her feel sick. She was literally tethered to her desk by her fucking head.

She and her fellow hens had no way of controlling the calls that were continuously auto-dialed and force-fed into their ears. A short, shrill, electronic tone would sound to give her a much needed second of dread before the next awkward sales call. It reminded Tash of a seal she’d seen as a kid. It would ‘talk’ whenever a whistle was blown. She wasn’t sure if she had seen it at a theme park, or if (more likely) she had seen the seal on TV at some point, but she pictured that pitiable animal every day. Forced to perform. A brilliant, wild beast in a swimming pool. A fierce hunter handed limp dead fish from a bucket. With a sore on the end of her nose, that nobody told her, little Tash just knew, it had developed from bashing its head against the sides of its Blue Heaven Milkshake coloured enclosure.

The calls were almost constant. You would get off a call and then ‘bweeeep.. Hello?’ You could, however, while on a call, change a ‘setting’ so your phone would ‘fall’ into ‘bathroom mode.’ Bathroom mode was timed. The moment your previous call ended, you would see the numbers start to clock away on your screen, demanding your return. Nonetheless, within a day Tash started drinking glass after glass of water- liters, and liters of the stuff and heading off the toilet for snatched moments of silence and solitude, all the while thinking of those numbers counting away screaming to her to hurry. She realised after a few weeks that she could just cut out the middle-man and slip away to the bathroom, lock herself in a cubical and take a moment, without actually needing to pee. She would pass the elevator on her way to the toilet and each and every time she did she would fight the very real desire to just get in and leave.

Now she had been in the job for seven months she went to the bathroom during the day less and less. The gravitational pull of those elevator doors had become so strong that she preferred not to put herself through the discomfort of resisting them. That, and at her first I.R (Internal Review apparently being too difficult to say) an Obese 22-year-old manager named Danielle had worked out how many minutes a day on average Tash had been in ‘bathroom mode’ and informed her that 12 minutes a day was;

“Really way too much.”

Danielle didn’t need to take calls herself anymore, and instead spent most of her time eating cold Dim Sims and pizza from Tupperware containers designed to hold party sized salads and wiping crumbs and oily skid-marks all over her black covers. Other times she would lumber gracelessly around the office staring at people like a shadowy ghoul, haunting their periphery and feeling important.

“How do you think you can improve on this?” She’d said, staring down at her 50 cent clipboard.

Tash had felt her face flush, not with embarrassment (which would have been warranted) but with rage. Not only were her toilet visits being recorded, but that information was now being used by this fucking slob to try and shame her. And for what? So she would spend an extra couple minutes of an eight-hour shift literally tied to her desk?

“I guess I could stop drinking water…” Tash had responded through clenched teeth. Danielle didn’t look up as she excreted an effortless;

“ah-ha,” and filled in the section on her worksheet under the heading ‘how staff member will improve.’

Tash’s eyes were boring holes into the dandruff encrusted part in Danielle’s greasy black hair. She clasped her knees and fought her hands not to fly up and slap Danielle’s blubbery crème caramel of a face.

‘This is hell’ she had thought to herself.

‘Hell is a fat disgusting face you can’t slap’.

She became aware of the fact that her expression might give her violent intentions away. Her eyes were burning with an unrelenting stare she had focused like a laser of pure hatred at Danielle’s dumb head.

She dragged her eyes down to the floor where she saw Danielle’s feet were testing the limits of a pair of tortured ‘flats’.

‘Those poor flats are the flattest flats I’ll ever see,’ she thought to herself.

‘No matter how bad things get, my existence is still better than those poor brutalized shoes.’

She had then swallowed hard and tried to will a nosebleed, which right on schedule had refused to come.

The moment she was out of the boardroom she felt her nerves begin to settle, she made her way to the bathroom and let her eyes fall on the elevator doors just long enough for her stomach to ache. She pushed the ‘ladies’ door open with the force of her entire body and heard it slam against the bathroom wall behind her as she hurried into a cubical. She then lined the toilet seat with paper, pulled down her paints, closed her eyes, stuffed her fingers in her ears, held her breath and peed. For years, including the entire time she had been in school, she’d had a fear of using public toilets. She found everything about the experience confronting, revolting and above all embarrassing. It seemed completely unnatural to defecate close enough to another person so as to be able to hear and smell the entire process. It opened you up to germs, but worse exposed you to the possible judgment and ridicule of others when at your most vulnerable and disgusting. For years she used only her bathroom at home, and if she needed to go at any other time. She would hold.

Until one day, in first year Uni’ Tash left the house early in a rush and forgot that she needed to pee. She spent the next 12 hours in varying amounts of agony. When she finally returned home to pee, she wept in pain and realized she’d likely done her body some damage. She promised herself she would get over her anxiety and devised the aforementioned method of sensory deprivation to deal with it.

She had learned over time to enjoy these precious seconds of escape. While everyone else looked at the back of toilet doors and attempted to time their bodily functions with the intermittent drones of the hand dryer, she floated into deep space and hovered amongst the stars, or sank into secret oceans to float amid neon creatures and seals without scars.

She washed her hands without looking in the mirror. She hardly ever looked in the mirror. You can’t change what you find there, and she felt people were most at peace when they completely forgot they had any outer-shell at all. So she tried her best to avoid reminders. It wasn’t that she thought she was unattractive, in fact, she really didn’t know what she looked like. It was just that she always felt sort of surprised and disappointed by how static and ordinary her reflection appeared. It was a shock for her to see that all that she was, everything she knew and thought and felt could fit into such an ordinary, unassuming casing. She understood punks and Goths who tried to realise ways of externalising their insides. She had even spent some time as a teenager hanging out with a group of old school ‘crusty’ punks. Only to quickly discover that these types of sub-cultures just created their own constitutions to follow, their own laws to abide and her freedom to think and do as she thought best was even more restricted within the confines of a micro-society then in the outside world.

She walked back to the boardroom with labored steps. The grey carpet was wet cement, she felt her feet sinking and sticking. She wanted to run but couldn’t. She didn’t even know why she had been invited to attend this thing. Somehow her email had fallen in with the suits’ about four months ago. She had already attended twelve P.D.’s (Professional Development seminars) since then. She went to the first one because she had heard there would be free food and she was allowed to be off ‘the phones’ for an hour to attend. The first had carried the catchy title ‘Leadership Development for Core Business Function in the 21 Century’ and had essentially consisted of a Steve re-ordering the words in the Seminar’s title over and over again for an endless hour. Tash had questioned from then on whether it was a fair trade but reasoned that anything was better than actually doing her job.

She got back into the boardroom just as Steve was handing out the Cake Pops.

“Ok ‘P.’ Who can tell me what the ‘P.’ stands for?” He addressed the crowd with a Cake Pop in hand.

There was no answer.

“Think about it guys…. The ‘P.?’”

Silence. He cleared his throat.

“In C.A.R.P.?”

Sweat was visibly starting to build on old Stevie's head. He waved the Cake Pop at the silently staring crowd.

“I guess I won’t be handing out any Cake Pops today,” his voice quivered, he was beginning to sound desperate.

‘This is getting sad’ Tash thought to herself.

Even to a ‘Steve’, who ate suits for breakfast, the ding-dongs she worked with were pretty lame. Tash looked around the room at the sea of faces. They were all fixed on the Cake Pop. As Steve waved the treat, their beady eyes followed it.

“How about you madam?” The poor bastard had chosen Danielle.

‘Good choice old boy…’ Tash thought to herself

‘…that beast would step on her own grandmothers face if it meant she could reach a ripe plum… well maybe you’d need to throw a pizza and a can of coke up a tree, Danielle hasn’t eaten a piece of fruit in years…’

Tash laughed.

Not a discreet giggle.

It shot out of her short and loud like the honk of a goose. Danielle was trying to climb a tree, while Steve, pink-faced and sweating, was trying to tempt her to the top.

“P. what does the P stand for Danielle?” he yelled down at her, his voice echoing ghostly.

Danielle stared up, her expression hungry, “P.P.P…Pizzzzaaaaa…..”

Tash cackled. She might have been able to stop herself if it had occurred to her that she should. Instead, her laughter got louder, her body heaved with joyful convulsions. Something was happening, something had happened. The absurdity of it was all too much. All eyes had now graduated from staring blankly at the Cake Pop to blankly at her.

“What the fuck is all this?” Tash managed to say through fits of laughter as she began to shake from her seat, eyes filling with tears.

“What’s happening?” she screamed hysterically, crying with laughter.

Steve held a wilted smile for as long as he could. He looked at Tash and across the room. Some people were giggling. At what? He wasn’t sure. Others looked confused.

He was losing them. He felt sweat pouring down his head and into his eyes. They burned. His face was on fire. His head was throbbing. His shirt was growing damp.

The laughter continued.

He had lost them. His face was so wet he could feel it dripping. He looked down at the Cake Pop in his hand to see it’s stick was pathetically bent. He must have squeezed it. He was tense. He saw too that some of the icing must have melted into his hand. The pink and red icing was suddenly everywhere, his hands, his shirt, he lifted a hand to his face and stared down at it – he was covered in the stuff!

‘How did this happen?’ he thought to himself, suddenly feeling faint.

It was a nightmare.

Tash looked up, unsure if she was ever going to be able to stop laughing. When her eyes were greeted with a most incredible sight.

Steve stood before her covered in blood.

He was staring in horror at his own hands, his shirt was saturated, his face completely smeared in blood. She had only looked away for a moment and the surprise of how different he now appeared shocked Tash into silence instantly.

“What’s happening?” screamed Steve in horror.

As he hit the ‘P’ in ‘happening’ he spat blood across the room, spraying a white-haired woman in the second row. The crowd’s attention fell to the front of the room once more, to the horrifically transformed Steve. They gasped in unison. The white-haired woman began to scream, just as Steve choked, sending another jet of blood out into the crowd. No one said a word, rather everyone let out their own primal shriek as they launched from their seats and began to scatter. Danielle’s oversized form instantly caused a traffic jam in two directions. People attempted to climb over the folding chairs, which collapsed beneath them and sent them flying in every direction. No one knew what was happening. Steve looked monstrous and nobody wanted him near them. Steve made a run for the door only to have members of the panicked crowd push him back into the room. Everywhere you looked you could see more and more people covered in blood. Danielle, bombarded her way towards the door, flicking subordinates aside. She lumbered with effort, as though she were moving at great haste, but her massive size made her appear to be moving in slow motion. It was in slow motion that Tash saw her ‘flat’, finally succumb to its injuries. As she attempted to pivot her body, the seam of one of her shoes tore and out exploded an angry red pinky toe, as plump as a steamed Dim Sim. Danielle tripped on her own toe and began to fall forward, slower than what gravity should have allowed, her nose hit the door and she slid down to the ground, causing a sore on the end of her nose. Someone kicked a table sending the Cake Pops flying through the air.

Tash hadn’t moved. She sat perfectly still watching the scene unfold. People were screaming, crying, there was blood, fear, icing, piles of people and chairs, arms reaching out clawing to the heavens, desperate, pained faces.

It was a fucking renaissance painting.

Danielle was blocking the exit, she had fallen directly forward and not thought to try and catch herself, pinning her arms beneath her, her hands poked out either side facing up, fingers wiggling pitifully, her head faced forward, her chin resting on the carpet. Winded and dazed, she gasped for air. Tash started at her before her gaze drifted up to the oversized banner above which read ‘C.A.R.P.’

She could have applauded.

“Good one Steve!” she yelled, with the sincerest of smiles.

“My name’s Peter” He gurgled back, staring at Tash incredulously.