Wait with me Lover, for the Machete Choir

I’ve been reading the headlines about the machete choir and I’m not usually one to pick up the newspaper. I heard about what they did in Islington. The mess they left on old street. The machete choir have certainly gotten people talking. They most certainly have done that. They are all the radio blathers about. The baking hot topic of the taxi drivers.

It is so cold in the mornings I could cry icy tears. There is a plastic shower curtain hung where the glass of my window should be. A beach ball, an ocean and a shale and sandy paradise printed on its surface. Sometimes frost creeps along the ocean and I think that paradise is freezing over. Sometimes I like to think that.

They say the machete choir have a key to every house in London. People have seen them out the windows of the underground. In the cold nothing between underground stations. There was the tube that left Charing Cross full and arrived in Leicester Square empty. A hundred pairs of shoes lined up along the seats, a strange groaning playing across the tannoy system. There is an old tube line underneath my house. There must be rats down there, running up and down the rails like haunted carriages. There must be.

I haven’t worked in a long time. It never suited me anyway. I used to work pushing a litter cart round and round Tottenham Court Road. Every day that I worked I had a feeling in my belly as though I was falling. At Christmas we held a party on a patch of sand by Blackfriars Bridge. I thought I saw a man’s face gulping his mouth under the water. We made a point of not picking up our litter.

There are stains on my bedsheets like bruises. Blossoms of black and red and brown. I know that eventually the machete choir will visit. I am goose-pimpled with fear at the thought. I am not afraid of what they will do to me, rather I am terrified they will see my soiled sheets. I feel flushed with shame for what they might think. In my dreams my sheets are as hard and white as porcelain. I slip down them as though I were being pulled along on a sledge.