the day i met garfield

I remember when Jenny came home for the first time with her leg cut off. Kate was so afraid. She’d creep up to Jenny and then make a small afraid noise and run and hide behind the table legs. I like Jenny with her leg cut off, I feel that she is complete now. But it was sad to see Kate so afraid.

I often wish I could talk to Jenny and Kate. I do talk to them, but I wish I could communicate with them. They probably wish so too. They’re very interesting. Garfield’s the opposite. I have many a lengthy conversation with Garfield, but he is possibly the most pathetic and boring ‘creature’ that ever existed in the whole of my Reality tunnel.

I remember the first time he ever spoke to me. I was on the island and we were going out for a meal that night, and I’d gone for a walk down by the seafront, so I could see Fawley glittering across the water like the fairground where people go when they died if they never became world-weary. I was walking back up and I felt like a reefer so I smoked a reefer and didn’t intend to have another one but then I did.

I had to get ready for going out so I had a bath and I sat in the water going through the things I had to do in order to appear sober, only to realize that I hadn’t been going through those things at all but had been staring at a flake in the paint above the door frame for a few hours or seconds. So I’d start going through the list only to realize it all again.

When I got out of the bath I went to my room and looked in the mirror. I didn’t recognize myself as usual. My eyes looked wrong and my skin looked the wrong colour. It all kicked off when I turned on the hair dryer. I could hear them all talking strange things and banging about and whatever. And then Garfield spoke; he said “nine thousand firemen.”

I later realized they had all been Garfield, but taking different forms and different words. The meal went unmarked without anyone noticing I was stoned which often happens as to an onlooker I was probably no different.

The next day I was walking round the DIY shop with mum and he talked to me again, only he made more sense this time. I talked to him back and he told me that if I was going to speak to him could I please speak to him out loud rather than in my head or not at all, so I did because back then I was a slave to un-people like that. I still talk to them out loud on principle, but not because they want me to.