Troy wiped the last flecks of shaving soap from his face and looked deeply into the mirror. He had, as ever, made a hash of it, bristles uncut and soap in the ears, but this did not concern him. Did he look consumptive? Would he pass muster? Or would they walk around him as one best left to his fate? He was embarking on the most preposterous bluff of his life. He did not know what he expected to see, but the worst of what he saw was the stark contrast between the whiteness of his skin and the blackness of his hair and eyes.
He pulled at the mirror to reveal the tiny medicine cupboard buried in the wall behind it. Aspirin; Elastoplast; a ribbed brown bottle of kaolin and morphine mixture that he was pretty certain had been there since before the war, now separated into strata of mud and cement; penicillin left over, and no doubt festering, from the dose of the clap Kolankiewicz had been so indiscreet as to mention. And there were the two bottles of pills side by side. The remaining bottle of Mandrax Clover had not swallowed, and the bottle of Dexedrine he’d got from the all-night chemist’s in Piccadilly last night. ‘Drink me,’ they said. ‘Eat me,’ they said, regardless of form – one to make you bigger and one to make you small. He unscrewed the cap on the amphetamines and tipped a little yellow pill into his hand.
Walking to work, he knew which one it was. It was the one that made Alice bigger, definitely bigger. The sleeping pill had shrunk him, shrunk the world, nest-wrapped him and Clover to the point where reality had pleasantly blurred. This, the ‘upper’, as Anna had put it, stretched him, he was taller – well, he felt taller. He filled the space around him, his stride lengthened, his feet left the ground – he grew to fill the world. The world was the world as he thought it. It existed because he thought it. Cogito, ergo est. And it was just as pleasant a place as the nest had been.