vale spider

While the spider was burning I had compared the smell to garbage in my mind and thought how terrible the smell was, but not for a second had I considered what the smell was or, for that matter, why there was even a smell at all. I had killed an innocent creature in the most sadistic fashion and not batted an eyelid. The thought that maybe I was possessed at the time by the memory of that spider in my towel, in the thrall of a sort of temporary madness which knee-jerked the murder of this spider into occurrence without my being able to stop it, was cold comfort because it was downright absurd. All I knew for sure was that I was a cold-blooded killer and my actions were as incomprehensible to me as they were despicable, truly as fucked up as it got. 

But the worst of it all was that Kiera’s dad had been wrong that day: I wasn’t vegetarian – I was vegan. I refused to wear leather and attended veganism seminars. I had every back issue of the Friends of the Earth cookbooks. I scoured ingredients lists and knew what was in every numbered food additive. I signed all the AVAAZ animal rights petitions that entered my inbox. The only cosmetic I ever used was organic vegetable soap, on my face, on my body, instead of shampoo, everywhere. I took iron and B group supplements. I was proudly, even militantly, vegan. The room started to do dizzying shit and so I popped two Temtabs which put me out until midday.

 *

From then on, eating vegetables left me with an acrid taste in my mouth, as though I was eating poisonous stuff or weeds. I almost felt guiltier eating them than meat because more than anything I hated posers, and I’d become one. Pretty soon all I could stomach were sweet potatoes, bananas and the odd bowl of porridge made with water. I no longer believed that deep down I really believed in all the sacrifice and the scrutiny or the politics. I didn’t even know if I cared about animals anymore. How could I have?  Vegan, as I think now, had been my epithet for five years, a parenthesis placed next to every utterance of my name. And now it was bunk.

The sight of paintbrushes made my fingers tremble. When I held one I would break into rabid shivers. It meant that anything I did looked amateurish and the act of doing it the opposite of catharsis. I began to doubt whether I actually liked to paint or whether the fact that I was talented and cool people respected me for it wasn’t the real motivating factor in my desire to be an artist.