NEWSLETTER

Scurvy Boy
I was 19 and living in a glorified toilet block with two mates—Liam who didn’t really live with us but kept his mattress in the lounge and paid rent sometimes, and Big Ben who was the complete opposite: A giant hermit with a surly disposition. Ben spent his days lying on Liam’s mattress, listening to hardcore, and farting. We had lost the key to the front door, and the lock wouldn’t open without it. I would come home drunk, have to remove the slats from the window, climb in, and pass out to the sounds of the motorway on my rotting futon.

Even though I dressed almost entirely in hand-me-downs, I decided I needed new shoes. The problem was that after paying rent, buying food, and getting drunk my benefit was long gone. I definitely needed new shoes but I also needed new clothes, a bed, toothbrush, etc., and after a week of racking my brain I came up with a brilliant plan. If I stopped buying food for a month I could save the £150 or so I needed. For the next four weeks, my already shitty diet was reduced to whatever I could steal and flour and water—which I would fry up and eat with tomato sauce (this took care of needing to buy toilet paper too). The saving was going well.

The weird thing is that leading up to contracting scurvy I felt fine. It was two in the morning—I was watching some TV and jacking off on Liam’s mattress. After I came I felt weak. I tried to stand up but my legs could barely support me. I stumbled into my room, collapsed on my bed, and fell asleep. The next day I felt like someone had tenderized me with a baseball bat. You know when you get a blister on your tongue? The whole inside of my mouth felt like that. I could push my tongue into the roof of my mouth and spit out blood and pus. Back then I had a face full of piercings (it was the mid-90s) and all the holes became infected overnight. After a couple attempts to stand up, I crawled out to the lounge. Ben, who was farting and eating margarine straight from the tub, shot me a dirty look and edged away from me. It was obvious he was gonna be of no help and the phone had been cut off months ago. I crawled back into my room and lay there spitting blood and passing out.

All presenter photos by Patrick O’Dell. Styling by Sara McCormack. Alberto: Y’s suit, Yves Saint Laurent shirt, Guy Laroche tie.

The next day this girl I had been seeing showed up. Unfortunately this particular girl not only had a drug problem but was also a complete sadist. She stood in the doorway looking at me disapprovingly. “What’s wrong?” she asked as if my sickness was some kind of insult to her. “I don’t know, but I feel like I’m gonna die.” She started fishing round in her bag and pulled out a couple bottles of pills.

“Take these.”

“What are they?” I held up the bottles, but my eyes hurt too much to make out the writing.

“I don’t know, some shit. It’ll make you feel better.”

I swallowed a couple of each pill.

“Can you call my mother?” I asked in a voice so pathetic I didn’t recognize it as my own.

“Sure, when I get home.”

I felt the drugs start to take effect. For the first time in 24 hours I wasn’t in total agony.

For the next two days I kept popping pills and becoming detached from the sickness. I was like a witch doctor examining new symptoms with a morbid fascination. If I scratched myself lightly on any part of my body, it would come up in pus-filled welts minutes later. I also discovered scars that had been healed for years had started to reopen. All this was fascinating until the drugs began to wear off. Then I was gripped with terror. I was thinking about giving Ben instructions for my funeral when my girlfriend turned up again. She looked wasted and her eyes kept rolling around. When she talked, it sounded like a record on the wrong speed.

“Are you still sick?”

“I need to see a doctor, did you call my mum?”

“No, I forgot.” she said, flopping on to the end of my bed.

I forced myself to sit up to try and give what I was about to say some impact.

“Please, I’m really sick. You have to get someone to take me to a doctor.”

She sat there staring at me blankly as her drug-fucked mind registered this new information. After ten seconds she said OK.

My mother turned up the next day talking about how some weird girl showed up at the house. I think at first she thought I was just wasted—I had been eating pills like Tic Tacs and wasn’t very coherent. But when she saw the welts and blood she started to take me seriously. The doctor was shocked. After consulting a couple of books, she looked at me with an expression which was one part concern, one part amusement, and said, “I think you have scurvy.” Both of us sat there not really believing it. This was the only other case she had heard of since the introduction of electricity in Dunedin when four students died after months on a diet of chips and beer. Apparently, if I had left it another week I’d have been dead as well. The doctor gave me a prescription for super-strong vitamin C pills and painkillers.

DOMINIC MONAGHAN


Dog Feasts On Tampon
It was Christmas Eve 2001 and my boyfriend had come round to see me at my parents’ house while they were out at a party.

We started making out in my room and after a few minutes he started to slip his hands up my skirt. I told him I didn’t really want to do anything because I was on my period.

Undeterred, he said he didn’t mind if I didn’t mind, so I said OK. Before I’d had the chance to fix my bits, he took hold of the tampon string, pulled it out, and threw it romantically across the bedroom.

My parents came home early, so we had to get dressed in a rush. I looked briefly for the tampon but couldn’t find it so I just left it somewhere in the room.

The next evening I was sitting on the couch in the front room watching bad Christmas TV, drunk and stuffed full of turkey, when I heard my mother calling me into the kitchen.

I got up reluctantly because I thought she was asking me to help her with the dishes, but when I got in there I was faced with the sight of her and my dad examining the dog’s anus on the kitchen table.

“You wouldn’t believe this, Kate,” my dad said, “but the dog’s got a string hanging out of his backside! He must have eaten a party popper or something. And it must have made him bleed or something because there’s blood on this string. Did you see the dog eat a party popper?”

It suddenly dawned on me what was about to happen, so I blurted out: “Oh yeah, he does that all the time, give me the dog, I’ve done this before. Trust me, you don’t want to see it.”

I grabbed the poor, barking dog, rushed it upstairs, and performed the unpleasant operation of pulling my own tampon out of the dog’s ass in quiet solitude.

KATE CARS


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