Of Clockwork & Condoms

It takes me a while to drift off. My mind is wild with thoughts — loud, cluttered, restless — as though the universe has hijacked my amygdala and is waging war on my eyelids. One thought keeps elbowing its way to the front, refusing to be ignored: Please, for the love of all things sacred, let Mat come home quietly. A small, reasonable hope. Laughably naive. The kind of hope that tends to collapse the moment reality so much as glances its way. Eventually, though, I slip under — not fully asleep, not properly gone, just submerged enough to lose my grip on the room. Hello, dream world. Or at least… I think I’ve arrived. I hear the front door. A pause. Then a commotion in the hallway — clumsy, familiar, unmistakable. The brass doorstop is kicked hard enough to skid across the Victorian tiles, screaming its tiny metal soul out. I sigh inwardly. Oh. Here we go. Too many bevvies. He must be absolutely steaming. My eyelids are just beginning to sink back into place — heavy, cooperative at last — when the hallway light bursts into the room and lands squarely on my face. It doesn’t just wake me; it drenches me — a full-throttle baptism into unwelcome consciousness. Mat stumbles in, all limbs and noise, knocking into things with an almost impressive lack of coordination. I clamp my eyes shut immediately, and play dead. If I don’t move, if I don’t breathe too noticeably, perhaps I don’t exist. If I don’t exist, I cannot be perceived. If I cannot be perceived, I cannot be disturbed. This is, in my opinion, nobel-worthy logic. He lingers, fumbling, hovering in that vague, disorganised way drunk people do when they’ve lost all sense of direction — or sense altogether, for that matter — before eventually stumbling back out. Silence returns, tentative but promising. Right. Let’s try that again. Barely thirty seconds pass before I hear it. Scrunch. Scrunch. Scrunch. I freeze, my entire body tightening in quiet disbelief. Surely effing not? Scrunch. Scrunch. Scrunch. Each aggressive twist of plastic rattles my bones awake. “You have got to be fricken kidding me,” I mutter internally. I know he takes his role as household recycler very seriously, but recycling bottles at this hour feels less like responsibility and more a savage attempt to dismantle what little remains of my sanity. Before I can even begin to settle again, the light returns — loyal, intrusive, and entirely without shame. Mat reappears at the bedside, leaning in far too close. “Mandy… Mandy…” he whispers, giggling in a way that instantly shaves years off my lifespan. “Look at my face.” I reluctantly open my eyes and turn towards him. He brings his face inches from mine, grinning. “Can you see how red I am?” “Red?” I squint. His face looks… normal. Tragically so. Without warning, he flicks on his phone torch and angles it under his chin, transforming instantly into something between a campfire ghost story and a deeply underfunded horror film villain. “See it now?” he asks. I stare at him for a long moment, unimpressed. “The only thing I see is idiot,” I reply, before rolling over and reclaiming my side of the bed. He leaves. Or at least, I think he does. Because a moment later, two hands wrap around me from behind — but not normal hands. These are colossal. Cartoonishly oversized. Twice their natural size and somehow thrice as grabby. Obscenely grabby. They snake over me like overfed vines — invasive, persistent, creeping into spaces they have absolutely no right to creep. “Oh no,” I mutter into the pillow. “Not this.” He’s in the mood. I am profoundly, spiritually, aggressively not. I am done with the day, the night, the world, and everything in it. “I want to sleep,” I say flatly. He continues, undeterred. When it becomes clear this is not going to resolve itself in my favour, I give up entirely and make a run for it. Only… the house isn’t our house. I stop mid-flight, disoriented. Gone are the slightly tired walls and familiar creaks of our Victorian. In their place: vast open space, glass walls, sharp lines — something lifted straight out of Grand Designs. Cold. Pristine. Completely, unsettlingly wrong. I don’t have time to question it. Behind me, I can hear him coming — those same oversized, overenthusiastic hands, slapping against the silence like some unhinged clapper powered by libido and misread cues. I sprint down a corridor and dive into another bedroom, scrambling under another bed as if it might offer sanctuary. I pull the covers up, willing myself invisible. It lasts all of three seconds. He finds me. And then I hear another voice. Male. Unknown. I slowly turn. “Mat… who is that?” He shrugs, casual as anything, as though bringing home a random man from poker night is perfectly standard procedure. Brilliant. Just what I need. “Stop it!” I snap, sitting upright. “I just need to sleep.” Mat looks crestfallen. His friend looks even worse — utterly crushed, his dreams of thrupplehood dissipating along with my dwindling will to live. “But I have something to show you,” Mat says. I exhale sharply, dragging myself out of bed. “Fine, but make it quick.” He leads me out onto a balcony, and I pause. It’s beautiful. Plants hang from overhead beams, trailing gently in the night air. The gentle, eternal whisper of water nearby — calming, almost hypnotic. “Look,” he says, pointing. Behind the house, a river stretches out — dark, glassy, undisturbed. And then I see it. “What the fuck is that?” Sitting in the middle of the river is… something. A monstrous contraption that looks like a carnival float wearing the innards of a clock. Cogs spin violently, metal grinding against metal in a relentless, ear-splitting rhythm. It churns and turns and refuses to be ignored — an ugly, mechanical intrusion in an otherwise peaceful scene. I turn to Mat for explanation. He’s gone. I glance back inside. He’s asleep on the sofa. “Bloody typical,” I mutter. I stand there for a moment, staring at the thing. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t soften. It just keeps going — loud, constant, impossibly out of tune. I can feel it winding me up from the inside out. Sleep is no longer an option. So, naturally, I grab my jacket and head out. The park is unfamiliar, though it carries that vague sense of somewhere I should recognise. Everything feels slightly off: paths too long, shadows too heavy, the silence not quite behaving itself. I pull my jacket tighter around me. It’s cold. Or maybe it’s just that creeping unease slowly working its way up my spine. Then I hear it. A voice. High-pitched. Singing. I stop. I know that voice. I could recognise it across a thousand childhoods. “Elmo?” I say aloud, already regretting it. ”… na na na na na… na na na na na…” I follow the sound and find an old television set sitting oddly beside the path. The screen has been removed, and inside — because of course — is Elmo. That hyperactive, ADHD-personified, lovable red menace. Going at it like this is his moment. “… it’s Elmo’s world…” Except it isn’t. The lyrics twist mid-song. “… it’s condom world…” I blink hard, as if that might help this make any sense. He stops singing abruptly and looks straight at me. “What the fuck are you staring at?” he squeaks in his high-pitched voice. “I’m trying to sell condoms here.” Right. Message received. I nod once — a silent agreement not to unpack any of this — and carry on walking, humming the tune to myself. Because, of course, it’s catchy. And, apparently, this is fine. Up ahead, a hen do barrels into view — a glittering collision of sequins, prosecco, and wobbling legs. “Oh bollocks,” I mutter. “YO, POSTIE!” one of them shouts. I look down. Uniform. Full postman pat. Of course. “Where’s Butthole Lane?” she demands. “…Up the hill and round the corner,” I reply, gesturing vaguely in a direction that… feels about right. “Fucking useless,” I hear one mutter as I walk away. Rude. Also — call it intuition — but I get the feeling Butthole Lane is not a real place. I keep walking anyway. Through streets I don’t know. Places that don’t quite exist. Until I reach somewhere that does. The depot. Of course. It’s midnight. I’m not due to start. It should be locked. But the door opens easily, too easily, as if it’s expecting me. Inside, people are already sorting mail, chatting quietly like this is entirely normal. I wander down an aisle where a group of posties are sprawled across the frames like alley cats. “Room for a little one?” I ask. They shrug collectively. Not a no. Not quite a yes. I perch anyway, slipping into place, pretending I belong. And then I see her. Roxanne. A childhood friend — familiar, grounding, the only piece of reality I can cling to here. She’s absorbed in her phone, eyes locked onto the screen. Something about it pulls my attention, and before I can stop myself, I glance down. My stomach drops. The dream app. My app. The one I use to catalogue and archive all my dreams — obsessively, meticulously, like a sleep-deprived lunatic wrestling rogue thoughts into neat, obedient lines. A chill creeps up my neck. I’m not even properly anonymous on there. First and last name. Practically an invitation. It wouldn’t take much. She taps the screen. Publish. I shouldn’t look. I absolutely shouldn’t look. But curiosity has me by the throat. I slip my phone out, hands suddenly cold, less steady than I care to admit, and find her profile. The post is already there. Fresh. Waiting. I open it. “I keep dreaming about this woman,” it begins. “She looks like me, but older. Tired. Like she’s running from something she can’t quite name.” My chest tightens as I read on. “She keeps trying to sleep, but something — or someone — won’t let her.” The room feels smaller somehow. “There’s a machine in the water near her house. Loud. Constant. Like it’s powered by her thoughts.” I swallow. “She doesn’t realise it yet, but the machine is hers.” My grip on the phone tightens. “It runs on everything she won’t switch off.” I stop. One last line. “And the strangest part? She thinks she’s dreaming.” I lower the phone slowly, the noise of the depot humming around me, blending into something else — something mechanical, repetitive, familiar. Somewhere, faintly — Scrunch. Scrunch. Scrunch. And for the first time, it lands properly. Not the noise. Not the chaos. Not even the absurdity of it all. But the pattern. The interruptions. The restlessness. The constant turning, churning, thinking. I don’t need to look at the river again to know that thing is still there, grinding away in the dark. Of course it is. I built it. And I never switch it off.