Self Portrait

Comic fiction. One man's brave attempt at love.

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Joel Cleanskin lived life at arm’s length, though not by choice. People were afraid of him, always judging him in a negative light. Take that morning, for example. The woman at the counter had offered Joel his bánh mì with her hand stretched backwards like a relay runner awaiting a baton. She was sobbing, muttering prayers. Her eyes were pinched shut. Joel’s mere presence caused fear and disgust. 

Joel let his hurt feelings be known by snatching the paper-bagged roll. The woman then lunged to her colleagues crouching by the soft drink fridge. They prayed together.

‘There better be extra chilli or else–’

He wanted to say, ‘or else I will buy my bánh mì across the road,’ but he broke into a violent coughing fit caused by that morning’s deep-clean of a dusty orphanage. Before he could explain, the women were clamouring for the emergency exit. Joel was alone again, so be it: such is life. He bit the paper bag between his teeth and picked up the Christmas shopping with his left hand; his right hand still grasped the hatchet.

Joel sat in his usual seat near the shopping centre escalators and took a bite. Insufficient chilli. He was beyond devastated. Straight away, his face scrunched to a single point like it was being sucked by a vacuum. All the features–nose, lips, eyebrows–came together and forward, off-the-bone; it was a hideous expression: pained and childish, made worse by the snotty tears and mumbled queries of God.

Of course, his pain wasn’t really caused by the absence of chilli: Joel was lonely, isolated. He lived alone, worked alone, ate alone. He lived life waiting. He was surplus stock in a warehouse, staring at his own used-by date. The chilli, like all minor setbacks in life, was a final straw. He was a soft-bellied man in a world of final straws.

At first the woman on the escalator appeared as a floating head. Then she sprouted a neck, shoulders, arms, and a daughter! By the time she crossed the escalator’s lip–metal grate to polished tile–Joel had stopped crying. He now sat legs crossed, squinting. He resembled an important man concerned for the ASX–a magazine man. 

Then, as the woman led her daughter across the reflective floor, Joel witnessed a concerning development for physics: the world turned blinding white.

Someone–maybe God–must have torn the high ceiling off the shopping centre, parted the clouds, and focused the sun’s rays on this woman. All that remained was her blonde hair, her dimpled smile. The rest of life had burned away. She was a nuclear blast. She was a powerful laser: able to rid suffering the way one removes a tattoo from their heart or hair from their anus. 

Joel took a monstrous bite of the bánh mì to occupy his racing mind. Thoughts of anus hair removal were clouding his judgement. He chewed furiously but this time the bite was exclusively chilli. The burning made itself known, lips to stomach. 

‘Damnit. I am in love,’ he thought. ‘There must be something I can do. For her I would do anything. For her I would–ahh chilli in my eye–become an accountant. I’d cover the world–ahh the pain–in a boring blanket of numbers. But what I am to do–too much chilli–for she is a beauty, and I am but a humble man–ahhhhh.’ 

Joel needed time to think; he needed water.

Next to Joel was a coin-operated ship with a painted-wood hull and room at the tiny wheel for one child. After breaking from her mother’s grip, the girl ran to the ship and toppled in head-first. The mother followed and knelt beside the girl. Joel, who now looked extremely concerned about the ASX, only allowed himself a subtle lick of the lips to ease the chilli burning. He didn’t want to be noticed, not yet.  

Over the ship’s portside railing, the mother pointed. ‘What do you see out there?’  

‘I don’t know,’ said the girl. ‘What, Mum? Tell me, Mum.’ 

The mother pressed her cheek against her daughter’s and used her pointed arm like a sight. ‘Can’t you see the dolphins?’ she said. ‘Right there. Yes. There’s a pod of dolphins climbing out of the water and diving below: up and down, up and down…’

‘Yes. Yes, I can see it, Mum.’ 

‘And over there, what do you see?’ 

The daughter caught on. ‘A big whale–big swimming whale.’ 

The dolphins were allegedly in Foot Locker, the whale in Micheli Jewellery. Joel scanned the shopfronts but all he saw were the fixed hands of capitalism: supply chains and staff sheets, dye numbers and blood diamonds, electricity bills, training regimes, ad campaigns, lunch breaks, harassment policies, debt.

Joel’s world had always been the inside of a watch: complicated but explainable. Watching that woman, however, he wondered what it would be like to just imagine. The excitement became too much. A voice inside cried, ‘Do something, do something!’

Joel burst to his feet like the ASX had crashed and he was the only one who could save it. He then approached the woman (regrettably) with the slow, methodical steps of a stalking jungle cat. All the woman saw of his downcast face were the two slits of burning eye beneath his brow. As both a warning and cry for help, she let out an ear-bursting shriek. Her daughter joined in; mimicry is how the young learn to survive.    

‘Oh this,’ said Joel, wobbling the hatchet. ‘Let me explain or else–’ 

His next coughing fit erupted loud and sudden like a lion’s roar. The deep, guttural bursts of sound sent the woman tumbling onto her backside in fear. Her daughter was now out of reach, and the plains of Malvern are such a dangerous place... 

The interruption was unfortunate because the explanation for the hatchet was benign. After lunch, Joel was off to cut firewood at the local homeless shelter for men newly released from prison. It’s an outreach program. They are going to roast a lamb.

Now, as for why the hatchet was covered in blood, the explanation was also benign. Joel was walking here to get lunch when a giant red kangaroo meant for the hills of Emerald came bounding down Glenferrie Road. Soon, a car struck the kangaroo and a crowd formed around the twitching beast. They were trying to determine what to do. 

As the crowd bickered, Joel knelt by the animal and soothed its pain. Under his palm, the roo’s cheek felt like the rough bristles of a shaving brush. Its eyes were black, knowing. ‘There, there, Old Boy.’ Joel tried to imagine the kilometres covered by its powerful legs–the pale green vistas, the red barren expanse. What a bold animal to travel this urban. It reminded Joel of his childhood dog, Arthur, another maverick who never did what he was told. The world does not deserve such fine creatures.

‘Enough. Enough,’ he said to the crowd. ‘While you argue, this animal suffers. You stand there talking of liability while the animal feels pain. Have you no heart? Have you no morality? Unlike you, I care. Unlike you, I will do what needs to be done. I will hatchet the beast into tiny pieces and stuff it in that garbage bin.’  

Back in the shopping centre, Joel’s coughing subsided. He crouched at the daughter’s eye level and put his chin on the hatchet head. He was conscious of what a poor first impression he had made and was desperate to course correct.

‘I had to help a little animal go to heaven,’ he non-threateningly explained. To the mother, he offered a sympathetic smile. She would understand his lie–all adults do.

Wrong again. The mother tore the daughter from the fake ship and held her close, while the girl took handfuls of her mother’s dress and cried into the fabric. Joel was confused. He didn’t understand the scornful looks the mother cast his way. Then he glanced down at his shirt and the riddle was solved.

‘Oh, yes. I see,’ he said.

It’s not an exaggeration to say Joel was head-to-toe covered in blood. He resembled a man who had endured an Amazonian coming-of-age ritual: a night’s sleep inside a goat carcass. His shirt and pants were blood-drenched, dripping. There were bloody footprints all over Malvern like a winding trail of ants. His face too–particularly his lips and cheeks–all battlefield red. But again, there was a benign explanation. 

While butchering the kangaroo, Joel wanted to preserve the organ meat. He found it hard, however, to cut away the connective tissue and visceral fat; after all, he had a hatchet, not a scalpel. So, the obvious fix was to bury his head in the cavity like someone bobbing for apples and chew the organs free. But people kept trying to pull him out. At one point, Joel and the kangaroo were dragged a full tram stop length together. They left behind a bloody trail of bile and intestines like some high-speed wreck, and all through the harrowing pitch-black journey Joel’s jaw never unclenched; he knew they wanted the organs for themselves. Joel was a student of human nature.

Now armed with the real cause of the mother’s fear, Joel knew what to do. He removed a package from his bag, unfolded the newspaper wrapping, and displayed the contents like an early Christmas gift.

‘This is a liver,’ he said. ‘There’s one inside of your mother and one inside of you, for now. Ha-ha-ha.’ 

Lonely Joel started to feel like a father teaching his daughter about the world. The round-faced young girl was so eager to learn that there were tears in her eyes. The moment moved Joel so much that again his face collapsed to a single point.

The woman, already sickened by the urine stench emanating from the smeared kidney blood, now gasped as the man’s facial features unstuck from his skull. The eyebrows and bottom lip nearly touched. The wincing sound was like a kettle set to explode. He ceased looking human altogether, and the tears of blood (chilli-induced) brought to mind questions of evil: if Satan is real, is this not how he would appear? Of course he would come for us at lunch. The woman needed to act, fast.

‘Yes,’ she said, breathless and quick. Her first word to Joel, an affirmation:

Joel believed he had broken through. ‘Yes to what, to me, to us?’ 

Her wide eyes were those of a new believer. ‘Let’s take Isha to the ocean,’ she said. 

‘That’s a wonderful idea,’ said Joel. He licked his burning lips. ‘I just love children.’ 

‘I know you do. That’s why you have to come as well. You have to see the ocean too.’ 

The mother placed Isha back in the captain’s chair, while Joel sat on the floor with his head resting on the plastic hull. He was below deck, explained the mother. He was a deckhand making lunch for the captain. ‘Aye, aye, liver and kidney for the captain!’ 

Leaving the jetty, the mother pointed out the coastline, buoys in the bay, and the grassy headlands. Then the waters turned dark, and the ship was soon surrounded by turtles and dolphins and scary sharks. 

‘We’re going to sail even further out,’ she said, ‘so I want everyone to get some rest.’ 

‘Yes, Mum.’ 

‘Aye, aye, Captain’s Mother,’ said Joel. ‘We’ll be eating kangaroo beyond the horizon!’ 

Joel closed his eyes, mostly for the theatre of it and for Isha’s sake. But he found he was so relaxed–for the first time ever–that he did become drowsy. This lovely, serene feeling, one that washed against his heart, echoing the rhythm of the fake waves on the plastic hull, had a name: Peace. Lonely Joel was not so lonely now.

He soon awoke to a rubbing sensation on his palms after the briefest of dreams (one that involved jacking-off a bamboo shoot). His eyes sprung open in time to see the hatchet being pried away. Before he could react, the mother was swinging the weapon like a farm scythe. ‘Stay back… back.’

One hatchet swing came so close that Joel felt the whoosh of the blade against his face. ‘Please. Please,’ he said. But the mother’s eyes were rage-filled and the little girl grabbing her leg was showing teeth, growling.

It dawned on Joel then that, as is so often the case, some key element of the world, of life, of women, was beyond his comprehension. The confusion and befuddlement saddened him–to have been so close. ‘What did I do? I’m sorry. Please.’ 

‘Stay away… the power of Christ compels you! I will kill you right here and now.’ 

The threat was like a hatchet to the heart. But if a hatchet-swinging rejection was enough to deliver Joel’s end, then it would have occurred long ago. In a sense, he was inoculated. One more exposure made little difference. The only real symptom was embarrassment. But in the scheme of things that isn’t so bad, and to keep the mind busy there’s always people to help, football to watch, firewood to chop.

‘Look, I’m sorry–I really am,’ said Joel. ‘I promise I’ll never talk to you or your daughter again. But please, give me my hatchet; I need it for the homeless men.’

‘Help. Help. Freak. Help. Help me.’ 

‘Ma’am, be reasonable. I’m making a roast with homeless men. My hatchet, I insist.’

The mother yelled, but no one came. Like always, she would need to save herself–and Isha, of course. Her best option was to throw the hatchet and run, run faster than she’d ever run before, run and not stop until she found a police officer. Fortunately, that wasn’t far; the police were just down the road, head-scratching around a chalk outline of a headless, limbless kangaroo. 

Joel caught the cartwheeling hatchet with ease and watched the magnificent woman trample the dolphins and the giant octopus, and he said goodbye to the beautiful ocean she took with her, forever.  

If only the woman had seen him then. His expression–once contorted, extreme–had relaxed. His downturned mouth had adopted its natural, melancholic slant, while his cheeks, forehead, and chin were at rest. Instead of a devil, she might have recognised the fallen angel: bloodied and lost. If she looked closer, she might have seen his lonely, beating heart; any closer than that she would have found herself, for we are all one on some level, and the profound tragedy is that our shared beauty is so easily lost beneath our rough hides and personas–and, yes, the kidney blood.