Sundays are for weeding and cuticles. They share similar lines of thought -- removal of the unneeded. On that particular Sunday, cool spring had warmed into early summer. Errant growths shot up through the gaps in the garden's dry concrete slabs, reached out of their brick enclosure, fierce toward a solid sky. The sun teased their edged leaves, its light circling the rims of verdant youth.  
Such futility was pruned, shoved in black bags, hauled off to the middling babble of daytime radio. I liked the radio, it made the house fuller. Circumstances of London rent had forced me into living with a gaunt drug addict and an actively dying man, thus Sundays were for weeding. My cuticles came after the gloves were off. Nails and gardens, windows to the soul. 
On my way out, I took the last black bag to the front door, where an unexpected visitor lay on the welcome mat. A flyer. We never got flyers. The estate was at the back of a park, nestled in a no man's land between distant tube stations. A wilderness. Yet, there it lay. 
Taking a closer look: a garish smash of bold colours, stock images and loosely translated phrases greeted me. 
"MASTER SRI RAM - BEST ASTROLOGER", it read. Palm-reading, tarot, removal of witchcraft. Money problems? Master Sri Ram. Relationship problems? Master Sri Ram. "Get your love back", "confront bad spirits", Master Sri Ram. 
At the bottom, the flyer directed me to a small commercial unit in Lewisham -- "right next to Peri's Piri Piri chicken shop on Lee High Road". At least they were thorough. 
Figuring it for junk, I took the flyer and the last black bag with me. Trees wreathed in gold sunlight, and a heavy blue hung over the heat rising from the asphalt outside. A short stroll to the council bins. Still, by the flower beds and bollards, the domestic remains of movers littered and rotted. A pink bear with a head removed, now crawled upon by sugar-crazed ants, broken cabinets and an office chair that could swivel no more. A tree's shadow canopy played on the patchwork of brick. 
As I looked along the estate roads and parked cars, a familiar bash of primary colour battered me on the peripheral. I stopped just short of the recycling. 
Every single car along the curb had a Sri Ram flyer tucked neatly into its right-door handle. For a moment, I admired the work ethic. Sundays were for weeding and cuticles. They had ticketed the entire street. I tried not to think about Jason from recruitment or Frank from onboarding. I tried not to think about Melissa in Amsterdam, and I tried not to think about bad spirits and Master Sri Ram. The black bag went into the bin but the flyer came home. 
 
I was acquainted with feverish dreams. Though, not of the kind that plagued me on my passage into Monday. A place familiar, though not at that hour. A large pool, drained of water. Blue lights hung low along yellow tiles and empty stalls. I had learned swimming here. Or, a part now unknown to me did. I can see that boy through a glass, and yet while his face is mine, it is obscure -- blurred by the imperceptible miles of distance. No one was there during this visit. Just me, and the echo of my steps around the dry-bed of the pool. There was light but I'm not sure from where. Half-day, half-night. A telephone, on a winding wire, lowered from a darkness above and down into my cupped hands. When I put the receiver to my ear, there was a slight hiss, a distant pop -- and a man on the other end informed me that drowning was the most peaceful way to die. 
Apposite were my midnight screams, as the next day was spent around a phone. I was waiting for a call from Frank from onboarding, or Jason from recruitment. Definitely not from Melissa in Amsterdam. A thousand job applications and two names saw mine. Frank and Jason. 
Frank and Jason didn't know it, but I was acutely aware, that they held the dangling prospect of gainful employment over my head. Saturdays were for job applications, Sundays were for weeding. Mondays were for waiting around the telephone. A voice from the ceiling. 
There were no calls from Frank, or Jason, and certainly not from Melissa in Amsterdam -- but why would she call, she never calls now and I'm sure she's loving it and not thinking about me and riding the bicycles and living the life and not thinking about me.
Evening came, and it was morose. Evenings like this I tried to dissect the disease in my life, pick apart the ligaments of my choices, diagnose the illness in my body. Sometimes this was literal, as I convinced myself an ab was a tumour one too many times. Most times this was more abstract, and this latter kind usually led to the former. Innards are messy, and unseen for that reason. We wear skin suits to hide the untidiness. Yet, I can see my veins wiggle beneath the thin sheen of flesh in the light of an electric bulb and I think about how mortal, pathetic and messy I really am. Dissecting a frog would have more use than dissecting me, for at least the frog had lived while I haven't even been born. 
Tuesday and Wednesday came and went. Night fevers swept in and out. I was in the swimming pool, then hacking half-digested chunks into the toilet bowl. Then it was morning, and still no calls from Frank or Jason or Melissa or anyone for that matter. There was no harm in trying. 
It was Thursday that I went to Master Sri Ram. An hour long bus toured me through the jungles of South London -- the half-shuttered main roads, the Grecian townhouses, overpriced food markets and heaps of rubbish along pavements and side streets. I read a book about mycology, and every time we went over a bump I thought about the freedom in mycelium.
We neared Lewisham, and doubt crept in. As if I could feel Sri Ram in the air. The inevitability of him. I got off outside Lewisham shopping centre. Sun bore down on a roving market, as fish, fabric and fresh fruit were flogged from gazebos and wagons. I battered my way through to a high street, along which I searched for Peri's Piri Piri chicken -- my Mount of Olives. 

 Alas, I came upon the chickenshop. Day-drinkers and gamblers hung out of its doorway, stared at the patterns in the tables under garish fluorescents, groaned and murmured as an employee screamed out the same order number to a gallery of blank and distant faces. Next door, an A-board stood out in the cracked pavement -- stubbed cigarettes around its frame. "Master Sri Ram", it said. 
From the street, a busy one at that, the unit was impenetrable to sight. A heavy red curtain, emblazoned with rich tapestries and bejeweled sequins, swayed in the slight breeze -- the entrance. Windows either side were shuttered, themselves canvasses for the passing graffiti of the drunks and the prepubescents. 
My eyes shifted between the A-board, and the curtain. Momentarily, I was rooted to the concrete -- as I became increasingly aware that I was increasingly embarrassed. Am I mad? The thought didn't occur on the journey over -- nor as I got dressed, or as I showered, or as I took my morning shit. Seeing Sri Ram had hitherto been conducted with the solemn duty of wiping my arse or flossing my teeth, or doing my cuticles or weeding the garden -- but I was sure to be made out a fool, or Sri Ram a charlatan. What was my point in being here, on Lee High Road, between Sri Ram, a chickenshop and a puddle of foamy piss? 
Soon after, a jolt bolted from my thighs, into my knee and through to the calves -- it was equal madness to make the journey, but not lift the veil. With the weightiness I had expected from the deep red, I parted the curtains, and slipped inside. The moment I did, Lee High Road and surrounding Lewisham no longer existed. 
A corridor. Straight, lined with curtains -- exotic silks patterned up and down the walls, toward a thin sheet that blew in the repetitive gust of a sentry fan. Through such a sheet, I could make out a vague figure -- I pressed ahead, and found myself face-to-face with Master Sri Ram. 
Brutish gemstones adorned Sri Ram's fingers, a medallion hung from a bulbous neck. Thick curls of smoke-grey hair tumbled down an old, carved face -- yet there was a flash of vitality in the deep-set eyes. They laid on me, narrowed. To his left, a gallery of statues -- Vishnu, Krishna, Jagganath -- to his right, an impish looking man -- younger, more casual. Incense sweetened stale air, yet among the jasmine, sandalwood and persimmon, a slight aroma of carpet stayed.  
"You are here. Finally." With wide arms, and white teeth, Sri Ram welcomed me from behind a small desk. On it were a pile of seashells and foreign powders. It was dark, and I squinted at the two men as I fumbled around for a "hello". 
Sri Ram was described as the "best Indian astrologer" on his A-board, but I couldn't tell if the Master in front of me was Indian, Arab or Chinese. The younger man, who I came to know as Jan, was angular yet unassuming. Dutch. He rose, took my hand -- shook it soft. 
"This is best astrologer, Master Sri Ram. There is nothing he cannot do for you. Any problem? The Master will fix. I promise, brother." The younger man guided me toward a chair, which I felt obliged to fall into -- before he took his place next to me. Sri Ram was opposite me, but the younger man was positioned directly to my side -- turned toward my ear. His face lingered on the boundaries of my peripheral as I turned to the Master himself. 
For what could have been five seconds or all of eternity, Sri Ram studied me. His eyes were like a desert oasis. Something drove you toward them, but you couldn't tell if they were a mirage or not. At last, with a heavy sigh, Sri Ram deflated -- smiled. There was a warmth to it, but something about the younger man bothered me. 
"You. Your face." Sri Ram mumbled. 
I leaned in -- the younger man cleared his throat, explained: "He's saying 'your face'."
"I understand that, but what about it?"
"It's lucky." Sri Ram talked as if he saw me coming. 
"It doesn't feel lucky."
"No. Good life. Palm."
The younger man touched my shoulder -- and gently said, "The Master will now take your palm -- for reading. He's very good."
Bemused, and a little anxious at just how hidden the unit was from the outside, I stuck my palm out. 
Sri Ram took it in an iron grip. His eyes bulged, hovered over the lines and marks in my hand. Traced along the ring finger to the bottom of the thumb. He tapped the table. I didn't understand. He tapped again. 
"Other hand, now," said the younger man.
I obliged -- for that seemed like the only thing to do. With both hands out, Sri Ram placed the pile of seashells in them -- he cupped my fingers over each other, enclosing the shells within my loose grip. 
"Shake."
I did so, and wondered if Melissa had found someone. Sri Ram jerked his head to the gallery of statues. 
"Pray."
I did so, and wondered if everyone was in on the joke of life in a way that I wasn't. Maybe I was the punchline. 
"Okay," Sri Ram began, as he brought a crooked pencil and a sheet of paper out onto the table, "birthday?". 
I told him, and remembered how much I cried on my fifth. He tapped my hands, and I let go of the shells -- they scattered across the paper. 
Sri Ram counted out twelve of them, left the remaining four to the wayside. He then added twelve to the sum-total of my birthday, which somehow gave him the answer of:
"Ninety-six years, two month, three days. Good life."
"Good life." The younger man chimed in. 
"Ninety-six? I have to do gardening for another sixty-five years?" 
"No, no. No garden. Luxury, and money, are coming to you. He can tell -- from the face." The younger man explained.
"What about the face?"
"It is lucky." Sri Ram seemed to like this line. "Your birthday. Your face. You know the year?"
"Twenty-twenty--"
"No. Zodiac. Year of the Horse." Sri Ram put all of the shells to one side -- took my hand in his. "I like you. You have great life. But. In last four years, a man, and a woman -- they have placed bad spirits on you."
Melissa. "How do I get rid of them?" 
The younger man got a bit closer. "The Master can get rid of them for you."
I could sense the other shoe dropping imminently. After all, no one had asked me for money yet. Sri Ram pointed deep into his own chest, declared:
"I pray. For you. Five time. After five time, the spirit gone."
The younger man got close to my ear, breathed loud down the canals toward my brain stem. "Five days. All it takes." 
Parts of me attracted toward the proposition. In a way, spirits had led me down errant paths. Shoots of growth that needed pruning. For instance, life could not have been going well for it to end up in a curtain-laden commercial unit next to Peri's Piri Piri chickenshop. At the same time, life couldn't have been worse -- since the Franks and Jasons of the world won't call me back. As the thoughts tumbled, unfurled, considered and congregated, a question spilled from a tongue I had thought mine until then:
"What will it cost me?"
"One-thirty."
"One-pound-thirty?" The optimist in me thirst for an agreeable answer, but even as the words careened out, I was set on my financial future being irrevocably ruined by a possible capitulation. 
"No. One-hundred-and-thirty."
The other shoe dropped, and the clack against the floorboards reminded me that I shouldn't've been in a commercial unit next door to Peri's Piri Piri chickenshop. 
With a quick excuse about a non-existent boilerman, I assured Sri Ram and Jan that I was to 'seriously mull over' the one-hundred-and-thirty commitment. With such a platitude complete, I made a quick getaway. The bus was late, and then the bus driver refused to let me board. Half an hour later I was on the way out of Lewisham, and I regarded my escape as as an example of a steely resolve. 
That night was strange. Fever dreams usually come as fragments, yet the dream that night was of an extraterrestrial order. I grazed upon the fertile grounds of the Eocene, deep within the ancient landmass called Laurasia, now considered northern Wyoming. Paleontologists today would call me an Eohippus. High trunks of protozoic trees reigned high above. Humid heat bared down on swamp-soil. Peat and mud baked in still warmth. I was the size of a fox. Wet bark and lichen beckoned me through the brush. Air hummed with the rhythmic beat of cicadas. The sun drew low. Golden rays stretched through miles of forest, lit through the undulating heat of primordial steam. A deep musk, a fermentation, carried through -- thick and wet. Dense in the dew of dying light, the dance of leaves rustled into the night. Shafts of sunset faded into the crevices of rabid moss while giant magnolias clung to virgin earth. 
Something was in the dark. My eyes had not evolved to the light, and the shivers well-known to prey beset my quad-pedal appendages. There was something out there. Something was pushing through the overgrowth, battering between branches, heading my way through the cover of foliage --
A fanged jaw shot out from the dark, and I awoke in a torrent of sweat. 

 Monday was for waiting around the phone. Frank and Jason didn't call. Melissa was in Amsterdam. Weeks passed, and I believed the latitude of my life to be terminal. The fanged jaws tore out my larynx. Savings dwindled. Night shifts at a warehouse in some distant industrial park made up for it, but it meant that Sundays were for sleeping and the waking hours were for weeding. Still, every night I was hunted in Laurasia. The interminable cycle: the half-days and lost-nights, the blurred hours and mindless months, it all coalesced into a blob of nothingness. My mind flittered between the rows of the warehouse, the brightness of the lights, the dry-bed of the pool, the fertile Eocene, Melissa in Amsterdam and the unreturned calls from Frank and Jason. One night, as I diverted packages off the line, to the sound of an American podcaster explaining how vaccines were designed to kill us, my phone rang. 
It was Mitch. I liked Mitch, and knew him for a while. He was a failed DJ, a part-time lover, and an all around layabout. He never asked me for much, never challenged me to a point I had to scrutinise myself. Someone I could dominate in a way only a friend could.  
We agreed to go for a beer. I took a PTO, claimed a migraine, met Mitch at some dive place in a back street of Brixton. Some band was on. Post-punk bullshit with an axe to grind, a rage against a war that never happened. 
Mitch and I drank some Kronenberg. Talked about some times that we laughed about, but didn't quite remember. 
"You know, man... Uh, these days you seem a bit different." Mitch always had a face when he wanted to be serious, and it always pissed me off. 
"We're all different, Mitch. It's called aging."
"No, you seem, I dunno. It's not just me. I spoke to Fran."
"Who cares about Fran?"
"You told your boss to go fuck himself?"
"He started it." 
"How old are you?"
The first time I didn't really have an answer for Mitch. Students screamed as the band crescendo'd, and I thought about the smear on the wall behind Mitch. He looked at me, as if he knew me. I guess he did.
"Mitch. Who the fuck do you think you are?"
Sunday I did weeding and cuticles. Monday I was on the bus to Lewisham, rode the same bumps to the roving market, and bumbled myself over to Master Sri Ram's. 
I paid the hundred-thirty and left. On my way out, Jan gave me a "talisman" -- with the instruction that it should be placed under my pillow for five days and five nights. Otherwise, Sri Ram's prayers would obviously fail. Humiliating was the walk back, so much so, that I avoided reflective surfaces so I wouldn't have to look on a man that had just paid over a hundred quid for a clay circle most likely molded by one of Sri Ram's grandkids. 
That night my head slept above the talisman. My dreams found me stalking through the dark bowels of Laurasia once more. 
A flesh-lust lingered as I choked down granola and milk the following morning. Dreams were realer than real. Every day I awoke with a migraine, as the changes in atmospheric pressure tightened the little veins along my brain. For a few hours I was light-headed, as there was too much oxygen in my waking life. My biology ran on prehistoric software. The phone rang.
Frank. "Please, please, please -- tell me you haven't found a job."
"I push boxes around and sleep. So. Not really."
"Great, SO glad to hear that. I just re-read your CV, and... Wow. Can I just say -- wow?"
"You most certainly can. If 'wow' gets me out of boxes."
"Listen, how do you feel about consultancy?" 
A night of prayer, and I was a consultant. Sri Ram truly was the best. The five days ran out, but before they did, Frank had me fully set-up at a job that I 'did', in the most functional sense, but had zero understanding 'of'. 
Every day, I worked from home -- usually from my garden, as it was the summer. I let the weeds stretch a bit, as I sat in five-hour long meetings. My only responsibility was to say 'all good on my end' as we wrapped up, and click on multi-coloured boxes all day on a program developed in 2006. 
Still, the dreams persisted. 
It's hard to say if I was happy, or content, or at least relieved. There was something about trying to keep your head above water -- it made every day a fight. Each gasp of air an ecstasy unto itself. Brine coats your throat, and you laugh in the swell of another push, another struggle to safety, that you are not yet drowned.
Calm waters see to calmer swimming, but you only emerge back onto land clean, rather than changed.  
I had just logged off a meeting that had gone round in circles for three hours when the knock came. 
After I threw some trousers on, I answered. 
Melissa. 
"I'm worried about you."
It was like staring at a cadaver. She looked different -- more in focus than she ever did when we were together. 
"What... What are you doing here?"
"Mitch said you're acting really... Erratic. And odd."
"I have a job. This is a working day. Who's unstable now?"
"I didn't say unstable."
"You said erratic."
"Oh, Jesus!" Melissa stopped -- composed herself. There was a lot I knew she wanted to say to me, and it took the strength of a saint not to say it. Her eyes softened. "I spoke to your parents."
"You what? I thought you were in fucking Amsterdam?"
"I was worried--"
"Worried? When the hell have you ever been worried?"
"When did you last look at yourself in the mirror?"
I recoiled. Furrowed at her. "What--what, what are you talking about? Have you come all this way just to insult me?"
"When was the last time you had a shower?"
I didn't know. 
"When was the last time you had a shave?"
I didn't know. 
"When was the last time you had a haircut?" 
I didn't know. 
"I think you need to speak to a professional." 
I told Melissa to fuck off, and I could prove I was fine. She humoured me at the doorstep -- I invited her in, as I could see the neighbours looking over. 
After the door was shut, I told her we would go to Sri Ram.
An hour on the bus, and we rode over the bumps -- I told Melissa about mycology. Everyone on the bus stared at us. I told Melissa that mushrooms have been around for hundreds of millions of years, pre-dating most mammals. 
We got to Lewishman shopping centre, through the roving market, through to Lee High Road. She held my hand as we walked to Peri's Piri Piri chickenshop, and she let go when we found the commercial unit empty.