“I’ve got an idea! A really good idea. Let’s have a sweet treat!”

“Thank you, Mrs R., but I don’t eat sweet things.”

“And how do you manage that? I wouldn’t survive without them. And since I was banned from smoking… Well, you know what it’s like, after a heart attack… How much do you smoke, Magduška?”

“I don’t know. It depends. I don’t really count (bullshit, I smoke forty a day, no problem, but I’m embarrassed to tell you that), maybe fifteen?”

“Oh, that’s not so bad, you’re a mild smoker. And does your mum smoke?”

“No. She never even drank alcohol (mum’s angelic face, an uncomfortable feeling in the belly), that’s her all over… a healthy lifestyle.”

“Well, definitely. Nobody can get away from their heart. But I’ve started to get scared, you know. After all, the craving for a ciggie is, what can I say, I smoked since I was nineteen, but now… I prefer to eat sweet things.”

“Uhm (don’t worry either way, the sugar will kill you even faster!)”

“What brand do you smoke, then? No offence, I hope, but I have one packet left… I have wine too. Please take them!”

“Thank you (good thing you don’t force that disgusting rum chocolate on me. Good thing you don’t ask how old my boyf is.).”

At night I can’t get to sleep, again, I drank all that disgusting cheap sweet wine, as I’d already drunk what I had at home, while pondering that Mrs R.’s household isn’t at all the sort of household that has porcelain vases like my granny’s did. And how is it even possible that some pensioners can keep their dignity, they manage not to surround themselves with stuff, particularly not stuff made of porcelain, they die at an appropriate age and don’t burden the family with their immortality; I ponder not wanting to ponder any more, I play hypnotic recordings on YouTube to help me sleep, but can even hypnosis get me to sleep when I’m this sloshed? Will any sort of hypnosis help me with this much alcohol in my blood? Will anything help me at all, ever? That would be a good experiment, actually, trying to get hypnotised while rat-arsed, of course it’s unnecessary, but I should have known that even before I went into the kitchen to roll myself a cigarette at half-past three in the morning, because I’d already smoked all of Mrs R.’s disgusting fags, I should have known that I was still blind drunk even before I stumbled out of bed, slammed into the wall and bumped into the doorhandle, that there was no way I could roll myself a fag, that I’m only going into the kitchen to become aware, again, of my unhypnotisable condition, to re-experience the frustration of where I ended up, going into the kitchen at three-thirty a.m., where I’m not able to roll a cigarette, because I’m a boozed-up cow who’s somehow too over-sensitive, too porcelain, to take care of her own granny, while gratefully volunteering to clean the neighbour’s – no relation’s – house, which is already three times cleaner than her own. And the boozed-up cow even shamelessly phones her mother and boasts about what a super, unselfish person she is. She no longer admits to the disgusting wine and disgusting cigarettes. For god’s sake, her post-heart-attack neighbour still had a packet of cigarettes left. Good Lord, when did anyone ever voluntarily smoke Petra? Ugh, what a super-productive day! How is it even possible that one person could have such a super-successful, super-salutary day?!

I’m young, after all, I’m helping the post-heart-attack neighbour with the cleaning, but only to suppress my pangs of conscience about not being able to wipe my own granny’s arse or help my own mother with it after her heart attack, no matter that I spent the rest of the day boozing and shagging my new boyf, the geriatric one, I’ve already done my good deed for the day, everything nicely altruistic, just for disgusting wine and fags (I don’t want money, that’s how my mother brought me up), I can still boast to my pensioner friend, the female one, about what a super good person I am, at four in the morning I’ll email her about cleaning for the post-heart-attack neighbour and I won’t even forget to remark that I didn’t accept any money, even though she offered.

The boozed-up cow didn’t take the dosh, but woohoo, cheap wine!

She doesn’t eat sweet things, follows a healthy diet, and fucks everything up with cigarettes and bad booze which, of course, she only accepted (and drank) to be polite. “Send the canteen vouchers, by registered post, because I’ll die this week.” In an antique shop, she once bought a postcard dating from ’56 with that written on it. The text fascinated her.

The last thing she thinks of before she falls into an unhypnotised coma is that she didn’t brush her teeth, that they’ll go yellow again. And she spent so much money on whitening. The last thought of the day: she had less dust in her flat than I do in mine when I’ve finished my cleaning. I like to surround myself with pensioners. Analogue relationships. Digital relationships have never been my thing.

Then the dreams, the strange dreams, and maybe here it would be good to consider why I’m going out with a sixty-two-year-old when I’m thirty-five, why things are the way they are, but I’m never going to think about that again, as after this night I’ll fall into a waking coma, but I don’t know that yet, nobody knows that yet, not my old boyf, not Mrs R., not my mum nor my granny; now it seems that I’ll just go to sleep as per usual and in the morning everything will be as it should, there’ll be space for asking questions, for cleaning, cleaning up in my head as well as in pensioners’ flats, there’ll be space to roll cigarettes and spill tobacco on the floor under the table, for a conversation with my geriatric boyf that never took place, although it should have, there’ll be space for everything, that’s what I’m dreaming right now, because I feel immortal, I feel that granny lived to see today, so it just isn’t possible that I won’t live to see tomorrow. Tomorrow. I’m young, after all.

None of these people know any of this yet, me included,

but I’m aware of everything right now, just before I die mentally, and possibly also spiritually.

I’m aware of what is really important, everything I’ve fucked up in life, and maybe even of why it happened. Not that I wouldn’t have been able to reach this conclusion before, while awake. But why would anyone worry about that, when they have their own lives, when they have other, more important, work than thinking about the fate of other people, or even their own, god forbid, when in their own hedonistic opinion they didn’t drink and smoke a sufficient quantity of alcohol and cigarettes, when they didn’t live on the Mediterranean coast for long enough and didn’t think up enough philosophical treatises that will remain eternally locked in their own limited minds, who would wonder about the causes and effects, who would pay any attention to the other people who are here in this world too, and other priorities, and other ways of existing. And anyway – the dream carries her away among Andalusian boats, why should she concern herself with some old woman who lives in a city five hundred kilometres away, who right at this very moment is getting out of bed, full of strength and even fuller of old-age dementia, and putting on her funeral clothes to wear in her coffin, singing to herself as she dresses, whooping loudly enough to wake mum, mum who’s just had a heart attack, who runs into her room, Magda’s old bedroom when she was a child, and then dad’s old drinking room, and then a lounge for visitors and then granny’s room, with granny’s deathbed; she looks at this spectacle and asks what granny is doing at half-past four in the morning, why is she putting on her black clothes, and granny, whose sweat-stained white vest is sticking out from under the black blouse, states with absolute calm and a sane expression on her face that she’s got to look good at the funeral, hasn’t she? What funeral, Magda’s mother asks, mine of course, says granny, quite seriously, and at that moment it’s clear, not to Magda in her dream or to her wide-awake mother, but to the Lord God and certainly to granny herself that this is granny’s last night on this earth, that those are also granny’s last words before she gives up her soul to heaven, or to hell, who knows, Magda certainly doesn’t, Magda has to make enough of an effort not to puke all over her own bed.

And in the morning, she’ll wake up from dreaming that she was in a coma for the rest of her life and that granny died and she’ll go for “coffee” as usual with the other failed alcoholics, like she does every day.

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