"Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives… and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be."
We were somewhere around the bathroom on the edges of sanity when the sugar began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “Alice, you need to calm the hell down, you’re going to wake the neighbours up. It’s three o’clock in the morning and these people are sick.” And suddenly the night was full of strange vibrations. She was screaming like some kind of fruit bat that had mistaken corn fructose for an orange. What was this animal?
It was still four hours till daylight. They would be tough hours. I knew we would be completely twisted, fractured and wild and crazy by seismic shifts in our delicate minds. We would have to ride it out though.
France had given us €300 to buy food. We had spent most of it on sugar. The kitchen looked like the sweet aisle in Disneyland. We had three bags of Haribo, seventy five chocolate coins, five sheets of high powered sugar paper, a salt shaker half full of sherbet dip and a whole galaxy of chocolate bars, fizzy bombs, face twisting sour chews… and also four bottles of coke, three tubs of ice-cream, two bottles of Fanta and five cases of Monster energy drink. Not that we needed all that for the night, but when you are nearly four and get locked into a serious sugar collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can go.
The only thing that worried me was the energy drink. There is nothing more savage, more out of control than a three-nearly-four-year old in the throws of an energy drink binge. And I knew Alice would get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
“Daddy,” said Alice as she slid down the corridor and smashed into the bathroom door. “This is better than school.” She got up and sprinted back into the living room. “Let it go, let it go, let it go.” Frozen was the only music we had, we played it over and over again like demented seals on some frozen Arctic tundra.
But before we go on, let’s get to the bottom of this sorry spectacle. Twenty-four hours earlier and we had been sitting in the living room at Apocalypse House. I was four G&T’s in, Apocalypse Mommy was sipping long island ice-teas on a Zoom call with her friends. Alice was painting rainbows on the wall.
The phone rang. Then another phone. But they were video calls from China, friends from school, old colleagues from the distant past with stories of corruption, gratitude and craziness in the time of Corona. But one of the calls was a revelation. It was work. A story. But what kind of story?
“Who is it Daddy,” said Alice. “What’s the story? We should do it, it’ll be worth it. We can get some sweets.”
She was right. The biggest human experiment in the history of this mad mad world. Four billion people, locked in the homes for fifty days. Could it be done? Could you last? We were going to dive into the beating, feral heart of the lockdown dream and find the story, the real dream. Alice, hyper-active and crazy from sugar.
Getting hold of the sugar hadn’t been as easy as it should have been at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Fear and paranoia was crawling up the walls of the supermarket, but the streets were empty so we rolled down the roof of the V.W Golf and drove like deranged bastards across town.
Apocalypse Mommy called when I was contemplating running the lights down by the stadium. “Do you have the credit card?” she asked.
“I have three major credit cards and two hundred in credit down at the sweet lab.”
I hung up and made some calls to my contacts at the supermarket. I wasn’t going to mingle with these swines. They were sick and I was healthy and I liked the balance in my favour. I’d left my mask at home so told them to pile the sweets outside the door in a box. I’d slam into the car-park sideways, put the tail out and they were to fill the trunk with the merchandise.
“Daddy,” Alice said, “the car is front-wheel drive, how are you going to power-slide into the car-park?”
She was a smart cookie. But she was young, she lacked experience.
“Speed,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “With speed you can do anything.”
We got to the pick up doing eighty-five. The car smashed over the pavement separating the road from the car-park. The green lizard hadn’t come to a halt and Alice was tearing through the package, ripping sweets from their wrappers, tossing them in the air and stealing them from the sky like some kind of deranged machine. Red, blue, green, more greens and more reds. She was guzzling them down.
“Go easy with those,” I said. “You’ll do yourself some damage.”
“Worry about yourself,” Alice said as she jumped back into her car-seat. I slammed the car into reverse and we high-tailed it out of one pool of chaos, straight into another. We left the car-park sideways, heading east.
When we got back to the apartment the sugar was already ransacking our senses. Alice ate another three wine gums to continue the buzz, I was crashing. I needed sleep, or food, or sleep and food. A nice comfortable bed, a hazy lazy Sunday afternoon. Instead there were errands to run. I had confused the sugar crash with a lull and it was about to have dire consequences.
Wave after wave crashed upon me. These sugar substitutes hit you like a slow breeze at first. They fool you. Make you think the worst of it is over before they unleash some unholy riot on your liver and kidneys. Your blood pressure tries to communicate with God, your glycaemic index spits out confused warnings like some kind of broken seismograph. Only you’re on Mars and the whole planet is a volcano.
“Where is the energy drink,” Alice snarled. “Where is the Monster? Where is the Monster? I need aspartame, this glucose isn’t working.”
Apocalypse Mommy said, “Just give it to her. For God’s sake. Look at her eyes, they’re bloodshot. Christ, what have you done?”
But Alice was one step ahead. She cracked the can open. It was a litre. A thousand millimetres of who knows what. Soon she would have no feeling in her tongue, blurred vision, no balance. There would be a total disconnect between the body and the brain.
It was bath time and Alice was coming up on a litre of energy drink. I tried to coax her into a corner but she ran up the wall. Apocalypse Mommy tried to grab her but Alice lashed out and then darted behind the sofa. We had her trapped though, the pincer manoeuvre, one each side, an arm each. But she sprang out, over the top, we were side swiped. But she couldn’t get far. A neighbour knocked on the door.
“It’s alright,” I screamed. “It’s bath-time. This is normal.”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning,” he screamed back.
Where was I? Was this the lockdown parenting dream? What was the meaning of all of this? Was there a story or was I just roaming the empty living room and kitchen, half blind on a sugar frenzy?
Alice was in the bath, somewhere. Water was running over the edges of the porcelain. Bubbles as high as mountains hid a Chinese plastic factory of toys. The water was pink, empty bottles of Paw Patrol shower gel and foam bath lay scattered around the floor like machine gun casings. Nursery rhymes blasted from the radio which teetered close to the bath.
Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, Mary had a little lamb it’s fleece was white as snow.
“Turn it up, Daddy. I can’t hear it.”
“It won’t go any louder. Wash your hair.”
“I’ll get shampoo in my eyes.”
And she thumped the water. A Tsunami of grimy, soapy water was raced down the corridor and into the living room.
Apocalypse Mommy was oblivious, she’d had seventeen Singapore Slings and was having a Zoom chat with some old friends from China.
If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.
The music was deafening. I had to use a mop to clean her hair. Then I left her to it. She was on her own now, she would have to deal with the crash herself. The sugar had taken her to the furthest reaches of her mind, now it would take her to the darkest corners.
Two hours later she came into the living room carrying her school bag. I thought she wanted to do some colouring, practice the alphabet. She laid the bag on the table and took out a little bottle.
‘Drink me’ was written on the side.
“What’s in that?” I said.
“Advantame.” She said. “You don’t need much. Just a tiny taste. It makes pure Red Bull taste like ginger beer. You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.”
“Where did you get this from?”
“School,” she said. “It’s totally pure.”
I drank half the bottle.
Alice said, “You did too much Daddy, too much too much.”
And she went to watch the Disney channel with Apocalypse Mommy on the sofa. I crawled into bed to ride out the storm. The first waves were the worst, there was nothing like it, somewhere between honey and citric acid, sweet and sour colliding like black-holes at the centre of a galaxy so far away it isn’t there any more. All I could hear was Richard Nixon and the Watergate tapes, over and over on some kind of evil loop. Only he was singing nursery rhymes.
The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
This aggression will not stand.
Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, Mary had a little lamb it’s fleece was white as snow.
And a darkness swept over me. I could feel my kidneys, a trillion blood vessels breaking down the Advantame, working magic in the depths of my stomach.
And I slept.