The Cheese Dreams

Herewith, my accidental Recipe for Caseio-Oneiric Disaster.

Ingredients:

• 11 episodes of “Breaking Bad” in 2 days
• One sliced thumb in the preparation of…
• One 4-egg omelette sprinkled supra-liberally with sharp Tillamook cheddar

Instructions:

1. Spread the TV show thickly over a couple of rainy days’ hiding inside. Allowing the first nine episodes to settle, retire to kitchen.
2. Take approx. 2-3mm off the top of your thumb in dicing ham for the omelette. Apply sticking plaster.
3. Cook omelette slowly with a stupidly deep layer of tangy, processed, plasticised, ready-grated Tillamook reclining across its surface. Ingest at a rate of knots.
4. Return to TV and pile on the last two episodes for good measure.
5. Journey to the land of Nod.

Results:

• The safety and warmth of your home is transformed into the clean but slightly claustrophobic, childishly-decorated motel room above the manager’s office space in a dingy, dark, commercial warehouse. Your companion contributes cantankerously to your bickering; dirt and mould encroaching everywhere in the cavernous corrugated corridors downstairs contrast  with the washing-powder odours and creamy cleanliness of the living quarters. A smooth but suffocating sensation of stasis concurrently comforts and crushes.
• A change: cold dread creeps dryly down your spine as the realisation washes over you - they’re coming for you. They want the only thing that stands between you and abject failure, collapse and ruin. You’ll have to work out what it is. Go through the cupboards. Turn out the desk drawers. Find out. They’ll never stop! The only way out is to run. Both of you must somehow get away, the stash intact. Pack it up! Get out fast. Get in the car; find somewhere to hide - yet …
• There’s nowhere to go. You’ll run forever if only you can stay ahead of them. But they’re fast. No human’s that fast. The engine rising to a scream, you scramble onto the back seat and gaze nervously out back at the gathering pall of menace swarming up the road behind you. They’re almost with you - you were right, the killers run at superhuman speed, the very thought of their progress clotting, curdling into a swarming, gelatinous mass of insidious intent, transcending and transmuting their visceral physicality to solid steam streaming into the air around you. Tentacles tear from the core, grapple with the atmosphere, careering chaos crawling to the car, emerging hands erupting, spreading, fanning out like smoke and lightning and solidified swirl behind, the shape of a face materialising into an ectoplasmic head inside your suddenly porous escape capsule, ebbing and flowing, in and out, round and about, pushing and probing at the boundary, trying to outrun, engulf, ensnare, until - something shifts. A distant call? An edict from elsewhere requesting a retreat? But it’s a reluctant, recalcitrant recession, it won’t last long - and you can’t run this fast forever.
• You wake up staring, stark, suspended, the certain knowledge lodged deep in your gut that they’ll return, soon, swifter, stronger … how to guard against their primeval power?
• No answer. All hope is gone. Ignore the screaming of your senses and wait patiently for reality to reassert itself.

Resting early after an unexpectedly good dinner on my first evening on the edge of the Pacific, I become aware of a consciousness drifting up from empty blackness toward insane, howling, primal noises. A hole in the ground on the edge of a reservoir reaches down to, and up from, the bowels of earth. There’s machinery. A turnpipe. Voices babbling. A chickenshit priest stands at the edge of this chasm in reality, shuffling dirt into the maw of the abyss. Brave children scrabble around the edges, blazing naïvety and innocent strength into the whirlwhind of madness. Mud’s all around. Swirls of possible loss and potential redemption. What? “CHAOS! COLLAPSE!” - but you’re talking nonsense! - “Is that what the voices say?” Yes! “Who says that?” Huh? You did, you twat - you are ‘the voices’! - and I wake, realising slightly sheepishly that I’m shouting “TWAT!” to myself. So. The product of nearby oceanic hum? Roaring wind? A motel dropped on a ley line, perhaps? Or the unanticipated agression of that rather splendid glass of port? Or … a solid slab of baked, thoroughbred cheesecake? I think we know the answer.

On Saturday, I ate no cheese at all; none by day, nor any by night. A handful of walnuts, scraped through some hummus and wolfed down with some red seedless grapes shortly before retiring, was apparently all it took to conjure up the powerful image of three late-middle-aged, leather- and PVC-clad, peroxide-permed dominatrices stealing suspiciously similar walnuts from the shelves - and smashing champagne bottles with their steel-reinforced underwear - in CCTV footage of a supermarket heist they stopped to pull on their way to gatecrashing a garden party at which they would watch several foxes biting the ankles of a large brown bear chained to a post. At this point, it seems that perhaps the cheese is simply toning down the dreams somewhat. Normal service will presumably resume shortly.

A January Wednesday. An unpasteurised block of boutique British blue, purchased with precise change, its seven-and-a-half-ounce weight left loitering in a large coat pocket for a couple of hours. I took it home, wrestled with the hand-wrought wrapping and exposed the heaving, breathing, mouldering dairy slime within; shaved off solid slices and slurped them in ‘til my cheeks flamed with lactose licentiousness to match, gave it an hour or so to settle, and topped up with one last layer before retiring to sleep, perchance to … What? Who’s that? I know you. I know your face. But why there? In that place? Hold … no, you don’t fit with … wait. It’s early. So early? A yellow, brown, crumpled-duvet fold of faces. A murmuring, muttering confusion of friends, familiars. We’re here together, conjoined in companionship. No - I’m here alone, it’s dark, I’m awake. There’s the whistle of the wind in the vent. How are you there, then? What are you … what’s that? That spectre of solidity in the angles of the room, coalescing soul-smoke, oceans of identity ebbing and flowing through - what space? what distance? what proximity? Bang. Back in the room. Clear, crisp. White walls, shadow. But … what is it that engulfs, ensnares, frames, follows, fills? Will it take hold? Will it spare me or leave me desolate? we - I - you … an icy lake. An aging trawler breaking the surface, frosted in time. A skinny lump of human creature on the footboard, agèd yet ageless, wizened, taut, playing with beads on the frozen flats - preparing poison? Plunder? But how she’s frail, fragile, silver hair disguising a knotted brow and … oh, no - not frail. What horror is this? See the steely glance. A brooding, murderous witch insanely intent on insidious acts. Pushed into the ice, she spreads thick black lines about, rending the shattered surface like cracks in a mirror. Shock at the cold forms fright and turns to terror, yet she floats like a bobbing buoy. Fish her out and risk the lives and loves of all those unsuspecting and unwilling inhabitants of her nefarious plots, or let her freeze, fade into the formless void of the deep, and suffer the unending memory of those eyes, those piercing pinpoints of agonized fear? The choices convolve, a vindictive vortex merging, mingling to a silent, screaming scirocco - but it’s too late. I’m awake, and the eyes remain. Three days in, and already I’m undone.

A pack of Tesco’s Extra Strong Farmhouse Cheddar, 240 grammes. Left on the side for an hour or two to warm, ripen, sweat, prepare; half of the synthetically-sharp, pseudo-cultured blob subsequently summarily stuffed gob-wise in an access of oneiric expectation. Result: an excess of bureaucratic recursion; a 4am foray into a neo-Escherine vista of queues, lines, delays. Navy, civilians, commercial staff alike, piled in to a cruise-line cavalcade of shuffling souls, waiting wordlessly for direction, dictated divinely or communicated corporeally from its constructing committee. A cast of thousands, millions, infinite individuality coagulated as a congealed corpus, suspended soporifically in a meandering, trickling stream of eternal expectation; a tacit, preternatural comprehension that the unachievable end is already arrived. Hardly an unexpectedly anodyne outcome, from such a saccharine source.

Eleven o’clock; tick, tock. A cellophane-shrouded, ammoniac slice of supermarket Brie, two chunks already down and tempting a third - but no; gluttony, I’ll not abase myself further before thee. Yet already my nightly fate is sealed; swirling streams of panic materially manifest as motorway murders, their cunning, concealed orchestrator looming large in my mind. Jacknifed lorries, felled trees, black ice, butchery. Lord Brie, how cruel thou art.