Mondays Smell of Burnt Toast

Monday June 10th, 10.14 am

His movements were slow, every small calculation visible in the adjustments and readjustments he made lowering himself into the chair. Three hidden cameras recorded what Harry did.

The room was small and regular, like a box. The walls were blank and a table sat in the centre with two chairs facing each other. In one chair sat a man wearing a white coat looking as though he was reading a manilla file of loose papers. The white of his coat smelled of apples and Harry heard the single note of a struck bell when he looked at the man.

The earth spins through space and around the sun. The speed of its movement is something astounding and yet we have no sense of moving. Harry remembers as a child sitting in the back seat of his father’s car and waiting for the lights to change, and the car edging forward, so slow and so little that it might have been missed, except that he could feel the movement, the whole world sliding past his window.

Harry sat in silence, waiting for the other man to speak.

‘Can you tell me your name?’

It was a silly question. The name on the file was what the man wanted Harry to say. He’d been asked the ques tion before. It made no sense to keep asking it.

‘My name is Harry,’ he said.

The man ticked a box on a sheet of paper.

‘And do you know what day it is?’

Harry knew. It was Monday. He could tell from the smell. Mondays smell of burnt toast. He didn’t know why that was.

‘It’s Monday,’ said Harry.

Even his words came out slow, like they were new and he was saying them for the first time, not certain that the sound they might make would be the right sound.

‘I know it’s Monday. I can smell burnt toast.’

The man in white tried to hide his surprise. Harry noticed the arching of one eyebrow and knew he could not smel l anything.

‘Why burnt toast?’

Harry had no answer to the question so stayed silent.

The man in white gave Harry a minute to reply, then wrote something on the piece of paper.

Harry waited.

‘Do you know where you are, Harry?’

He could hear something red, and jangling like dropped change, and that made him think he might be in a school or an insurance office.

If you put a cold hand into a basin of tap water it will feel warm. Put a warm hand into the same water and it feels cold. Harry thought he had read that somewhere, or had heard someone explain it to him. What he wasn’t told was that the smell stayed the same, that water smelled of green.

‘Do you know where you are, Harry?’ said the man again.

Harry shook his head.

‘Do you know why you are here?’

He didn’t know. Nobody had said and Harry hadn’t asked.

‘Can you remember what happened before you came here?’

Harry could remember breakfast, sitting on a metal-framed chair in a room where everyone wore blue, except the women and one man. There was a woman there who smelled of storms and everything around her was loud music and the music tasted of sour fruit. He liked her. She was kind to him. He never could remember her name, so had written it on the inside of his wrist in case he ever needed it. He looked at it now. Her name was Caroline.

‘My name is Harry,’ he said. ‘Her name is Caroline.’

‘Who is Caroline?’ said the man.

Harry could see her when he closed his eyes, could smell the storm and hear the music and taste the sharpness of lemons or grapefruits. That was Caroline. But he didn’t know how to say this to the man in white.

‘Mondays smell of burnt toast.’

‘Do you know where you are, Harry?’

Harry nodded. It was what he thought the man wanted.

On one of the screens in the next room Harry’s face was visible in close-up. He looked frightened and lost, his eyes glassy and staring.


Saturday June 8th, 10.02 am

Harry sat up in bed. It was not his bed. He knew that right away. There were wasps caught in the folds of the sheets. He could hear their angry buzzing, even when unpicking the folds he could not see them.

‘Good morning, Harry.’

He recognised the music she brought into the room, and underneath the music a growling like thunder – he recognised that too, and the sour citrus taste left on his tongue. He checked his wrist.

‘Good morning, Caroline,’ he said.

She pulled back the curtains and let in the sun. It hurt his eyes at first and the hurt was something he remembered, from somewhere.

‘And what day is it today?’ said Caroline.

She moved to behind him, gently pushed him forward and punched air into his pillows.

‘It is Saturday. Saturdays are always orange and smell of piss.’

‘Don’t you like Saturdays then?’ she said, peeling back the sheets of his bed.

‘Liking Saturdays has nothing to do with their colour or their smell.’

There were plasters on the ends of all his fingers. He didn’t know when that had happened.

‘Do you know where you are, Harry?’

He didn’t know that either.


Wednesday June 5th, 10.09 am

Harry lay quite still. He didn’t know he was Harry, not till later. His thoughts swam in and out of each other and the smell of apples hung in the air. He had picked apples one summer, with his mother. They were paid for each wicker basket they filled. He collected the apples that weighed down the lower branches and his mother climbed the ladder, so high he couldn’t see her sometimes. They got to take apples home with them, too, at the end of each day. So many apples. They kept them wrapped in paper and straw, stored them in cardboard boxes in the dark under the stairs. Sometimes he would shut himself in there just to be with the smell.

Wednesday, he thought.

There was a woman by his bed. Sitting as still as a picture, a magazine open on her lap. Her hair was the colour of wood with the bark peeled back, and he felt cold watching her.

She looked up and was surprised to see him awake.

‘Harry?’ she said.

It was a question. He wasn’t sure of the answer. The ends of his fingers burned.

‘Harry,’ she said again.

He didn’t know who she was, but something told him he should. The smell was familiar and she was grey, like memories can be grey sometimes.

He thought of the moon landing he had watched with his father, the slow moving spacemen, and slow talking too. One giant step. Only they were small and grey on the screen, the steps and the men. And these days everyone saying they were not real, pointing to the shadows and saying they could not be. And everything a staged set.

‘Harry, it’s me. It’s Julie.’

Julie smelled of dust. That was what he recognised. Julie smelled of dust. Like the grey that is laid on things when they are left untouched for a long time. Julie smelled of dust, he would have to remember that.

She took his hand in hers, not making contact with the plastered ends of his fingers, just holding the palm, loose, and stroking the back.

‘It’s Julie.’

A woman who said her name was Caroline took his temperature and recorded it on a chart at the end of his bed. She offered to bring Julie tea and asked him if he wanted some, too.

‘Would you like some tea, Harry?’

He was Harry. He knew that now.

He nodded his head. At least he tried to.


Monday June 3rd, 10.06 am

The air tasted of silver, and fizzed on his tongue like lemonade. His eyes were closed and he could hear movement around him and the regular sound of machines counting out the seconds. There was music underneath everything, the sound of one song playing over and over, not the words, just the tune. He could smell burnt toast. It was a familiar smell. He thought it must be Monday, and didn’t know why he thought that.



Saturday June 1st, 10.01 am

He was a shape in the bed. Without definition. A colour and a smell more than a shape. The smell of toilets that aren’t clean and the colour of marigolds. And a feeling. He was a feeling, too. Just the one sensation. And it was pain. A pulsing pain. That was everything he was, and everything he had been for as long as he could remember. And he didn’t know how long that was.



Thursday May 30th 10.10 am

They did not know who he was at first. A man found in a field. Unconscious. His clothes burned to his skin and his hair singed and the ends of his fingers dripping blood from open cuts. He was strapped to a gurney, tubes and wires keeping him alive, and the scream of sirens still ringing in everyone’s ears.

There was a picture in his wallet, the plastic melted a little and the picture too. His ID said his name was Harry and so that is what they began th eir sentences with. ‘Harry can you hear me?’ ‘Harry, you have been hurt.’ ‘Harry, do you know what happened? Can you squeeze my hand? Can you blink?’

His black blank stare was all there was.


Thursday May 30th, 4.00 am

Harry woke up alone. Julie was gone to her mother’s. They’d fought again and he didn’t know why, didn’t care either. He lay in th e dark, listening to the house shifting, the tiny creaks and groans as it stretched and flexed. The air felt thick, and warm. He kicked back th e covers and breathed deeply.

He got up from the bed and made his way through to the bathroom. The snap of the light was sharp and his eyes squinted against the sudden brightness. He looked at himself in the mirror. His skin was grey and his eyes, too. He stuck out his tongue. He didn’t know if it looked as it should.

Outside it was darker than dark, and the sky growled. Harry pulled on a shirt and walked into his pants. Then he lit a cigarette and went out onto the porch to smoke.

There was a storm coming. He could tell. The hairs on his arms stood up and he tasted metal or blood on his tongue.

He stepped down from the porch and onto the grass. It felt soft under his bare feet, and cool, and wet. But Harry didn0t really notice, was thinking of something else, lost in thought.

‘Maybe it is time,’ he said. He was not in the habit of speaking to himself. ‘Maybe it is time for a change, and Julie going is right and as it should be.’

He tried to remember what Julie had said. ‘It is over, what we had. Was over long before now.’ She’d been saying that a lot recently and a part of him knew she was right. ‘A new start. We need to let this go and move on.’ That’s what she had said. What she didn’t know was that he had already moved on.

He climbed the fence and wandered into the middle of the field. It was beginning to rain and his shirt stuck to his skin. He wiped his wet hair back from his eyes and looked up at the storm above him.

A decision was made then. He lifted his arms in celebration and called out her name.

Then there was only white, a seething hot white that reached down through him and made everything new, like a clean page.


Monday May 27th, 10.00 am

Her name was Marilyn. He said it over and over, tasting it, testing it.

‘Come for breakfast,’ she’d said. So he had, at ten o’clock prompt, knocking on her back door.

A bell chimed once when she opened the door, and once again when she closed it. The radio was playing, a song that he recognised. Marilyn was still in her dressing gown. It was white, like a nurse’s uniform or a doctor’s coat. He kissed her, and she smelled of apples. It was the shampoo that she used.

They had gone straight to her bed.

‘This is for real?’ she said.

Harry would have promised her the moon, the stars and everything in between.

‘This is more real than real,’ he said. It was a cute thing to say, even though it made no sen se, not really.

‘It’s just that things are moving pretty fast here,’ she said.

‘Not as fast as you think,’ said Harry. And he told Marilyn about the earth whizzing through space and no one ever noticing. She laughed.

‘You know what I mean,’ she said.

Her hand in his was cold. And then it was warm.

‘This is the start of something,’ he said. ‘It really is.’

Afterwards she had made toast and burned it.

‘From now on, Mondays will always smell of burnt toast,’ he declared.