Sometimes the Illness will take spoons faster than I can count and it’ll take Me along with my body.

That’s the worst part. I can cope well enough with my limbs breaking down now, as if they’re powered by cheap batteries with an hour’s life in them. But when it takes my mind I lose all sense of who I am. My ‘Me’. It’ll take an hour to type a short text message or remember the name of my own goldfish. It feels like being trapped on a raft in the middle of an ocean of brain fog, just floating into nothing.

‘Ugh, I’m going to be late again,’ Mum says as she rushes to get ready for work. ‘Are you going to be okay on your own today, Alice?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I say, picking up my laptop. ‘I’m back to a full set of spoons now.’

But as she kisses me goodbye, looks at her watch and swears, I wonder if that’s entirely true.

Welcome back to Stream Cast, Alice

Users online:

tokyo--drifter

Online for:
16 mins

Users offline:

daddycool-007

Last online:
72 days

Connect to a channel to start watching.

Hana is online. And, even though I feel a slight pang above my eye, I click to connect and disappear.

Connecting to tokyo--drifter …

8

tokyo--drifter

And now I am being held on a selfie stick as I watch my old babysitter, Hana, wander round wide pedestrian streets with whole forests of buildings either side.

She has the camera turned to face her, which is something she always does and I don’t know why. It makes it impossible to believe that I’m walking round Tokyo with her. Why would I ever walk backwards?

Her hair is in pigtails and she’s smiling at everyone she walks past, but I try to see beyond her face to the city behind her.

Tokyo is buildings and glass-fronted arcades and lights that flash like a Christmas tree. There are people everywhere, holding hands and cameras, and pointing at things higher than I can see.

She swings the selfie stick round and I feel like I’m being helicoptered. She eventually sits on something I think is a bench, watching something I can’t see behind the camera. Some music starts up and someone’s singing, and I keep expecting her to turn the camera towards the action. Instead, I watch her watch whatever it is with her mouth open.

‘Turn the camera round,’ I say out loud, but of course she can’t hear me. The streamers never can.

I’m thinking about disconnecting when I catch the shopfront screen behind her. It was advertising a soft drink, but now it’s turned into what looks like a giant fish tank – as if it isn’t a screen at all, but a portal into a world within a world.