Waiting in 1990

The receptionist smiles and leans over the front desk. She passes me a blank colouring-in book and a handful of pens and pencils. I can wait over there. Printed with chunky lines on white paper, the cover depicts a schematic of the same waiting room in which I’m standing. A generic image of a child has been inserted next to the reception desk. Child and desk are dwarfed by a perfectly rotund cartoon droplet standing next to them. The droplet looks down at the child with googly eyes and a wide grin. It has two arms and two legs. It wears shoes. It says something via a speech bubble that I assume is welcoming. In the next page, the droplet gestures with its gloved hands to other rooms beyond the frame, inviting the child to take a guided tour. Unclenching my fist, I survey my colouring options. I pick the red pen first, but it has already run out, leaving only a brittle squeak and pink smear. I fill in the fat droplet with green pencil instead.

There is a subsection of kink called ‘Vore’. To count as Vore, the thing or image has to be consuming itself. The Vore genre is primarily considered a sexual fetish, but representations aren’t always schlocky cannibalism. In fact, it’s a fairly common occurrence in everyday life: butchers adorn their vans with comical pigs snaffling sausage rolls; ice cream parlours decorate their part of the sidewalk with sculptural effigies of a big drippy cone licking a mini drippy cone; cartoons of burgers are often, by dint of their bun-shaped mouths, already munching down on a beef patty with tomato and lettuce. After Jesus and his disciples, smiley face ecstasy pills and their consumers are perhaps the most mainstream human symbol of Vore culture: eat the happiness you want to be.

Part-distraction, part-education, the book is a Vore-ish attempt to assuage panic – panic of blood, panic of needles, panic of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis, panic of death. It seeks to consume attention and, in doing so, habituate a narration of blood. The duration required to fill in this book also allows for the other practical things that happen here to take place with less interruption: the time it takes an adult to donate a pint of blood, the time taken by a nurse to administer an infusion, the time needed to interview someone as a transfusion candidate.

As well as the small child and the big droplet, there are other characters that appear in later pages of this colouring-in book. A red blood cell presents a challenge for my remaining colouring options – green pencil already taken, so it goes purple. Boringly, a white blood cell is meant to stay blank, but I fill it in orange highlighter anyway. Some of the flashier disposable pens that the receptionist gave me come bearing logos I’ve seen around here before: Glaxo, Pfizer, Bayer, Astra – companies with a stake in the droplet’s story. But after testing each of the pens, I find that their ink is either just black or blue biro. I toss the book aside after encountering a platelet and ask the receptionist if I can have one of the patient cookies.

Mason Leaver-Yap