The Floppy Dunlop Club was something I heard people whisper at night in the dorms during basic training, shaved heads reaching down from the top bunks to tittle-tattle, the dog tags chink-chink-ka-chink against the iron frames like car keys, dangling. The name was something I heard people whisper in the showers after a fitness test, when white buttocks and the chocolate mohawks between their cheeks were foamed with soap. I heard it whispered when a recruit left in the middle of the night, his bunk found void in the morning, the sheets tucked in tight enough to strangle the mattress. But the meaning of these whispers was not discovered unless one was deemed psychologically unfit for the army, or had that could not be farked attitude about I-rack.

When I was sent to the club, I was sent with the sheer pain of knowing I would next go either to a state hospital, or that decrepit town where I was born, that small settlement where one has to follow down a toothless white rabbit to reach the town centre, the brown-brick town hall cloudy with asbestos.

I preferred to return to that hole, hidden from the roaring highways and major roads, where the corn grows, where the beans grow, where the cows muster. I preferred to return, rather than be put in a real institution, where there were more candy-coloured medicines than placebos.

The nurse handed me a pair of Dunlop Volleys and hospital pyjamas, one hundred percent cotton. The Dunlops were a size and a half too big for my red as salmon feet. It did not matter how much I begged for a smaller pair of shoes, the nurse made me wear them from the moment I swung my legs out of bed to the moment I swung them up and under the sheets.

The nurses could hear the Dunlops, the white canvas clown shoes, because of the flop; the slap of the rubber soles against the thick linoleum, which was chequered in some parts. Most of the nurses said it was a safety precaution to hear us soldiers approaching. After all, we were mentally unfit.

Dunlop shoes are comparable to a slipper, though somewhat more durable due to their having been designed by a company famous for making the first pneumatic car tyres.

Some of the soldiers joked around the television about their shoes being made from second-hand tread; they dreamed of a Dunlop representative lost in some forgotten dump, collecting tyres from their pillars behind the lawn clippings and carrion crows.

The soldiers laughed about this each day, until one of them had his penis pink and sore, knifing through the slot in his pants, as he mumbled an anecdote about his kitten killing spree, right hand a blur. The men grabbed the backs of their chairs and screeched. The black squares of the chequered floor were scarred from cheap pine, Ikea legs. From beneath the blur of his hand came a wet flickering sound, as when one lathers the tongue with saliva and jolts it up and down epileptically behind the front teeth.

I always thought it was a dangerous notion to associate with men who spoke of kittens. I once saw some men in my unit tow kittens behind a Hummer with lengths of Nylon cord, laughing hysterically as a ball of fur bounced up and around in the plumes. But this was not what disturbed me the most. What disturbed me the most was that all of them were part of a city intelligentsia, the kind of people who watched ballet in dappled bowties.

For men whose brains were not at all twisted, floppy, the club was a place were one was sent to fill in the time, wait for all the paperwork around the formal discharge to clear. If he simply wanted to change his career, trade his camouflage for a pair of jeans, travel down the coast picking fruit, then the visit was an obligation, signed in blood.

I hid my real reasons for being on the ward. I simply told the other men how I was apposed to standing in a sandstorm with a gun and had never touched a kitten other than to pet it, feel its fur, soft as flour.

The army stated that normal people did not kill kittens. Normal people bulled forth through pelting sand, beneath the sheltering sky and listened to shells landing against the soft manila floor of a forgotten desert. Normal people, according to the army, are supposed to knock on a brown chest with lead, with the flinch a finger and tatter a hijab.

During admission, the men were all jarred like coloured M&Ms for the doctors to break open on the floor. The psychologists sifted through for the black M&M, the sunspot behind the rainbow.

Sometimes, the black M&M hid within the colours. But mostly it did not even exist until basic training, when a soldier squeezed a trigger and kept on squeezing long after the magazine had gagged its shells. The soldier squinted to the target and saw kittens, kittens and more kittens. When the kittens arose in his sight, the coloured M&M broke off from the rainbow and took a shit beside the leprechaun, in his pot of gold. The coloured M&M did not apologise to the leprechaun. He simply waited till the dark of night and contracted a blast from his own machine gun.
I did not know where I stood amid these people. I sometimes thought about my actions, my words, for there were at times, great boils of silence on the ward. I never knew how dangerous it was to be in the army. I did put my finger in the wound; I admitted that. I wriggled my index around, searching for something, maybe a little piece of innocence, something I thought I could still find in another human’s torn head. No one really knows why he sucked on the end of it, not even me, and I slept beneath him. I do remember the blast. Somehow, that night, the rift split further and my thumb found a sort of gaiety in the gore.

I told the doctor how all I could think of was this girl I finger-fucked on the soccer oval near my house. I thought it was strange how, after the death of a friend, a soul, all I could think of was this virgin’s vagina. When the doctor spoke, or retorted, he vomited tomes of medical terms. He believed I had some sort of fascination with opened skin.

My father once told me a racist joke. He said if I ever wanted to have sex with an Asian girl, I would have to impel her sideways, for their openings are similar to their eyes. This did intrigue me for a while, maybe a couple of summers ago, until I saw a porno titled Pumping Ping-Mei.

Maybe it was that brick-head who ran our drills during basic draining. I would fire and miss a target, fire and miss a target. He always called me Small Town. Spill his guts Small Town, he would scream, gravel throat. We’re going to galvanise you, son. Get that farking towel head. Go on, plug him. When we get to the desert we’re going to kill some farking Mohammed Mohammeds.

But there was something about the tone in his voice, the kind of tone that does not impinge the brain but whispers to it, as if it were a melody, the kind of song which causes lethargy to swell up in the eyelids of an infant.

I guess, after I heard his voice, I enjoyed it when the targets became mannequins filled with red paint. The heart pulses, the bullet rockets, never to be seen again.

I do not know how to put it into some form of sense, perhaps there is no form suited. All I know is a severed brain feels like a vagina. I learnt that in the army.

I remember once, while in The Floppy Dunlop Club, I wandered the long corridor which broke off into a series of offices and a large bathroom, walls lined with sinks and mirrors, all continuous. I turned and to the back of the ward I saw the ranks of bunks, iron and cold. There was no painting, no clock stretching for another number.

I found that the more I walked the ward, dragged my feet, scuffed my Dunlops, the more rubber life I left in my wake. I imagined seeing the heart of my shoes break off from my heels and slip over the linoleum like a wet, pulsating fish, torsional. I saw its withered lungs tumble over the tiles.

The head nurse ordered me to fold up beneath the sheets. But I kept digging my toe into the linoleum, squeak, like a mouse having its abdomen pulverised by the hasp that comes up and over, powered by a spring. The club of soldiers climbed down from their bunks and they too scuffed their soles against the sparkling, chequered floor, melding the rubber, with great furious friction, like animals.