Gary J. Shipley - Crypt(o)spasm (2016, Schism Press) - libgen.li

CRYPT(O)SPASM

First published by Les Éditions du Zaporogue in 2012. Revised edition first published in 2016 by Schism2 prεss First edition ISBN: 978-1502402189 Copyright © Gary J Shipley All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law. Printed in London, UK.

CRYPT(O)SPASM by Gary J. Shipley1 Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life. Heraclitus 1 My one and only heteronym.

CRYPT(O)SPASM or C^0 or THE SILENCE OF DERAILED TRAINS or PUTREFACTIONS or NERVE MAZE or WHAT A DEAD-END SKY, MY LOVE or IMPOSSIBILIA or BURROWING FOR LIGHT or HOW A TITLE BECAME A NOVEL OR A NOVEL A TITLE or

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven. John Milton PARADISE LOST The mental and the material are really here, But there is no person to be found For it is void and fashioned like a doll, Just suffering piled up like grass and sticks. Buddha VISUDDHIMAGGA Where are you going That you suck breath like mileage? Sylvia Plath THE OTHER They won’t listen to me or come and see me. What have I done to them? Why do they torture me so? What can they want from a miserable wretch like me? What can I offer them when I have nothing of my own? I can’t stand this torture any more. My head is burning and everything is spinning round and round. Save me! Take me away! Gogol DIARY OF A MADMAN

A SICKNESS OF WORDS There are days when I can’t stomach to write, when I can’t stomach even to think of the ridiculousness of writing as being the reason why I choose not to. On these days my flat is my enemy: all those fucking books, all those bound words covering my walls and cluttering my floors like the infectious growths of some grisly disease. I live in an abattoir of vanity. The inside of my head is being eaten alive by chattering fleas. I can’t help thinking the last twenty-odd years of my life have been rooted in some fearsome mistake, and that I’ve been wasting my days with this disagreeable pastime. What do my silly little textual configurations amount to? I’m revolted by my flimsy creations, sitting quietly in the corner of the room, flat and unreal. If it earned me any money it would be a cuntish way of making a living, but it doesn’t grace me even with that. I can’t excuse my idiocy on pragmatic grounds; a risible means of putting food on the table, now that would be something. I could laugh it off then: it’s easier to laugh as a worker than as a slave. Did I ever really feel a calling? Is this serfdom of letters my destiny or my will? To what end am I pressing my deepest thoughts between sheets of paper like dead flowers? To what end any of this? I go too far. These feelings pass and I’m back writing again, taking it seriously, pushing myself on to greatness. But I never really lose the sense that I have a sickness, that I’m ill with empty words, afflicted with associations and verbal structures fit only for leading me astray. My hometown of Pavilionstone is a death camp, a corner of Hell, a twisted thought experiment made manifest, a place of ordinary horror… Ah, and what townsfolk – how I could have wallpapered my heart with their sad faces…. The year is 2610, or so they tell me. That, at least, is the date displayed from the roofs of the N.W.R. buildings that I have seen, and I have seen a few in my time. And time is what they have now; time is what the New World Republic has provided them with, and there was a time when they were all so grateful, but now is not that time. This time is shaded in doubletalk, and misery, and a life mourning simpler, happier times when people

were always dying some other day until that day came. Now that day, for most, all bar a few, never comes. The world made Spain where dead men live…. Charles lines up his cigarettes beside his typewriter with the intensity of a boy arranging plastic soldiers. Before beginning to write, Charles would arrange his authorial props: to his left are ten cigarettes, a cigarette packet with a lighter placed on top, and an 8-inch square Murano glass ashtray; his coffee is to his right, his typewriter directly ahead, and almost defiantly inert. If, having sat down to work, the words eluded him, panic would well up and he’d find it necessary to either rearrange his props a little, pick up a book and skim it for inspiration, have a piss, or take his fat, bald head in his hands and wrestle it for prose. He once read that some respected author or other would always finish his day’s writing mid-sentence, so as to provide a segue into the following day’s writing. Charles considered this a capital device, but never got around to employing it himself, and during those times when the words refused to surface, he would always berate himself for not having done so. It never made any difference though, and having completed what he felt was a sufficient output for the day he would always tie it up, in order that he might cease to be plagued by where it might have gone had he remained where he ought to have remained, in front of his typewriter, bashing out his masterwork. Will this gherkin drown in its vinegar? I come to Proust on bended knee: “It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence. […] So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books.” And as, with a shaky bowel, I anticipate looking out from this scoffing nowhere of broken spines and laden shelves, feel free to browse the clutter of words I have collected, words from which I formed the tools of death. 8

C-SECTIONED There were, a long time before my own strained birth, a couple of soft minds who used to live in the rooms across the hall. She had one of those enlarged foreheads that push the hairline way back above the ears like Gary Conway the Teenage Frankenstein. Her hair was thin, wispy and brindled. He was barely out of short trousers and as vacant as she was sour. Someone should have done something sooner. Something should have been done. All who knew of them wondered how they were going to manage, and yet nobody did a thing. On first meeting her, the landlady had sensed “something of the chill of the charnel house” about her face, her mannerisms, her bug eyes, her being. Her face was peculiarly still, so that regardless of what was happening to or around her, her expression never changed. She looked back at you when you talked to her; “she talked right enough about things,” to quote her landlady once more, but it was as if her body had been possessed by some alien entity new to the subtleties of human physicality. She went through the motions of normality, but one could only imagine the vitriol and rancour that waited impatiently behind the scenes. At least now nobody need imagine any longer. That boyfriend of hers was just plain thick; there was no real malice in him, although he did have what they call ‘criminal ears’: coils of pink skin jutting out from the side of his head, not unlike those of a pig. She was none too smart either, don’t get me wrong, but she came across as though she knew she was missing something, that she was wrong – a semi-retarded devil. Yes, as if she knew. Like when somebody knows they’re mad, I guess. You can still be mad and know it, can’t you? Maybe if you’re mad you can’t know it, because if you did you wouldn’t be mad. Nah, you can know. Anyway, she was like that. She hadn’t been showing long when it happened. It was all up front and you could easily miss it out of profile. I know, because according to reports many had, right up until a week or so before, done just that, many times. She 9

was a week away from five months when they did it. They hadn’t been counting the days since the blood stopped coming and dirtying the bed, since he’d “hurt her with his thing.” They’d lost track of when. Neither of them worked or had any friends. They had each other, and when that wasn’t enough they had the dialetheic solace of superbrews and speed. He’d heard sounds of choking, gurgling, and churning – a muffled symphony of suffocation. He started to panic when he felt something brush against his cheek, and leapt up and asked her what the fuck was going on. She felt it “struggling” inside her and screamed – “What the fuck!” – gawping at him, nervous, expectant. They shared another super and waited. “I can still fucken feel it! I can still fucken feel it! My food’s come back to life inside my guts.” He paused as best he could, gave some consideration to his answer, eyes trained on the flitting excrescences, and then with gravity and confidence said, “It wants out!” A couple of minutes later it was out, or, to qualify on a once indefinite article, he was out. To cut her open, he used the razor blade that, just minutes earlier, had been screeching crescents and half moons of speed about her compact face mirror. She never made a peep. Nobody heard her make a noise that night. She opened up real easy, the skin being so tight and all. She split like a fish belly full of roe. Such was his impatience that he damn near took one of its eyes out. And after all the fuss, it didn’t seem too pleased to be out. Mum was stuck in a one-question mantra: “Is it alright now? Is it alright now?...,” until she fell asleep. She never woke up. She slowly bled away into the mattress, her gut splayed and deflated like some punctured balloon. They locked him up and buried her. And then they spotted all the telltale signs of the glaring inescapability of what had happened. He’d remained in there with them for two days. He’d watched TV. (From what he could recall, a couple of Dad’s Army reruns had distracted him, as had an Ealing comedy which, after a little questioning, turned out to be The Lavender Hill Mob; this was before he became ensnared in a seemingly never-ending cycle of WW2 documentaries, from which he’d found it impossible to extricate himself: turning over from one he was confronted with another and then another…. These included: ‘Mengele: Angel of Death,’ ‘Homosexuality in the Third Reich,’ ‘Hitler’s Henchmen,’ ‘Auschwitz Atrocities,’ ‘Echoes of the Holocaust,’ ‘The Exquisite Darkness of Nazi Uniforms,’ ‘The Gestapo: Policemen with Style,’ ‘History of the Brownshirts,’ ‘Eva Braun: First Lady,’ ‘Theodor Eike and the Waffen SS Totenkopf Division,’ ‘Colditz Stories,’ ‘Nietzsche, Hitler and the Spiral Germ’…) He smoked what cigarettes were left, ate the few meagre scraps found festering in the fridge, and managed to block out what had happened. He was somehow able to disassociate himself from the small body in the sink – tap dripping, plip 10

plip plip, on his chubby little arm – and the larger one slowly merging with the mattress. Against all the odds that baby did not die. Birth was not the death of him. 11

LEAD TANNING And then there was Frank Stone, an oldish acquaintance of mine reborn from his wife’s brutalized corpse. …One day Elizabeth will die her second and, one must suppose, final death. Anyway, where was I? … The sun bled through the parched leaves of our bastard sycamore, its bleached cascades pouring into the dry earth, as the unfinished fence at the bottom of our garden leaned precariously into its shadowed props. I was down the hotel bar talking the same old regurgitated bollocks, sucking on a hot brier and swilling back enough mild to drown a small litter of puppies, while my wife, Elizabeth, was absorbing the sun. She would have certainly been naked; apart, that is, from the huge black sunglasses perched on her nose, her burnished skin exposed to the air and the sun, writhing around as if on a spit, displacing old sweat. Our garden wasn’t overlooked, so you couldn’t accuse her of being an exhibitionist. However, as I mentioned, the fence was in a state of disrepair, and so someone could have spied her nakedness had they crouched down to look. But that wouldn’t have worried her too much: she always said the sight of her unclad body was enough to give anyone mulligrubs, and thought me, her adoring husband, an absurdly insincere flatterer when I so vehemently disagreed. But it was all pretty much the plain truth. She would have been on her favourite recliner: the one covered in faded sunflowers. Her puckered skin would have been damp with bronzing oil, and her fingernails and toenails would have just received a fresh coat of flamingo pink. She might have been reading, or starfished on her back with a magazine at her side. She might have been applying the final stroke of varnish to her nails. (There was, after all, a bit of smudging present.) She might have been on her front, brown arse skyward – defiantly callipygian even in the face of death. There were so many variations when I came to think about it, and I did little else for what turned into years. 12

She would have smiled initially, I’m sure about that. She always smiled, always had, and what a smile it was. She’d had the fullest lips in her youth: a couple of prime pork sausages testing the tensile strength of their intestinal tubes to the full. ‘Blowjob lips’ they’d called them at school. Like her breasts they’d deflated somewhat over the years, but had managed somehow to retain the memory of their former glory within the context of her face. When she smiled, her cheeks would almost obscure her eyes: all was lips and teeth and gloss and cheeks. Her smile would have been a factor on that day – that you can be sure of – as strange as it might seem, but then you never knew her. It wouldn’t seem strange if you had known her, but only I ever did. At least, that is what I like to think, and it is most likely true in any case, at least in the way I mean it, which is, after all, a pretty standard way. Maybe one of you did know her – that is a definite possibility – but not in the way I knew her. I don’t imagine she would have carried on smiling for long; I mean, she wasn’t fucking simple. Who would carry on smiling? I’m pretty fucking sure you wouldn’t, and even if you would have, it wouldn’t have come close. At best it would have been an embarrassment, at worst a mutilation. I’ve undergone many changes since then, each of them seeming so necessary and yet not. This new life of a used-up man – this clapped-out dog with new tricks – she never would have believed. All those years I’d stuck to the things I’d known, quietly and smugly petrified by any promise of change. But who ever needed change with her around? Now it’s all different, and so, accordingly, am I. If Elizabeth could see me now, I… If only I’d finished that fence…. I’m not discontented now, three years on. Neither am I content. I’m something I’ve never been. I was fine for 33 years: I had Elizabeth. Elizabeth made me happy when nothing else did, which was most of the time. Life consisted of Elizabeth, our temporary partings and imminent reunions: hence my presence down the hotel bar with a few old cronies as Elizabeth glistened like some slippery stool under an obliging September sun. I didn’t exactly enjoy those solo expeditions, but I didn’t ever want to take her for granted, so I had to force myself to be apart from her at certain times. I could tell when the time was right, when I was closing in on disregard, and when only the distance of others could repair our closeness. The same faces year after year, the same vestiges of some past somewhere. Of course, a few were lost to the ravages of decay and bright lights, but remarkably there were always some not-so-young pretenders to take their place. The mainstay were Glyptadon/Armadillo, Ricky Tragedy (before suicide), Gyulus, Sammy the Friendliest (hungriest) Dog in the World and James his miserly owner, Tony Med, Polite Arthur, Mad M. and his dead brother, The 13

Lame Fighter Pilot, Wiggy, and Charles (or Falstaff’s Fat Brother as some people called him), all of whom had been frequenting the bar for time immemorial. Sammy was by far the best company. He’d lick your hand like a lunatic who’d just been given a tongue to play with. In all likelihood he was seeking sustenance, urgently trying to remove a layer of skin before you tired of his advances and retracted your hand. James, his overtly frugal and hairy-nosed owner, used to let him feed on the scraps from his boarding house; but, given his tendencies, these were likely to have been scarce, and so the free bar snacks (nuts, crisps, and the occasional vol-au-vent or sausage roll) provided an excellent opportunity for him to feed his animal at no expense to himself – tight fucker’d skin a turd for an ha’penny. That in mind, he never actually fed him from the bar himself: that would have been too blatant. Instead, everyone else, being well aware of Sammy’s starvation diet, would oblige with the feeding. James was pleasant enough, and always ready to talk, as long as the talk concerned the matters of money. He had an eye for a nubile young filly on the rare occasion that one should flit into the bar by mistake. But then didn’t they all? All, that is, except the league of hard-faced faggots invariably huddled together in the corners fingering one another’s dirt. Ricky, poor old frustrated Ricky, Ricky whose favourite catchphrase was, “You don’t understand! Does nobody understand?” But we did; we understood all too well. I mean, he talked of nothing else but his unfortunate circumstances. He was a desperately lonely man. He craved female company, but even the crisp white suit that never left his skin was not sufficient to attract the opposite sex in a hotel bar invariably full of fairies and musty old men. We asked him why he didn’t pay for it, and he replied that he never had and never would, and he never did: he threw himself off a bridge straight into the path of an articulated lorry travelling at sixty miles an hour instead. (Randall Jarrell threw himself under a truck aged 51…) The general consensus among his friends when they heard was, “Fuck that waste of space, how is the lorry driver bearing up?” Gyulus was of Hungarian extraction, an expert in the dying art of knifesharpening, an early-morning picker of edible non-hallucinogenic fungi, and self-appointed promotional manager for Drum tobacco and the overnight goulash. He had thick blackberry-black hair that he aggressively claimed as his own. He drank as many pints of Spitfire as he could get his hands on, usually around seven or eight. He’d go out at least five nights a week, leaving his little woman at home watching TV. “She gets her seeing to when I get in,” he says to anyone who asks after her in any way, not that many do, not with any degree of seriousness anyhow. “If I drunk I rape the bitch, she is no complaining she is – howdyu say? – gagging for it.” A dapper gent, his sarto14

rial elegance coming courtesy of charity shops and the dead husbands of his wife’s friends, who was forever trying to sell you something: the shoes he was wearing, a pair he had at home, or a spare bicycle that had a saddle that cut his balls in half. He was especially disdainful of those he labelled “Pilchards,” which, roughly translated, means the common herd, the sheep, the rabble, the cannon fodder of modern living, the scum, pretty much anyone but himself and the person he happened to be talking to. He memorised poetry to earn himself free drinks from the right kind of soon-to-be-ex-Pilchard, usually Attila József or Sándor Kányádi. Polite Arthur was an eminently likeable septuagenarian with a white neatly trimmed moustache, a dense tweed suit and immaculately buffed brown brogues. He was separated from his slightly younger wife who, nevertheless, still kept an eye on him and had his best interests foremost in her mind. He drank Bass like one would drink extremely hot tea. To say he had a penchant for apologising isn’t enough: excusing himself was his métier, and he made full use of his gifts. He was always on the lookout for opportunities to beg your pardon. Not a large man, it was as if he thought himself gargantuan, always aware that his extreme bulk might be inconveniencing someone in his vicinity. If a group of exuberant youths barged past him in the street, he would trot along behind them expounding his sincerest regrets to the young gents and young ladies for knocking into them. But he also had a bitter, petty streak: he would bark abuse at the poor hotel waitress if, when serving him his nightly meal, she happened to drop the knife and fork that he used to meticulously dissect his ham sandwich. Do you have a theory yet on who killed M.’s brother? A bit too soon I expect, but you’ll become acquainted with the facts sooner or later. You might even become a suspect. And don’t be perturbed any if M. accuses you of putting paid to his brother’s miserable life across one of this town’s many hotel bars. He’ll probably walk over to you and look deep into your eyes and say, “It was you, wasn’t it! Don’t you dare deny it!” You’ll be taken aback, but not so taken aback as you would have been had I not mentioned it. He’ll spout his elliptical spiel of cover-ups and incompetence as long as you remain within earshot, and invariably a good deal longer. His brother, as far as I know, was stabbed in the stomach outside a busy department store one Saturday afternoon. The man who did the stabbing was never apprehended, hence M.’s quest. M. has been traversing this town in search of his brother’s killer for nigh on thirty-five years now, and he finds him most nights. His is a pathetic tale all round. He spends all his money – all the money left over from his nightly trawls around the bars in search of his brother’s killer – on Luke, his suicidal son, who attempted to take his own life about ten years ago and has been threatening a repeat performance, complete with 15

jaw-dropping finale, ever since. M. pays him to stay alive, day-by-day. A few think it’s just a sick joke and that Luke is a laggard and a scrounging cunt who has cashed in on his moment of weakness and on his father’s lifetime of the stuff. M. can’t see anything untoward with the arrangement. He regards his son’s predicament as irrefutably tragic, and sincerely believes his son does him a service just by staying alive. M. knows Charles. Charles doesn’t bother trying to hide his mendacity, and keeps M. company only as long as M. continues to buy the drinks. Charles resents the money M. wastes on his son, considering it money better spent on his old mate Charles. M. and Charles do not get on particularly well, but each pretends to listen to the other, and they find that enough to sustain their friendship – in addition, of course, to Charles receiving his free drinks. The Lame Fighter Pilot was a punishing bore – not even Polite Arthur would enter into conversation with him. He was one of a few too many. He may well have protected his country from the airborne Hun (if you bought into his being transferred recently from the N.W.R.), but nobody gave a shit. Under his arm, or beside his pint on the bar, was always the same book: some photographic montage of local Spitfire pilots in which his ugly mug was featured, or so he maintained. He wore a poppy all year round – that war had never been allowed to end, after all. We called him Mainwaring behind his back. When he was sufficiently inebriated and had nobody new to bore, he’d just lean into the bar mumbling “Bash the Boche! Bash the Boche!” under his bad breath. Fucking old bullshitter probably saw no more action than that fake Brit Faulkner. Tony Med: short, plump, long-haired, and not afraid to wear turn-ofthe-century tennis garb on the bleakest mid-winter evening. Despite his myopia he refuses to wear corrective spectacles, which explains his habit of laying the communal newspapers out on the bar and burying his head in them, running his face along the print as if reading Braille with his eyeballs. Tipple: lager, Kronenberg 1664, which he sups without interruption until the money or the time runs out, or until he shits himself on his barstool and is forced to rinse out his white knee-length shorts in the toilets before returning. A finder of lost walks, and advocate of walking for its own sake, he has strong legs and more places to leave than find. I’ve just realised that I have introduced and discussed some of these old reprobates in the past tense, but they are all still with us – bar Ricky – only I am no longer with them. I have been busy recently, busier than I have ever been. My time has been taken up, occupied. I’ve had things to do, important things by all accounts – well by mine, at least, and that is the only one that concerns me, the only one that has ever concerned me. Like Dostoevsky 16

cramming productive time between crippling, stunting fits of epilepsy, I have made the most of small stretches of lucidity. I’ve been busy. Now let that be an end to it. You’ll know with what soon enough. 17

THE NUMBER CRUNCHERS In order to have a superior and sustainable population, every country had a quota worked out according to its size and resources; the rest, inevitably, were killed. Some people referred to those deemed unworthy of eternity as lebensunwertes leben. But most chose to avoid this phrase and its unsavoury connotations, simply referring to them as subtractions (–) and themselves as additions (+). It didn’t really matter what you called them, for it did nothing to alter their fate: the power of words has its limits. First to qualify for extermination were newborns and any infant up to the age of five; being aged five to sixteen was also precarious, but the chances were better, in that at least you had one. Everyone in prison with more than a year left on their sentence automatically qualified. Those with less than a year were investigated individually, assessed on the severity of their crimes and recidivist tendencies. Retards, invalids and the insane were high on the list, unless they had proved themselves worthy of the corrective surgery they would come to receive if accepted, which virtually none of them did. Drug addicts and alcoholics were given a month to straighten up, at which time they would be reassessed. Those that didn’t clean up their act automatically qualified for liquidation. Many were so depressed towards the end of their month of abstention that they faltered deliberately in order to save themselves from an eternity of kicking. Street dwellers were injected with battery acid as they slept in doorways, save the bother of having to endure their presence in the interview rooms. During the assessment period there was call for a number of recounts, as some, as yet uncertain of their future, took it upon themselves to improve the odds in their favour. For many, it was a truly hazardous time to be alive: on the brink of immortality with a warm gun barrel in your mouth. In the end, those with security systems survived with relative ease, while the rest took their chances with everybody else. The authorities did their bit, but it wasn’t taken all that seriously, for obvious reasons. When the time came for final decisions to be made and implemented, a good deal of the N.W.R.’s work 18

had already been done. In excess of 35% of unwanted digits had by then been taken out of the equation. Extermination squads were partly responsible for laying the foundations for the N.W.R., for sending those extraneous digits out into the night and fog, mopping up those that attempted to flee their fate, or those who had no close family or friends to dispose of them. The ruling was that everyone was to take care of their own, but for those that were discontented or isolated from other people there were the squads. To guard against mistakes, the chosen ones were each implanted with a cranial chip. In the initial months of the N.W.R., there were a number of incidents where rogue minuses attempted to remove these chips from legitimate pluses and implant them in their own heads and so escape detection. Any such tampering did not go unnoticed, all such rogue minuses swallowed in minutes. Some managed to elude the authorities for a month or more, but as the numbers diminished the squads made easy work of their detection and consequent annihilation. In a world full of people who had sacrificed their lovers and their own children, and of children who had put paid to their elderly parents, and brothers their wayward sisters, and sisters their junky brothers…, for the sake of immortality, where was there for the loner to hide? Nobody would take them in and offer them refuge from a death on which their own eternal life was founded. Two days into the initial week, it was broadcast that those errant minuses that managed to survive the first month would be rewarded for their ingenuity and resilience with a pardon and subsequent inclusion into the N.W.R.. When the few that had survived the allotted period surfaced, seeking out their reward, they too were killed. On Enumeration Day the flags on every N.W.R. building were held at half-mast in honour of those who had died so that others might live forever. A period of collective mourning was observed, and parents wept for their brave, selfless children. The last enemy had been destroyed…. ‘Head Hunters,’ ‘Dead Headers,’ ‘Scalp Shakers,’ ‘Loaf Lifters,’ Nut Packers,’ ‘Cold Crowners,’ ‘Conker Cutters,’ we are known by all these tags, but our official title is, the rather more prosaic, Life Enforcement (or Extension) Officers (‘L.E.O.’s’ or ‘Lions’ for short). There are many thousands of us worldwide, all looking to undo Death’s handiwork, to vandalize the labours of the ultimate vandal. We don’t have a uniform as such, although a good number of us do tend to wear black roll-neck sweaters on the job. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s a manifestation of over sublimated squeamishness, or maybe not. This subcon- 19

scious dress-code has, if nothing else, given rise to another nickname: ‘Beatnik Boncers.’ Nobody is permitted to die here, and I mean nobody. Many try and many fail. A few manage it, very few, fewer all the time. We are getting more efficient, better equipped and better staffed every year. Soon we will have a completely deathless year – I can feel it. It will come. We will all of us live, soulless, and deathless. This is the end towards which the Worldwide L.E.O. Network is striving. This is our part in the overseer’s principal plan. Almost everyone has contemplated suicide at one time or another, but most, realising the futility of attempting to take their own life, go no further than their dreamy ruminations. Some say that by depriving people of an escape route from life, we are responsible for increasing the current sadness and depravity of the men and women of this planet. Such individuals, sickening defeatists the lot of them, refuse to see themselves as part of a new global family. They are, of course, to be pitied, being as they are, quite obviously, insane. They are not punished, but treated, humanely, in identityreassignment wards that have – so I am told – a 100% success rate in curing such misguided panic-mongers. There are those within our ranks who advocate the use of extreme torture on such unfortunates – I, Molech Mundungus: senior L.E.O., Branch 4, am not one of them. I see no point in inflicting pain on those whose faults are so easily rectified. Everyone is fitted with a microchip transmitter that records brain function, which it conveys every half second, along with its location, to a constantly monitored central database. As soon as a brain’s activity drops to a dangerous level, a number of L.E.O.s from the relevant part of the world are assigned to the freezing project. Competition between L.E.O.s helps keep motivation levels within optimal parameters. (We work both individually and in teams. I choose to work alone. It hasn’t always been this way: I’ve had partners in the past, but it isn’t for me these days. No. I’m better off working alone.) We aim to get to potential victims within a few minutes, so as to cut down on the reconstructive work needed to bring them back. With each excretion we have fewer to deal with. With the introduction of compulsory health checks every other day, and all the many improvements in safety protocols, it really is small wonder. It was as a result of these measures that we were able to afford the manpower to establish units of highly-trained men and women who, relieved of dealing with all the more standard attempts at suicide, found themselves free to combat other, more ingenious ways of cheating life. In the beginning things were far messier. Those that were genuinely suicidal just blew their brains out, naively believing that by destroying their brains they could thwart any efforts to reanimate them. Fortunately, we had 20

already devised effective ways of dealing with the brain blowers, although, unfortunately for us, it took everyone quite a while to catch on. (What needs to be taken into consideration is the highly covert nature of our work back in the early days. When people came to after what they imagined to be a successful suicide attempt, they were bewildered, but ultimately they believed what they were told i.e., some crock of shit that involved them bungling their suicide. I mean, how could they doubt it? They were living proof, or so they believed, of its being true.) They pose no real problem to us now. Another aspect of the job is the process of negatively maintaining the Magic Number, or ‘weeding’ as some of the guys call it. There are those that call it ‘infanticide,’ but that’s unnecessarily provocative. If you want to be pedantic about it, then, well, yes, we do kill babies. But what would they have us do with them? How would they maintain the Magic Number? If people didn’t go against The Way then we wouldn’t have a problem: we could get on with our other duties and our bad-mouthers could find other abstract causes with which to trifle away their time. (I can hear them try, in their unrealistic, stuck, quixotic, half-cooked rapping knocks, the dreamy cry of, “I want babies by a gearbox!”) Numerology is our business; we kill off subtract – what would prove to be, if given the chance – rogue numerals. To associate what we do with murder is an unnecessary extravagance of conscience. They have no psychological legacy that need concern us. No legerdemain is required to justify what, after all, must be done. It is imperative that they be taken out of the equation as early as possible, before they become real ethical quandaries. Birth control, we are in charge of birth control, with nothing Christielike about it. A suitable voltage applied to the back of the neck, a convulsion and then no more. All is quiet and still, and peace reigns. Still, it is best not to get too caught up in the tranquillity of a passing and run the risk of forgetting to zip them up in their little bags in good time. There is something so serene about those over whom death still has dominion, as they give up and go so very easily, never to become anything, so easily forgotten – unique, but in no relevant way. Maybe you could think of us as a form of Malthusian aftercare service. Yes, that would pretty much sum it up. Murder is now obsolete; although, in the early stages people were, for a time, more murderous than ever. For instance, despite revenge killings being a pathetic waste of time, there were still those who spent year upon year ‘killing’ the same people. Although, incarceration and torture soon became the primary outlets for one’s hatred of specific individuals. Whereas a man enraged by his wife’s infidelities might have shot her and her lover in a fit of passion, he would instead roast them both over a fire, or ploddingly skin 21

them alive, or some such nastiness. You might think man had descended into something unrecognizable during this period, but you’d be wrong. It is just that men, in general, learn to endure things that they never would have dreamed they could endure when they had less time to endure them. Torture, sexual violence, and attempted killings are now extremely rare in the N.W.R., almost unheard of: such things were merely the playful exuberance of our salad days, those days before the chasm of meaning opened up for us, before the swollen self-importance of morality rushed in to fill the void. Those sideshows of juvenile self-eaters common to the northern districts of Pavilionstone, or so I am informed, could never exist here. Even the details, which I share now only under sufferance, are still a source of severe discomfort to most, a discomfort seemingly unabated by endless repeat viewings. According to lore, the adrenalin produced by pain and fear dramatically improves the taste and texture of a child’s flesh: the internal organs marinate in dread. It is not uncommon for the young victims to have their hands carved off while still very much alive, or to be thrown into specially designed wells filled with edible glue, where they are said to struggle for hours before finally succumbing. Some of the children, those aware of the purpose of this process before falling victim to it, have taken to gnawing away at their own meat before their captors get to it, sampling one last pleasure before they die. They sit and chomp away at their arms and legs, biting and ripping at their flesh, swallowing as much as they can before they are discovered and killed on the spot… 22

LOVE IN THE CREEK Decay gliding through the rotting apartment; Shadows on yellow wallpaper. – Georg Trakl, ‘Amen’ Molech presses button 3 on an intercom panel and waits. “Hello? Charles?” “Who is it?” says Charles plangently. “It’s me.” “What about Coco?” “I’ve just come from there.” “Alright, I’m coming down.” Charles trundles down the stairs and pops his bulbous, fuzzy clown head around the door. He shuts the door to take off the chain and opens it again, all the while remaining hidden behind it. He glances out at the street as if expecting to see something hideous. The moment Molech is safely inside, he slams the door shut behind him. Charles is shaking his head to and fro like a dog wrestling the dying breath from a rabbit. This can only be interpreted as a prelude to a distinctly lengthy and frenetic explanation, an explanation poisoned with nerves and loneliness. The top two thirds of the hallway walls are a filthy sludge brown, the bottom third black, decaying and peeling to reveal a bleached-out red. The white paintwork on the split and warped doors and banisters is brittle and heavily chipped, revealing old colours: ill greens and rusty beiges. The light switches, splattered with cracked paint, are those round, bulbous, tit-like things invariably seized up with time. The floors are bare, cold and clattering. The thick newel posts look as if rats or hungry men with small teeth have been nibbling away at their edges. Once inside the stuffy confines of his flat, Charles tells Molech to take a seat. Charles remains on his feet pacing around the room, sweat rolling down 23

his forehead into his glazed, frogspawn eyes – he looks to be shot full of Metrazol and bad dreams. He smiles knowingly to himself, as if aware of just how ridiculously agitated he looks. He offers Molech some coffee and scurries off to his squalid and thoroughly outmoded kitchen to boil the kettle. A whirring noise is coming from behind the mould-bespeckled curtains. Molech is tempted to investigate but, unable to find a clear path to the window, gives up on the idea. The flat is teeming with musty old books, scrunched up packets of Benson and Hedges, empty bottles of blended whisky, a cityscape of stacked audio cassettes, and piles of typing paper nursing a plague of indecipherable words. Molech glances over at an open book that is lying beside him on the sofa. Underlined in blue biro is a passage about a German playwright by the name of Ernst Barlach, who according to the book didn’t begin to write plays until he was over forty years old. (If Molech had flicked through the rest of the section on German writers he would have found Arthur Schnitzler’s name highlighted with a now faded circle of pencil lead, who didn’t start his writing career until he was nigh on thirty, and Hermann Broch’s name underlined in black biro, who didn’t publish his first book until the age of 45…) Charles has given himself a few more months before the hope runs out. But then he is always on the lookout for someone older, and will no doubt find him if he hasn’t already. The problem with Charles’s slothful existence as an aspiring writer is that although the years to make it were fast diminishing, the days were too long to create any urgency in their passing. (Outside Pavilionstone, in the not too distant past, almost everyone you’d meet would claim to be a practitioner of the arts. It was as if all of a sudden people had woken up with this craven urge for creativity – the flatulence of unsanctified distress – the need to make their mark, to leave something meaningful behind now that they weren’t going anywhere. They wrote poems, short stories and novels, painted pictures, sculpted, strove to reinvent art for the new world, made documentaries, films, anything that might distract themselves from survival: a world full of scared dabblers and dilettantes. “We all do art and literature now; creativity is the new TV,” they’d say. And like TV, a vast majority of it was shameless, unadulterated shit. Charles is pretty much the only person in Pavilionstone willing to squander his time on creative impulses; the rest are too busy cooking up ways of getting out, of being worthy, of living forever or obliterating the concern. Charles doesn’t want to live forever; he just doesn’t want to die before fulfilling his literary potential. If his novel turns out to be the best novel ever written, then he need not fear death anyway, for his immortality will be secure.) 24

He didn’t have time for writing catchfires, no time for Hanz or even the shortest spell of precautionary nom-de-plumes. Italo Calvino once said, “It would always be better not to have written one’s first book.” Charles believed himself justified in ignoring this statement, given the logically implied book vacuum, and the fact that the smug little eyetie had himself been one of the most prolific authors around. Never trust a man who refuses to take his own advice. The bible lays open on the sofa – always a bad sign. On the floor by the TV there is a copy of Wallace Steven’s The Palm at the End of the Mind. Above the spot where Charles habitually sits and writes are two scraps of paper pinned to the wall. One of which reads: writer’s There is no greater solitude than the samurai’s Unless perhaps it be that of the tiger in the jungle ‘The Book of Bushido’ Charles Schaefer There is no irony intended in this; Charles is deadly serious. He has isolated himself from the distractions of others (“distracted from distraction by distraction”) for much of his adult life in his quest for literary greatness. And with success yet to come, he is in no position to be flippant. Paul Auster could appear on the TV and claim that “The world can do very well without the books I write.” Charles could not. The world is waiting for what he has to give it, and he is not about to disappoint. The way he sees it, the world may well have done without his work so far, but that did not mean it could continue to do so indefinitely. Hence the second scrap of paper, which reads: Remember, my time is coming. (B.S. Johnson.) Molech excuses himself and heads for the bathroom. The sink and the bath are covered in a thick counterpane of solidified skin; the toilet is an open throat coated with scabs of shit. Molech breaths through his mouth as he pisses into it. A toothbrush lays on the edge of the sink, minute black morsels darting to and fro between its splayed bristles. 25

On Molech’s return Charles unloads: it’s a sensitive matter, the gist of which, he explains, is that he is being taken for a ride. He lights a cigarette, drawing on it heavily in preparation. A man in a blue tracksuit, who regularly frequents the same cafe as Charles, is spying on him, listening to his conversations, grunting and making sly comments if Charles ever talks about women. Charles has had a relationship with the man in the blue tracksuit – consisting of nothing more than suggestive eye contact – for more than fifteen months. Charles goes on to tell Molech how he’s been torturing some woman by not meeting her. Last Thursday at 3 P.M. – the time at which they invariably tended to accidentally (as contrived as any accident) cross paths on the street – she was not alone, so now Charles is punishing her by not showing up. Molech asks Charles what has been said during these afternoon encounters. Charles tells him that he has never spoken to her, or her family, who he nevertheless claims to know. He is told to keep Pessoa and Ophelia Queiroz, Eduard and Ottilie, Frédéric and Madame Arnoud, Turgenev and Pauline Viardot, Lorca and María Luisa Egea González, and Kafka and Felice clear in his mind. He goes on to mention the woman’s sister, who, when he approached her a few days earlier, had just grimaced and asked of him: “What?” Charles had walked off, somewhat embarrassed, without replying. “How’s the coffee? Okay?” “Fine thanks,” says Molech. Actually it was shit. It was always shit. Instant. Instant shit. Why wait for shit? The day after Charles first had eye contact with the woman, he overheard the cafe owner and the man in the blue tracksuit discussing how he could be good for her. How did they know? Charles wondered. And what business was it of theirs how many fingers he had? Too many for his love to be genuine as far as they were concerned. How dare they label him heartless and devoid of passion. The man in the blue tracksuit had blushed when Charles had seen him on the street earlier in the week, and now he’s convinced that this man is a cutout. Charles tried to give the man in the blue tracksuit a letter to pass on to the woman, but he refused him this small epistolary favour, insisting that Charles be patient. Charles has come to the conclusion that the man in the blue tracksuit is a spy for the woman’s father who, incidentally, Charles knows to be a real big fish. He also suspects that the father has been following him for the past fifteen months, in order to get more information on the man his daughter is so interested in. Some days later, walking down Charles’s road with no intention of calling on him, Molech looks up at his window to see him looking out, frantically 26

beckoning him inside. Molech walks to his front door and waits. Charles opens the door and runs back up the stairs to his flat, his wake made of blended whisky and fags. He’s shedding weight like an air balloon. He can’t be eating, or else his constant mania is cutting through him like a pair of Metzenbaum scissors. The air there is thicker than usual. Molech is told that he’s not going to believe something or other, so he prepares not to, not that he need prepare. Charles drags him to the window and tells him look down at the street. “What am I looking at?” “The cars. Look at the cars!” Charles looks out at the street as if beholding a miracle. “Look at them all lined up! A red one, then a black one, then another red one, and then, look, a white one. You see the order; just look at it! ‘I walk downstairs once in every five minutes, look out of the window once in every two, and do nothing else.’ That’s Dickens…; he had the measure of this place…” “But…” “I know what you’re going to say, but not on a Tuesday, not these cars, not today. It was like it yesterday, too. At three this morning a woman impersonating my mother walked across the road…. There are forty N.W.R. agents over there.” He points across the road to some empty flats above a string of charity shops. “And that Thai woman – bitch. I went for some supers last night, and just as I pass the Italian restaurant a group of people go in. Don’t you see?” Molech’s face was vacant, sightless. “They’d been waiting for me. Everywhere I go there are people waiting, waiting to perform. It’s so well executed. As soon as I approach them, people go into their roles. That Thai bitch wished me a good morning the other day. Can you believe it? After what she’s done. You do see it don’t you? That plant in the window, you see what it is: an Aspidistra. How dare she put that plant there. How fucking dare she.” He rifles through a pile of papers on his settee. “Did you hear about that man who murdered all those young Thai students by slowly suffocating them with sticky tape?” He looks down at a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand and reads from it: “He wrapped their mouths and noses tightly with Sellotape, layer upon layer upon layer so that their eyes protruded hideously from their faces as they fought against the odds to breathe. Apparently he had read reports of the Chechen elephant, and been intrigued by the idea of watching someone slowly die through the simple process of excluding oxygen. Afterwards he cut them into manageable pieces and concealed each of their bodies in a specially labelled suitcase: little leather graves with short eulogies scrawled onto white sticky labels, labels he’d stolen from the firm of underwriters where he’d worked as an office clerk since leaving school. 27

“All eighteen suitcases were purchased from the same leather and luggage shop, barely five minutes’ walk from his flat. The proprietor, when asked whether he had thought it strange that one man should buy so many suitcases, especially given that they were all exactly similar, replied that the man had claimed to be storing ties in them, and that the more ties he collected the more suitcases he needed. This explanation hadn’t seemed that strange to him. “The bodies were all arranged inside the cases in the same way: calves bound together and placed in the underwear compartment in the lid, along with the forearms and the hands which were screwed in place; the torso and the head – still taped around the nose and mouth – were neatly arranged in the right-hand side of the case, while the upper arms, thighs, and feet occupied the left-hand side. The presence of seminal fluid in the cases led investigators to assume that these ‘flat-pack sex-dolls’ were the result of a particularly methodical brand of piquerism…. “Where are men like that when you need them? Inspirational men. I bet you didn’t you know that it was witnessing Calcraft’s short drop method that inspired Hardy to write Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” He ends his meandering prolepsis with a sigh, and sends his thumb burrowing up one of his nostrils. Molech hands Charles a couple of cigarettes, and leaves. Charles phones Molech early on a Tuesday morning and they agree to meet in the hotel bar that night. When Charles arrives he is thrashing his head about and pressing his fingertips deep into his temples, as if kneading pizza dough. However, despite these behavioural quirks, Charles is making a concerted effort to fit in. Instead of his usual confrontational and antagonistic banter, he quietly listens to what others have to say, even humbly deferring to their greater knowledge on occasion. After half an hour or so, Charles is struggling to keep it together. He gets up and walks to the window. He stands there staring out into the drizzled streetlights. Molech carries on drinking at the table. When Charles returns, he quaffs his drink down and says, “I’m writing poems, only simple ones, but I’m writing.” Molech nods, expecting some further elucidation that doesn’t arrive. Whispering in Molech’s ear, Charles tells him that N.W.R. agents followed him on his trip to the shops earlier that day, where he was witness to 25 separate tableaux. The example he provides involves an elderly man with dirty fingernails asking for directions to the harbour. Molech doesn’t bother pursuing the, no doubt, multitudinous implications of such a request. Charles tells him that he has it all documented, and that he is sure that someone has been snooping around his flat when he goes out. 28

Girls with red hair dance like fairies because of something or other Charles and Molech had discussed. Brash gulls strut down the streets and people move aside for them. Charles is hounded by sub-human offscourings: ugly girls in crop tops with saggy, stretch-marked bellies punctured with scabbed piercings brush up against him and make suggestive remarks…. “Don’t you see? It’s just to let us know that they know.” Molech isn’t altogether comfortable with Charles’s use of the word ‘us’. Charles smiles at Molech, half demented, and says, “Life’s exciting isn’t it?” Molech tells him to forget about this woman. “I know what it is,” says Charles, looking meditatively at the wall, “it’s people with too much time on their hands: if you’re working hard you can block it all out. It never goes away, but you don’t notice it as much. Let’s face it, she’s only a secretary and could probably do her job in her sleep.” A pile of paper – Charles’s unfinished ms. – flaps open in the middle to reveal a mouth. It speaks: “All my parts have a history aside from mine: I am Goliath to many Lumpls, too many Lumpls. I am a jigsaw puzzle of things vile and picture-less, made up of deceased instances of exploitation, frozen moments relived in the order of your choice. I am not unlovable and do not go unloved. I am the offspring of vanity and stubbornness. I am a monster, a patchwork demon fashioned under the slurred glare of pissy, gallowed eyes.” 29

LAB RATS Lance and Jack came to know each other early in life. The circumstances under which they met were rather extraordinary: they shared a cage and a buxom nursemaid. These two imprisoned infants were of considerable interest to various scientific communities of the day, and it was these venerable scientists themselves that had them living under constant observation, isolated from the rest of the world until their eventual release, some time too late for childhood to matter. They did at least have each other; they did at least have that. Lance had been privy to less than five months womb-time when he was cut out of his mother’s soft warm belly with a razorblade and discarded in a metal sink, all chills and hard edges, and he had lived. Not only had he lived, but in the weeks that followed his discovery he had displayed signs of cognitive awareness far exceeding those expected from one so young. Whether or not his absurdly large head and unsightly ears were a result of his unorthodox and premature birth is debateable. What is not subject for debate is that his head has always been disproportionately large. As an adult he stands a paltry 4ft9in. tall. For the size of his head to be correctly proportionate to the rest of his body, he should be over 14 ft. The Elephant Man was so called due to the elephantine texture of his skin, and not because he was afflicted with colossal ears – in fact, his ears were rather small. Lance’s on the other hand were not. And not only were Lance’s limpid lugs larger than is pleasant to behold, but they also refused to run snugly along the side of his head, preferring instead to hang in the air like loose sails. Yes, Lance Noggin was a most singular looking child and grew up to be a most singular looking man. But however freakish the ears, they were nothing to that which nestled quietly between them, lurking in the dark and bubbling away like some witch’s cauldron crazed with chemicals and esoteric body parts. The titanic slab of grey flesh that had become his brain too fully and too quickly was set to reinforce a myth much berated by the small of head. For although there are indeed men possessed of very little brain matter whose intellect is prodigious, who somehow manage to slosh and splash abstract thoughts around in 30

their cerebrospinal fluid to great success, Lance was not one of them. He had a big brain and big thoughts. It is, then, clear enough why Lance was locked up in a cage and kept under close observation for a portion of his young years, but what about Lance’s cage mate, Jack? What was so special about him? Jack’s parents had volunteered him for this lab rat existence, for they professed to be appalled and perplexed by (what they considered to be) his increasingly unnatural behaviour. They believed him to be a sexual deviant, a natural-born queer. (Jean Genet pins Sartre to the floor and thumps his chest triumphantly, before whipping his cock out with menace.) Jack was yet to celebrate his first birthday when he was submitted to the cage with a string of “filthy molestations” to his name. He had been caught in many a compromising situation, including giving head to his little cousin, tugging off his mother’s friend’s sons and buggering a host of nursery school buddies. It had been some while before the excuse of innocent exuberance had been deposed by the more sinister and profligate diagnosis that was to see him end up a nappy-clad fag lag. But in the end, the evidence was incontrovertible: the Harrisons’ cute boy was a flagrant sodomite, or, even, as some put it, a “filthy little rapist.” They had never had any intention of letting Jack loose to pursue his interests, and Jack would still be behind bars now if it weren’t for Lance. Actually, that’s not strictly true: Jack would be dead now if it weren’t for Lance, as would most everyone else for that matter. I know what you’re thinking; I pride myself on it. You’re wondering whether Lance ever fell prey to Jack’s insatiable horniness. The answer is an indefatigable no. Lance was too smart for that to happen, and Jack was smart enough not to try, not that Jack was particularly smart, he had good instincts is all. Jack’s relentless predilection towards same-sex fornication was (and is) counterpoint to Lance’s almost monkish sexual indifference. Lance, in all his days, has never so much as yanked his sacks dry, never even felt the urge. The only time his dick ever got attention was when, poised delicately between thumb and forefinger, he pointed his piss home. Jack, on the other hand (his own, not Lance’s), never tired of manhandling his manhood, and it wasn’t long before Jack’s wanking and moaning came to be nothing but background noise to Lance; he even came to believe that Jack’s frenetic self-pleasuring aided his concentration, gave his thoughts a place to transcend. Lance spent a lot of time thinking, reading (he could read as well as most by his 2nd birthday) and plotting, for plotting is what you do when all those around you are dumber and more powerful than you. 31

The lab in which Lance and Jack lived (Lance up until he was five, Jack a week and a day past his 14th birthday) had bars at the windows and white walls, within which each had his own bed and little else. In the summer months they were taken out and placed in the garden thrice weekly for a couple of hours at a time. Jack loved the feeling of sun on his skin and screamed himself hoarse when he was placed in the shade, or forcibly dressed so as to protect his skin from burning. It didn’t much bother Lance either way. ‘Dead’ was Lance’s first word, spoken at a month and a day. He would repeat it over and over, sometimes shaking his head, sometimes not. His aptitude for language was remarkable; he was enjoying the nuances of Pynchonalia while Jack was still having trouble dribbling. Lance felt that Jack would have got a lot out of Pynchon’s hard-on novel, if only he’d been able to read and tear himself away from his own warhead for a few minutes. At the age of five Lance was entrusted to the care of his aunt. It is highly doubtful that this was deemed to be in Lance’s best interests, given the aunt’s dubious character. What is far more likely is that it was as a result of a certain Reginald Woolly pushing Lance out of the limelight and into the plumlight and grabbing the attention of every child-intelligence specialist in the land. Reggie Woolly had been hailed by large sections of the scientific community as a natural-born mystic. But more on master Woolly later. Lance was more than a little offended by the sudden shift of interest, but considered himself ready to meet the world, and so consoled himself with the prospect of doing just that. And meet the world he did, in the shape of a squalid 2up/2down terrace in a road of crud brick and peeling paint, of snotty menaces glaring into the gutters and grown-ups with curdled faces sniffing the November air as if it were bad milk. His aunt was waiting for him at the door, her dog tucked lovingly under her flabby arm. “Well ain’t you a funny looking thing. You what gifted looks like? Woulda thought the big man coulda done better for imself. They told me you was five.” “I still am.” “Well you sure as shit don’t look it. Not too sure what you look like. My so-called sister weren’t owt special but… guess that’s what you get when a good-for-nothing speed freak goes and starts firing his pellets into a tranny… Inside!” She stepped aside to let him pass into the house. As he squeezed past he smelt her for the first time. He was unable to place the origins of every scent in her cocktail of odours, but one he did recognise immediately was the bleachy perfume of disenchanted spunk. She followed him into the house scratching between her legs as she went: her cap long overdue a replacement 32

– dead sperm stuck to the membrane like tiny flies caught and forgotten in some derelict web. Lance’s aunt had made no real provision for his arrival and had no intentions of ever doing so; this much, at least, was clear to him from the off. The house smelt as bad as she did, for the house smelt of her, as if she’d rubbed her smutty scent into every corner. She hadn’t found Lance a place in school – “Just turn up; they’ll have room for a scrawny little termite like you. You might have to leave those ears at home though hahahakooaaarrrhhhkooaaarrrhhhh.” Whenever she laughed she would aggravate the phlegm quietly dozing on her chest and fall prey to a violent coughing fit that would see her face suffused with restless blood, and her eyes swallowed up by their lids. “I’m not having you hanging round here all day; that’s for fucking sure, mister.” Lance never went to school and, as there was no school allocated to him from which he could be accused of playing truant, nobody missed him. He never went to school, but as far as she was concerned, and she wasn’t as long as he was out from under her ever-elevated feet, he never missed a day, even going in on Saturdays for extra classes. He would sit on park benches and read. While his remote classmates flicked spit down the back of their maths teacher’s trousers with their rulers, he read Principia Mathematica, and various works by, among others, Leibniz, Frege and Gödel, and when he didn’t understand something, he didn’t call on the sputa-legged maths teacher, who wouldn’t have heard him and wouldn’t have understood the question had he been able to, but instead read whatever it was that he didn’t understand again, then again and again and again until he did understand it, when those depthless surfaces became chasms. While those same dry-mouthed desk scrawlers were plonking away at rainbow xylophones in music class, he sat and read The Tin Drum and felt luckier than Oskar, while at the same time envying him his deep attachment to his small red and white drums. While the others were hopscotching, bulldogging, piggybacking, standing on their heads (the girls’ skirts falling over their faces to reveal pinched white cotton), skipping, snogging, touching up, fooling, fingering, laughing, crucifying, crying, scratching and running, Lance harnessed the sun and chased ants about his feet with it, every so often allowing the tip of those conical rays to screw their spindly legs up into balls. When they weren’t busy blinding ducks or old women with an eye for his bench, he sometimes allowed the rays to tunnel through the middle of fat slugs; and before he knew it playtime would be over and he was back to the books, the smell of smouldering invertebrates still fresh in his nostrils. Lance didn’t always study in parks. He would alternate between the parks and the library: the parks on fine days and the library on not so fine days. He 33

could be found sitting on a bench in the pouring rain on occasion, for Lance had his own criteria as to what constituted a fine day and, as you might have already guessed, it wasn’t all about the weather. The fewer people he saw on a not so fine day the better: the library, with its many desks tucked away in shushed corners, lent itself perfectly to days of this kind. Lance thought about Jack regularly, and vowed to set him free as soon as he could. Lance didn’t consider him a friend as such, more a beloved pet (a pink-eyed guinea pig), a being that would be better off under his care than anyone else’s. 34

WIVES DIE HERE – WE KNOW THIS Mors omnia vincit My wife died; this much we know. She was repeatedly coshed over the head with a crowbar. Her brain haemorrhaged and she died. She fell in the sun and her killers ransacked the house. She lay there convulsing, the last sparks of electricity running through her circuits, and they unplugged the video recorder and the TV and placed them in huge sports bags. She shat herself without the mercy of coverage as they tittered and spun the rings from her fingers. She is dead and I told myself that I had no choice but to accept it, that it would be hard, but that the sooner I came to terms with it the better. I told myself these things, but never really believed them, never really accepted it was all over. Elizabeth and I had been introduced by mutual friends, a couple now separated: he was a hopeless alcoholic who’d crapped the bed once too often. What had most likely made the difference on the last occasion was the fact that it was his 13-year-old daughter, Clarissa’s, bed that he had mistakenly crawled into in a drunken stupor. Apparently, (I shouldn’t laugh but…) apparently her mother, unaware of what had transpired during the night, and thinking her waste-of-space husband had just collapsed in a gutter somewhere, sent the daughter’s friend, who as usual had called for Clarissa on her way to school, up to her room to get her. Needless to say the friend saw and smelt the full ugliness of the scene: Clarissa’s naked father’s backside and right leg protruding from the sheets streaked with shit, and her friend, still fast asleep, with what looked like shoddily applied self-tanning lotion splattered up her bare arm. It wasn’t too long before the fickleness of the teenage girls’ allegiance to one another became all too apparent, and Clarissa’s dark secret became common knowledge throughout her school. All it had taken was the amorous attentions of the wrong boy. 35

There were many nicknames and standardized taunts that were circulated at the time. Among the most popular being: “Are you alright? You look like shit.” “Sleeping Poo-ty!” “You know what they say, Clarissa, ‘If you go to bed with an alcoholic father with loose bowels, you’ll wake up covered it shit.’” “I had a crap night’s sleep last night. How about you, Clarissa?” and so on. Last I heard she had a serious drinking problem herself. I wonder if she shits her own bed now. When for years you live with somebody who is right for you, not somebody that you one day find yourself with without quite knowing why, but somebody who in a sense has always been there, long before you ever clapped eyes on them, somebody who it would be unhealthy not to welcome into your life, as foolish as denying the legitimacy of what the mirror offers you as you hold out for what might be a better reflection… I don’t wish to sound too deterministic about the bonds of love that intertwined us, that caught us in its stranglehold, that mixed us up together, Elizabeth and me, until, like Siamese twins, our separation became perilous, for I might never have happened upon her, and yet I might still have loved. I began browsing for answers to unformed questions. How did it all begin? It began in the minds of others. It began long, long before Elizabeth or I began. My mind would wander at the least provocation, and when it wandered it wandered to Elizabeth and a renewed interest in the whisky bottle. I was attempting to wean myself off both of them. The first few months I did little but drink whisky, eat bananas and smoke cigarettes. Even when I was self-destructing I had enough self-preservation to contain the damage. I’d been scouring the house for fresh reading material, when I came across two boxes of books and journals, all on the subject of philosophy. I remembered where I had acquired them as soon as I saw Magritte’s Reproduction Interdite looking back at me (or refusing to) from the front cover of Bernard Williams’s Problems of the Self. I’d bought them (at an extremely fair price) from the mother of some dead 19-year-old boy, who had been in his last year as a philosophy undergraduate when he swallowed enough rat poison to put the local pied piper back in business. She blamed his death on the nature of his studies: philosophy had killed him with all its questioning and constant doubting; it bred the most pernicious of insecurities – inescapable ones, locked under your skin so that the only answer becomes death. She could not have these books hanging around the house gloating over his demise. She didn’t warn me about exactly what might happen if I actually got around to reading them; she didn’t seem to care, which was pretty fucking remiss given that the contents of these boxes had, according to her theory, driven her son to commit suicide. What the fuck was she doing purveying 36

these deadly and nefarious wares out of her garage, anyway? Do mothers whose sons have died of drug overdoses hock the remainder of their sons’ gear? People don’t always believe what they need to believe. After an initial skim through some of the titles in those dangerous boxes, an idea began to germinate somewhere in my greyer than grey matter, aided somewhat, it must be said, by what turned out to be some uncannily propitious highlighting. (Of course, I took these circled paragraphs, underlined sentences, and tiny annotations in the margins to be the marks of a suicidal student, revision aids most likely, but, nevertheless, a part of me couldn’t help seeing them as somehow meant for me.) Synaptic fusion abounded and I thought about nothing but the most nebulous of plans, a plan that I tried desperately to codify. Elizabeth’s diaries, her little foibles and idiosyncrasies, personal identity, amnesia, the doctor’s wife, some vague recollection of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, what it was about Elizabeth’s death that got to me, Buddhism, and Heraclitus, Heraclitus that infernal riddler. It was only a line, just a line, but it was enough in light of everything else, enough to go on, at least: Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper. 37

UNGLUED AND UNDERSEA Some twenty or so metres beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean we find two men casually expecting to inhale their next breath, but what happens instead, as they gently, mindlessly go to draw in their next measured dose of oxidant, is that their throats and nostrils are instantaneously filled to capacity with salt water. They are no longer lounging about and shooting the breeze in a sun-baked office stacked with books and journals in some Californian university or other. They are not, but they expected to be, and in a sense still expect to be as they hang in the water before sinking deeper, staring at each other disbelievingly through the blue-green transparency that is stifling them whether they have come to accept it or not. They have sunk only a few feet when, in spite of their near catatonic dismay, they initiate a struggle upward for air. They clutch and tug at the sea as if clambering up an elasticised cargo net. It takes them ten seconds or more before they find any sort of rhythm in their desperate ascent: their heads too full of questions, beaten into submission by a torrent of queries, consumed by befuddlement. Breaking the surface of the water, coughing up sea from their flooded lungs and drawing in the air promised to them by the steady procession of spatio-temporal continuity is, for our two displaced heroes, so many lifetimes lived over and over in revolting slow motion. In real time it takes little more than a minute. As they tread water together, two buoys bobbing, spluttering, gasping, unable to satisfy their newfound craving for oxygen, they attempt to empty their heads of the stock car rallies of perplexity careering around, crunching fenders, colliding head-on, corrugating bonnets. They heave out their words as quick as they can, lest they should interrupt their breathing for a hazardous length of time. Their sentences coming out piecemeal, staggered and disjointed. “What the fuck…is…going…on?” “I’m dreaming…you’re dreaming…we’re dreaming…This isn’t…can’t be real.” 38

“This…makes no sense…no sense...” “I don’t think I am…I…think it’s…real. I think it’s real.” “This is…madness.” There is no land mass in sight. They look about for somewhere to head for, but find nothing, nothing but rolling waves, pelagic birds exploiting the breeze, and an evening sky promising rain. And as the hopelessness of their predicament encroaches on their thoughts they begin to feel the strain in their legs, begin to realise that they can’t keep their heads above water indefinitely. The salvation of a communal dream state, a dream state unlike any other they have ever had cause to remember, soon evaporates as they are forced to entertain death pouring into them as they plummet to the seabed, limbs spent, brains undone with bemusement. They fight against it while they are able. “This can’t be…happening…I don’t accept this.” “I’m doing my best not to…but I…don’t fancy drowning…in order to find out…that I’m wrong.” “Things like this don’t even…happen to other…people.” Their strength is sapping, but they don’t have long to go. Their ordeal, or rather this part of the ordeal as a whole, an ordeal that is not, strictly speaking, theirs, will be over soon. I’d like to say that they will live to see another day, many days, a possible 288 days in a day, but sadly I can’t, not without first making my definitions clear, logic prevents me. Triman lays crucified, deadly still, forcibly relaxed on the surface of the water to conserve energy. Lakok attempts to do the same, but finds himself sinking, unable to quell the panic amassed throughout his body. “You’ve got to relax, otherwise it’ll never happen.” “Relax? How do you… suggest I do…” “Relax or drown. It’s as simple as that.” “It really is as simple as that. When you put it…(he takes in a gobfull of brackish water, which he then projects from his pursed lips in a steady arc, in the style of an ornamental fountain)…fuck…like that…it sounds so much easier.” “Just ’cause we’re at sea doesn’t mean you have to start repeating my words back to me; I’m in no danger of becoming confused about who it is you’re talking to….” 39

CHARLEY SAYS… Charley says: I suffer from acute IBS, or possibly Crohn’s disease. I defecate at least five or six times a day: a steady procession of dun-dyed jelly, mucus and water. My stomach is permanently distended, brimful with filthysmelling gases. I am contaminated and made sick by my own waste. Anything that life throws at me I hide away and squirt shit at it. I shouldn’t drink alcohol or eat spicy foods, but I do. I once abstained from booze and edible food for a whole week, and experienced only a nominal alleviation of my symptoms. I didn’t keep it up. When I look down at my vast gut, or turn sideways in the mirror, I look like what I am: a man perpetually pregnant with nervous faeces. I’ve spilt my dregs in kitchen sinks, park ponds, wastepaper bins, my underwear, my shoes, my pockets, all manner of unsuitable places. During particularly egregious attacks I assume the position recommended for those on board aircraft about to plummet into the earth: head between my knees, hands clasped over the back of my skull, as I wait for impact. I always look down afterwards for blood; it feels so much like draining off a wound that I am sure there must be some, and sometimes there is. But like everything in life, it is not completely without pleasure. There is a lot to be said for having something to take your mind off the stresses and strains of living, something that needs doing the moment you need a diversion. I compare my times spent sweating in lavatories to anxious cigarette smokers – they suck in and blow out and I relax and contract, but we both stink up the place. I smoke as well, and invariably spark up as I let the first lot go. Directly after I have finished I feel purged, cleaned out, but it doesn’t last long. That, after all, is the bitch of IBS: you can always be cleaner, emptier… AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF ENVY: Bret Easton Ellis was a mere 14 years old when he attempted his first full scale novel. (He had completed his first novel aged just 10.) Borges started writing at the age of 6, and published his first translation when he was 9. So many writers published in their teens: 40

Anna Akhmatova (18), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (14), Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (17), Thomas Chatterton (16), Eliza Cook (17), Abraham Cowley (15) (‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ was written when he was only 10.), David Gascoyne (16), Knut Hamsun (18), Mrs Felicia Dorothea Hemans, née Browne (15), Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov (17), Harold Pinter (18 or thereabouts), Edgar Allen Poe (18), Arthur Rimbaud (had finished writing poetry by the age of 19), Patrick Hamilton (19), Percy Bysshe Shelley (18), Alfred Tennyson (18), Fedor Ivanovich Tyutchev (16), Patrick White (17),…. Down by the harbour, opposite the bronze statue of John Christie, in smelling distance of the sea, you will find row upon row of abandoned amusement arcades. The machines’ lights still flash, they still whoop and whistle, but nobody much plays them anymore. Silverado and Copper Dropper push around the same old coins, but none ever drop clanking into the tray. The only people to frequent these places now are dealers and their customers, and they only play the machines to look legit, although they needn’t bother, ‘cause no one gives a fuck anyway. The Rock Shop has shut its doors for good. No more days leering at the flaccid mixture as it’s folded and rolled out, folded and rolled out. Nobody wants lurid sticks of sugar with the names of ghost towns written through their insides these days, and who, in all fairness, can blame them? The tattoo parlour persists, but nobody much opts for Bulldogs, anchors or big-breasted mermaids these days. It’s all amulets: scarab beetles, ankhs, blackened eyes, portraits of sex-killers, prayers for eternity and religious iconography from across the globe. Nobody seems to love their mum much anymore. Shoddy fishing boats bob languidly in the harbour like disturbed minds tethered with lithium. The seagulls have all migrated to McDonalds where they battle with bloated pigeons over discarded French fries, partly devoured beef patties and soggy chicken nuggets. The nearest these gulls get to the fruits of the sea is a regurgitated Fillet of Fish. Sunday night is fag night at the bar, not exclusively so, but Sunday night is when they come in en masse from the shelters and catacombs along the Leas. They leave their chilly, damp little prophylactic-strewn hovels and come into the warm where the wallpaper is as vulgar as they are. Men in their fifties with shaven heads and lean little faces and mean eyes and no lips sit around on high-backed leather chairs with their young boys all craven and excitable. They eye up the fresh-faced morsels they have caught like fishermen full of poppers and Spanish Fly with no respect for the frontier of another species. 41

Daft old women with their teeth and sanity on prescription comment to one another in hushed tones about how sweet it is that these young men get on so well with their fathers. “There is hope for us all yet,” they say, nodding dreamily. The younger boys are hidden away in shadowy corners and plied with a constant supply of booze, well out of sight of the barman and other prying eyes. Most of the men that these boys accompany aren’t even real fags; they just get a kick out of brutally fucking something fresh, something wide-eyed, something still capable of being ruined. The young boys sweat and quake in their chairs as if facing impending death; their smiles look as if they’ve been daubed on by epileptic finger painters. Soon their anuses will resemble the ferocious mouths of rabid dogs: diseased, foaming, dried out. Nobody ever takes precautions with these boys: it’s bareback all the way. Their freshness needs to be felt, skin on skin. Old men sodomize them with their gnarled and misshapen walking sticks. This is something that happens, but not so often that we cease to call these sticks walking sticks. AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF HOPE: Emily Dickinson only published three, six, or seven (nobody can make up their mind) of her approximately 2000 poems during her lifetime. Anne Bradstreet’s poems were published in London without her knowledge. Lautréamont never lived to see his work for sale. Only one of William Blake’s books was published conventionally: the rest he self-published. And his poems were for many years ignored and largely unread. One critic even went so far as to label him an “unfortunate lunatic.” Sherwood Anderson wasn’t published until he was 40; Robert Bage was 61, William Burroughs (39), Raymond Chandler (first novel aged 51), William Frend De Morgan (first fiction aged 67), Theodor Fontane (first fiction aged 71), William H. Gass (42), Alasdair Gray (47), George Grossmith (45), Paul Hazoumé (48), O Henry (42), Matthew Hopkins (the witch-finder – Stearn’s sidekick – first published in 1647, the year of his death), Henry Miller (43), Marquis de Sade (42), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (44), Wallace Stephens (43 – although most work published past the age of 50), Laurence Sterne (46), Anne Finch Winchilsea (52), Andrew Young (50),… Rilke didn’t get anything substantial down until he was at least 35, and then the death of some girl inspired him to complete all his major works at once… ‘But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer.’ I can hear the constant flushing of toilets and the swelling of blocked pipes, pipes choked-up with body parts, straining and cracking under the pressured 42

accumulation of severed hands and feet…. I can hear newborns gagging as their mothers force-feed them their dirty diapers…. 43

JACK THE FAG Jack Harrison, the man, stood 6 foot 4 inches tall, and was handsome in an obvious kind of way, with his Roger Ramjet chin, thick wavy brown hair, and buff gym-slave’s physique; he was also a rampant fag, but not so you’d tell from any detectable effeminacy. He was, as he termed himself, a manly man’s man, your str8-acting masculine type of queer who doesn’t feel the need to prance about camping it up in order to reinforce his sexual preference. On the other hand, he was never inclined to hide what he was either: when guys he worked with, who were as yet ignorant of his persuasions, would talk of their sexual exploits with women or seek his opinion on some piece of pussy in their vicinity, he’d just come out with it: “I’m kinsey six: I fuck men.” Such was his refusal to fit into any of the standard heterosexual stereotypes for his kind, that his homosexual declarations were often thought to be disingenuous. He didn’t really give a shit whether people believed him or not; he’d been upfront with them and that was that. Given his stature and rather uncompromising demeanour, very few of those who had issues with toilet traders had the balls to make a big deal about Jack’s unashamed homosexuality, and those that did didn’t make the deal big for long. As you can well imagine, it doesn’t take too many guys taking umbrage with Jack’s proclivities to be laid out on their backs to deter others from opening their mouths on the subject – one to be exact, a Mr Mickey Volko, chief technician of sub area B1. “No one wants to know your dirty fucking habits, Jack. Kindly keep that shit to yourself!” “Well pardon fucking me, but if I remember correctly, and I do, it was you who dragged me into your tawdry little polari in the first place?” “I’ll know not to bother in future.” “Anyhow, I’ve been wondering, are you some sort of tranny? It’s just that you’ve got bigger willets than my old mum and she ain’t exactly concave of chest. Or maybe you’re just a regular 175er and this is your backward way of trolling me and, you know, if you weren’t such a meese bastard I might have 44

considered it, being that for the last day or so I’ve had nishta returns on my lunchtime milk runs…. Oh come on then, if you’re feeling a tad shy we’ll just have a good old-fashioned Princeton rub down; it’ll keep the neocon inside you happy if nothing else…. Hang on, you old invert you; I see your keys, boss. You sly little devil you, and here’s me giving you shit, with you hanky coding it to the left n’all…. I’m not sure you got it inya to be a top you know, a tad too phlegmatic if you ask me…. I tell you what, Volko, let’s take a shufti to the altar room and we’ll see how affable you are then.” “Is that chutney ferret speaking to me?” Nobody in the room answered; a few of Jack’s friends couldn’t help smiling, though. Mickey got out of his seat and walked over to Jack, bent down and whispered in his ear. “Are you talking to me, queer boy?” Jack grabbed Mickey by the neck and slammed his face into the edge of the table, splitting his lip and chipping one of his front teeth. Still holding him by the neck, Jack repeatedly kicked him in the balls until he turned grey and fainted. The next day, Mickey tried to initiate disciplinary action against Jack and was told that no joy would come of it, and that if he pursued it any further he would lose his job and more. He asked what was meant by this, to which he received no reply. Mickey let it go. One thing, apart from fucking, sucking, rimming, and derivatives of, about the gay scene that did interest Jack was its slang, and he’d managed, over the years, to harbour a rather extensive mental glossary of readily available faggot jargon. (He was one of the few gay men to be fully conversant with and regularly use – the all but extinct – Polari speak.) In this sense he was again quite an oddity, for although in many of the places he frequented slang terms were regularly used, nobody used them with anything approaching the respect and range that he did. This lexicon of queerdom reminded him of a time when being homosexual had an edge to it, a time when it had been laced with an oh so delectable depravity. He had even devised a number of his own terms, some of which had actually caught on among his circle. Some of them involved extending existing slang terms. For example, those he suspected of packing out their crotch he called ‘basket weavers.’ However, most of his terms owed their existence to him and him alone. For instance, Fisters he called Herriots, and a ‘spurious curious’ (‘spurcurios’ for short) was a term he had invented to label those men who fantasize about having sex with men, even believing that they are ready to try it, but who will never allow themselves to actually go through with it, those who lack the self-awareness to know how far their curiosity will take them – real fucking prick teasers. Sometimes they would go all the way to getting your dick between their chops before they lost their bottle. There 45

were two basic types of spurcurio: there were those who turned nasty and those who couldn’t apologise enough for wasting your time, but he just lumped them both under the same heading; they were both equally infuriating, whichever way they chose to deal with their rapid change of mood. Jack was a voracious cruiser; he had been known to bed up to four different guys in one night. (The ever-present dark rings around his eyes had led P., at one point, to suspect him of being a fellow insomniac. In fact, P. had been acutely disappointed when, after continually catching him catnapping in his office, he was eventually relieved of this misconception.) Jack had a penchant for black bubble-butted twinks, although it must be noted that he’d played around with his fair share of bears, Barbarellas, egg-fresh chickens, leather, boretto and Marlboro men over the years. Jack’s “bagadga,” as he predictably called it, was a beautiful specimen of manhood by any standards: just shy of 9 inches long, turtlenecked, with a full 6 inches of girth, a light pink head, tight palm-filler bags, and a glorious lustre to its wide corona that was enough to make brown berries weep. Jack regularly shaved off his pubic hair so as to accentuate the size of his piece; he loved the look of awe it provoked in those that beheld it – he never tired of hearing the gasps, the “yum yums,” and the giving of thanks. 46

THE GLOOM FACTORY I took the opportunity to view Elizabeth’s body at the undertakers. The practiced solemnity of the staff at Hambrook and Johns troubled me and I wanted to leave, but I forced myself to stay and look her in the face one last time. I would never see that face again, unless photos count, and they don’t. I hadn’t had the idea of giving her a new face at this point, but even if I had I still would have climbed that narrow staircase, with its brass stair rods and floriferous carpeting, and entered the room with the box I’d bought for her inside. I closed the door behind me, leant back on it and stayed there a while. I could hear a young boy ululating in the street below and I wished him dead. My wish went unheeded and he continued. I leant against the door, staring at the brass handles adorning my wife’s casket thinking of kisses I had sometimes found tiresome to endure, of otherwise pleasant hours I’d tainted with cheap spite, and all those shrugged-off hugs that now pained only me. I could hear more grievers turning up downstairs and one of the black suits speeding through his textbook sympathy. How long do I have up here? I wondered. How long before they knock on the door and usher me out for my own good? How long am I allowed to spend contemplating my wife’s corpse? Do they have a designated time limit for this type of thing, or is it discretionary (within sensible limits, of course)? I found myself moving towards the casket. I clutched hold of its rim and stared down at the part of her dress that covered her belly. Her dress was patterned with a thousand tiny flowers. The brass and the flowers reminded me of the stairs I’d had to climb to get in there, the stairs I’d have to descend to get out, and all the other stairs I’d have to go up and down to get places that she wouldn’t be, before I stopped climbing stairs for good. I slowly panned to the right: the safe direction. The dress went down to her ankles as it always had. No surprises with the shoes either. She had on her brown suede kitten heels with slight discolouration around the toes. It was fitting that they would rot in the box with her. 47

I’d never seen those feet so still. She was always tapping them, rocking them on their heels, clenching her toes like an ape, waving them in the air to dry her toenails – they’d never stopped moving. She even shifted them about constantly in her sleep: they would search out warmth under the covers and end up basking on the backs of my legs. I thought about how cold they must be in those shoes with no blood to keep them warm, and for a moment they became independently important, existents in their own right, not unlike the trophies of Jerome Brudos. My eyes wandered to the left until they reached the tanned hands (I’d expected them to be paler somehow) embracing her chest. Bela Lugosi sleeping on soil from his homeland. Or Christopher Lee for that matter, but still far far removed from the truly masterful Max Schreck. His Nosferatu/Count Orlok captured better than any the shadowed existence of deathlessness. Those hideous prosthetics were inspired: Modiesque fingers slowly stabbing their way through the cold sepia gloom like the clawed branch of some possessed tree. Freddie’s blades were their clear descendents, as shadows gave way to the taut, pink flesh of young dreamers. (Lugosi was the real deal: he was buried, according to his wishes, in full Dracula costume and make-up.) Why do they do that with their hands? Only the undead dare to sleep like that. I was thinking about whether I was going to be able to bear looking at her face. I really wasn’t sure that I could go that far left. And then, as if I had been duped into it, like when you try to read only one answer in a list of answers to some crossword puzzle and fail, I found myself looking at her closed eyes. No eyeball movement beneath the lids; no eyeballs at all, if truth be told. I’d done it: I was looking right at her, and all that was left to do was go. To walk out of that room and never look at her again. Then it struck me that maybe I hadn’t been apprehensive about seeing her face at all; maybe I was just afraid to let her go, to leave her there alone with her cold toes and her hollow eyelids. Touch her face. That is the next part of the process. Kiss her on the forehead, the lips, those lips (I laughed and somewhere she laughed with me, but not really), stroke her cheek, run your fingers through her wrongly-parted hair... I wondered how I could let something as basic as touching her evade me so completely. But it had, and that was the way things would be now between the two of us. I took up each of these variations on tactility, slowly, cautiously, robotically, not like a husband, more like a bomb disposal expert. It couldn’t have been touching to watch. None of that confusion you find with apes where they try to make the dead come back to life, lifting up an 48

arm and watching it drop to the ground over and over, perplexed as to why it wilts the way it does. There was none of that. On a rooftop across the street a seagull tipped its head back and shrieked like some castrated coyote howling in a lunar fit, and I just stood there not knowing what to do next. Should I say something now? I didn’t think I should. I didn’t feel like hearing myself say anything. I thought to myself, I’ll go soon. I looked at the door and knew that none of those somberites would come in without knocking and then waiting for me to ask them in. They must have plugged all of her orifices. They always do that; I’m pretty sure of it. They do it to stem the flow of internal fluids desperately trying to flee their dead container. My stomach wasn’t strong enough for an unplugging. I was not wanton enough to even consider going that far. A bit sad when I think about it, like when no tears are shed at a funeral, and everyone just stands about chatting idly and looking forward to the refreshments. All I did was climb into the coffin between her puzzled knees, open her blouse, wank off over her tits, get out of the coffin, do her blouse back up, and wipe away the spunk from her neck and chin. As I wanked I kneaded her dead breasts with my left hand. I looked for a smile on her face (a proper one – not that manufactured Mona Lisa half-smile some morgue technician had constructed out of her mouth)…. Actually, I didn’t do any of those things, although it did cross my mind as a way of staving off my inevitable departure from that sad room. I’d tried to cultivate an erection through the fabric of my pocket as I looked down at my dead wife, but found my body unwilling to be party to such profanity. They knocked four times (two sets of two) and on receiving no reply entered the room. I had her half out the window at that point, my hands on her thighs poised to complete a singularly joyless defenestration. Authorities were called, questions asked and asked over, condolences and reprimands offered in tandem and accepted in silence, for I found it difficult to speak. All I could think about was the reaction of the two men that entered that room, the detail that marks that day to this day, their eyes revolving up into their skulls as they sauntered over to where I stood, their weary faces lacking the merest announcement of surprise. 49

TORTURE HOUSE TAKE-AWAY The fog had come in for the night, a real peasouper, damp cobwebs clinging to light and periphery vision. Charles remained in his armchair chain smoking and rereading a book he’d never read, his eyes like cracked marbles in a storm cloud. After some deliberation he had decided against going out. After all, why should he make the effort for tragic old slags in tired-arsed discotheques, only to have them flake out and smear their make-up all over his pillows? His gaping eyes moved over words, attempting to draw them in, to extract meaning from the page, but they remained there in front of him, immovable, and no matter how many times he tried to prise them free they refused to succumb. There is something out of place here. My movements are constantly monitored by unknown forces. I try to keep off the streets. I don’t want to be an easy target. I am of the utmost importance to them for reasons not yet known to me. I must presume that I am the only person here outside the network. I am desperately short of food. I shop after 1A.M. in the local minimarket. Living on dubious meat pies, pasties, sausage rolls, crisps, half-stale sandwiches with soggy brown salad, tinned beans, and chocolate bars. Not sure it’s safe there anymore, though. No food for past two days. Must leave, but can’t, for fear of what’s out there. I no longer trust the saveloys from those devious Turks at the chippy: they’re probably made from the mashedup clits of young Muslim girls. I shan’t go there again and watch them snigger and deride me from behind their chip-cone towers. The acids are making food from my stomach lining. It’s been foggy for weeks now. The murky grey/white sky is too low. It falls to earth behind green trees and black houses and in front of spies on the corner of streets beside burnt out telephone boxes smoking. It comes in from the sea, a shoal of smoky plankton sticking to the breeze. They’ll not flush me out into this wilderness of grubby clouds. The walls in this place seem thinner: I can hear movements behind them. Some50

times I turn the TV up as loud as it will go, but I don’t watch it, and I try not to listen to what is said. I can spot them anywhere now without even trying. Cars honk and I hear the knowing laughter of drunks. I looked at my hands yesterday and noticed that I’ve taken to nibbling my nails and the surrounding hard skin. My fingertips are uncommonly sore and there is a peculiar sensation when I clasp my glass too tightly – stop – Dark corduroy skin – plastic coma eyes – vortex of drunken dreams nag, sucking dingy uniform streets around and around my mind like faecal boils locked in the cycles of a Laundromat. My legs are awash with boils dripping forest-green poison. The capillaries in my face are bloated; I have red, puffy aphid eyes. They tell me that the tachinid fly larvae eventually kill the host to avoid a hangover. Others live in the eggs of various pest insects and damage the liver so that it becomes unable to remove unnatural fears. Nausea – parasites vomiting white bug alcohol – lady beetles, praying mantids in the arms and legs. Fly-bug-insect disease and feeding attacks are caused in part by a poor diet and green lacewing egg infection. Sleeping disorders, anxiety, abdominal pains, neurological disorders, clotting disorders, whitefly parasite, mealybug destroyer, solitary drinking, numbness, sexual dysfunction, the leering descent of Mrs Michaux’ melting mug. Large doses of alcohol can nurse centipedes or wood-boring beetles, spider’s eggs, the heads of hornworm caterpillars. Need to get me some Zotal insecticide, drink the bottle dry in monstrous mouthfuls and have its cleansing violence twist my limbs. I toss and turn in furious sleep. If only my skull were a cyanide jar. See fact sheet: ‘syndromic mummies and the conspicuous cocoons of cardiovascular damage.’ Belly full of warm scotch and parasite toxins. Whitefly eyes – the look of the damaged parasite – crumpled teeth, a mouth full of dog ends, the charismatic smile of Ted Bundy over and over – blizzard of fungal buckshot – I am the victim of a mutant strain of melancholia. Have you ever felt a rupture in your brain? Everything going along fine and then something, some peculiarly violent and errant abreaction, occurs, and all of it is suddenly made wrong, without anything having changed. Medical men sometimes call them anxiety attacks, but they are more than that. For as long as it lasts, you are unable to attach much importance or meaning to what is going on around you; it appears to you as some ridiculous, badlyacted, play. You really can’t believe you’re part of it. But all this occurs while still knowing in the back of your brain that it’s you that’s not right here; you’re the one that’s seeing through a very necessary veneer, behind some veil of ignorance that is there for a purpose. After this has happened to you it doesn’t go away, not fully. This awareness stays with you, an awareness that 51

you are aware, from time to time, of having to suppress. All this is hard to explain. But then any event is hard to explain. You know that feeling when you are watching a movie with other people and the movie is one of those with a crucial twist in it, but only you know what the twist is? You see them engrossed in the story, looking for clues, missing clues, engaging with the characters, while you are detached, aloof because of what you know. They can’t see how contrived it all is, are blind to what’s in front of them, and deaf to the significance of certain words. Only, with the experience I’m trying to relay to you, there is nothing really tangible that you know that the others do not – it’s just a feeling, but a feeling that feels like knowledge. Suddenly, the whole world and your entire existence is unpalatable, an ailing joke. You feel like a claustrophobe coming around from a daydream and finding himself in a low-ceilinged cellar: you have to get out. The claustrophobe has somewhere to go. Even if he can’t get there because of locks and bolts, he still has that place of sanctuary in his head. Where is there left to go when you get the feeling, the feeling that feels like knowledge? Escaping your surroundings won’t solve anything. Initially, you might be relieved to be hidden away from other people while you are feeling this way, but no sooner have you achieved isolation than it becomes your enemy and you realise you’ve just made things worse, for by running away you have extinguished hope, that glimmer of a chance that escape was possible. The claustrophobe will feel better if he doesn’t try to open the door, than if he tries and finds it to be locked. If it were possible you’d crawl out from under yourself and shed your physicality without a moment’s hesitation. If it were possible you’d do this. Charles can often be found fiddling with his underpants. He’s forever picking them out of the chaffed crevices either side of his testicles. Like (or because of) Proust he has a predilection for tight underwear in spite of the obvious discomfort it causes him 52

I KNOW NOT OF WHOM I SPEAK, WHEN I SPEAK OF ME “That I-thoughts and first-person perspectives are intimately connected, and that ‘I’ refers to the person who utters or thinks it are common conceptions, conceptions no doubt shared by some of you here. Indeed some of you (he glares down at Reginald Woolly and his cronies, all associates of Language Over Ontology (L.O.O.)) take both these claims to be undeniably true and to imply that an impersonal reduction of reality is doomed to failure. You also take the truth of these claims to exclude the possibility of accounting for persons and their persistence in terms of the connectedness and continuity of psychological events. “You think that ‘I’ refers to persons because the rule for ‘I’s use stipulates that it refers to whoever produces it and so, as only persons have I-thoughts, the referent of ‘I’ must be a person. And while I accept that somebody capable of using ‘I’ must have the attributes of personhood, I claim that it does not necessarily follow from this that an I-user is a single person. By I-user I mean the individual physical system whose proficient language capabilities bring about this I-token’s use….” Professor P.’s voice rang out across the vast lecture theatre, filled to capacity with tired-eyed university professors: philosophers mostly, some scientists, a few journalists, a handful of those individuals who make it their duty to safeguard the moral well-being of everyone else, some religious types (one from each of the major religions: a leading Christian, a leading Muslim, a leading Hindu, and a leading Buddhist) who everyone ignored, or at least tried to – except the Buddhist, as Buddhism tends to demand more respect from philosophers than the other faiths, which is most likely due to its having a more philosophically palatable metaphysic, theories of epistemology that reward re-evaluation in the light of more modern theories, a distaste for gods and other unnecessary clutter, a snappier dress code and more melodic mantras. 53

P.’s mouth was too close to the microphone, and his voice was getting kicked about by the sound of his breath and his chin brushing over the mike mesh. But as he got into his stride he eased back, his hands clasping the lectern’s wooden plinth authoritatively. And ‘his’ mind began to wander as he spoke. [Why can I never think of cunt as cunt? Sweat mags do nothing for me; for all their plastic pink, whirring, knobbled intussusception, their frozen fusing, their mock seriousness, their strained posing, for all that, they are devoid of meaning. In a magnified bitch-slit I see a dead starling chick fallen from its nest, cringed tissue cold to the touch, the horripilation of unborn feathers – a crude plummet written in callow, terror-stricken Braille, unread, unruffled, unreadable, glossed over, truth polished into a snare….] “To just assume that a single I-user is necessarily identical with a single person is to pass over some deep and puzzling questions regarding the identity of persons, and to beg the question against those who think that in cases of multiple personality disorder (or disassociative identity disorder) a single human being is inhabited by more than one person. [There’s trouble down at Leibniz’s Mill: they’re brawling over the chaff....] I suggest that we can abide by the rule governing the reference of ‘I’ by claiming that ‘I’ refers to I-users, but in doing so leave the exact personal status of ‘I’s referent (i.e., how many persons an I-user is) undetermined. Employing the notion of an I-user will also enable us to account for reality in impersonal terms, because the concept I-user is itself reducible. “My claim is not that ‘I’ does not refer to persons or reflect the firstperson perspective simpliciter, but that the rule governing the reference of ‘I’ – as it has come to be applied – does not determine that this is the case. I regard persons as essentially defined in terms of psychology: as a brain, a body (or functional equivalents) and a series of interrelated mental and physical events (let us call such persons Reductive Persons). The causally isolated psychological enclaves present in a case of multiple personality disorder would, I propose, fulfil this Reductive Person criterion. [This won’t work. I can see the propaganda posters now: Billboards showing the mass graves of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sobibor, Chelmno… malnourished jumble of grey death with brightly coloured smiles added to the sunken faces of disfigured bodies. Hollywood smiles with bleached teeth adorn the melange of corkscrewed necks and bullet-peppered chests – grins like fresh wounds forcibly torn into dead flesh, a sick animation of drab, bloodless meat. The punch line (the hook): ‘Who’s Laughing Now?...’] “Certain of you present here today appear – in your past writings at least – to regard a person as essentially an irreducible unified conscious subject that happens to supervene on (but not reduce to) an individual physical sys54

tem that is capable of reason, reflection and self-consciousness. Let us call such persons, Further Fact Persons. I argue that the rule governing the reference of ‘I’ does in no way favour the Further Fact account of the separateness of persons over the Reductive account of the separateness of persons. [I see things as they are, how they never want to be seen. I pare down, peel away, pick apart, cut into, break asunder; I deconstruct men and women, and those that were nothing to me before are little more afterwards, less the lies of their construction, their cogs and levers laid out in front of them, the lowly subsystems of a darkling unification. Their dander is up; they’re scrambling with their mess of parts and broken connections. They’ve relied too long on the sterility of theory, on the easy compartmentalisation of warring factions. Compared to them…look at me: black-faced coal miner retreats from his workday to a coal house with a carbonised garden and coalmice tweeting from the charcoal trees. The inside of my skull is lined with this raven mineral; crush my head in a vice and a diamond will pop out, and there’s the chance that you’ll look on it as me and wear me in a ring, laying a kiss on me now and then for good luck....] “Although I am quite obviously a staunch advocate of the existence of Reductive Persons, I do not need to argue for this in any great depth in order to reject the perniciously draconian anti-reductionism that hides from our refulgent future like a petrified mole. All I need do is account for the referent of I-thoughts reductively, while leaving the personal status of that referent somewhat undetermined. For my primary target here is to disprove the claim that an impersonal description of reality could not account for the content of I-thoughts. “Persons are defunct, old hat, and, if I wanted to be ever so slightly hyperbolic, there is a sense in which persons don’t exist and never have. I shall now...” “But how do you propose to account for the content of first-person thoughts? Or are you going to do away with them as well?” heckled a bearded man from the back of the lecture theatre. Two guards, recognising the individual as a sociologist notorious for getting out of his depth, escorted him from the building with their batons in his ribs. The security was provided by the sponsors of Professor P.’s research, Futurelife, a subsidiary company of the major conglomerate, Headway Enterprises. They had seen fit to line the room with men (thirty in all, fourteen up each side of the room with two on the door) kitted out with batons, and stun guns. They wore black uniforms with grey trim and braiding down the legs, arms, and on their pockets and peaked caps, which were low enough to obscure their eyebrows, serving, so the experts will tell you, as a means of de55

humanising the wearer. It is said that Futurelife, and indeed Headway Enterprises as a whole, only ever recruit their security from the armed forces. The men are either recently retired, or else have been lured away with monetary incentives too difficult to refuse. Ex SAS and SBS2 are always highly coveted – handlebar moustaches all round. “The man has a point, and since it’s been brought up I’m happy to deal with it. All things are open, transparent: we have no desire to hide the truth behind unnecessary obfuscation. “I do not necessarily subscribe to the old Kaplanian view that In each of its utterances, ‘I’ refers to the person who utters it, for I believe that ‘I-user’ and ‘person’ are not co-extensive terms and that in certain situations they could come apart. [Let me, by means of a demonstration, rip the virgin from the girl before your very eyes, and by way of a finale put her brain through a mincing machine while leaving her mind intact. And I can pull it off, because I am the master of subtle distinctions and not their slave....] And this provides us with a basis from which to reject the claim that the indexical nature of ‘I’ precludes a reductive analysis of persons in terms of psychological connectedness and/or continuity, and its realizers. [How these fools love to fawn and tremble under the yoke of language. How they love to chase behind their abstract systems and deductions, donkeys to carrots nurtured by their own manure….] “The following thought experiment will hopefully clarify matters: At some time t1, there are two I-users a and b. a occupies spatial location S1 throughout what is to follow and b occupies spatial location S2. At t2, a and b undergo psychological transfer via a taping procedure. This process involves a blueprint tape being taken of a’s brain and of b’s brain, and the information then being transferred by duplicating the brain states from a’s tape onto b’s brain, and duplicating the brain states from b’s tape onto a’s brain. The transfer is instantaneous. In other words, there is no time during this procedure at which I-users a and b are not persons… {And the point is eventually made, as you would expect. But, with Milan Kundera in mind, I thought I’d spare you the tiresome intricacies of his thought experiment, lest you should be tempted to doubt my credentials as a novelist.}3 2 Charles once read a book written by a former member of the SBS in the hope that it would go some way towards demythologizing them. He clearly recalled a drinking game whose rules the man had described in some detail. The game was called ‘Drink the Turd,’ and it consisted of one of a group of men crapping into a stein, which was then filled to the top with beer and drunk from by everyone present. Charles would have liked to have been repulsed by it, but instead he felt once again the gnawing absence of such comradeship (however vulgar) from his own life. 3 For as Kundera writes, “there is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think.” 56

“…You and I both know the problems we face with regard to space limitations in this world. Concentration City will be a thing of the past; we are looking now at a Concentration World. [We are looking at a disorientating trip into the black coal stars of selflessness: a cavity of swarming obscurity, illuminated only by ultraviolet tubes that revel in the sickening lambency of cunts and cocks rotating in deranging afterimages. One’s sense of self is achieved by mirrors and a constant numbing commentary from within, the protagonist and his reflection projected on either side of a transparent screen apparently levitating in fog. The technical tricks are self-evident and the splicing of black and white with colour reveals the all too contemporary complexion of the actor, of myself, who plays both parts. I sit and watch my hands fighting, screwing and murdering each other, sit watching as a 14-yearold school girl, her face disfigured with razor cuts, drowns in glue on a milehigh monitor amid a barbarous freak show of lost little men....] But there is an answer. The technology is not only here for eternal life, but spatially concentrated life also. And we can do this because we can accept the normative relations that can make two I-thoughts of a single I-user contradictory, while leaving the question of whether the two I-thoughts were thought by one or two persons undetermined. This can be achieved because the truth conditions of such thoughts can be determined by the physical isolation of the physical system that realizes the thoughts, as opposed to the psychological isolation of what that physical system realizes, or any further fact about that physical system regarding its unified consciousness.” An ill-co-ordinated barrage of claps ensues, the enthusiasm of the halfconvinced attempting to make the leap to full commitment – the place wise men avoid, along with champagne lunches and dead men’s underwear – via the unquestioned crudity of the smashing together of palms. Professor P. nods with a note of condescension and metered impatience as he waits to resume. A tentative hand is raised in the front row, the row that has been given permission to interrupt the speaker with any pertinent questions. Professor P. looks down at the raised hand and the face of the man it is attached to. P. is on a roll and dislikes having his rhythm broken, but can vaticinate with some ease that attempts to ignore the wavering arm will eventually prove more distracting than allowing the question, especially since the man the arm is attached to is Reginald Woolly, an antagonistic philosopher renowned for his intellectual persistence. “Yes?” “Just a small point,” (P. doubted that, as did everyone else who knew anything of Woolly) “concerning every philosopher’s favourite fruitcake: the well-known sufferer of multiple personality disorder, Miss Beauchamp. Now, 57

if we take causal isolation of psychology to account for first-person perspectives, as is your want, then two of Beauchamp’s personalities (B 1 and Sally) will qualify as persons that just happen to occupy the same body. But if ‘I’ refers to such persons (i.e., Reductive Persons), B 1 will be able to successfully refer to herself using ‘I’, as indeed could Sally; and so B 1 ’s use of ‘I’ and Sally’s use of ‘I’ would refer to different things, which results in a problem. For imagine Sally says ‘I have been to Pavilionstone’, and B 1 says, ‘I have never been to Pavilionstone’. [I’ll snap the spines of a thousand worthless vertebrates if I have to; I’ll show you evil if I have to mutilate a million men to do it….] Now, if these two uses of the term ‘I’ refer to two different people, then it should be possible for both sentences to be true. But it isn’t. [Unless Headway Corp’s desire to create a world populated by the living dead has warmed you to contradictions, in which case I’ll warm up some corpses for you to play with, let you get intimate with the zombie skin of one of my experiments – see if you can’t overlook the flies and the rats cocooned inside her....] Because there is still a normative connection between these two statements that results in them being contradictory, in spite of the lack of causal relations between them.” “But this does not show that Beauchamp is a single Further Fact Person. I thought I covered this already. All that it shows is that ‘I’ isn’t sensitive to the causal isolation of psychological properties, but to the causal isolation of the physical system that realizes those psychological properties – in other words the I-user. P. leans back and cracks his neck. He looks back down at his audience with a wince, and clears his throat before proceeding. “If ‘I’ refers to Reductive Persons, and there are two such persons present, then there is nothing to be concerned about. There only appears to be cause for concern because ordinarily the person/human being ratio is one:one. So even though B 1 is not aware of ever having been to Pavilionstone, if I-user Beauchamp has been there, then so has B 1 . [Beauchamp was a one-woman orgy waiting to be had, and I’ll bet Dr Morton Prince had himself a time – “Now Miss Beauchamp, another session of hypnosis today, and let’s see if we can’t coax out another of your dirty little minxes. I do so love a close family….”] B 1 being unconscious (or not in control of Beauchamp) at the time Beauchamp is in Pavilionstone, does not mean that B 1 has never been there. A suitable reply could be something along the lines of this: B 1 would have to learn to restrict her claims about her movements through space and time to awareness claims such as, “I am not aware of ever having been to Pavilionstone”. [Actually, on second thoughts, Sybil must have been the real prize fuck of the century – 16 all in one go. I bet she shredded some pricks in her time....] But we needn’t go this far, because any claims involving a person’s 58

embodied behaviour, when that person shares a body with another person, will be open to such mistakes. We can just say B 1 is merely mistaken, and understandably so. Just as I would be, if someone sedated me in the middle of the night, drove me to Pavilionstone and back again so that I awoke in my bed the next day. There is no cause for concern; it is just that one of the persons (B 1 ) makes a mistake. “If there are a certain number of physical systems capable of I-thoughts in the world, and if the expression ‘I-user’ is just a mere redescription of ‘person’, then we could expect the number of persons in the world to directly correlate with the number of such physical systems. I may point to Beauchamp and correctly label her a single physical system capable of I-thoughts, but I cannot (at least not without begging some important questions) conclude from this that Beauchamp is a single person or subject. For if two concepts are equivalent, one being a mere redescription of the other, then, ceteris paribus, counting under one concept will yield the same results as counting under the other. And, as I have said, this cannot be guaranteed without begging some important questions as to the identity of persons. At times t1, t2, t3..., we might claim unproblematically to have the same I-user, while being presented with what we might want to term different persons…. {Alright, Kundera, keep your fucking hair on!} “We shall now break for lunch. The canteen has catered for all 150 of you, and there will be no supplementary meals for multiple inhabitancies. We abide by the rule: one gut, one meal. The number of persons you might be is, as far as the canteen managers are concerned, irrelevant. Maybe some of you will want to mull this over during lunch and on our return… Yes, sorry?” A pony-tailed man with five day’s growth, and a red and grey striped jersey beneath his black fitted suit jacket is standing up with his hand raised. He is a celebrated and widely published Continental philosopher (very much in favour of the distinction and of his falling on the side he does) by the name of Peter Satzo, one of those who believes translation will bring him truth. He shouts up at the stage, turning his head continually to gauge the response of those around him. “In light of the catering department’s rule and Professor P.’s theories, there is, I believe, cause for some concern regarding the possibility of the proliferation of messiah complexes for persons who exist as part of a multiple occupancy, for if, as Nietzsche put it, ‘the belly is the reason man does not so easily take himself for a god,’ what becomes of those who are forced to share one?” “HaHa, most amusing. And a perfect illustration of just what hogwash is proffered by those who disparage a philosopher’s sense of humour. And now to lunch… What’s this? Back for more?… Can our ribs take the onslaught?” 59

“Humouring you and your colleagues wasn’t, believe it or not, the primary purpose of my sharing my observation. I’m sure you’ll agree that one man’s Weltanschauung will never be for everybody, no matter how condensed we become in our mobile single-bellied time-shares. I mean, just…” “That is the beauty of truth: it is not just for everybody, but for every person. Lunch everyone! Unless, that is, anyone else has been browsing ‘Maxims and Interludes’ recently?” The audience responds by jettisoning their godly aspirations and getting to their feet. Peter Satzo sits back down in order that he might again stand out from the crowd, which is not merely standing but on the move. He remains seated, feeling marginalized and misunderstood as everyone else leaves. It’s not that some of the others present don’t share Satzo’s sentiments, it’s just that they’d rather not end up at the back of the lunch queue. 60

A SUBTERRANEAN DEN I descended the stairs to the basement. I have one of those basements that the movies love so much: an oblong room with a set of open stairs running down one of the two longer walls, no windows, and a concrete floor littered with the dried-up hollow husks of insects long since liquefied and sucked up through the straw-like feeding utensils of some little predator or other. They floated on the tiniest draught; even the most infinitesimal of air fluctuations was enough to send these ethereal imponderables gliding about the floor. The place was chilly, a little damp, with nothing but a few old boxes, a decrepit workbench, a swivel chair, and a washing machine to distract the eye. But such rooms had potential for so much more, both seen and unseen: corpses (dead or undead) beneath fresh layers of concrete or bricked into walls, psychopaths with grey eyes and red teeth ready to grab your ankles through the staircase as you ascend its creaking treads, a hideout for those avoiding zombies… I was to spend the next five months and three days of my life in this room. Making myself at home consisted of clearing the workbench of a few dog ends and cut nails, a rusty tenon saw, a screwdriver thick with paint, and the end of a broom handle, before stacking up my books and journals in three piles on one of its ends: my workshop of filthy creation. Days and nights went by in that basement room without my noticing. I was in a haze of pre-owned ideas, busy shaking the dead hands of sagacious men. There were too many blind alleys to mention, too many moments when my impatience led me astray. But nevertheless I made progress. I slowly pieced together a way to piece together Elizabeth. 61

She must remember me.4 4 The amnesiac “has the structure of something as something.” She is the embodiment for me of her in-order-to and nothing more. Inauthentic? Most definitely, but what of it? I am merely providing a situation – existence demands one – and excluding the possibilities that aren’t relevant to my project. I mean, what fucking project would she have? I am simply highlighting, destroying, blinkering possibilities for her own projection. None of our projective capacities are unfettered anyhow; I am simply taking charge of her fetters. For the love of God, I have single-handedly sailed to the Islands of the Blessed – what is Dasein to me? Fuck Dasein and fuck authenticity, fuck all over-hyphenated thoughts. 62

She can be made to remember.5 5 What was it Jean Paul Sartre said? “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself” and “Before that projection of the self nothing exists.” Sartre, you may have appropriated all your best ideas from Martin-the-Nazi-sympathizer, but you certainly improved their packaging. The rhetorical force of the bug-eyed, pipe-smoking deviant is incontrovertible. L'fantaisiste parfaite de Mr Magoo. So much painstakingly tedious soul searching, and all because he couldn’t take his acid. “Man is nothing else but what he or someone else purposes, he exists only in so far as he or someone else realises himself or someone else, he is nothing else but the sum of his or someone else’s actions, nothing else but what his or someone else’s life is or was” (Existentialism and Humanism – italics mine). This is the blueprint. 63

She needn’t be alive now.6 6 As Thomas Nagel put it, “most of us would not regard the temporary suspension of life, even for substantial intervals, as in itself a misfortune. If it ever happens that people can be frozen without reduction of the conscious lifespan, it will be inappropriate to pity those who are temporarily out of circulation.” 64

She should forget her death.7 7 “Nil igitur mors est ad nos, neque pertinet hilum.” (Lucretius)…. 65

She can unmake the thing she made.8 8 “He knows death to the bone. Man has created death.” (Yeats) Or did death create us so that we could marvel at its work? 66

She is indestructible.9 9 “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but some- thing of it remains which is eternal.” (Spinoza. Ethics 5, 23)…. Empedocles: “Fools – they have no far ranging thoughts: they suppose that what did not exist before comes into being or that something may die and perish entirely” (B11) (Plutarch, Against Colotes 113 AD)…. 67

She will emerge elsewhere.10 10 Boris Karloff tapping into Amanda Duff’s brain in an effort to commune with his dead wife in The Devil Commands…. 68

She is this idea of her.11 11 I, like Philonous (a.k.a. Bishop Berkeley), “am not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things.” He really did give himself all the best lines. 69

She must exceed logic.12 12 Paralogisms 1: Pure apperception is a mere consciousness: the I-think. Is this really to be considered knowledge of a substantive ‘I’? For Descartes, one necessarily led to the other: cogito ergo sum. But this is a mistake, for all this gives us is a consciousness of unity not a consciousness of the owner of this consciousness of unity – the owner, after all, might be disparate. All the individual thinker amounts to is a unity of consciousness. ‘I’ = a logical substance, not an enduring, surviving substance. This logical substance is more noumenal nonsense, and without a believable self, Kant’s admirable ethical theories are just theory. For as the self dissolves, so too do the grounds for attributing any special status to moral behaviour – not that anyone has the intellectual strength to give it up. 70

“I am fast becoming something in need of reordering; even a lusus fabricae like me – a teratoid abortion that needs to be reassembled and reinstated – can still hope to be rescued from obscurity by his master’s loving digits. Spend enough time polishing a rock and its entire surface area will become smooth. Spend enough time polishing a rock and it will disappear. Spend enough time reworking in search of perfection and …” 71

Before I happened across Psychological Reductionism I was floundering slightly. In order to understand my project you must be acquainted with his rather unique account of persons. In brief, Psychological Reductionism focuses on the causal relations that exist between certain kinds of mental and physical events (and the physical systems that realize them) in order to account for what we commonly call persons. Its preoccupations are not so much the sameness and countability of persons, as the connectedness and continuity of those mental and physical events that, in conjunction with a brain and a body, or functional equivalents, happen to constitute persons. While it is necessary for the Psychological Reductionist to adopt a working criterion of personal identity, his primary concern is not to defend it, but to investigate what it is that matters about it – to separate the important elements in one’s survival from the unimportant. He usually assumes something like the following criterion of personal identity: if some single future person has enough of my brain matter (or continuous functional equivalents) to be psychologically continuous and connected with me, then that person is me. However, the important element in this criterion is psychological continuity and connectedness (with any cause) or relation R. He argues for the claim that identity itself is an unimportant factor in the persistence conditions of persons, relation R being the only thing that matters. Fuck CBC2, let it go jump in the lake: she is something special and only like every other living thing in ways that don’t matter. Characters in movies and literature quite often seek catharsis by avenging the deaths of their nearest and dearest. In the better quality productions this rarely has the desired effect on the aggrieved survivors: the audience feels better, but nothing has been solved for the characters, who still mourn the loss of their loved ones as much as they ever did. I have never sought out the killers of my wife, because I cannot see the point. Kill them and there are many more just like them. It just happened to be them that opened my wife’s skull. I grieve over the absence of my wife; I do not grieve over the baseness of a subpopulation of humankind. 72

UMBILICAL ATROCITIES I already thought more than once that my best way of life would be that of living with what was needed to write and a lamp in the innermost room of a vast, closed cellar. […] Who can say what things I would write! From what depths I would draw them! – Franz Kafka Babies born blue and bug-eyed, lynched from their mothers’ bellies… Hobby’s hipbones jut out like Gothic gutter supports atop shapeless bandy legs, wide-eyed, stricken-mouthed gargoyles propping up a pre-pubescent tummy swelling. There was something transcendent about the feel of strong heavy bones beneath skin as sleek and unblemished as a frozen pond. Coaxing, cajoling, small feet with tiny toes, bawling, whining, but she don’t half make your prick look big. Cunt like a baby viper’s throat, clutching tighter than uncle Kroll’s hands around the neck of some schoolgirl, as I push in badness and dirt that’ll kill her for years to come. Feel bad? Let her feel bad for the both of us. So light, such delicate limbs; scoop her up and put her down; nice and easy now, it’ll be ok. Oh that’s a fucgoodgirl. It’s just about me now, drinking it in, making it worthwhile, filling her candy mouth with my tongue, twisting at those pig-pink nipples, ejaculating the way SHE made me feel all over every one of her tomorrows…. I’ve been to some parties. I’ve been to parties that have had in excess of nine months’ planning go into them, secret parties for a select few, the chosen few. A woman is already in labour as people arrive, her labour being the catalyst for the calls going out. We have been primed and ready for weeks – waiting, poised by our phones like fat, balding, lust-skewered defenders of Gotham and grot. We wait, us four or five men, men known to one another through the hobby; we wait and she groans, sighs and wheezes away, hour upon hour, her fat ugly tits drooping and dripping with sweat. We are all of 73

us (all four or five of us men) sickened by her: a piece of old fruit macerated under the skin by a congested flurry of coalescent cheese-fly spawns. The baby sheds its mother’s saggy body like a snake shrugging off its old skin: Midline Episiotomy incision is made and we all of us (us four or five men) perk up as a gooey lump of loveliness comes into the world, into our world. We knew it would be a girl. One of us wouldn’t have been here had it not been, but it made little difference to the rest. Misoneism might well prevent you from enjoying, or at least taking on board the possibilities of pleasure from what is to come, but don’t let it. Let such an attitude be the preserve of the old, the dog-eared cunts that doff their caps and know what they know. I’m sure most of you have sensed what I’ve been building up to anyhow. You’ve let your inquisitiveness get the better of your disbelief. You know what we’re going to do (us four or five men) with our miry prize, dangling from its cord like a midget on a space walk. Say it to yourself! No, on second thoughts, shout it out loud! “You are going to…” There are questions anent the most repulsive of details running through your head. Questions like these: Do you (you four or five men) do it as a group? If you take it in turns, how do you decide who goes when? Do you draw lots? Do you watch one another or demand privacy? Is the mother complicit in what you do? And questions you might still be unable to form (but do stick with them, they will come): Is there room for you to force your…? How many fingers can you…? Does anyone ever…? You happy-go-lucky calculators of felicity can have no qualms, I’m sure. There might be some who took on board Mill’s flawed notion concerning generalized do-nots, but this is mere fetishism – don’t we have enough fucking vices? There are no consequences for little Betty: at that age she has no real memory to speak of. We sometimes even shield the mother from view. So where’s the damage? Where is the depleted utility? If you count our utility (us four or five men) which you have to (sorry, no choice in the matter, I’m afraid), then you have no option but to side with us. If you are still feeling uncomfortable, just remind yourself of the existence of coincident entities, and so remember that no person was ever a fetus, or the resultant newborn, not me, not you, not anyone. 74

DEVIANT CAUSES AND THE TRAGIC UNDOING OF TWO CARELESS PHILOSOPHERS It could be argued that one thing can be (psychologically) connected and continuous with some other thing without there being any causal links between them, and that all that is needed for b to be qualitatively continuous with a is that b continue in the exact same way as a would have, had a still existed. Qualitative connectedness and continuity is surely maintained if when b does and thinks x and y, then in the nearest possible world in which b is numerically identical with a, b also does and thinks x and y.13 And there seems no intelligible reason why b would not carry on where a had left off if indeed b was qualitatively identical to a. If we think that relation R is the relation that matters, then we might think that in order to avoid challenges from those who would argue that differences between causal psychological connectedness and/or continuity and non-causal psychological connectedness and/or continuity can be trivial, we will have to go one step further and somehow incorporate freak instances of exact non-causal duplication into our account of what matters in survival. (Ordinary survival is, of course, causal, but then ordinary survival also implies identity, when what matters about personal survival does not.) As a result of this we might well think that we are forced to choose between the Scylla of allowing what matters to be determined by trivialities,14 and the Charybdis of rejecting causation as a necessary condition for what matters in survival. In fact, there are two philosophers (Lakok and Triman) who seem to view the 13 Nobody mourn David Lewis, for he still exists in all those existent worlds in which he didn’t die: he has created multiple heavens in which he can continue to baffle readers with tales of worlds in which he is already dead. If you feel inclined to shed a tear, just think of the Mirror Master chuckling devilishly, safe within the confines of his mirror world. 14 Although the differences may be trivial they are not extrinsic, as they are events (or not, as the case might be) in the history of none other than the person in question. 75

situation as just this desperate, and end up coming out in favour of the latter of these two options and calling for the rejection of the causal condition. Lakok and Triman feel that the onus is on the ‘any cause’ theorist to have the courage of his convictions and allow what matters in personal survival to make the step from ‘any cause’ survival to ‘no cause’ survival. After all, the result is the same, and ultimately it is the result that matters. They ask us to each imagine that as we die, somewhere else in the universe an atom for atom replica of us comes into existence. They then ask us to imagine that instead of our materialization happening somewhere else in the universe, it occurs at the exact place and time where you happened to dematerialize. They then claim that if such causal breaches were to occur, we wouldn’t and shouldn’t be bothered by them, nor should we pay any money in advance in order to prevent such breaches – if it were possible to do so. We should expect no alteration in the practical goings on of our lives. The same conclusion should be reached, according to them, if, to our surprise, we were to be informed by reliable scientific findings that person-stages are never causally related, and that in fact they are connected by some non-causal process of which, until now, science had been unaware. Such findings would not affect the way we live our lives, and therefore they would be findings about which we should not be concerned. But what they didn’t foresee… I mean how could they? How were they to know the truth about this non-causal spatio-temporal continuity that was sitting in surreptitious surrogacy for causal continuity? What they didn’t foresee was the possibility of the following relation: The relation of non-causal (spatio-temporal) continuity: Up until time t1 the relation will appear to mimic causal continuity by maintaining spatio-temporal stability, although after time t1 spatio-temporality is randomly re-established every five minutes. They weren’t to know this. They were convinced they were safe, that the gods of induction would protect them from the unforeseen, forever stave off non-causal continuity’s headless yuletide. Their crime was no more than a philosophical peccadillo, a small oversight, but they were to pay with their futures – with no possibility to recant their claims. Philosophical sloppiness no longer goes unpunished. You’d better be absolutely sure that you have considered all the loopholes before you start making claims and value judgements on the back of your logic. And given that it could be argued that the ‘any cause’ account only really needed some minor revisions, it looks as if our friends, Lakok and Triman, were a trifle cavalier in their eagerness to dive into the smug exclusivity of a new theory. 76

SLOTH TERRORISM You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury I overheard the shrill hunger of gulls as small reptilian terrors tumbled into the earth on a morning that had stayed up all night. Structure burgled turbulence in a search, a scavenging for sanity, for a hastening of Apollo’s sweaty mitt. Just a taster, just enough to get me back off, to get me back there, to slip around in patent shadows until such time as shadows harden and take on the form of the world. I cannot find anything resembling myself amongst all this rambling, free flowing, Lynchian half-sleep, just bits of unordered history that have set up home in my crowded nest – all soapsuds and whitewash. There was a time when I would feast on the corroded arteries of old men, and lounge around in their clotted blood. I would eat young girls, and finding that their sinews stuck between my teeth, board their innards like a swarthy pirate. I rid myself of humanity’s shroud, anticipating ebullience with a twitchy trigger finger and a jeer. I answered the calls of the dying with a facilitating blow. I recruited swarms of support to stifle with pillows and peppered kisses. My head hit the sky with a Laputan thud and I collapsed under the weight of sweat and powders. I towelled down with the softened hides of skinless unfortunates. And I eluded the man on the stair. Fear draws me on, for without fear I am unable to dream. I attempted to make a collage on the theme of hatred, fragments of venom stitched together with frosted scotch tape: An officious gauleiter tortures local spastics with crocodile clips and a telephone rig, as drunken SA look on, licking Red blood off sore knuckles. Witch-finders find devils to be buoyant. Lazy wastrels expectorate blood-streaked phlegm down the back of businessmen’s trousers and then wink conspiratorially at their scrawny hounds…. 77

A list of things I need: black eyes to scare the deaf, strong hands to choke the offspring of idiots, embryonic stigmata to… I picture myself tugging as the tip of a scarlet stiletto rips through screaming fur. I raise my eyes in jaded disaffection as the camera zooms in on a 4year-old girl lapping the cum off some old man’s pecker as he slaps her around the face and probes her delicate holes with his calloused, tobaccostained fingers. I eat my fill amid the taut dropsical bellies of starvelings, and do not even feel their stares. I force exhausted mothers to watch as I drown their new-born babies, still wrinkled and sticky with birth grot. A Dog’s Love for its Tail: one loves and is intrigued by one’s self like one loves the unknowable, the unattainable. A dog chases around after its tail and the dizzier it gets the more it sees its own tail as the tail of another dog: a foe, a prospective lover, everything and nothing – ultimately something unrecognisable. Charles sits up in bed and reaches for his notebook, but the words are gone, the moment is lost. He drags himself up out of bed and into the toilet. A line of thick murky urine arcs into the bowl. Pains in his lower back prevent him from standing up straight. He lights a cigarette and crawls back into bed. When Charles was late rising, he’d remind himself of Thomas Pynchon who would begin his working day at 1 P.M. (when Thomas Mann, having been writing since 9 A.M., would finish his) with spaghetti and a soft drink, and read and work until three the following morning. Charles would vow to do the same, invariably falling asleep in front of the TV shortly after midnight. As he dragged himself from the sofa to his bed he would console himself with the thought that Pynchon too had a weakness for trashy TV, as did J. D. Salinger. Some mornings it is necessary for Charles to place his feet in a bucket of potassium permanganate while staring out across a photograph of a Montana dam in order to remind himself of his need to write. He didn’t suffer from athlete’s foot, as one might expect, but he did long to long to write, for writing to become his profession, for it to be everything. If I am disconsolate with life and the world around me it is not without reason. It has been said, behind my back and otherwise, that I ought to grow up and get on with things. I can honestly say I don’t know what is meant by this piece of advice. I know what the words mean – words are my business – but about how to act on such advice I am at a loss. How does one grow up? What things does one get on with? The problem is that I have already grown up, but in a way that is considered somehow inappropriate. I haven’t grown up properly. 78

The implications are clear: I am self-obsessed (so I should introduce something into my life to distract me from myself, something other than myself that I might become obsessed with); I dwell on things too much (so I should introduce something into my life to distract me from the things that I now dwell on, so that I might dwell on this new thing instead); I am unrealistic, a dreamer (I should focus my attentions on things that I might actually be able to achieve, and take solace in those things, so that I don’t have to dream anymore); I refuse to take account of my responsibilities (I should not rely on the assistance of others to take care of the things that are up to me to take care of); I am a misfit (I should fit); I am as I am (I should be other than I am). The people who suggest that I grow up and get on with things don’t like me as I am. If I was to say to them that they simply don’t like me, they would (I suppose, as I have never put this to them) deny it vehemently. They like me as the me that has grown up and got on with things. They like all the choices that I didn’t make, and as a result like the me that made those choices. They envisage liking the me that will go on to make those choices. And they have the audacity to tell me that they live in the real world (this real world). I am suspicious. These people seem rather too well acquainted with this other (possible) incarnation of me. Where and when did they get to meet him in order to come to the realisation that they liked him so very much? I think maybe I’d like to meet him. 79

The Zombie Fairytale. Charles longed to be a zombie, and was plagued by the argument that stated that there could never be such things as zombies or automata, not even transient ones, because the whole concept of a zombie is incoherent. That concept being, that the world might have been in all respects the same as the actual world is, apart from the fact that there would be nothing that would have conscious experience, nothing it would be like to be a zombie. Charles found the argument against the possible existence of zombies logically sound, but could not bring himself to believe it. There had to be a cure for the disease of consciousness that didn’t involve Dahmer drilling holes into your skull and drizzling corrosive fluids onto the soft flesh of your brain. Without the possibility of zombies what was there to aspire to? He cursed those that had discovered consciousness, constructed it and given it a life of its own – who were those Frankensteins of phenomenology? those qualia monster makers? raw feel fabricators? Descartes is a prime suspect; the rest are on our files. We didn’t even have consciousness here until the midseventeenth century. Before that, all enjoyed (as only those who cannot feel enjoy) the sweet dead life of the zombie. But Charles did not long for death; he longed for his existence to be unquestionable, to be relieved of the burden of consciousness without dying. Consciousness as it stood was unacceptable: vain, intrusive, and masochistic. “Was there ever a time to be unlike myself?” he asked. The circular layout of Pavilionstone’s streets means you are always coming back on yourself; one’s self is never left behind for long. 80

THE POST-LUNCH LECTURE And I saw the future Impaled on its cruel coils, A murdered mouse sliding down the glass. – Richard Howard, ‘Intimations of Mortality’ “We have three problems: One, we all want to live longer. Two, the world is already crowded and overpopulated. Three, we want to remain the same persons and so be able to have genuine (accounted for) I-thoughts. A solution would involve something that made it possible to reduce the amount of space a person takes up while allowing persons to exist indefinitely long. I have provided you with just such a solution. Some people talk of ‘body sharing,’ or ‘time-share brains,’ or ‘invisible overcrowding,’ or even ‘part-time existence,’ but I put it to you that part-time existence, if that’s what you want to call it, is better than most if not all of the other alternatives, given the spatial restrictions. “Now there is of course another route we could take, and I’ll pass over to Mr Lance Noggin at this point and let him put the case for culling.” Professor P. stepped out from behind the lectern and went peripatetically about the stage looking at the crowd, asking something of their silence. He knew even Woolly couldn’t come back with anything that need concern him on this issue: he was beat, and the fact that he sat in his chair avoiding eye contact and looking at his wristwatch told of it. P. knew what mattered, and yet he still gave them what they wanted: their logic, their reference, their language. Who wouldn’t want just one more day? Even that desperate cunt with a cap full of snot and buttons sitting on the street begging for alms wouldn’t turn his nose up at it; even the guy whose adored wife and children have just been ploughed down by a car and killed wants one more day of grieving. 81

Think of all the sufferers the world puts up with, and then compare that with how many are actually wanting and actively striving to die. “A gift without break, the gift of gifts: that is what I’m offering you. But as you will all know, a gift is never free….” Lance made his pitch. It went to a vote and the case for culling won out: too many, it seems, were squeamish about P.’s alternative, whether they accepted his logic or not, and most did. Oh yes, all this is the result of free-will at work, of democracy, of majority rule; all this was consciously sanctioned by all those with voices to be heard, or, should I say, by all those with voices deemed worth hearing. If this was forced on people, they are no longer with us, and really, when you look at the bigger picture, they weren’t worth hanging on to. There was a global referendum (you can’t say fairer than that): the world’s first, but by no means its last, and we all voted to forgo any future generations in order that we might all achieve immortality. When I say all, I do not of course mean all: I am simply attempting to indicate the overwhelming levels of subscription to the New Way. For instance, a good chunk of America’s bible belt were, initially at least, very hostile to what they believed to be the Devil’s thumbs a twitching with a fearsome feverishness, and they reviled those who professed to do God’s work better than the man himself. They denounced Headway Corp, Lance Noggin and all his minions as wily imps of Satan. They refused to sacrifice their paradise in the heavens and offend their master for the sake of an abomination on earth. But only the real die-hards held out once the vote was in and the heathen self-importance of the world’s population had been well and truly heard. Still, despite being a rarity, such enclaves of resistance were not altogether insignificant in number: you had the Buddhists (Nirvana was good but you couldn’t propose waiting for it forever), the Roman Catholics (pious and kipperish to the last), the Hindus (a disparate bunch it must be said, although most took issue with man-made eternity, choosing instead to promote Sanātana Dharma), and certain Islamists (who saw it as the final battle of jihad, and as an excuse to indulge in their passion for explosives) to name but a few. On the whole, the Jews were no real problem; most came around to the idea without too much persuasion, for they are it must be said an eminently pragmatic people. Nobody really knew what they were getting into. They looked in the mirror, and around them at those they loved in addition, and thought they knew what they had to do. For starters, nobody thought they’d be denied an exit 82

should they desire it, as Lance had at this stage neglected to share his all too literal programme of deathlessness with anyone. To be immortal is to be free of death, not to walk in its shadow for as long as one chooses. 83

THE BAD LOGIC OF SENTIMENTALITY God, the great validator, would not deceive her as to her memories and any deductions reliant on them, according to Descartes, but I would. In saving her from doubt I will give her existence to someone else. I would have to lie to her, should she be there to be lied to. I must swamp her with alien quasimemories, saturate her to such a degree that should any home-grown quasimemories attempt to surface they will instead drown like worms in the sodden earth. Not even her pineal gland can save her now. When I first discovered that she was dead, and for days, weeks and months afterwards, I shuffled around like an old man in a large and increasingly unfamiliar house. Like poor Aston after his disruptive ECT, I could not for the life of me get my thoughts together. But it is different now. Now I have my own shed to build (so to speak), my own preparations to make. But I, unlike poor afflicted Aston, have the will to commence with my plans just as soon as the world conspires in their favour. I had Elizabeth’s body buried. For some reason I had an aversion to her body being burnt and spun around in a huge drum with steel balls to break down the bones: too procedural, too hurried, too mechanised. The allotted space for cremated bodies is tawdry: a necropolis for small but much beloved pets: hamsters, goldfish and the like. So demure, not wanting to take up too much space, excusing yourself in death. Fuck that! Fuck that! Fuck four up five down like Blake! Fuck multi-storey graves, piled up on top of one another like corpse kebabs! Take up as much fucking room as you can, in as ostentatious a manner, for you have earned it. If not, then fling yourself down the toilet and be done with it. I wanted her body to rot away slowly, to be given time to properly decompose. She had without doubt been cut about during the autopsy, and most certainly been treated disrespectfully, the butt of at least one piece of juvenile death humour. I have come to realise that none of that matters. Not one bit. 84

I should even be unperturbed if someone in the know was to tell me that Elizabeth’s body had been voted most popular ride at the Annual Necrophilia Convention. For similar reasons, I cannot begin to understand people that devote their lives to looking after loved ones that have suffered extreme brain damage, so severe as to rid them of any psychological traits once peculiar to them. What a waste of time. Why are they doing it? Duty. Duty to what? So much woolly thinking and empty-headed meliorism disguised as respect or valuable sentiment, so much frightened, self-serving bollocks dressed up as martyrdom and saintliness. So you’ve sacrificed every waking hour for the past 30 years for the sake of your daughter who is so mentally handicapped that she cannot even negotiate a spoon into her mouth. Well aren’t you the cunt! (If you’ll pardon my ad hominem.)15 You see these smug twats with their coach loads of unfortunates down by the seaside, pushing their damaged cargo along the promenade in wheelchairs, and while they are relishing the break of the waves, the cries of happy children and the cool breeze tempering the warmth of the sun, their cargo stares at its knees, twitching and dribbling, screaming uncontrollably, completely oblivious to its surroundings. Advocates of what I shall call the Smug Twat Martyr View16 claim that personal identity goes along with a person’s basic psychology and to a certain extent with the realizers of that basic psychology. By basic psychology they mean those mental capacities that are possessed by all normal human beings, notably their capacity to reason, in at least a rudimentary way, and their capacity to form some simple intentions. Everyone’s basic psychology is – by definition – the same. The criterion for personal identity on which the Smug Twat Martyr View relies is something like the following: Person Y at this time is the same as person Z at some future time iff (1) from the present physical realizer of Y’s psychology to the physical realizer of Z’s psychology at that future time, there is sufficient continuous physical realization of enough central aspects of Y’s present psychology and [probably] (2) {some clause suitable for ruling out unwanted cases of branching}. 15 Once again, in the spirit of Kundera, I am attempting to keep my tone “playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or inquiring.” 16 Please do not interpret this label as in any way indicative of eristic reasoning on my part. 85

Here we see ‘basic psychology’ contrasted with ‘peculiar psychology.’ Whereas basic psychology is all-important for supporters of the Smug Twat Martyr View, peculiar psychology is of very little importance when considering our persistence conditions. By peculiar psychology I mean those elements of my psychology that single me out from some or all other normal human beings e.g., my autobiographical memories, character traits, desires, fears, etc. I tend to think that this distinction is rather artificial, and that one’s reasoning capacities and self-consciousness are intimately linked with one’s memories, desires, fears, etc. But I digress. If one’s beloved wife were to change, by means of some tragic accident, from a friendly, gregarious, intelligent and loving partner, to an unsympathetic, cretinous loner with a disagreeable and vindictive character, wouldn’t we find that bond of love weakened to such an extent that one would no longer have any existent reason to favour her interests over some stranger’s? One might, for a time, try hard to connect the memories of how she was and one’s deep regard for her at that time to how she is at present. [Claim yourself! Be all you can be! Torture: Brand her flesh! Gag her mouth! Bind legs until they turn blue! Piss in her eyes! Shit in her ears! Slice her open with razors and cheese-wire! Splinter her bones! Snap her in two! Open her rectum with your nails! Tear her cunt apart with nail-skewered dildos!... Isn’t this the true mark of man?...] But the memories no longer fit anyone and so, unfortunately, neither do the emotions so tied up with them. To continue to love this disagreeable cretin and to treat her no differently to how she was treated before the tragic accident would be tantamount to derangement rather than genuine love. [Love her with your fists until her cheeks implode into her mouth and she chokes on her broken teeth…] If offered a preaccident duplicate of your wife, in return for the painless destruction of your actual wife, I believe that it would be too tempting to pass up. Your deep regard for your wife’s previous demeanour will dictate your answer. In the case above, what could motivate someone to opt for the destruction of the pre-accident duplicate of their wife rather than for the destruction of their post-accident wife? [A hideous stranger with limp, gangrenous limbs and a cupreous smile, her head encased in a sculpture of twisted metal, with bars and rivets driven into her soft scalp, half dead and crammed full of lice, the victim of repeated brain violations, half-eaten blood machine feeding a crow’s heart, a vacant mugshot for a face and a mudslide for a mouth. That’s the truth, Eric. Why would you want take the advice of some hunk of metal whose notion of reality appears confined to what happens? Come on! You of all people… You’re better than that….] Because, advocates of the Smug Twat Martyr View would no doubt reply, the latter is still one’s wife as opposed to a mere duplicate of one’s wife. 86

Let us now investigate what such an answer might amount to. If your beloved wife was to be reduced to a disagreeable cretin as a result of some tragic accident, then there is little doubt that you would wish that the accident had never happened, or that you had it within your power to return your wife to her former condition. But what if your wife was in a persistent vegetative state as a result of the accident? In this case, in addition to these unrealistic wishes, you might wish that she had died in the accident, or that she pass away quickly and painlessly and not live too long as a vegetable. It is entirely likely that you would think thoughts of the form, “She might as well have died!” and mean them, so that if you were offered a pre-accident duplicate of your wife in return for your wife’s painless death, there could be nothing, I suggest, to dissuade you from accepting the offer. [Which do you take home from the labour ward, the baby or the meconium?...] Of course this does not yet make a case against the Smug Twat Martyr View, because your vegetable wife no longer has any basic psychology and so advocates of this view could agree with the rationale that might lead you to choose the pre-accident duplicate of your wife over your post-accident wife. However, what this case does show is that bodily or (more specifically) animal continuity, in the absence of any other continuity, is of no, or at least very little, importance as far as our loved ones’ continued existence is concerned. [Are those threads at the back of the man’s sketchy, scar-ridden face? Two escapees from a knot, maybe. The two lovers’ lower ends meet – legs desperate and entangled. Her nipple resembles a bullet-hole or a cigarette burn. The variegated building-block constructions either side of our two lovers could be toy trains, or even the frames of Victorian bathing chalets. The man has a dislocated arm with a hand that looks like a huge molar. A dent in the back of his head is discharging ink like some angry squid: a smudge in the thin air, a defence mechanism, a smokescreen of dying thoughts. Unlike the delicate pouting of his kiss, there’s real force in the way he clasps his hand around her neck and cheek. Her eyes are clenched shut for fear of seeing what is so excruciatingly transient. Her lips are unresponsive in the end, as if she had already left him. The dread of some imminent time does this. It takes you long before you go, but not all of you: it leaves enough behind to suffer....] Let us now look at the differences between the disagreeable cretin wife case and the vegetable wife case, and see if they can ground any differences in the way in which we approach them. In the disagreeable cretin wife case, brain matter that is physically continuous with that which realized the preaccident wife’s core psychology realizes the post-accident wife’s core psychology. But, according to advocates of the Smug Twat Martyr View, everyone’s basic psychology is the same, so how can this be what you (as her devoted husband) are particularly attached to? What you value about your wife’s ex87

istence are surely not capacities that are present in every other normal human being on earth, nor are you particularly attached to a section of your wife’s brain matter. Your wife’s new distinctive psychology cannot be relevant here, as it is completely different to anything before witnessed in your wife and certainly not something that you are favourable towards. What other differences are left that could constitute a reason for opting for the destruction of the pre-accident duplicate in place of your post-accident wife? There are none, at least none that can legitimately be thought to reflect your love for your wife. It could be argued that my account is morally unpalatable, because it advocates a notion of love that cashes-in sufficiently damaged loved ones for more agreeable pre-damage duplicates, and that it is in fact this notion of love that is superficial and impoverished, as opposed to the Smug Twat Martyr View’s. After all, doesn’t such a notion of love just serve to promote the lover’s convenience and desires rather than those of the object of that love? In answer to such an allegation I should have to ask by what properties or relations the Smug Twat Martyr View’s notion of love is sustained in the above examples. It cannot be sustained, as I have argued, by a portion of brain matter, nor can it be sustained by a basic psychology that, by definition, is shared by every other normal human being on earth. All that is left, and indeed what advocates of the Smug Twat Martyr View spend a lot of time focusing on, are the prolonged relations between lover and loved one that existed in the time previous to cerebral damage. But how can these past relations sustain the continuance of a special sense of duty in light of the catastrophic changes that have occurred, changes that have, after all, destroyed the very framework that had sustained those relations? What we might have had reasons to do in the past cannot dictate what we will continue to have reasons to do in the future, especially when the future can no longer uncover any support for those reasons. You cannot just find this unpalatable. You cannot just turn away with scorn, you self-righteous imbecile; you have to be able to disprove; you have to be able to come up with that magic element wherein your sense of duty and attachment can reside. But you can’t can you. You can’t do it. And don’t you mention the word ‘soul’ to me! Don’t you fucking dare! Please have the decency to keep a lid on your very personal reasons for believing in the existence of an immaterial soul and the magazine or TV show from which you gleaned them. Magnets had souls according to Thales of Miletus. Magnets possessing souls supposedly explained their ability to move iron, which, it seems to me, makes as much sense as anything else having a soul and of why they might have them. 88

THE POLYSYLLOGISTIC CURSE Intellectual work leads practically nowhere. – Arthur Rimbaud’s Mother Here sits Reginald Woolly observing yet another ball-breaking Chrysippan silence. His left hand scribbles notes of angry negation into a busy loose-leaf folder. He is, as is always to be expected these days, seated between what it is safe for most of us to call two heaps of wheat grains – one considerably smaller than the other, but increasing in size all the time in perfect harmony with the larger heap’s depletion. A 100 watt bulb sheds its unsophisticated light about the cluttered room as the sun, lurching, tries, with no concept of failure to dishearten it, to break through the inch-thick drapes which haven’t been parted in over a year. On the table in the corner of the room, by a heavily-bolted front door, are five mounds of long grain rice, a single mound of peanut M&Ms, and two mounds of builder’s sand. On another table by the window are 500 five-legged ants in a glass tank alongside which, in another, exactly similar tank, are 500 six-legged ants; in both tanks a pair of silver tweezers and a magnifying glass are just visible amid the tumult of shiny black bodies. Reginald Woolly is searching for a universal algorithm for the detection of clarity, so that it might be clear whether some collection of beans/seed/wheat x is clearly a heap or not, thus enabling him to rid his toolbox of those pesky, embarrassed silences and ‘don’t knows,’ leaving him with a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ and nothing more. He wants and needs (and has already started) to make the move from infallibility to omniscience. He had spent years wasting his time with nihilism, starting off local, but turning global within hours. (He had also toyed with Halldén’s and Körner’s nonsense logic, but ultimately found both versions unreasonable.) Back then he could be seen strutting about dressed from head to toe in black, accentuating the graveyard pallor of his face, with his well-thumbed copy of Begriffsschrift 89

clutched under his armpit. Everything was empty at that time, every thought, every concept, and every word an empty casing that crumbled and dispersed into its natural state of incompleteness. He once drew himself up some sandwich boards that read ‘THE END OF OUR WORLD NEVER HAD A BEGINNING,’ and walked through the town on weekends wearing them and answering questions of those genuinely intrigued by the plight of all thinking people. He had always, ever since the day his epiphanic quest for clarity had begun, found it hard to accept that the boundaries of his words, his concepts, and his thoughts were invisible to him; he was an unwilling subscriber, and constantly looking to overcome the bleak desperation that leads one to global nihilism, but for years he was unable to see past the emptiness he had found. That fat men were thin, old men young, the bald hirsute, the dead living, heaps non-heaps, rich men poor, many few, and the ugly beautiful, proved to be a constant reminder of his being ostracised from the world in which he lived, and that every other living creature was in the same boat mattered not, appeased him not, and not only because almost every single one of them had no idea of their inherent remoteness from their world, but for other reasons as well. But little-by-little he moved away from nihilism and found hope in ignorance, in the thunder of millet seed and his grandmother’s extravagantly helical ear horn. There had always been phalakros paradoxes everywhere he’d turned, but now he was confronted by one every time he looked in the mirror – now it was personal: the essential indexical had come along and pierced the skin. He couldn’t be arranging sets of mirrors in many elaborate configurations, in order to make visible every square millimetre of his head, with no hope of ever satisfying his question one way or the other. If the loss of a single hair follicle from some full head of hair always leaves a full head of hair, then successive losses of single hair follicles still leave a full head of hair – if only it did not work the other way around as well he might have been able to console himself, to let valid argumentation lie to him, but it did, so that was that. If Galen knew of nothing worse and more absurd than transgressing the Tolerance Principle, then he never had to contemplate his own hair loss with no hope of ever knowing whether or not he was bald. He hears a yelp from an adjacent room and rushes to investigate. On entering what was once advertised as a spare bedroom (which he has since transformed into a laboratory of sorts, filled with computers, measuring devices, dials and indices of all shapes and sizes, levers, cantilevers, alembic-like weighing machines, and caged animals, including cats, dogs and rats) he looks up at an LCD that reads 1,293, and sighs. Reginald is still toying with statistical regularities in – all too many – variations of word or symbol appli90

cation when he wants so much to move beyond it, to free himself from the ecliptic shroud of ignorance that envelops him whole and without break or cleft. Patch is lying on the floor of his cage, his spine snapped in two, foaming and bleeding at the mouth, his legs at corrupted angles. Reginald scratches his head and runs his hands agitatedly through his hair, and then thinks better of it and checks his fingers for signs of any dislodged follicles, of which there are, on this occasion, none. Recorded on the LCD is the total number of lead shot added to his weight transference machine before Patch’s spinal cord gave way under the pressure. The lead balls were dropped into a huge dish that directly conveyed their accumulative weight to a series of levers and finally to a pump that pressed down onto the middle of (in this case) Patch’s back, allowing Reginald to have the weight of in excess of a thousand balls condensed into a small workable area. (Who could hope to stack hundreds of anything within the relatively tight space offered by a dog’s back? He didn’t have the room or the money to test on animals with more spacious backbones, such as elephants, or even, to go down the traditional route, camels.) He had lost count of the backs he had snapped; it ran into the hundreds, and he hadn’t finished yet. Reginald looks down at poor old Patch and doubts that he appreciates that he is a living (well, just) example of a Hegelian preoccupation: the fact that quantitative difference instigates qualitative difference. You might think that these tests have little to do with Reginald’s obsession with vagueness, but you’d be wrong; they have everything to do with it, even if they are not obviously relevant to the existence of objects about which it is (or appears to be at least) impossible to say with any certainty whether any given term is applicable. Reginald Woolly was, always has been to my knowledge, and still is, an unfortunate looking creature. I wouldn’t mention it but for the fact that I have never cast my eyes over a more clumsily put together individual in all my time spent encountering individual upon individual. His badly managed facial features are really rather remarkable: his face being not so much ugly as jumbled, not so much abhorrent to behold as confusing; Picasso never misused a tired and wearisome mistress in pencil, ink or oil with quite the level of contempt for order and balance displayed by Reginald’s designer of flesh and bone. His mouth, with its stringy lips and its dancing tongue, is not unlike a lizard’s. His nose is markedly off-centre, with one nostril considerably larger than the other, and unfortunately this lop-sizing of nostrils does nothing to balance out the nose being situated too far to the right; in fact, as if to piss in that drowning man’s mouth as he gasps for air, it actually accentuates the distorted logistics of his nasal placement. He is a squat man, standing 91

only 5ft 2in. (the average height of a fifth-form schoolgirl) in his specially designed shoes, that give him an extra inch, hidden someplace between insole and heel – who could tell just where? If you drew an imaginary horizontal line from the top of his left eye across the bridge of his nose and over to the right-hand side of his face you would come across the bottom of his right eye. His eyes differ in size – an imbalance at times rectified by his conjunctivitis (not to forget his gingivitis – while I’m dealing with one itis – which, aside from gums that keep their blood on the outside, causes him to have halitosis and loose teeth) which can tend to affect one eye more than the other and so, as luck would have it, on occasion actually help balance out the horizontal plane of his face. His ears – who could forget the ears? – are, to speak in their favour, approximately the same size; however, they are ridiculously small given the hugeness of the head on which they rest. And, of course, he is losing his hair. To the casual observer, Reginald is just an Epistemicist who is somewhat reluctant to accept the necessity of his ignorance, a man engaged in an obsessive theoretical game of hide and seek with a particularly slippery quarry – the cut-off digit – and this cannot simply be dismissed as mere appearance, for there is a sense in which he is doing just that; but this would not be an entirely accurate appraisal of how he sees himself, and it is, after all, as any good Supervaluationist will tell you, only one sharpening of what it is he might be doing, which might be precisified in any number of different ways. Reginald would describe himself as a man going out on a limb, imperilling mind and soul, to overcome ignorance, to dissect the penumbral blur of our words one by one – although it would be an enormous weight off his shoulders if he could just manage the one. Reginald is not much liked and, in keeping with the ways typical of loners, puts little effort into finding reasons to like others. Even his parents, who, both in their 660th year should, like fragile coastlines, be feeling the merciless erosion of time, have little to do with him and his pedantic and querulous ways. You only need to be told that as a boy he was known by the tag, ‘Igor,’ to get a fairly accurate picture of Reginald’s lab-days: those of a lonely child who spent the majority of his time dreaming, reading and making dauntless efforts to ignore, but preferably to foil in some way, his many tormentors. However, despite his having lacked familial and non-familial bonds throughout his formative years and beyond, he is not indifferent to the existence and opinions of others, for he has spent too many years involving himself with the blissfully uninformed to be able to turn his back on them or enjoy his intellectual pursuits without scheming about some future time when he will be in a position to embarrass certain people, alarm others, and – best of all – completely crush and demoralise a tiny sub-population of think92

ers whose work has managed not only to get under his skin, but to live and breed there, nestled amid an ever-thickening layer of fat. There is one particular subcutaneous scholar that has done more damage than most on the chagrin-inducing stakes, and that, not unexpectedly, is none other than Professor P. himself. As far as Reginald is concerned, P. is a degree theorist with a hard on for immortality that he hides behind a neatly interwoven blanket of soulless psychology. Reginald despises him and all he stands for, hates that he is so successful, and is genuinely disturbed about where his research and the popularity of its implications among men and women of influence is leading a world full of poor blind fools unable to find logic and clarity. Reginald refuses to be just another fool, even if he is the only one refusing (which he isn’t). But he is used to being alone anyway, used to a hostile reception from humankind, and so shall not be fazed by being the wrong side of a ratio that reads, The World: One. “No more facts to come. We know them all. They are all on full display. But why, then, do my words continue to resonate like slow footsteps in empty tombs, like the rapping of knuckles on suits of armour in cobwebbed stately homes? The honeycomb centres that make our symbols for this world so light will not be filled in, have their wormhole cavities made matter, by your conjunctions that not only allow contradictions to become half-truths but, as is found with the babble of drunks, are unable to distinguish repetition from contradiction. And it does not stop there. No, the abominations keep on coming and you pass over them as vain men pass over ugly women, with neither a smile nor a nod of recognition. You would have me live with my being bald or not bald qualifying as no truer than my being bald or being a woman; you see no oddity in your degree functionality account of conditionals deriving perfect truths from half-truths, and now you want, on the basis of this travesty of truth, to eradicate persons from the face of the globe. Well here is one man that won’t be lying down to be told what matters, allowing my self to be ripped from me before I have had time to locate it.” He thumps his fist down on one of his many desktops, and a pile of Escher prints flutter to the floor. As he picks up the scattered reproductions of woodcuts, engravings and lithographs, he cannot help but think that maybe now an answer will come, as his eyes run right to left and back again for the meeting of Tag und Nacht, from top to bottom in the Luft und Wasers, as he falls into the wonderland of Drehstrudel looking for the end, as he looks for where outside becomes inside in Belvedere and even takes time to acknowledge the desperation of the prisoner who is denied access to the puzzle (and its possible solution) that consumes all those free to wander, which Reginald feels is the mirror image of his own predicament. Then, almost 93

without warning, his red eyes start to glaze over with tears, and the skin where his lips should be begins to tremble and quake. A tear drops off the end of his nose onto one of the apexes of the stellar dodecahedron resting in his lap, and he wipes it away, with some urgency, into a collection of junk: a broken pipe, an empty sardine tin, a piece of string, a broken bottle, a broken egg shell… He sits there and envisions a time when order will come to him glinting with magnificent purity from deep beneath the frowsty, stygian appurtenances of day-to-day living; the day is coming as sure as death once was, and sometimes he thinks that the two might be one, either one bringing about the other. He is sure that he will be able to walk on the glassiest of surfaces, and that to be a friction-lover is to be consoled with scrambling for soot while the world goes up in a puff of smoke. Time is running out. Reginald sets his prints back on the desk in an orderly pile and gets to his feet. He has only 7 more days to cross off before P.’s inaugural lecture at The Headway Institute for Practical Metaphysics, and is nowhere near fully prepared to face all the possible onslaughts that might be levelled at his theories, although he does regard himself suitably equipped to successfully put his case against P. and his cronies. What he isn’t at all sure of is whether he will actually be given the chance to express himself in such prestigious, influential and, more importantly, antagonistic company. He realises that he will need something spectacular to convince the opposition and dissuade them from their misguided attempts to condense and elongate the existence of persons by denying their true essence, and he believes he has devised just such a source of persuasion, only it needs work and he cannot be sure whether a week will be enough to complete his task. One must not get the idea that Reginald is entirely alone in his beliefs, although one would be correct in thinking him isolated with regard to the methods he employs. There are indeed others who are fearful of the rather sudden ascendance of Professor P. and his Reductionist policies, but they are an essentially disparate bunch which offer little in the way of presentable, predicable support for their arguments, relying rather too heavily on the swaying power of classical logic and faith in the existence of unobservable logical objects. In a world of empiricists – see-to-believers – they find themselves, almost all of a sudden (at least in an academic sense of ‘sudden’), progressively outnumbered. Reginald, or so he hoped, was about to change all this, and finally demonstrate, for the eyes to see, the pure impredicative glory of logical truths. He would, for the first time, reveal a world that our words have come to hide from us ever since we stopped looking beyond them for their meaning. He has told nobody of his recent breakthroughs, not even those in his department who sympathise with him and his philosophical perspective; in 94

fact, he has been so silent during his 6-month sabbatical that members of his faculty, and indeed those from without, are harbouring suspicions as to his recent developments. Since he moved into this flat, nobody else has set foot inside it; only the secretary of his philosophy department knows of his address, and he has given strict instructions that it not be disclosed to anyone. She has stuck to her word and hasn’t revealed the whereabouts of his flat to a single soul. Reginald bends down, takes hold of Patch’s tail, and flings him into a huge black sack hanging in the corner of the room, the contents of which he will dispose of at a later date, and then shuffles back to a heap of grain in the other room and sits down. 95

MUGSHOT COLLAGE …the book is being composed, and decomposed, under his very eye. – Robert Pinget I can hear overweight men covered in thick black hairs – backs like grizzly bears – and blue tattoos, snapping the front teeth off pre-pubescent sex slaves with dirty pliers, so they may gobble their punters’ pricks with newfound ease. Fill the gaps in Katarina’s teeth! I can hear the seasoning of ruined girls on every street I pace; I can hear their bruises bubbling to the surface, the screeching of cheap plastic shoes all strap and heel, and girls sobbing into pillows, while unctuous, ursine men – the black-haired, blue-tattooed men – smoke cigarettes and wonder what it would take to feel bad about themselves and the things they do. They hold their heads in their hands and listen to the stifled weeping of defeat curled up on the bed beside them. They maybe wonder why they are not more touched by the hurt they inflict, why someone else’s fear and suffering are no more than piquing noises in their ears, sounds of success, the flick book fluttering of notes, the groans of satisfied customers. I hear it all. I hear it all, and carry on walking where I’m going. I hear the needles sliding in and out of anal openings, dragging bloody cotton stitches behind them as they go, to make things tight again, to bring back the illusion of first-timer-ism – just a couple of stitches and their good to go. (Always white cotton, never black: the blood stains the white cotton and allows the stitches to blend into the background.) It doesn’t take long for a cotton-clutcher to become cotton-clutched: a few weeks, maybe a month. I hear 12 o’clock shadow cutting into soft young thighs like a cheese grater. And somewhere else, not here, never here, someone knows her legs are parted wrongly. I hear a pre-teen starlet struggling to reveal the deception of the curare ‘anaesthetic’ under which she cannot fall to the men cutting her with scalpels who are already well aware of what it is she cannot tell them – her 96

untranslatable agony, the torture from which she cannot even flinch, all the excruciating epiphanies that an otherwise epiphenomenal pain can bestow. I head away from the tightly-coiled streets, away from the cacophony of swallowed pain drowning out my thoughts, until finally I reach The Leas. Not a parasol or perambulator to be seen; no boaters or bowlers adorn a head; no bath chairs, no prayer book spines glint in the Sunday sun: the promenading public are no more. And Judy has a fouler mouth outside of Mr Hayes’s hands, and no three Queens will come to watch her as she belts her man and shouts the odds. Radnor’s bobs, all decked out in blue and braided gold, are long since gone, the undesirables spared a rap from their stunted canes. Two bandstands down and one to go, and you’ll have to crane your ear to hear Newmann’s Red Hungarians blow through Worm’s Blue Viennese, should you ever get beyond the music of our trees. Do any make the Visitor’s List now? Not many, if any, could really hope for that. All are general now you know, and wouldn’t think to Court beyond. From the east end you can spy 3 Albion Villas, where Dickens resided for three months while writing Little Dorrit one must suppose because one is told, rattling off his prose to the measured fall of dead men’s feet down Remembrance Hill. Charles, writer in residence at the present time, a few streets from his namesake’s brief abode, scratches out his words, but still as yet no rooms in pubs named after him. Just down the road in a tool-shed-to-be H.G. Wells had scandal in Spades, and brought along Chesterton, Henry James, G.B. Shaw, Arnold Bennett and Conrad to stay. Public amusements are still scarce, and murder on the sandhills still frowned upon it seems. Too few severed legs and hands to stub a toe on Pavilionstone sands. No longer are there fences to keep wandering feet off grass, all is flat and, with the odd exception, rather sparse. Some daughters still show themselves about, but without their mothers on their arms, and eligible only by the hour. Down the cobbles on your right at number 10 was once the home of The Beehive Wireless Depot, when wirelesses were the want of passers-by. But its most recent incarnation, before its windows were painted in and pushed in, was as a shop selling fake lace frills in black and red, for wives to excite the eyes of their hubbies and lure them back to bed. Knickers less their gussets, peephole bras for pink protruding eyes, suspenders dangling in the window, less a pair of thighs. The goods weren’t made to last. The styles were passé – we ain’t talking haute couture, more brassy than classy, a little fruit to dress the plate and nothing more. Most men looked in, few stepped in, even fewer women. But some skirt would, on occasion, set the brass bell ringing inside this emporium of lightweight sleaze: I’d say five or six a week. The proprietor wasn’t in it for the money, that much could be safely said. Nevertheless, he was there six days a 97

week from 9:00 A.M. till 5:30 P.M. and rarely missed a day. He stood firm on his non-returns policy and with good reason, you might think. After all, who wants used undies? Apart, that is, from those men who send £10 cheques or postal orders to porky housewives in dirty bunny slippers for the chance to sniff between their legs, and dream, and make-believe their source. Most don’t even wear the knickers they send out in jiffy bags, even a quick wipe is seen as too much trouble: they spray the soft porous gussets with canned synthetic muskiness (some essence of cunt manufactured by the same people who have the gall to bring you port and stilton flavoured crisps) and laugh as they think of all those gullible tossers getting worked up over something that’s been no closer to a twat than they have. He would encourage his female customers to consider trying before buying, repeating the spiel about his goods being non-returnable by way of cajolement. The changing room (he had only the one) had a full-sized door with a bolt on the inside to make the changer feel secure as they shed their clothes and donned whatever skimpy garb they’d picked out. If he’d simply had a curtain separating the changing room space from the rest of the shop, then an element of caution and coyness would have resulted in a limited disclosure of body parts, whereby yet-to-be-purchased knickers are pulled over those already in residence, and bras are removed through the arms of Tshirts. The room was fitted with a chair to precipitate comfortable, unrushed disrobing; he would say, “No rush, take your time.” As a woman entered the changing room he would always nip out the back of the shop, and would return to the counter and make as if rearranging stock a couple of minutes before she exited with her verdict. There was, of course, a surveillance camera concealed behind the mirror. I believe that he was recording them in addition to getting some gratification right there and then with them still on the premises, there being no danger of being rumbled, what with the brass bell on the door of the shop and his being able to guarantee that the customer was within the confines of the changing room, as opposed to sneaking up behind him while he toiled over his manhood. Before buying the shop, he used to supply and fit surveillance equipment, mostly to large companies, but with the odd private venture. Even once the shop was up and running he would install such gadgetry on Sundays and weekday evenings. Needless to say, he never mentioned the shop to any of his clients, and invariably did such work on the outskirts of town, away from the cobbles. I don’t think he ever got caught. I think people just stopped coming to the shop and so he shut it down. He probably still has his stash of recordings, including a few favourites that he watches again and again. 98

Prehistoric-looking gulls tear the dead apart in the streets. I see them fighting over some old soak’s liver, over discarded fetuses that have spilled out from the holes pecked in bin bags… photos of Modiesque, blank-eyed hookers trussed up like turkeys flutter free from their beaks… Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi once came here. He was on board a ship that docked at Pavilionstone harbour. Gandhi, man of peace, came here and left. If he were here now maybe he’d fast unto death to highlight our plight, as he was always a one for fasting. If in doubt, fast unto death! It was truly remarkable just how many times this man could fast unto death – the world’s first cheater of death perhaps, a precursor to the new world beyond these walls. As I pushed my feet through what to me unseen were autumn leaves on winter floors, I inclined my gaze and saw the leaves were printed paper burnt a long time back, page leaves of some book, singed and desiccated, black-edged and curled up around my shoes. I grasped a handful, and read two of the segments that had managed to stay in one piece. This one: uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from its hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted. Murderer’s ground. What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be Followed by this one: was sitting. He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know I kept them with the intention of confirming their origins, with the intention of rereading them as if they were somehow portentous. Queens House, that oblong monstrosity, all metal-framed glass and white blinds, with all the architectural flair of an accumulation of sticklebricks, was once the Queen’s Hotel in all its Victorian splendour. The offices for our local rag sit on the foundations of a medieval town house built pre 1400s and demolished in 1916. The comparison whiffs of criminality and disregard, of young, free men pissing on the graves of old soldiers. Half-baked hacks scrawl out non-events in passionless, ill-constructed prose on Bail St: the unreadable heralding the unimportant. And now nobody can run their hands 99

along its quaint clumsiness. Down the road a little, 60 or more O.A.P.s rot in the red and yellow bricks of Glendale. ‘Glendale’? Fucking ‘Glendale’: who thinks up these names? Valleyvalley. It’s nowhere near a fucking valley. (Maybe it’s an allusion to Kenneth Bianchi and predicted body counts.) Flies clung to the insides of ribcages in a carcass wall down Butcher Row. Chops the size of your arm swung from the outside edge of window frames. Bring death back out onto the streets where we can see it! Let us inhale the depths of its caverns! Let us see our Kidders squirm! Now there are butchers forcing hysterectomies on pregnant women in their back rooms and selling the resulting ‘Saturn Haggis’ to their special customers. (They strangle the mothers, cut the baby out and put it straight into marinade before the lungs have had chance to clear.) The ends of buildings, where the adjoining property has been demolished or burnt down, are left raw, without sutures or cosmetics, so that you can still see the old joins – one half of a Siamese twin with her guts hanging out, or a gaping whole in her head…. If you stitch enough evil together can you get a hold on it? Or will you always be able to see the joins? Diseased meat is scaling the inside of my tumbler…. If shop signs can symbolise a town, as Gogol with his golden loaves believed, what then do they say of this place? Its shops say: NA I – CLOSING DOWN SALE – EVERYTHING MUST GO – CLOSED – SHOP FOR LET – GOOD RIDDANCE TO NIGGER SHIT – THE ONLY GOOD ANIMAL IS A DEAD ANIMAL – PRICES SLASHED – END OF LINE SALE – SHOP FOR RENT – NO MORE THAN ONE CHILD AT A TIME PERMITTED IN THIS SHOP UNLESS ONE OF THEM IS DEAD – CHEAP BEDS – TO LET – REDUCTIONS – MURDER SPASTICS – STOCK CLEARANCE – – HELP NEEDED – SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE DISEMBOWELLED – SAVE YOUR SOUL KILL YOUR CAT – TO LET – CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE – PAKIS GO HOME – LET US LIVE – TEAR DOWN THE WALL – NO TO ASYLUM FOR ALL – BREED TO KILL TO LIVE – MENGELE FOR MAYOR – MY SISTER WAS RAPED BY A DOG… 100

Can I hear you weep for signs of old, now corroding in some dark corner of a scrap yard, signs that speak of pride and produce second to none, of innovation, of precious metals, and even world dominance? A BOTTLE OF BASS INSIST ON SEEING THE LABEL – LYONS TEA – SPECIAL NOSEGAY – BORWICK’S BAKING POWDER The Best in the World – Protect His HEALTH LIFEBOUY SOAP – GOLDMANS WASH BLUE FOR SNOW WHITE LINEN – FRYS CHOCOLATE – PEAK FREAN & CO BISCUITS – ELECTRIC MACHINE BAKERY – VELAM CHOCOLATE – WILLS’s GOLD FLAKE CIGARETTES – PUNCH HAVANA CIGARS – OGDENS GUINEA GOLD CIGARETTES – PLAYFAIRS BOOTS ALWAYS THE BEST – REYNOLDS’S NEWSPAPER… Gogol had his landowners and their dead souls; Charles had baby farmers like Harriet Mitchell and Amelia Dyer and their discarded litter of dead children, their harvest of starved bodies drowned with tape around their necks. 85+ years crammed into two small rooms – knitting projects – sticky sherry schooners – orderly clutter – pig’s trotters, dripping, lamb-shank stew, brawn – organized lunches – a multitude of yarns on the decrepit and the dead – too many photographs, and too many hours spent looking at them – calendars with no days crossed off – no mirrors – blisteringly hot radiators – TV always on like Rauschenberg’s – Zimmer frames draped in snotty hankies – the smell of rotten mince – plaid slippers soaked in piss – squadrons of head-lice guzzling the blood of thinning scalps – ulcerated legs – the sexual abuse of minors, punctuated with steaming-hot cups of tea – painted plates hanging from the walls – bloated feet with fused toes – loose bowels and loose tongues – quaking hands and blood-stained eyes – ornamental china dogs – Spitfire prints – tasselled lampshades – faded photographs – varicose veins twitching under the skin like mating larvae… 101

CHUMPS AT THE COLONY Queasy green walls cluttered with yellowing newspaper clippings, sketches, paintings, unintelligible daubs in frames, multicoloured spots in bubble wrap… It is difficult to breathe for the brooding stratocumuli rising from cigarette upon cigarette perched between the manicured nails of old fairies, the nibbled stumps of nervous artists, or the bejewelled fingers of some likely geezer, rolling overhead spreading its sticky sap with penetrative omnipotence. People prop themselves along the tarnished banquettes and chatter and laugh, drop their cigarettes on the floor and tread them into the green sea of bile that passes for carpet. There is a window over by the bar and Lakok decides to head for it. “Excuse me. Sorry. Can I squeeze through?” says Lakok as he proceeds to elbow yet another person in the ribs, causing them to spill some rocks from their Absolut. The cigarette smoke is irritating his eyes and making it hard for him to see properly, and as well as bumping others he is getting progressively more disorientated as he, himself, is bumped and knocked off course. “Want to watch where we’re fucking going then don’t we, love!” says a man in a soft falsetto. He smiles as if in reaction to a series of electric shocks. His friends titter, and he flicks at the spillage as if dismissing a particularly bedevilling Indian boy persistently begging for sustenance. “How’d a cunt like that get past the perch? How she managed to tie her shoelaces is a wonder to me. I ask you.” “What you drinking, Cunty? We got the beers you see, the spirits you see and any cocktails made from said spirits, and that’s it, and don’t fucking ask for coffee or tea because I can’t be fucked. The sarnies are all gone, so if you’re hungry best you fuck off!” The woman behind the bar turns to her two friends, addressing them both as Mary, despite the fact that one of them is a man, and asks them what they thought of her impersonation, before letting out a tremendously resonant burp. The man belches back his appreciation – Buuuuuurrrilliant – while busily fiddling with something in his pocket. 102

The barmaid stares at Triman expectantly as she sucks on the end of her Marlboro Light like it was a reed and she was submerged. She wears big black boots, blue jeans, and a striped suit jacket fresh from a cancered man’s back; she has shoulder length hair cropped into her face (when allowed to escape from behind her ears), no top lip to speak of, a couple of wayward incisors, and a grand, sweeping jaw-line shaped like an Amish beard. “Sometime today or I’ll have your prick nailed to a board,” she says between sticky, doughy mouthfuls of jam donut. The icing sugar clings to her teeth like snow to the sides of trees in a winter storm. “Two vodka rocks, please.” As the barmaid prepares the drinks her two friends look up at him, look at each other, shake their heads and laugh; when Mrs Mary laughs, her eyes shut and her top set of teeth jut out from her mouth, as if taking off a Chinaman. Mr Mary picks up his large whisky and Mrs Mary strikes a match and lights her cigarette. Her hair, a shag of uncombed fleece, hangs around her long, slightly spotty face, its features all crammed clumsily into the middle. Her heavy eyebrows lurk behind the tinted lenses of thick-rimmed spectacles. Her top row of teeth is too far forward, and some kind of lesion, blister or cold sore, sits on her bottom lip. Large silver earrings dangle from her ears. Mr Mary appears pretty well pissed. He is wearing a luminous green T shirt, and blue denim jeans and jacket. He has a boyish Dennis the Menace hairdo, a few days growth, surly eyes, a broad negroid nose, no top lip (thinner even than the barmaid’s), a thick-set face, eyebrows like Bert from Sesame Street, and a face lost to a quizzical frown, with a mouth that’s so harsh it’s always falling into a wry smile in order to save itself. He is still fiddling with something in his pocket as he leans back on his barstool and tries to attract Triman’s attention. “Pssssst!… Oi pssst!...” Triman nods in acknowledgement, and the man beckons him over: “Cumere a minute!” “It’ll have to be.” “Does art scare you?” “Not especially. No.” “Good. It scares most people. Especially the art I make: stirs them up a bit, see, makes them realise just how fuckin breakable life is. You don’t know who I am do you…? No I didn’t think so. Good. Expensive fish and chips! You what? Fuck off! Only kidding yah. Where was I; I’m all in a fuckin spin. Cunts in their suits ’n’ flash fifty-grand fuckin cars – I spend more than that in a week on taxis; cunts, they don’t impress me. They’re scared of me and what I do. They think they can control me, neutralize my art by buying it, by owning it. They think they can overcome their fear and aversion to my stuff 103

by paying me off, by possessing it: cunts. But that’s not you, right. You’re not afraid are yah? Take a look at this!” He opens up his left trouser pocket. “See that? That’s fuckin art, go on take it out! Have a closer look! It won’t fuckin bite yah.” All Triman can make out, as he strains his eyes to see through dense shadows and suffocating smog is, what looks like, an all but deflated balloon. He imagines that maybe this guy is going to get him to blow up the balloon, which will end up spelling out some funny message like, ‘Give me something small and wrinkled and I’ll blow it’ or ‘Drinks are on me!’ or ‘Queers are disease-ridden gobshite!’ He looks closer and then decides to just take it out and have a look. It is warm to the touch, and as soon as he starts to pull it from the man’s pocket the penny drops: the mystery art object is attached, and not to the pocket, but to the man. Triman yanks back his hand in shock – “Uggghhhh shit, you fucking perv!” – by which time the man has extracted it from his pocket and plonked it along his thigh. “Count yerself lucky he didn’t put it in your pocket, mate. Heeeeaahahahhahahaha…” says the bird at the bar with the misaligned jaw and the long face, who is busy writing letter after letter and stacking them in neat piles of four. “Nah, that was yesterday” she replies to somebody across the bar, “today I just want to die drink.” “Come on, admit it, it’s a fantastic piece, a lot of fuckin wow factor...” Triman turns his back on him and raises his drink to his lips. 104

QUANTUM LONELINESS We individualize objects and people all the time, but we need to ask by what principle this is achieved. Beware though, because the maelstrom into which this question leads us is as deep as philosophy itself. It pulls you in whirl by whirl until all around you blurs into a sickening universality. Different people have different properties; isn’t this how we differentiate between them? We might even go as far as to say that divergence in properties is a legitimate basis for ascribing individuality to things. The bundle of properties that was Elizabeth is unlike any other bundle of properties. But need it be unlike every future bundle? It is a logical impossibility for two things to have the exact same properties on the assumption of impenetrability. But Leibniz can have his law, for I have no concern for relational or modal properties – only monadic, non-relational properties for me please. But we really shouldn’t conflate the epistemological issue concerning how I distinguish Elizabeth from others with the ontological issue concerning the metaphysical basis of Elizabeth’s individuality. Individuality, after all, does not necessarily imply distinguishability. But am I really to believe that Elizabeth’s source of individuality can be found in something transcendent of Elizabeth’s properties? Any possible candidate becomes something to be added to the list of her properties. Some property-less substance about which we can know nothing cannot be what divides me from her. No stark haecceity can make sleep bypass loneliness; no elementarily vague pronoun ascription will stop me drowning in cheap blended whisky. Nothing can be done with it: it’s fucking useless. Transcendental individuality travelled by Post in 1963 and got lost. The sharp metaphysical distinction between things and relations between things is a myth, a verbal convenience, a piece of nasty propagandising courtesy of talkers everywhere. 105

Massacre in the Hall of Mirrors. Bodies hanging in the air like Surrealist corpses, flesh stretched and wrung out, mangled and bloated… headless bodies and bodiless heads… dismembered limbs scattered on the reversed horizon… the slow confluence of persons into slaughterhouse slurry. Reflections cutting women up like the Dali killer. Fleeting elephantiasis morphs into the bony stick legs of starving African children. Chalk outlines of countless fused body parts forming a diagram of frail, impotent carnage. Women’s tits carved from their chests in honour of Lorca… Murder games cleansed of death by hurried fascist sutures.... 106

MOLECH’S MISSION This town is limboland, a half-way house, a sorting office, purgatory, undecided. All here are waiting to see if they make the grade, if they can be included, assimilated with the rest of mankind. They wait, young and old, for the decisions of powerful strangers, decisions that never seem to come. Despite there being influences of the New Way, brought in by the few newcomers that are permitted to enter its boundaries, this place remains outmoded. Here people still die; people still die and nobody lifts a finger to reverse it. Not only do graveyards still writhe like rough green seas, but crosses, like the masts of sunken ships, have not ceased to multiply. And what is their task? What is it they must prove to their mysterious would-be benefactors? What will make the difference between being chosen and not, between furnishing earth un-trodden with one more wave and cheating the dirt of its undulating hallows? A few think piety will save them, that a purging of venal proclivities will make all the difference, wheareas the majority seem to think bizarre acts of cruelty and animal sacrifice will pave their way to immortality. Both camps are wrong. Most, steeped in death and horror, have been outcasts too long to have beliefs beyond their adopted drives. They are seasoned veterans of what it’s always meant to be human and, crucially, for as long as they can remember, what it has come to mean to be human in Pavilionstone. However inured most Pavilionstonians are to their fate, not many, if any, would pass up a ticket out of there, away from the oldness of dying. There are men and women in Pavilionstone that call themselves ‘Conduits’ and claim to be able to contact ex-Pavilionstonians, forever bringing back messages of hope and wonderment from the chosen ones, the worthy ones, the lucky ones. There are always plenty of dreamers that’ll listen and hurt themselves (and others) with hope. The methods by which they interact with those beyond differ according to which Conduit you speak to: some are contacted through their TV sets, seeing and hearing their message-bearers 107

kaleidoscopically over the top of regular broadcasts; others claim to be able to decipher the breaking of waves on the shore, the thick black ocean calling to them of those who’ll never be anything but alive. This is a town full of dreamers, a town full of people whose day is yet to come, men and women transfixed by their coffee cups, the floor, anything that happens to pass by a window, the sky, the horizon, their hands, the pages of a book and not the words, what goes on over somebody else’s shoulder, a blank wall, tarmac, people that can still allow themselves the luxury of drifting in and out of the cataclysmic perfunctoriness of their lives, lost in moments of cerebral pause, of reckless non-occurrence. But these people aren’t satisfied with a still moment out from the frenzied monotony: they live their lives in the torpor of everyday and freeze in the pauses. The years haven’t so much crept up on them and taken them by surprise, as stifled them in their sleep. They won’t wake up one day and they’ll be dead. No more pauses for life to slip in and out of. No more time to dwell. A town of lifetimes empty of life, waiting for something and nothing, and eventually finding it or not on not waking up. “Did you see The Confessions on Pav last night?” “No. I never watch.” “Everybody watches.” “I find it depressing. It gets to me, them dying minute by minute, needlessly. It should be quicker. That place should be wiped out.” “Needlessly! Have you heard yourself? You’re an odd one, Molech. Never quite sure when to take you seriously.” “Always. I don’t come in other shades.” “Take a break sometime.” “It’s better, easier this way.” “For you maybe.” “Who else is there?” “Me, for starters.” “But you approached me. Did you do it so I could make things easier for you? Because if so I wouldn’t know how, I really wouldn’t,” said Molech laconically. “What’s with you, Freakshow? Fuck off!” With these hastily chosen words the man turned his back on Molech and walked off, shaking his head and conjuring up further curses, curses that, if chosen well, might allow him to comfortably dismiss Molech once and for all. Molech looked on emotionlessly as the man walked away, and then went about his business as before, not giving the man’s outburst another moment’s attention. He knew that he had a reputation for being a bit cold to the touch 108

among those who had worked with him, but being largely disassociated from the sensibilities of those around him meant that he didn’t much care. Everyone dealt with it one way or another. Molech’s way was to make like it didn’t need coming to terms with, that everything would one day be resolved. He looked no further than that. He didn’t feel he needed consoling. He just got on with things. Molech had just finished rinsing off his grey plastic coveralls when he got the call. Somebody had thought it amusing to secretly supercharge his birthcontrol prod. Molech had applied his prod to the correct area at the back of the neck, where cranium gives way to spine, and activated the device with his thumb, only to have the 3-year-old’s head burst all over him. If it was supposed to rehumanize him, get him crying his way to discussion groups and the Pav channel then it didn’t work. It took him by surprise and scorched the fingertips on his right hand – that is all. It was the Professor. Molech had met him only once, when he signed up to the corporation just over a hundred years ago. It had been induction day, and he had been among many other rookies that P. had formally addressed. Jack Harrison had also been present. Some maintained that Lance Noggin had talked to them via a live video feed, but Molech could recall no such address from the man up top, and strongly doubted that there had ever been such an event. “Molech Mundungus: senior L.E.O., Branch 4?” Molech recognised the slow, precise vocal pattern almost immediately. “Speaking.” “I have an assignment for you, the precise nature of which must not be disclosed to any third parties.” “Understood.” “I require you to enter and take up residence in Pavilionstone for an indefinite period, and while there to record what you see.” “Forgive me, but I always believed Pavilionstone to be constantly monitored, and that nothing went on in there unobserved.” “Correct.” “So why post me there?” “Suffice it to say, there are things that we can glean only from somebody infiltrating Pavilionstone.” “And one last question, if I may?” “Go ahead.” “Why have I been chosen for this assignment?” “You have been found suitable in the relevant areas. Please report to the head of Branch 4 at your leisure. Goodbye.” 109

“Goodbye.” Molech thought he knew what P. had meant by his somewhat cryptic reply, and so chose not to pursue it any further. He was going to Pavilionstone and the exact reasons why could wait for now. Molech was not unaware that he was in what most outside Pavilionstone would regard as a privileged position. He would again feel the syrupy threat of oblivion, but more importantly, he would be free to succumb to its exorcising charms. (It’s a two-way street: those outside Pavilionstone, for all the ridicule they pour upon its poor unfortunate inhabitants, crave some of that weeping calamity for themselves and want in, while those inside want out.) He came to Hellfire Corner by sea, alone in a silent sloop, with the sweet spot of a cyclonic 5 and a lapping slack tide to bring it in, pushing its keel into the pebbled underbelly of the shore and tipping him out over the side into the foam. He dragged his feet through the water, his upper body swaying from side to side like a slow-motion gunslinger. The waves breaking on the shore sounded like canned laughter. He smelt it right away: the odour was death, and it was grinning from ear to ear, soft and wet, in squalid rooms with no latches to keep him out. He was there, in extremis, and could feel the flash of cold steel across his neck, bullets smashing through his back and careering into soft organs, and it all being done with the promise of no more of anything and yet somehow a piece of everything. The oxidized swoops of dead roller coasters smile and grimace overhead in maimed contusions of neglect. 110

A LEISURELY SEPPUKU There are no places to go where the dread of sameness cannot follow, where it cannot stalk your view with further recounted blessings. Is a tanka to be written for every listless, godforsaken day? If so, how would they sound? At daybreak I’m born; Many seagulls cut my cord. I can walk and talk Within moments of my birth. Who’ll blow out my candles now? Or: It is here I’ll die, Rusty tanto at my side: 1 of 47 Like the rest that wither here, So old, scared and honourless. Or even (with sacrilegious rhyme): Officers of death Endure their wait like statues Hidden from the eyes, For here we end when ended And we never say goodbyes. 111

THE NIGHTSHIFT Charles decided that he would write at night and sleep during the day. He would live and work in the dark and maddening recesses of his very own Nighttown, and leave the day to them, to those with achievable and inconsequential passions, those that never strive to do what nobody else has done, those stalkers of the day, those poshlost’ pigs wallowing in cowardly suns and baby-blue skies. They were welcome to their days; he would have the night and make it his own, and burrow beneath their dreams while they shed their skins in laboured snorts and groans. He’d drink deep of the unwatched vitriol of inky skies and hear himself in the disquieting quietude, and sleep through the futile noise of commerce and a thousand other humdrum drudgeries. They’d wonder where he’d gone, why they no longer saw him lashed to the crowded rocks of his former life. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. He must deafen himself to the siren’s call that would have him be like them, no better, worse in fact, yes worse, much worse… Never again must he drown beneath the fluff and flimsy of waking days. His were the cold and pitiless awakenings fed on turning slumber, the demonic rumours that drag our precious oversights through puddles polluted with twittering darkness. Somebody once told Charles that dreams were a cloudy consciousness of the small subset of possible worlds in which one never sleeps. Charles didn’t suffer from insomnia – although there have obviously been occasions when he has been unable to sleep as a result of a cluttered mind – though he often wished he did. He believed that if he had more time at his disposal, the weight of all those additional hours would compel him to structure his time better and so increase his output. All those days and nights staring back at him from a sleepless future – his own face turned into that of a hideous clown, with whirlpool eyes, and an abnormally stretched smile (like 112

Gacy the entertainer), with a manner of animating itself that Charles felt his pleasing metaphor, describing it as ‘robotic epilepsy,’ was still insufficient to convey its full horror – would give him sufficient time to nurture his gift. On certain days Charles was able to fall asleep with considerable ease: he’d be reading or thinking of something to fill his page when, after resting his eyes for no more than a minute or so, he’d nod off. When he woke up it was always with a deep feeling of self-reproach, and he’d go at his work with a determination and fluidity worthy of PKD himself. Unfortunately, his guilt-driven flurry of fingers was all too quickly spent – maybe a paragraph would get completed, maybe even two at a push. If he came to with an erection in place then that would need seeing to first, and consequently the redemptive moment would be lost. James Joyce would spend an entire day working on a single sentence. How many novels would Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac who wrote mostly at night, have completed in the time Charles had spent sleeping? The thought of it made him sick. Lautréamont only wrote at night. John Hawkes, who worked all day at H.U.P., would also write at night, not to mention an early morning stint before leaving for work. Charles had a hatred for men like Hawkes. Who were they trying to kid? Diligence has dirt beneath its fingernails, whereas all the poet can do is wait.17 It would be fair to say that Charles got bored, although he would never admit to it. How could he? How could he admit to being bored when he was never getting enough done? His time was his own. He managed his time. If he admitted to boredom, what else would he have to admit to? If he were ever forced to admit it, he would always have his lack of money to fall back on. He wouldn’t want to, but he would. The alternative would give too much away. (Is the phenomenon of boredom symptomatic of a deep-seated and secret longing for death? When we are bored we wish time away; we want time (bored time, that is) to pass quicker. We long for the time to come when we are able to escape boredom. When we are bored we look forward to a time when we are able to distract ourselves from boredom. During these distracted times, boredom waits patiently in the wings for the time when next our distractions desert us, for whatever reason. Boredom is the burden of time. Boredom is the burden of our awareness of time coupled with a powerlessness to fill it in such a way as to mask the awareness. Life is the burden of having to fill time. Boredom is the awareness of that burden. Life is the burden of having to fill time in such a way as to mask the awareness of time, the awareness of its burdensome nature. The true horror of boredom is disguised, 17 “And you can’t write unless you want to write, and you can’t want to unless you feel like it. […] writing you didn’t feel like doing ain’t worth shit” WSB. 113

and so alleviated, by the ability to foresee future, unwatched, time. We want for time to pass at a speed that prevents us from having to confront it, from coming face to face with it; we want it to race by so fast that we are only aware of it through the marks it leaves behind on the road. We’d rather it didn’t slow down in an attempt to make friends: it doesn’t make friends easily, has no social graces, and is so frightfully dull – with bad breath to boot.) Some writers never seemed to feel the need to sleep. Faulkner, while working nights at a power plant, wrote As I Lay Dying in his spare time, later claiming it to be a “tour de force” written “in six weeks, without changing a word.” Jack Kerouac’s favourite time for writing was from midnight till dawn. He wrote On the Road in three weeks and The Subterraneans in three days and nights. (At least PKD had the decency to sleep through the day when he could manage it.) It was a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September when Charles came up with the idea of blindfolding himself while writing, so that he might circumvent any temptations of the eye. But the insides of his head had a noose for him. The blindfold gave him the ersatz night of sightless eyes and melded landscapes, but it was not his own – it was Max Beckmann’s. Within seconds he sensed those two men with bandaged heads and the peaked-capped rapist standing at the window ready to hang and torture him, their figures, as if cut out of wood, had hard black outlines and faces of flint menace. The shadows inside his head had been claimed without him noticing. He lifted the bandage and looked out from underneath. Nobody was with him in the room. A dog howled… Samuel Beckett continued to write until his death in 1989, but the process grew increasingly repellent to him until, finally, each word seemed to him nothing but “an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” Here was yet another way Charles could feel like a writer when he hadn’t written a word in weeks. When he was crippled and made impotent by his ideals he remembered the words of Donald Barthelme with fondness: “The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives.” The final part of his triptych on the self-serving comforts of literary inadequacy came from Don Delillo: “If I discard a sentence I like, it's almost as satisfying as keeping a sentence I like.” Charles collects false hope and excuses like other men collect butterflies and ornate teapots. Nothing coming…. It’s not working…. The whole thing’s bollocks and I’m tired…. That’s it; I’m tired…. A snooze will sort me out…. Will fire me up…. No excuses…. Get on with it!... Find a segue in and you’ll thank yourself…. Have another cigarette.… They concentrate the brain…. More cof114

fee…. Best not to force the issue…. Joyce sometimes took a day to complete a couple of sentences…. I’ve done six…. I’ve only been up an hour…. I need to treat this like a straightforward job…. My surroundings aren’t right…. I need some diversion, a change of scenery…. I should get an office somewhere and do 9-5 five days a week like Auster…. This is a job…. Money might come…. If it does that’s what I’ll do…. Calvino wrote every day, regardless of location…. People will see me going off to work…. Would I take my books there?... Maybe some of them…. Would depend on the security I suppose…. Anyway, push on with it now…. Don’t get it right get it written! Get after it with a club!... Where am I?... What’s still to do?.... Read back a little…. That’s great stuff…. I was inspired that day…. When was that?... This boy can write…. Some days it just doesn’t happen…. Tide-punching…. Maybe I’ll read for a while…. It’s all work, after all…. Waste nothing…. Filling time and filling pages…. Vonnegut was spot on: “writing is disagreeable toil”…. Don’t tell me about real work if you know what’s good for you…. Pleasure only in completion…. Kafka didn’t finish much…. Good idea choosing themes that defy conclusion (Pessoa had it too)…. Kafka worked all week in an office, writing into the night in his bedroom. He claimed to have needed the claustrophobic routine of his job in order to escape the all-consuming perils of literature. I am afforded no such safety net. What can I hope to achieve that is worth achieving? T.S. Eliot worked long hours at a bank for many years…. How many years is writing behind painting now, Mr Gysin? How far behind everything else is painting? Why can’t I write a Rothko, a Klee? Why would I want to? “If you could say it in words there’d be no need to paint.” (Edward Hopper). I’ve given my adult life to this, and for what? Not to produce “bellybutton lint.” * Proust published the first volume of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu entirely at his own expense in 1913, after Gallimard rejected it. Nathaniel Hawthorne self-published Fanshawe in 1828. By 1923 Borges felt ready to bring out his first collection of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires, which was financed by his father. George Meredith paid for his ‘Poems’ collection to be published in a volume. The publication of Andrew John Young’s first volume of poems was paid for by daddy. Lorca’s father shelled out for his son’s first two books… Charles took refuge in the brotherhood (and so it went on): The Great Gatsby was described as an “absurd story” by one reviewer, “negligible” by another…. 115

When Charles started out he’d have been content with ending up buried deep (even unfathomed) in Nemo’s Almanac, but he couldn’t live with such slight attention now. He needed exposure, reverence. His work demanded it, and his sanity depended on it. It seemed very much as if Charles needed something of a revelation, and he needed it soon. Needing it, and he knew he needed it, only made matters worse, only served to consecrate the need itself, for Charles, as we know, was not a man who could work under pressure. The skin on my arms has grown a thousand spindly legs. There are insects inside me, bugs stranded on their backs, their legs beating bubbles in my blood. They’ll be out soon & they’ll join the spiders that prowl up & down the backs of my hands. They are invincible & have no fear of fire. If I crush my cigarette into one of their backs there is always another to take its place. There’s no point trying to shake them off, for they have hooks in their feet. But I shake all the same. They don’t like me to write. They always have to interfere. If I sit down at my typewriter they only want to hear about themselves & their kind, about their dreams & fantasies. They hijack my fingers & my keys, dancing their crude & insectile perversions across page after page. They make my skin howl with the filthy fucking dead heart bestrewn lie of satisfaction & calm. How can I hope to stay dry when they so obviously thrive in arid conditions? But you can never manage to drown them all. Believe me I have tried. They always manage to rise to the surface when the sun comes out. Just listen to me will you, warbling like some wethouse vegetable. A Life on Hold. Charles thought about a book he had read many years ago. In it a man promises himself that he will commit suicide on his 50th birthday. Knowledge of this releases him from the gloomy malaise that has been his life up until that juncture. (It doesn’t work for everybody: Celan couldn’t wait and threw himself into the Seine with over half a year to go.) Charles had the idea of bypassing a nagging conscience by planning his death to follow his indulging in some enjoyable but ultimately self-reproachable deed. He could do whatever he liked and, as long as he was prepared to die afterwards, he needn’t be pestered and made to feel bad about his wrongdoings. He also figured that if, while preparing to kill himself, he found his niggling conscience to be incidental in the face of death, swamped by what he was about to do, then he could postpone it a day. He could, he imagined, go on like this for years, doing whatever he liked and never having to succumb to the scorn of future selves who, in their desire to live out their allotted day, kept their sanctimonious opinions to themselves. The only problem with this plan 116

was that until he had finished his book he wasn’t prepared even to countenance his own hypothetical death. “Open up your hearts to me and I’ll close off your valves and show you death. And you might have thanked me and held me in your arms had you not been so short of breath.” 117

A LESSON IN TRICKERY Hell is having a smidgen of identity and trying desperately to hold on to it. This must have been what Modigliani was trying to convey to us with these, his dying words: “I only have a fragment of my brain left.” Now, even that fragment would be enough to save him outside of this place. I had never asked myself whether, if I woke one morning and nobody recognised me, my wife jumping from the bed in horror at this stranger lying beside her, I would doubt myself or the world, and so when faced with it I was woefully unprepared. The questions mount fast: Has something changed about the world or has something changed about me? Do I have a strong enough sense of self to point a finger at the world when everybody I recognise and have memories of being acquainted with suddenly deny ever having laid eyes on me? Will I eventually be forced to ignore my memories and start again? Will the world succeed in destroying me, or has it already destroyed me? Let me fill you in. My name is Mr J.C. Blake (and no, I don’t know what the J and the C stand for). I am 48 years old and have been married to Mrs Blake for 16 years. I have two children, Claire (13) and Rebecca (8). I have not lived a particularly interesting life, but then who does? Nobody I know – which isn’t saying much apparently. My life was fine: it suited me; I had designed it to fit, and of all the things it wasn’t, it was at least mine. My life doesn’t seem to recognise me anymore; it no longer has a place for me; I’ve been written out of my own life and nobody left within it seems to have noticed. Am I really so insignificant to my life that it can breezily continue in my absence? It would seem so when my wife wakes me with a downpour of punches as she scrambles to her feet and flees backwards, her hands grappling behind her in search of the edge of the bedroom door, her eyes stuck to me in terror. One mad wife does not a permanent exclusion from one’s life make, but then my girls are in the doorway of their bedroom on the brink of bawling, face to face with the fucking bogeyman, a mad hatchet man bent on 118

their slaughter, and they couldn’t have faked that shit, those bubbles of snot popping from their nostrils, the way they held hands and looked up at their mother, desperately searching for some clue as to how things were going to turn out. I was the fucking enemy, and what’s more I was an unknown quantity; I was not an abusive father figure that could be remonstrated with, or thrown a sacrifice while the other two made a run for it; no, I was an intruder in their lives. I got no sense that their fear of me had any history whatsoever: it was abject, missing the comfort even of bad expectations. “Stop this!” I shouted as a last resort. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” she screamed at a pitch that made my teeth quail. “I mean it – this has gone too far. The children are getting scared.” “Please go. Just leave now. I won’t tell anyone if you just go now. Please just go. Please...” “What the…What the fuck are you talking about? What’s going on here? Have you lost your mind?” “What is it you want? Who are you? What dyu want?” “…” It was at this point that I first checked my reflection in the mirror. I ran to the en suite bathroom and saw the same old face, my face, the thing I was maybe least attached to in my life, still present. But its sameness made everything else even stranger, even harder to fathom than before. If I had been grossly disfigured in some way, had some horrific mask grafted onto my face then, relatively speaking, things would have made sense. My wife and daughters had fled the house the moment I’d left them on the landing. I’d heard them belting down the stairs as I made my way to the mirror. I sat on the bed thinking of all the questions I should have asked them, and things I should have told them, but there was no use in it; their reactions had been too emphatic to make a question and answer session at all plausible. I left the house, half in search of my newly estranged family, and half out of fear of what would happen if I remained there. The front door was open, as was the cast-iron gate, its two kissing doves clotted with rust. The street was quiet, which wasn’t a surprise given that it couldn’t have been much later than about 7:30 on a Sunday morning. I could hear sirens in the distance, but it took until they were only a couple of streets away for me to realise that, in all likelihood, they were for me: a man who had crept into a woman’s house, slipped into bed beside her and passed the night with her while her children slept, unaware of his presence, in the next room. What might such a man be capable of? I walked off up the road at a brisk pace, still not entirely convinced that the police had me as their quarry. At the corner of the street I 119

paused just long enough to see three squad cars screech to a halt outside my house. I didn’t run far, less than a mile. I slowed down so as not to draw too much attention to myself, more attention, that is, than walking about the streets in bare feet, a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a vest had already caused all on its own. I was heading for my parents’ house, but wasn’t sure what I’d find there. More familiar strangers? The more I thought about it the less I believed that this thing, this attempt at ownerless life, spread any further than the collective fugue of my wife and children. I would relay what had happened to my parents and then ask them to accompany me back to the house, where I would attempt to make my family aware of who I was, and get to the bottom of what had happened to them. As I neared my destination I was conscious of how slow and short my paces had become. They were no more vigorous than the catatonic shuffles of a mental patient, which is not something I’d recommend doing on a pavement with bare feet. I had more doubts than I had initially allowed myself. They had been invited in without my permission and, like the worst of guests, were to outstay their welcome, oblivious to their discombobulating effects. My mum will be up, will have been up for a couple of hours now, I thought. She had always gone to bed early, never any later than 9:00 P.M., and so saw nothing peculiar in her habit of rising by 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning. She was attached to her ‘quiet times’ as she called them, her morning peace and quiet that was really nothing of the sort, for after dreamily drinking her cup of Earl Grey and preparing and eating her porridge, made with water and salt – the only way, according to her and her mother before her, that porridge should be eaten – she would turn the washing machine on, and then wash the previous nights dishes, her eyes glued to the ten-inch kitchen portable replaying the news over and over again. This was peace for her, because she got to get on with things without interruptions; she got things done and this pleased her. She liked that she was up while the rest of the street slept. When finally confronted with their front door I wasted no time in cracking the knocker. I remember it being louder than I’d expected and taking me by surprise. The hallway light was on and I could see my mother’s silhouette, somewhat taken aback, arranging itself for an unexpected visitor. If all had been right I would have crouched down, opened the letterbox and told her it was only me, so preventing her going to too much effort correcting her appearance when it wasn’t necessary. But I didn’t. Instead I just watched as she removed her rubber gloves, toyed with her hair in the mirror, and tidied the 120

hang of her clothes as she made her way towards the door and the anonymous outline beyond it. I heard the chain go on before the door opened: she had not made me out through the obscured glass, but then she wouldn’t have been expecting me to call on her at that hour. When I saw her face peek around the edge of the door I smiled and to my great relief she smiled straight back. “Can I help you?” she said, still grinning good-naturedly without making any effort to unhook the security chain. I experienced emotions that human kind are not made to experience; this was the point in bad dreams when your body woke you up, somehow knowing how far to take you without scarring your waking hours indelibly. I wished that my mother had been a joker, a trickster of the first-order, a card who never missed an opportunity to spawn a sucker, but, as no one wishes for what they already have, she was not the least inclined to play practical jokes. And my Dad, fast asleep in his bed, dreaming of pre-baiting the chalk pit with fluorescent maggots, could not be called upon to provide a second opinion on whether or not this was their son standing on the doorstep in his blistered bare feet first thing on a Sunday morning. Her agreeable old face, jammed between door and door frame, waited patiently for an answer, while her eyes glanced at my feet and then a little worriedly back at my face, whose features had rung no bells for her, not even the slightest peal. I was so full of questions, and yet all of them perished before reaching my lips. My silence was scaring her and I wanted to tell her who I was and for some spell to be broken. “Sorry, I must have the wrong house.” I turned round and started to walk away. “Who was it you were looking for, dear?” Those words were an exercise in cruelty too far. I kept on walking. I knew her head would remain where it was, would creep farther round the door edge as she began to lose sight of me. I was the walking dead, although not quite dead – but isn’t that the point? – like the seagull with its body flat to the tarmac, bearing the tyre tracks of a succession of cars, head still moving, beak still omitting flat-lung screeches as it tries to peel itself up from the grit, the seagull that nobody can muster the pity to swerve to kill. I retraced my steps and saw my mum’s front door close seconds after it had come back into view. She must have remained at the door long after I’d gone, and I kidded myself at the time that she had been sensitive to some deep familial connection between the two of us, despite not having a clue who I was. (But it wasn’t long before the fact of her inherent nosiness came to disillusion me.) Through the thick, scalloped slump glass I could make her out as she made her way back down the hallway to the kitchen. I rapped a 121

single knuckle on the door three times and called out that it was only me again, and that I had a favour to ask of her. She opened the door. The chain stayed on. “Are you lost?” “Not exactly… I have a question or two if you don’t mind; it won’t take a minute – it’s just that…well…I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before, and I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure out where and when, and I thought I may as well just come back and ask you.” “I can’t think, dear: I don’t get out much these days.” “Maybe it’s your son I know, or daughter even, something is familiar.” But before I’d finished the sentence, watching her head with its sad smile shake emphatically from side to side, I knew I’d made a mistake going back there. “George and I never had any kids. I would have liked to, mind, but George was never keen and so we decided against it. We’ve had a good life, all the same, and we’ve never wanted for much.” It’s one thing to wish you’d never been born, but to be informed of the fact by your mother was something else. What happened next is, thankfully, rather unclear to me now, and the only way I can come close to describing it is to say that I fell prey to an absurdly prolonged state of indecision, and the more I made efforts to master my floundering will the more fractured those efforts at mastery became. I kept hearing my mum saying, “Are you alright, dear?” over and over, but when I attempted to reply I was unable to utter a sound. I don’t know if she was aware of my internal struggle, or merely thought I had gone oddly quiet for a man who had turned up on her doorstep for a second time with the express intention of asking questions of her. Eventually I managed to mumble that I was sorry, and walked off, confused and lachrymose, back in the direction of my house. Before long I found myself waiting for my wife and children to leave the house so that I could go in and get my wallet and some clothes. (That was the plan, but I couldn’t really have said what would happen when I saw her, the woman who had given birth to my two children, who I had known for in excess of twenty years and had been married to for sixteen, the woman I still loved in spite of the damage that years of cohabitation had wreaked upon us, and my girls…) I couldn’t see any sign of movement in the house, and so wasn’t even sure that there was anyone in there to leave, but I couldn’t be sure, so I waited. “Excuse me, sir. Can we help you?” Two police officers were standing behind me; I hadn’t heard them approach, and so was taken completely by surprise. I was crouched down behind a wall. They stood over me, tight grins 122

cut deep into their idiotic faces, sardonically awaiting the litany of transparent lies that they predicted would issue forth from my mouth. Almost to order, I began with the first plausible excuse that came to mind as to why I might be skulking behind a wall in my bed clothes. “I’m looking for my watch. I lost it last night. I only realised when I woke up this morning and went to put it on.“ “Any luck so far, sir?” “No, not yet.” “Do you live around here, sir?” “Yes.” “Do you mind if we accompany you back to your house, once you’ve finished looking for your lost watch?” “Why?” “We’ve been having reports of some rather strange goings-on in this area, and would like to confirm your story. I’m sure you can appreciate that we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t follow up on what you’ve just told us.” They both looked at me in earnest, almost daring me not to succumb to their pre-recorded procedural pedagogy. I could see two other men – in plain clothes – get out of a silver car over the road from my house and start walking towards where we were standing. A police car pulled up along side us with three more men in it, and I gave up thinking of which house I was going to lead them to. I made the decision not to say anything until I could come up with an identity for myself that wasn’t going to land me in a secure unit. They kept asking me questions until they gave up and started telling me things instead, like what a man fitting exactly my description was doing in the early hours of that morning, and the severity of the crime they suspected him of, and so the details went on, and I just continued to keep my words inside my head, out of harm’s way. I waited for night to come, to be presented with a cell and to be relieved of my struggle for silence. My wife was called in and, after seeing me through a two-way mirror, apparently testified that I was indeed the man she’d found in her bed that morning, a man on whom, before waking up beside him earlier that day, she had never laid eyes. They tried to elicit a response from me by explaining how her children no longer felt safe in their own home and that the youngest of the two – he was talking about Rebecca, she has a name – had been unable to control her emotions or her bladder ever since the incident. They told me that they didn’t take kindly to men who scared the piss out of little girls, and I believed them – I mean, why would they? But I didn’t let on. I gave them nothing. 123

POCKET SAUSAGES “Ahhh I need this.” But just as Triman brought the glass to his lips – the vodka having slid around the ice cubes towards his mouth, so close to his lips that he could almost feel the burn through the combined powers of memory and expectation – it disappeared and he was somewhere else. “What…? Where the…? What?” Lakok, seeing him with his hand still up at his mouth cupped around an invisible glass, as if using it as a loud haler, had a good idea what. “I’m guessing five minutes came at the wrong time.” “But how come my drink disappears when this stopwatch doesn’t? And what about your notebook, and all the other things that I keep in my trouser and jacket pockets for that matter?” “Remember what Dennett says about naked Homo sapiens and Ursus arctus clad in clown suits and perched on unicycles? Yes? Well the same applies here I suppose. I take it that up until now you’ve had the stopwatch in your pocket at the witching hour. I’ve had the notebook in my jacket pocket for every glitch, and that’s why I still have it. If you’d had the glass in your pocket you could be drinking its contents now.” “Makes sense I suppose.” “What’s that stain on your leg? Are you bleeding?” “What stai…oh yeah…not sure…” He looked down at his trouser leg as if it didn’t belong to him. The stain was in the shape of a textbook splatter. In other words, kind of indiscriminate and so like any other stain-shaped stain, while being unlike stains that tend to look like, or represent other easily recognisable things. The only difference being that this stain was still dilating. Triman touched the darkened patch of cloth and brought the damp fingers up to his face: “Shit! It’s blood. But there’s no pain there… I mean, how could I have cut it?” He undid his zip and pulled his trousers down to his knees. He had blood on his thigh, but when he touched it and wiped the blood away there was no injury. It was then that he noticed how saturated his 124

pocket was. He did his trousers back up and started emptying the offending pocket before everything inside got coated in the stuff. Out came some coinage, a packet of mints, office keys to an office he was unlikely to see again, and a penis (or at least a piece of a penis) some 3 or 4 inches long, still warm and still pumping blood out of its severed end. 125

PROCURING AN AMNESIAC Where to find an amnesiac? Despite their plenitude in the provinces of fiction, the genuine amnesiac is a rare breed. Maybe a desperate out-of-work actress would suffice. No. Pretence wouldn’t cut it. Any mimesis must be blind. I could find a woman with the right look and then kidnap her, and conduct a series of experiments, administering controlled blows to the head until memory loss ensued. But the problem is they recover too quickly: in many cases they recover nearly all of their lost memories. I would have to pummel her head on a regular basis, in which case she would unlearn what I had gone to the trouble of instilling into her. The whole thing would be a fucking disaster. Scleromyxedema can result in a coma, and comas can give rise to amnesia. But Scleromyxedema is an extremely rare condition, and I don’t have time to play a protracted waiting game. Next… One in ten of those over the age of 65, and approximately half of all people over 85 will suffer from Alzheimer’s, which involves memory loss, but unfortunately it primarily affects their ability to make new memories. They can still bore any fucker to the brink of suicide with their tales of childhood woe and want. Anyway, playing down the role of the body in personal identity is one thing, but you can take it too far. Psychological causes: Psychogenic Amnesia (resulting from acute emotional trauma – post traumatic stress amnesia) is usually a transitory condition. Amnesia can be a symptom of Schizophrenia. No, I can’t work with schizophrenics: I don’t fancy waking up in the middle of the night and finding my wife hacking my nuts off with a kitchen knife because Satan, who happens to be disguised as a Jelly Baby, is demanding that she let him out. No, that’s not going to happen. Physical causes: aging: decaying neurons giving rise to senile dementia (Alzheimer's), stroke damage, protracted alcoholism damaging the mammillory bodies (Korsakoff's syndrome – primarily anterograde amnesia), enceph126

alitic brain damage, seizures, epilepsy, head trauma, inflammation of the brain, carbon monoxide poisoning, vitamin B-12 deficiency, mind-numbing routine, Huntingdon Disease... It is quite common for an amnesiac’s emotional memory to remain intact. They will have emotional responses to old friends and enemies, although they will not remember who they are or why they have the emotional responses they do. A medieval German king rots away in a cafard-inducing Canadian box room…. There are basically two types of amnesia: 1. Anterograde amnesia (usually involving damage to hippocampus, fornix, and mammillary bodies), the sufferer of which cannot form new memories after the accident/trauma: they exist in a claustrophobic fog of endless present. They cannot even establish that they have amnesia – they forget. Life for them is unceasing befuddlement with no hope of enlightenment. 2. Retrograde amnesia is better for my needs, the sufferer being unable to remember events before the accident/trauma. Transient Global Amnesia: a combination of both Anterograde and Retrograde amnesia – short-lived (as the name suggests) with no lasting damage. No good. Temporally graded retrograde amnesia (damage to medial temporal lobe): also no good. Extended ungraded retrograde amnesia (damage to the structure of the neocortex of the lateral and anterior temporal lobe) will do quite nicely thank you. And no, Resemblance Nominalism is not what I am advocating, before you ask. The best place to find an amnesiac was, I guessed, the hospital. I didn’t much care for hospitals: smooth surfaces and bright lights, old bodies on trolleys with the faces of ancient children, accidents covered in sawdust, grey mince and carrots, officious nurses with too much or not enough empathy, the elderly greedy for more time, raffles, bedsores, flowers, grapes, the smell of ulcer clinics, the hollow bravado of the cheerfully dying… But I had to suffer it. I became a volunteer, assisting at clinics throughout the hospital. 127

I gave a false name and address on the volunteer forms, and was careful never to talk about anything that might reveal my true identity. I created a whole new persona for myself. I told people that I had suffered a nervous breakdown as the result of stress. I made out that I had worked in TransPAV marketing, and that the long hours and the demanding nature of that environment had taken its toll on my mental health. By bringing up a past mental crisis I was able to allay any unwanted probing into my life by just going quiet. Sudden inertia on my part was enough to stop them in their tracks. Nobody wanted to be responsible for sending me back through the booby hatch. On alternate days I got a lift to work from an Italian hospital porter. He was a horny hothead, but likeable enough. A schoolgirl walked alongside the car one morning as we sat in a traffic jam. “I bet she got a tight pussy,” he said, staring over his shoulder straight into her eyes. “I wouldn’t be so sure; she probably has a couple of kids at home.” The car came to a standstill and she walked past. “Look at that peachy fooking arse! Sweet no?” I looked and expressed my concurrence: “Too good for sitting on.” A few minutes later and a little way up the street she walked across the crossing in front of us: “I like to run the leetle bitch over and then lick her out.” “Romantic.” He kept his eyes trained on her behind as it wiggled away down the street. “Fooking leetle coont, leetle bitch. I see her now, bent double over my sofa back home. I fuck her arse for her.” “Good of you.” “Oh she like Giuseppe inside her, don’t you worry. After I eat her she let me do anything, anyfookingthing. Mudder fucker, they all mudder fuckers.” The inane babble of two radio disc jockeys took up the pause, and I watched Giuseppe as he defiled that pretty young girl over and over again in his head. After assisting at eye, cardiac, pain, ulcer, and blood clinics, I finally got posted to a neurology clinic, which was held in an area adjacent to the psychiatric ward. The ward turned out be full of dribblers, mumblers, old women berating long-dead husbands for being late home from the pub (their dinners ruined), those forever grappling with the ‘evil’ nurses keeping them prisoner, catatonic starers, victims of all kinds of imaginary persecution, twitchers, 128

smilers, weepers, and old men who couldn’t keep their shaky, witch-like hands away from their peckers, but nothing for me. What had I expected? A line up of memory-void Elizabeth look-alikes, maybe. The patients who turned up for the clinic were not suitable either. Looking through their medical notes with the nurses, I found nothing of interest. After a month or so I got posted to the fracture clinic, which was right next to A&E. We got the usual outpatients, their appointment letters stained with coffee circles and jam, ill-prepared to sit and wait for any length of time, the odd emergency admission that got wheeled straight in (much to the annoyance of the not so desperately ill – who for a couple of seconds wished they were), and patients off the ward with their medical notes under their arm and a look of defeat in their eyes. She was one such ward admission. She came accompanied by a male nurse for an X-ray and post X-ray consultation. Sue, a rather overweight auxiliary nurse with a serious body odour problem, flicked through her notes before taking them through to the reg. They were looking for any damage to her skull that might help explain her recently diagnosed amnesia. My stomach jolted, my head emptied, and I grappled with a newly enraged bowel. This was it. She’d looked pretty good too. I scanned the waiting room to get another glimpse. She was more petite than Elizabeth, less buxom, but not so different in other areas that I couldn’t come to see her as my dead wife. She will more than do, I thought. I just had to work out how to get her out of there and back home. Thankfully I had driven my own car to the hospital that day, Giuseppe having been signed off with incapacitating headaches and a bad case of the jitters, which was no real wonder in light of the constant barrage of espresso, cigarettes, cocaine and ultra-violent sexual daydreams he subjected himself to. The name written across the front of her thin file was Justine —. According to Sue, the name may not be her own, merely one she recognised from somewhere, and so the doctors and nurses were simply using it as a convenient tag. Sue had taken her file from her and asked her to take a seat. Luckily, she had not so much as glanced in my direction. I had decisions to make. Should I make my move immediately? Or wait until after she had been for her X-ray? After seeing the consultant? Or when she was back on the ward? I decided to take the first decent opportunity I got; I’d waited long enough. “Can you tell me when my son is likely to be seen?” 129

“What?” My mind was understandably elsewhere, and unfortunately so was Sue. “We have been waiting now for over an hour, people who came in after us have come and gone.” A woman in an expensive looking suit glared down at me in my seat as she clutched her son firmly by his good wrist. “Mrs Turner is it?” I said as I pretended to look down the list. “That’s right.” “I bet your diaries would be a blast.” “Pardon me.” “They no doubt had earlier appointments… We are running a bit behind” I pointed to the white board on the wall that said, ‘THIS CLINIC IS CURRENTLY RUNNING APPROX 1 hr BEHIND SCHEDULE – We apologise for any inconvenience caused.’ “I’m not blind... Hello! Are you listening to me?” “Yes, sorry, you’re not blind, apparently. Is that right?” “No, but I am beginning to get a little pissed off,” she said flashing a glance at her son. “I see.” “I really don’t appreciate your attitude; is there somebody else I could speak with?” “Yes.” There were too many prying eyes in and around the waiting area to attempt anything. “Well?” The amnesiac was up on her feet and heading towards the toilets. As she walked off I made to get up and follow her. “Hello. I’m still waiting.” “Daniel Turner!” bellowed one of the nurses from examination room 3. The boy in front of me yanked at his mother’s sleeve and told her to come on, that his name was being called. “About time,” she said, pulling her son back in line with her as she walked off. I was through the main door to the toilet area before realizing that I had no implement with which to knock her unconscious. I didn’t even know how many blows I could expect to administer in order to knock her out. But I did know my fists would not be enough if I was going to do it quickly and cleanly. I dashed into the Gents. It was empty. I saw the looped-hand-towel contraption was hanging from the wall, and it took no real effort to wrench from its loose fittings. It was a fair weight and wielded in the right way would, I surmised, do the trick: the trick in question being to knock someone out with a single blow and keep them unconscious for at least half an hour, with130

out that blow being so hard that they failed to ever come round. I didn’t know what the exact weight for this would be but, somewhat instinctively, considered the weight of the dispenser to be about right. I listened at the door of the Ladies and eased it open. A woman was walking towards me. It wasn’t the amnesiac. I took my hands from the door, turned my back, held the dispenser directly in front of me so as to shield it from the woman’s view and walked back in the direction of the Gents. She walked out of the Ladies and straight out of the main door, and I turned round immediately and resumed my former position. I crept in and saw that one cubicle was taken, and that the room was otherwise empty. I walked past a row of cracked sinks and mirrors, and occupied the cubicle next to hers. I placed the dispenser on the floor and squatted down to look under the divider. Her feet were pointing towards the cubicle door, indicating that she was still sat on the toilet. Peering down between my thighs, I saw a streak of hardened excrement running down the back of the fissured pan. I heard her rip some paper and wipe herself. I picked up my weapon. She yanked the bolt back and her cubicle door came flying back and obscured my view, so I gave her door a prod with my finger to prematurely reverse its momentum. I watched as she washed her hands in the sink. She looked into one of the mirrors (square, dead, cyclopic eyes shot with cataracts) puckering and unpuckering her lips, twisting her mouth open to inspect the taut skin of her upper lip. She shook her hands above the sink and walked in the direction of the wall-mounted hand dryer. I raced to her, almost throwing the dispenser at her head while still attached to it. She was on the turn when it smashed into the side of her head. She cracked her left temple on the wall and dropped to the floor, hitting her head again. I steadied myself and prepared for another blow. It wasn’t needed. The hardest part was getting her upright. I managed to let her skull bounce off the floor twice more before getting her on her feet again. I supported her under her armpit with my right arm, as if she were some unfortunate lush, and dragged her to the nearest cubicle where I dumped her down on the toilet, resting her lazy head carefully on the wall behind her. Pulling the cubicle door to, I slid her foot up against it to dissuade anyone who might come in while I was away in search of a wheelchair. There was a queue forming at my desk as I exited the toilets. I headed towards A&E in the hope of finding an unattended wheelchair, of which there was ordinarily no shortage. The waiting area was full of patched eyes, sloppily bandaged legs and arms, the unpleasant marriage of antiseptic and old sweat. I found what I wanted parked between the two sets of doors com131

prising the A&E’s main entrance. I walked over and took it with authority, as if I had left it there, as if it had my name emblazoned on each side. Nobody confronted me as I made my way back to the Ladies. It all went pretty smoothly from there: I returned to find her where I’d left her, put her in the wheelchair, pushed her to my car and drove home without incident. 132

WETHOUSE WARBLINGS As the first of the day slides down they count out change for the next. The discounted price has allowed them to come in off the streets, or out from their rooms, to drink with others that also need to drink. There were a few females among these enclaves of perpetual dipsomania, and most of them tended to be half-skeletal chain smokers in their mid-tolate thirties with chewed up fingernails, concave chests, long lank hair, and complexions resembling the insides of an old brazil nut: the look of chicken skin stretched tight over blackened bone. Pale denim drainpipes, white tennis shoes and baggy black leather jackets seemed de rigueur. Their drinks of choice were pints of superbrew and gin chasers. There was a couple that never failed to turn up. She was different from the other women. She had yet to slip, but at the rate she drank it would not take long. The man who always sat with her had long black hair scraped back into a ponytail, a full black beard and beady little eyes behind glasses with thick lenses. They sat, mute, drinking their drinks and thinking about the next one. There was something overused about them, about their sallow faces with eyes that never met. They’d ran out of things to say to each other, and it was clear that the absence was felt. The entire sky is that white that exists at some midpoint on a colour chart ranging from white to grey, the colour of expensive writing paper and cheap toilet paper. The sky is empty, as if God forgot to paint it in: whitewash muddied with decomposed flies. The trees loom like dark, gangling monsters against the pallid backdrop of a dirty white sky. The sky lacks depth, its opacity binding you to begrimed pavements and faecal gutters, restricting your vision to the end of the street. On days like these the day never comes; one has the choice between the fuliginous and the subfusc. The spindly 133

branches of bare trees appear etched into the dead heavens like crow’s feet on an old drag queen…. I don’t much care for whisky. I drink it, but I can’t say I like it. My body often rejects it – it makes me feel dizzy and even physically sick. Other types of alcohol do not as a rule have this effect on me, unless I imbibe them in huge quantities. I drink whisky because it gets me pissed quicker than any other drink and money is in short supply and I like to be pissed, although not always, unfortunately, on whisky, as it can make me sick, but never as sick as the alternative. I care for cigarettes a lot. I smoke them and enjoy smoking them. Cigarettes are the writer’s companion: words come out and smoke goes in by way of recompense. (James Kelman saw no link between smoking and writing aside from both of them being “enjoyable solitary pursuits.” Charles sided with Amis Jr. on this one, who once said that smoking prevented him from writing bad sentences. In Charles’s case it often prevented him from writing any sentences at all, as he sucked his way through packet after packet, creating a smoke screen between himself and the empty page. Amis Jr. smoked roll-ups (Golden Virginia, I think), so too did Virginia Woolf. Charles thought that he too might take a break from tailor-mades, and that the rolling process would probably concentrate his mind.) Hangover symptoms: The disorientating – read life-threatening precursor to insanity and endless turmoil – jolts between absorption in something, bordering on zombification – be it TV, the dirt beneath your fingernails or watching toast burn – and a staggeringly chilling fear of such absorption. This lack of control is born of a cruel cocktail of tension and tiredness, where one oscillates between the external and the internal view of oneself, being ripped from the quiet homeliness of subjectivity and rudely deposited some place where you are available to yourself only sub specie aeternitatis. This mirrors a criticism often levelled at the Psychological Reductionist, for it is claimed that looking as he does from the outside in, he ignores what it’s like for persons from the inside. It is said that philosophers who have tended to take a third-person approach to the personal identity debate have, in so doing, ignored the essentially first-personal character of persons. The opposition call attention to what they maintain is a basic and obvious truism: that an experience being mine or not mine and that experience’s particular content are two completely separate issues. After all, they ask, isn’t it possible that any one of our experiences could have been different in content? And if so, couldn’t we just as easily say the same for every one of our experiences? However, following this rationale, I should be able to imagine never having existed, while also imagining that somebody was born of the same parents 134

at the exact same time as I actually was, and grew up to have the exact same properties, doing and thinking everything that I have in fact done and thought. How could such a so-called act of imagination be differentiated from my simply recalling my own history? If the answer forthcoming is that the difference is simply that you are imagining this person isn’t you, then surely a question arises as to what could possibly constitute such a difference. Whatever the opposition come up with will be a creation born of desperation and the worst excesses of imagination, a creation that would necessarily require non-rational persuasion of almost mesmerizing power in order to attract converts. This knotty duality of experiencing oneself also occurs when one is deciding how to approach the writing of fiction: compare, if you will, the detachment often experienced while reading experimental and/or metafictional/postmodern novels and the intimate involvement with character and action encountered in more traditional storytelling. This division is a little simplistic, I know, but it isn’t mine it’s Charles’s,18 and it does, nevertheless, have some grounding in truth. How to write fiction? Should one’s characters be as real as one can make them when people are less real everyday? Should one opt for a strong narrative backbone or something more sequentially wayward? Should one court the majority of readers or seek to exclude them? What of the authenticity that was once so admired? Where is it now? I don’t see it around me. I never did. What is authenticity now? Certainly not what they think it is. (As Huxley said, “Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”) In their ignorance they mistake shadows for that which casts them, and as a consequence seek only the honest replication of those shadows. Even if such authenticity were achievable, it is not desirable: literature reduced to a tool for historians. Fuck that! 18 Neat trick that – “The poetry in this book is shit!” Blame Charles. “The characters are mere sketches.” Don’t blame me, blame Charles… No, wait, that won’t work. Fuck, this stuff is good. 135

A Secret Discussion: OPERATION FORGETFUL SILENCE, Present: Professor P., Jack Harrison (Director: Futurelife) and, via video link, Lance Noggin (creator and owner of Headway Enterprises). A man in a grey Hugo Boss suit, with a huge glistening bald head and a glorious walrus moustache, appeared on the two-metre-square screen on the wall. It was Lance Noggin, the boss. He sat down at a desk, put his elbows on the desktop, interlocked his fingers and, looking straight out at P. and Jack sat some 500 miles away, said, “So fill me in!” Lance had made a fortune freezing Californian heads. He had frozen people from all over the world, all colours and creeds, all sexes, the young as well as the old. He’d also frozen entire bodies, but at the end of the day it was Californian heads, white geekoid-techitastic Californian heads, all piled up like so much snow waiting to be men again, that had made him rich. He had frozen the scalps of a whole generation of Silicon Valley’s finest minds and, at $20,000 a conk, had made a killing out of death. Other companies started getting snobby about neurosuspension, and began focusing all their energies on the cryonic suspension of whole bodies, but not Lance. He had realised, more than most, the complicated nuances of the psychology that propels someone to pay good money for the chance to come back to life in a few hundred years. He charged $55,000 for full body suspension, which was extremely competitive at the time, although the dream he sold, his marketing strategy, was primarily geared to popsiclizing pates. “Why pay for your entire body to be frozen when the technology necessary to bring you back to life presupposes the ability to create new, and far superior, bodies?” was the question his ad campaign asked the living across the land, and the techies, steeped in the nanotech wonders awaiting us in the future, loved its logic. He didn’t give a flagging fuck whether any of these geeky cryptobionts ever resumed life to be cured of their fatal illnesses; what he did care about was making enough money for the future. 136

He was one of the first to vitrify rather than freeze, thus eliminating ice spoilage. Actually he wasn’t, he merely claimed to be vitrifying rather than freezing, when in reality he was doing neither, for by this time he had long since stopped honouring his contract with the heads. Excluding the few he housed in cryostats for display purposes, he tended to dump them in mass graves, or else deposit them in vats of acid. Maintaining them at -320 degrees Fahrenheit cost money, more money than he was prepared to relinquish. Lance was in no doubt that the structures of the brain remained intact while vitrified, its lobes, its synapses, its neurons, its dendrites all intact and awaiting a spark of life to reanimate them, it was just that on this small scale he didn’t much care: ‘Fuck these Cheeto-guzzling misfits with money enough to buy their way out of heaven. Let them die with a dream in their hearts and let’s keep them dead and dreaming!’ was his (confidential) motto of choice. Some say that such a motto was mere speculation, a vicious rumour emanating from jealous rivals in the ever-expanding corporate world of afterlife. Nobody is sure. P. started to speak and then stopped in his tracks and turned to Jack. Jack, ever amiable with his fellow workers, especially when the worker in question was a cerebral phenomenon of this man’s class, indicated for P. to proceed, sat back in his chair and stretched his long muscular legs out as far as they would reach “Well it’s like this: the trials are coming on as expected, aside from a minor mishap with two of my more freethinking colleagues, who appear to have loosened their shackles a little too far and come unstuck as a result. They are as yet unable to report their findings but, if I was to hazard a guess, I’d say that randomness has them by the balls as we speak and nothing will be forthcoming for some time. However, we are not here to discuss glitches from within but offence from without, offence in the shape of Woolly.” “Is he really such a threat?” said Lance as he carefully snipped the end off his Cuban cigar and laid it down in the ashtray in front of him. “I thought all information pointed to his efforts having run aground. What has changed to make us want to take him and his inexorable methods seriously?” He picked up his cigar and rolled its freshly cut end between his lips. “Well, I fear this was a classic example of flagrant wishful thinking on our part. Nobody is quite sure what he has up his sleeve, so it would be foolhardy to dismiss him and his current work without being privy to its content. Plus, we must remember that a good deal of the negativity surrounding him will have been fuelled, to a large degree, by our own propaganda machine. And we must keep in mind that the man is no fool and, given that all he need do to create severe difficulties for us is merely sow seeds of discontent with our proposals among the wary and unconvinced, he is more than capable of caus137

ing us no end of additional PR worries. I am convinced that if left to his own devices he could prove to be as hard on our backs as he is on the eyes.” “And you, Jack, what do you make of this matter?” Jack read from the first of his prompter cards situated beneath the screen: “Well I must admit that I too had dismissed him as a harmless eccentric, and have been concentrating all my efforts on other matters, but now, after listening to P., I’m not so sure. But if there is any danger of bad press regarding this, then something has to be done about it.” “And what do you suggest?” Lance looks down longingly at the soggy end of his cigar, before the hours of subliminal restructuring at the hands of his personal hypnotherapist come into play, at which point he is flooded with images of sausage fat running through his fingers, into his cuff, and up his arms as he tries to spark up a prime porker that is exuding enough grease to coat an entire generation of channel swimmers. “I suggest we convince him with a practical demonstration. I’ll pass over to P. at this point and he can shed more light on the methods by which we can bring him around to our way of thinking.” “Thanks. Well, the new improved Mnemonic Transmogrifier Series # 3, or Moggy as the boys have affectionately named her, is now up and running and awaiting a new set of trials, so it might be an idea if we invite our Dr. Woolly down here to put his case forward to our team, and see if we can’t persuade him to put his balls in his mouth and let us show him just what Moggy is capable of.” “And I take it that once he’s strapped into the machine we can, as Jack so eloquently put it, convince him that his logic doesn’t matter a jot.” “That’s about the size of it.” “And if he doesn’t accept the invitation, or accepts, but refuses to play guinea pig, which from what I know of him he is wont to do, what then?” “I don’t think he’d pass up a chance to gloat and show us the error of our ways, so all we need do is bring him on board in an advisory capacity, by manufacturing some unforeseen hitches, and then have him come and tell us poor deluded fools why they occurred. And as for hooking him up to Moggy, well, if need be, this can be achieved without his being aware of it, via a short-range wireless transfer device. If all else fails, there are, I’m sure, cruder methods that could be deployed.” “Indeed, but crudity is never pleasant for people like us. Let’s go with your plan and see where it takes us… How is Project Makropulos coming along?” Project Makropulos was, as the name suggests, concerned with (authentically) freeing immortals from the insidious dance of existential angst. After putting so much effort into never dying, Lance had no intention of ending 138

up regretting his own success. The task of those involved with the Makropolus Project (which due to its highly confidential nature was only knowingly carried out by P.) was to come up with a way in which one can be fully aware of one’s existential predicament, while remaining completely impervious to the negativity, the burden of self-knowledge that comes with it and warms one to the worms and their greedy promise of a quiet mind. If anyone could devise some therapeutic rhetoric to ease the nausea of perpetual embodiment it was P., it was what he had been made for. He was working on the creation of a complex thought, a reason to keep going that could be implanted into immortals to counteract, to remedy as opposed to blocking out, what was, after all, an inevitable part of conscious life i.e., the objective awareness of one’s own being and its inescapable triviality, its repetitiveness, its soulless mechanics, the overstretching of one’s will to life, the cringing of meaning in the face of eternity… The task is a maddeningly difficult one, almost Woollyesque in its impenetrability. P. had been studying religious tracts, both old and new, for some considerable time, looking for clues. He came to the conclusion early on in his studies that nobody dreaded an eternal life where God’s open arms were waiting to cosset them:19 God, in virtue of his very existence, appears to defuse all concerns regarding the evaporation of meaning. Heaven, the paradise, does not accomodate anguish or vacuity of purpose. Eternal life itself solves no problems. But the reason why God and his home of heaven allay our existential woes is in virtue of their sketchiness; fill in the blanks and Heaven is no more and the possibilities of paradise begin to offend our sensibilities, as when the beauty of a young child’s face is forever marred, licked with the demonic, by the suspicion of hidden malice. The promise of a heavenly paradise is no more than the trick Richard Cottingham used to play with his plastic toy pistol. And yet from that missing heaven outspread I am supposed to read. This proved a constant source of annoyance for P., for he did not deal in the merely suggestive qualities of imposed abstraction, and nor did he desire to, but to delineate at any length was in this case necessarily to destroy, like joining up the dots on a classic piece of Pointillism. He had to nurture his poetic side, and momentarily relinquish the clarity of formula and argument in favour of the impressionistic datum of emotional responses. He felt out of his depth. 19 Those religious faiths that believe in an eternal cycle of reincarnation have account- ed for this in their own, godless way, by sidestepping a person’s awareness of their own immortality, and in doing so taken away any real sense of it being a continuation of us as persons into the bargain. 139

“I have some way to go before I’d be willing to divulge my findings. Progress is steady though; I can say that much.” “Okay. I’ll leave it in your competent hands. I have complete faith in you.” Lance got up from the table, carefully lifted his cigar from the sparkling ashtray and walked off screen. The screen went blank and Jack got up to leave. “What’s with Lance and those cigars?” Said Jack. “How do you mean? What, the fact he never smokes them?” Jack nods. “He’s trying to give them up. He hardly ever succumbs to the temptation of actually lighting them anymore, not since his sessions with a hypnotherapist, an acupuncturist, and a few other practitioners of less well-established methods.” “Thought as much, but then I couldn’t work out why he’d want to give them up.” “People are always giving things up; it’s not exactly strange. People give things up for all sorts of reasons.” “Surely the only reason he’d want to give up cigars is for the sake of his health. It’s not as if he can’t afford them. He’s going to live forever, so what’s the point? I don’t get it.” “I see where you’re coming from, but the preservation of his health is not the only reason he might choose to abstain from indulging in his cigar.” “What else is there?” “He enjoys abstinence; he’s an abstainer. As you so rightly point out, he has no need to lay off the smokes, but he has developed a taste for denying himself things he wants.” “He’s like some twisted variation of that crazy fucking air-traffic controller in that old movie, what was it called?... Airplane.” “What a day not to be giving up cigars.” They both laugh and make for the door. Jack holds the door open for P. to pass through, and they exchange smiles. By the time the door closes behind them the smiles have gone and no echo of amusement remains. 140

WAXWORK CARCASS What emerges from me, when I write, and constructs itself infinitely thereafter, is a human organisation of an unspecified species – grimy black, as filthyblack as possible, thus already bright, indeed gilded by its bright blackness, racked above all by the cruelty of man against man. – Pierre Guyotat, ‘Le Yeux de Dieu’ Some weeks they do a special show comprising anywhere from 5 to 10 victims. These victims are affectionately known as Melts, Bangladeshi (Indian, Egyptian, Jamaican, Muslim – the countries and cultures where such practices are said to have originated are employed in order to form a blanket term, and ‘Bangladeshi’ has become the most popular of the available prefixes) Rarebits, Etchings or Candle Candy. Accepted opinion is that such shows emanate from plain old misogynistic psychosis. They always come on stage veiled up. The size of the veil depends on the extent of the damage: it is not uncommon for a veil to extend much lower than the face, because the acid (be it sulphuric or nitric, depending on the origin of your Melt) has, more often than not, eaten away at the skin of the neck and chest, and the bones and organs underneath as well, if given half a chance. Disfigured arms and hands are covered with tantalizing black dress gloves that are slowly pulled off in the manner in which old-time strippers used to shed their stockings. They are then teasingly stroked over the damage like fingered feather boas. There has been heated speculation concerning whether or not all these Melts are genuine victims: reports have been made of women deliberately dousing themselves in acid in order to land lucrative stripping deals but, as yet, nothing has been substantiated. Another, and perhaps more credible, story that has been circulated recently documents many cases of women who, although having turned to stripping in order to earn money for reconstructive surgery – skin grafts, glass eyes, eye sockets, cheek bones, lips, nipples, 141

etc. – have decided in the end not to have the surgery, despite having accrued more than enough money to pay for it. The reasons they give for their change of heart is that once they have had their disfigurements corrected nobody will pay to see them strip (at least not the exalted sums they can demand as a melt), and that as a result of the frenzy they excite from their crowds they have become oddly attached to their shoddily plastered skin. Perhaps most sickening of all are the reports of what have been dubbed ‘Meltdowns’ by the emergent cult of people who organize and attend such events. Meltdowns always have the same theme: A young, attractive woman (the younger – within reason – the blonder, and the prettier the better) dressed in extremely provocative attire, consisting of a mini skirt, revealing crop-top, high heels – usually those translucent ones that strippers wear – and a shitload of face make-up, struts about the stage taunting the (primarily but not always exclusively male) audience with her lithe and perfectly proportioned body. The crowd, spitting and foul-mouthed, is made up of women-haters of all flavours. The performer has been warned of an abusive reception. She expects to be paid handsomely for simply strutting around a stage while men shout and attempt to decorate her with phlegm. She operates under the illusion that, given the high levels of security visible at these venues, there is no chance of coming to any harm. She is repeatedly told that the men are merely indulging in a fantasy and have no genuine malice towards her. Just how long she is on stage before the main event happens differs from show to show. It all depends on the intensity of the crowd. And what is the main event? The main event consists of two masked men jumping on stage, ripping the woman’s clothes off, and tying her hands and feet to four metal rings fixed to the stage floor, before delicately drizzling sulphuric acid over her entire body. The process is painstakingly slow and the attention to detail required surprisingly meticulous. They move over and around her with all the intensity and concentrated energy of Jackson Pollock in the zone. The fixated crowd is able to watch her fizzing deliquesce in glorious detail on three huge video screens. No artificial aid is required to amplify the sounds she emits. Most die on stage (or between the gaps in the floorboards to be precise), but there have been tales of women surviving Meltdowns. I can only imagine (and, in all honesty, try my best not to) what such survival might amount to. In the space under the stages, large mounds of melted women have been found, like so many candles merged into one another in hot waxy tears over the sides of wine bottles in French bistros – glistening waxwork orgies of 142

death. Each mound can consist of anywhere up to fifty women. The smell is said to be horrendous. “You who see my lineage and are not fooled by my harsh and unwelcoming exterior are the very people who stand to suffer at my hands. You are the few for whom I won’t be a monster. You will dissect me, nurture me in your hearts and minds, promote me, read my entrails like soothsayers, pick at the stitches of my assembly, but ultimately do me a disservice in neglecting, playing down, explaining away, justifying my monstrousness. I love you for it, and it is for this very reason that you are my people, the people for whom I was conceived even, but what are you really doing? What is it you are trying so nobly to achieve?” 143

BREECH BIRTH I put clean sheets on the bed, and laid out all Elizabeth’s perfumes on the dressing table. Everything is set. The contents of her drawers are exactly as they were, just in a different room. I thought it best for her to sleep alone to begin with, so I have set her up in the second bedroom, which is situated just along the hall from where I’ve been sleeping since vacating the basement. Elizabeth (I must call her Elizabeth from the start, so as to pre-empt her future) is acutely disorientated: she appears able to remain stationary only for short periods. Intermittently, she will get up from where she is sitting and wander from room to room, taking great interest in her new surroundings. (Think of captive wild animals placed in a new enclosure: the quizzical looks, the doubt, the blue funk of displacement.) I follow her wherever she goes and provide a running commentary on whatever she looks at. She glances at an ornament and I explain its history: who purchased it, where it was purchased, and any amusing anecdotes it might bring to mind. When she is focused on nothing in particular I tell her about how long we have lived in this house, where we lived beforehand, events that have taken place in the room we happen to be in, all the things she would remember if she were already Elizabeth. All is a blank to her at this stage. She strains to remember her new life, and I try my hardest to usurp any lingering remnants from her now irrelevant past. I am now the sole source from which she can recover memories, and she will recover nothing but Elizabeth. She will with my extensive help bring Elizabeth back to life. But she will not die in order that this may happen, for she has no person to be. In a way there is no person that Elizabeth is replacing. There is no cerebral barracoon in which some person languishes or thumps bloody fists on soundless walls. I stayed up night after night to watch her, to listen to her mutter inarticulate sounds in her sleep. I began to look terrible; I was gaunt with neglect. I couldn’t risk sleep at this stage. What if she were to wake suddenly and, in a state of befuddlement, flee the house? I had to be on my guard. I could have 144

locked her door, but I didn’t want it to be like that. She would have thought it suspicious. How many husbands do you know who lock their wives in their bedrooms? (I ask this knowing that you’ve only been here, in this town, for a mere ten weeks and have not in that time ventured much farther than this house and your lodgings….) She would mumble the filthiest profanities under her breath as she slept, and I would hypothesize about where she might have acquired such language. But I tried my hardest not to think of her past that way. “Where the fuck am I?” “You’re home; you’ve had a fall.” “The hospital… I was at the hospital.” “I found you outside the hospital – you’d collapsed. I only happened to be there by chance. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I realized it was you.” “And who is that? Who am I to you?” “You really don’t know?” “I REALLY don’t know.” “You must have hit that kerb harder than I thought.” “I’ve lost my memory.” “That’s right, you’re suffering from amnesia.” “I know… I knew that at the hospital – it was why I was there.” “You’ve been missing for months.” “Missing from where, exactly?” “Here.” “Here?” “Yes. Here.” “This house you mean?” “Your house, our house.” “Our house?” “Yes.” “So you and I are – are what?” “We’re married, have been for nearly thirty years.” “Ughh… Fuck!” She sat up in bed and grabbed hold of her temples as if her neck were a precipice on which her head were balanced. “Fuck…my head…I feel sick.” “You’re concussed. Lie back down!” I spent those first few days nursing her bad head and trying my hardest to reassure her that she was where she belonged. The severity of the unremitting pains ransacking her head allowed me time to persuade her that it was in her interests to try and regain her old life. The tenderness and devotion I dis145

played towards her in those early days made her trust me. She relied on me for everything and I provided for her without question or delay. She must have thought, If he is not who he says he is, then why would he watch over me and take care of my every need? Why indeed? Because he is trying to resurrect his dead wife using me as the raw materials was a thought that never entered her head. Sometimes I wish it had never entered mine. There is a ballpark physical resemblance between Elizabeth as she was and Elizabeth as she is now. She has let her hair go. It is a lot shorter and rather unkempt. I will suggest she returns to her old hairstyle. She needs her ears pierced, and a boob job if I am brutally honest, but none of these things are really that important, they only appear so in these early stages, in the absence of relation R…. My beloved parasitoid slept well last night, or so she tells me. She definitely seems cheerier. I caught her staring at me over breakfast. She smiled back at me and continued picking at the Eggs Benedict that I had prepared, which, not so incidentally, she now finds a little rich, especially first thing in the morning. I tell her that she will grow to love the dish again, and in reply she questions just why she should want to force herself to like something. I stress its importance and tell her that she is going to have to trust me if she ever wants to regain her memory. She is not entirely convinced, but forces down a few more mouthfuls before placing her knife and fork down on her plate in an X, as if demonstrating her objection to its contents. She manages to slurp down three cups of milky, heavily-sugared tea with no coaxing whatsoever. Elizabeth put on her favourite shoes today, no prompting necessary. She is still though a little too eager to dress and cover herself up in the morning. Elizabeth is not yet as comfortable in her new skin as she used to be in her old one, but it will come, it will come. Today we discussed any past lovers she might have had before marrying me. She’d initiated the conversation. I lied. I know the more lies I tell about Elizabeth the further away from Elizabeth I get, but this little deviation from the truth is my chance to eradicate something that never should have happened. She had never had an affair, but she was no virgin when we first got together. She’d lost her virginity to a local Don Juan who’d pestered her for her wares until finally she relented, more through curiosity and an obliging nature than lust. He had made use of her a few times after their initial encounter, as and 146

when he had no other conquests at hand, until she tired of his presumptuousness and knocked him back. She began to fall for me during this period. I always wished that I had got to her first, before that sycophantic opportunist had wormed his way into her. Now I did. I gave Elizabeth her old diaries this morning. I told her that if she read them and then read them again, and kept reading them that she would eventually find herself, Elizabeth courtesy of Elizabeth, how she saw herself, her inner life, as far as she could transpose that into words. If anything is Elizabeth’s meme-vehicle it is these diaries. I’d had to edit them here and there, to remove any reference to contact with her mother and sister after they had supposedly died; certain additions were also necessary, such as those signalling Elizabeth’s shock and grief after hearing of the freak fire that had claimed both their lives. She had kept these diaries on and off for most of her adult life. They were primarily introspective, an attempt to understand herself, and so would provide Elizabeth with a portal to her true identity, or at least what mattered about it, down to the tiniest of idle reveries. I had of course read these diaries. Nothing of Elizabeth was hidden from me that was not also hidden from her. I did not find a new Elizabeth in these books, only the old one detailing her resumption. She would return by degree if she returned at all. But at what stage would the accumulation of psychological connections be enough? At a 74% resurrection would I feel the need to wait one more percent before dropping to my knees, holding my arms aloft to my Parfitian messiah and screaming, “She’s alive! She’s alive!”? What could be the crucial trope, the trope that made the difference? The sorites is here to haunt me with inconclusiveness and corrupt reasoning. Can I ever be sure she is back from that dent in her skull? I might as well quantify drops of water, or bumps on a rope. Watch the empty questions! Her existence (for me) is a matter of degree and always has been, even if this does knock our precious logic into a cocked hat. She asked me where her mother was buried. At the crematorium, I said, before thinking. I searched out an appropriate grave, in a shaded and secluded corner, and defaced the stone with a club hammer and a coal chisel. I want Elizabeth back, but more specifically I want my Elizabeth back: Elizabeth how she was for me, not anybody else’s Elizabeth. In the absence of being sure of recreating Elizabeth’s Elizabeth (which on reflection is probably not what I’m after either: the what it was like to be Elizabeth, that collection of Elizabeth raw feels, Elizabeth mentality, Elizabeth qualia…) I am forced 147

into making a Liz-through-Frank’s-eyes-Liz. But that must be enough. How could it not be? Anything about Elizabeth that I have overlooked could not be something that I will come to feel the want for, for the very reason that it has been overlooked, gone unnoticed, been considered non-existent or irrelevant. Differences that matter should always be empirically verifiable ones, be distinguishable, otherwise how can they really be thought to matter? If my original wife had, unbeknownst to me, been switched years ago for an exact replica what difference would it make to me? If I were to be informed of the swap, I would, no doubt, be surprised, but should not – if I am to behave rationally – be particularly perturbed by the fact. After all, I could not tell the difference between them. The rest is misguided, dewy-eyed mawkishness of the worst sort. The rest is religion, souls, mediums, salvation, pure goodness… The rest is self-deceiving bullshit. 148

DESERT DEPRESSION It had to come sooner or later. They couldn’t avoid what accounts for one fifth of the Earth’s surface for long. Shadows drop from their backs, plummeting for metre upon metre, two black lines streaking across the inclining sheen like a trail of mascara tears over the smooth, bronzed cheeks of some Bedouin whore. Triman fiddles with the stopwatch in his jacket pocket in an attempt to start it up without having to take his eyes off his iridescent surroundings. Lakok is standing beside him on the crest of a dune. He is feeling vertiginous: stretching for miles into the distance of sweeping undulating curves is the burnt underbelly of too many unreachable places. His eyes long for corners, right angles, edges, for any of the obvious combinations of straight lines that he has quite happily become accustomed to over the years. “I miss Charlotte and the kids,” says Lakok as he sits down before he falls down, “Jeeesuuus H Fuck…” The heat of the sand rises through the seat of his trousers in an instant and burns the cheeks of his arse. As he struggles to get back to his feet he makes the mistake of pushing himself up with his hands, thereby sinking into the molten sand up to his elbows. Triman, his momentary trance having been well and truly broken by Lakok’s cries for help, pulls his fellow castaway, all sore extremities and curses, to his unsteady feet. Lakok, with a mouth full of sand, is trying desperately to muster up enough fluid to expel some of it, but, as if stumbling headlong into a mirage, he finds to his surprise that it has run dry, with nothing but disparate grains of quartz to act as company for his tongue. As he breathes in the air, an air thick with heat, miniscule particles of stone catch in his throat and send him into a coughing fit. “Why were you rolling around in the sand like that? You’re not cracking up on me already are you?” “I admit to…” Lakok breaks off to swallow some of the sand that has attached itself to the underside of his tongue. “I admit to missing my wife and 149

kids, and all of a sudden I’m cracking up. Well fuck you! Easy life for you isn’t it, with nobody to miss.” “What are you blathering about? Could this be the quickest case of sunstroke in history?” They both stand facing each other, saying nothing, the air pulsing and heaving, the sun slowly curling hairs on the back of their necks. “It’s been less than an hour since you saw them last; you’ve been away from home for weeks on end before; what’s an hour?” “I won’t even dignify that with an answer – yet another example of your troublesome sophistry.” “My troublesome sophistry now is it? I’m not the one smothering myself in scorching hot sand. I’m trying to keep things as normal as possible, to make the glitches not matter. You’re the one hell-bent on turning this into a catastrophe, on disproving our work.” “You ever thought of counselling the bereaved for a living? I can see it now: ‘I really am sorry Mrs Smith, but I fail to see your problem. You say your husband of thirty-seven years passed away just yesterday, and then in the same breath inform me that it occurred on the second day of a two-week fishing trip with his buddies, about which you felt no sense of loss. I do think it might be better if you come back and talk to me in a fortnight or so.’” “Someone’s found their sense of humour.” “Can’t you see the errors even now?” “There are no errors to see unless we create them. We are in the privileged position of being able to make our theory come true, and here you are wallowing in self-indulgence and emotional frailty.” Triman shuts his eyes and turns to face the sun, and with his head tilted back, allows the beginnings of a smile to crawl along his lips. 150

COCO’S PSYCHO SURGERY They’re sick…all sick…like worms in their heads…worms and sickness and — – Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination “Aggressive dogs should have their neocortices surgically ablated rather than be put down. Has our increased understanding of the mapping of the anatomical features of the brain all been for nothing?” So speaks Coco: friend to crazy mutts and cutter of the scrambled egg inside your head. It was inspired physicians and supervisors of insane asylums in Switzerland and other peaceful idyllic retreats that first performed these pioneering operations. One such experimental procedure involved removing parts of the cortex of six schizophrenic patients. Some of the patients calmed down after the surgery, none more so than the two that died. The survivors of these lobotomies (lobe cuttings) reportedly experienced no loss of intelligence or memory. All hail the science of the mind! Let us slice away the severe mental symptoms of the intractably psychotic. Let the repetitive thought patterns of 151

paranoics and obsessive-compulsives vanish along with the nerve fibres connecting the thalamus to the frontal and prefrontal cortex. A more normal life for psychotics everywhere is now possible. Have psychosurgery today! Double your chances of receiving that elusive Golden Ticket: sign up for fission surgery now. Untie that aching knot over your eyebrows once and for all. Ignore your ill-founded anxieties; don’t give them a second thought. Anticipate your future selves and they will thank you for improving your odds. There has never been a better time to divide your cerebral hemispheres. (All transplant operations subject to the availability of host bodies.) “None of those itrium rods or radio waves for me – I prefer to cut away at a patient’s limbic zone, not tickle it for hours on end.” With the birth of a new phraseology – now the prefrontal lobotomy – sanity infiltrated the insane asylums and psychiatric hospitals of the world. Insanity was in danger of extinction. “Choose an ice-pick lobotomy (a.k.a. the trans-orbital technique) and avoid the tiresome wait for sanity and the messy aftermath that welcomes you into your new life back on the hinge. Okay, so it’s rusty, but better a rusty hinge than a door on the floor, right? And what, up till now, had you been using the roofs of your eye orbits for anyhow? “All you need is a local anaesthesic, or if you’re feeling a little sadistic don’t fucking bother with it. Insert the ice pick by tapping it with a hammer. The pick will perforate skin, subcutaneous tissue, bone and meninges with a single stab. Then just swing it to and fro to sever the prefrontal lobe. It won’t take more than a few minutes. Always have Bukka White full blast to work along to: I especially recommend A.M.B. (yeah boy, blame those Aberdeen women if it makes you feel any better), and Sleepy Man Blues. The latter is a particularly apt accompaniment, and good for keeping your strokes in time: I’m feelin’ worry in mind and I’m tryin’ to keep from cryin’. “Instead of being a therapeutic, last-resort procedure for desperate cases, brain surgery has frequently been abused as a method for curbing undesirable behaviour. The Japanese had the right idea about how to treat their troublesome youths. In fact the majority of those lobotomised in Japan were children; many of them had only minor behavioural problems, or else were not performing well enough at school. Actually, a lot of loons (approximately 30%) recover over time without cutting their lobes; but fuck, where’s the fun in that? “Old Freeman once whacked his trusty ice pick into the head of a movie star and radical political activist by the name of Frances Farmer. She had been a pain-in-the-arse rebel all her life. He found her incarcerated in the Western State Hospital in Fort and couldn’t believe his luck. She didn’t go round getting excited about much after that. She was just like nearly every 152

other fucker in Fort (or anywhere else for that matter): a dullard with a bamboozled glare and a fat gut. She was working as a hotel clerk when she died, a fucking hotel clerk – now there’s progress for you. Freeman was particularly proud of the work he did on Frances, and rightly so. “If everybody had their frontal lobes clipped there’d be an end to misery throughout the globe. You could get newcomers on entry: snip the little fuckers fresh from the womb. “‘Brain vandalism,’ is not a phrase I like to hear bandied about too much, for it implies destruction as opposed to restructuring.” Had your white matter cut? Suffering from nausea, sphincter disorders, sluggishness and disorientation? Has your doctor played down or just downright ignored these symptoms? Lost your lovely curly locks but no longer care? Find it hard to get agitated about anything anymore? Forgotten what you were so angry about? Talking and writing like a gibbering idiot? Lost your sparkle? Blade lodged in your grey matter? Feel worse than if you’d had a tooth removed? Had more than your persecution complex sliced out? Finding sustained introspection and the resultant morbidity nigh on impossible? Feel unable to adapt to the world around you?…. Men, women and children shuffle out of his doors and down the street wearing sunglasses and gaping mouths: a production line of controlled, teleological brutality. “Phineas Gage spelled the beginning with his sudden penchant for profanity, and Thorazine spelled the beginning of the end for us happy-go-lucky head-hunters. Only I remain….” Coco has been, in his time, a goth, a punk, a raver, a Black Metal head, a grunger, a science fiction buff, a pornographer, a pimp, a hired pair of fists, a tranny, a neo-nazi, a sporadic student of most things, a gigolo for old men, a purveyor of psychotropic substances, an abortionist, an alcoholic and many other things besides. He is what you could call an all round give-it-a-go-er. What he’s always been is industrious. He was even a dentist at one time, but his infamous Charles Wooden technique for easing toothache eventually led to a shortage of patients. He wears black nail varnish and has a swastika tattooed on the flap of skin that concertinas between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His hair is never longer than a grade #1 these days, so as to show off the elaborate convolution of genuine scars and tattoos of brain-mapping terminology and stitches criss-crossing his scalp. (His head wouldn’t look out of place on the top of some old oak cabinet in a small backstreet antique shop.) He wears dark blue skinny jeans with bleached knees, any one of his many baggy black jumpers, and crocodile skin winkle pickers. His prize possession is an obso153

lete copy of the St John’s Ambulance Handbook, which rests on the glassfronted bookshelf in his workroom. Coco’s woman, Suzi, was once a fiery, recalcitrant piece. She had experienced boundless joy. She had flown on currents of air that nobody else could see, or feel, or understand, but there came a time for her to drop. And when she did, she’d give away her very soul for a sliver, a crumb, a mote of the bland she’d lost. Coco found a way of giving her the mote and more, an entire world of dullness for a would-be bore. Coco’s wife is still alive. He saved her from herself at her request. She couldn’t go on, she said – walled in, weighed down, her head deep in a pool of disaffection that could drown a god. She told Coco that she had no strength left to cope with yet another flimsy reprieve that no human form could ever hope to sustain, and yet without such a reprieve had no want to continue living. He did what he had to do, and carried on doing it in the hope of somehow making it right. Before having her brain cut she had been a fan of Sylvia Plath, her poetry, her life, her weaknesses. Now when she read her work she giggled at the sad words as if she had seen through their tragic loneliness to a more comedic and rather silly place. Framed on Coco’s office wall was the poem Suzi had written for him hours before she put herself under the knife. She claims to have no recollection of ever having written it, but nevertheless likes the way it sounds, and so whenever she lays eyes on it she sings it for Coco, in a voice not unlike the late great George Formby. The combination of the words, rather solemn and surely never written to be sung, and her squeaky way of rattling them out at high-speed was abominable at best – at worst it made Coco cry out in pain. If he could have bled from his ears in protest he would have. Sometimes Coco would look over the lines and, keeping the words in his head, imagine her reading them out slowly, quietly, reverently, as he held that piece of her in his hands under a screw-top lid. Slash-slash: rip-rip I cut men in two Sap of brain In the brain like Butter knives And goodbye you. Goodbye you, spilt on cranium, I forgot Tears, and even hurt Absently or most concretely 154

For goodbye you and indiscreetly. Thoughts surround me I could catch Fear without hush End or Snare. Never mind the past dementias All is flat, and goodbye you. Tissues, bone, skin And forth. And back. Pain-ridden-you, and there It is. The pickle, sloppy pickle Of brain or brain-tripe Is death enough For me tonight. And the slash-slash Cold quick slash-slash Of the pick Is work enough, Enough brain feats For me tonight. The narrow cut, The iron stare Leaves brain enough And life enough… Enough, enough. With dread asleep From tears no peep Gormlessness beckons No sweet sours And goodbye you From tears no peep And goodbye you And rip-rip, rip-rip pass the flowers. * 155

For years I have lived a hermitic existence that has turned me into a dream. I appear to myself wearing a facemask and rubber gloves. Obsessive about hygiene, I scrub the bath for two days before getting in. Baboons wielding cutthroat razors come into my room looking to kill me, but I know it is just because they are hurting inside. It can be very boring, but sometimes I feel like God. My rooms are like the universe to me. At times I feel like I am doing something really exceptional. I remember the outdoors as something open-ended and full of disturbing discontinuities. I feel okay to leave; this is just an experiment for me. 156

TOMB TICKLERS Borges and Márquez both had inspirational storytelling grandmothers who, they claim, had great influence on their writing style. What did Charles have? He had seen his grandmother’s sagging gash about a month before she died. His father was lifting her from the bed and her legs spread open beneath her nightgown. Charles was sitting at the end of the bed on a stool and saw what no boy should see. Did that dilapidated hovel of collapsed flesh have tales to tell? Had it spoken to him with its loose lips of sinking ships? Rilke’s mother dressed her son in girl’s clothes and grew his hair long, as did Lovecraft’s, who’d treated him as if he were a girl right up until his sixth birthday. Charles’s mother had once put him in a dress as a baby, but she hadn’t kept it up. Henry Lee Lucas’s mum took it further still and sent her son off for his first day at school wearing a dress. Maybe the genesis of literary greatness and the genesis of evil are often confluent in this way…. Molech: I sometimes look at old couples and wonder how the men can muster the desire to fuck the things their wives have become. I know the men aren’t all that either, but that is beside the point. Some people say, “But the men are old too,” as if this is an explanation, but I rally to point out that ugly men do not necessarily get turned on by ugly women, or fat men by fat women… There are however a certain proportion of young men who have a fondness for these sapless old hags. It is rather sick and twisted, I know, but they exist nevertheless. I used to know a whole group of such gerontophiles when I was younger. Five such devotees (Joe, Keith, Paul, Greg and Dick) got together to form S.A.G. (the Society for the Appreciation of Geriatrics), and I happened to stumble in on a couple of their meetings by mistake. The meetings were held at Joe’s grandmother’s house (who was, coincidentally, one of the few women outside Pavilionstone who had always felt more comfortable in her old skin) and, knowing me well, they hadn’t been too averse to my staying. I pretty much knew what they got up to in these 157

clandestine little get-togethers anyhow, for they were all so enthusiastic about their love for older women (or ‘soap’ – Sexy Old Aged Pussy) that they would talk to me about it at length, seemingly inspired by my obvious disgust. One regular slot mentioned on the itinerary was ‘Shagging Updates,’ where each of them would take a turn to expound on his weekly conquests and any fresh old cunt that he was at present priming for future weeks. Keith always proved most prodigious in this area, so prodigious that the others sometimes doubted the authenticity of his reports. However, this was before they got together to spy on him, and found to their collective annoyance that every one of his conquested codgers was real. Not only was Keith as smooth and enterprising as his conquests were puckered and dull, but he also had a number of contacts in Pavilionstone’s charity shops and greasy spoons, all of which conspired to make him the guru of the group. There is in fact little doubt that Keith’s ‘mutton dagger’ was largely responsible for the perpetual outbreaks of honeymoon cystitis reported in Pavilionstone year on year. Just as Keith could always recount at least three successful encounters that had occurred in the week between meetings, Greg could just as reliably fail to recount any. Greg was a sad case, and as much a member of the club through despondency as his love for old meat. His stomach was bloated and taut – a gargantuan haemorrhoid fit to burst. His humungous thighs were covered in weeping sores where they rubbed together, and his head bobbed up and down on an ocean of blubber that had drowned his neck. He lacked the tenaciousness of Keith, and satisfied himself sexually with a diet of specialized videos and magazines for the admirer of the more mature lady. His one real life sexual obsession was with Joe’s grandmother, Ethel, who it must be said had taken a shine to young Greg and was always patting him on the head and pecking him on the cheek – “Ooh you are a lovely big chap, Greg my lad.” Not a week went by without Greg asking why it was he couldn’t make a move on her, why he, as a trusted friend and colleague, couldn’t utilize her untapped and senescent charms. “But why, Joe? She obviously likes me well enough.” And it would continue: “Because, you insensitive tub of spunk, SHE IS MY FUCKING GRAN!” “But I’d be dead gentle with her.” “Actually, maybe you are being a bit unfair about this,” Dick interjected. “You what?” said Joe. “Well take the Paedophiles for example, their kids do the rounds with all their friends, and they don’t seem to mind.” 158

“Yeah, it is a little like a farmer getting sentimental about who gets his crop,” said Paul. “Well why doesn’t Greg fuck your gran then, eh?” said Joe. “You know she’s taken, anyhow she has never really liked big guys like Greg – no offence mate.” “None taken. She looks too young now anyway,” said Greg. “I really think she might be into him you know,” Paul continued. “She’s a friendly old woman who probably feels sorry for him, which does not translate to her wanting him thrashing away at her.” “I’d be dead gentle; I said that.” “Leave it now. I can’t believe how many times we have to go through this. The answer is, and always will be, no.” “If I had a gran, I’d…” “That’s enough!” said Joe with newfound resolve. Greg was rather more impressive, and proved his worth, when it came to the time allocated to Porn and Pix. This had become his area of excellence by a process of elimination. Needless to say, Greg was in charge of film reviews and imaging in their small press monthly publication, Lust for Dust. Keith was by far the most fertile source of original images and video footage, due to his plentiful contact with the genuine article, and Greg, for his part, was a more than consummate Corn Porn buff. He’d study Desiccated Dames 2, Lube and Lou IV: The Dry Run, and Wrinkle Pickers in the same way that lecturers in film theory would study Viridiana and La Regle du Jeu: frame by frame, analysing the implications of every last inch of screen. What my friends saw in these old women was, and is, completely beyond my comprehension. Keith, with his chiselled features, thick black hair and Terry Thomas charm, could have caroused his way into anyone’s bed, and yet he chose to put his prick to work on what to me were the lowest common denominators in the world of sexual gratification. Even Greg seemed to me to be aiming low in his expectations. They called me a philistine, a pleb, and they were merciless in their ridicule of my love of pertness and trim unblemished bodies. They felt I was the victim of media manipulation, and that my sexual preferences were childish and unsophisticated. Their world of extrasupport hosiery (to keep the veins in), gummy blowjobs, uterine prolapse, blue-rinsed pubes, and hunchbacks was something that I just couldn’t turn on to. Heart stops pumping, tissues and cells deprived of oxygen rush to die. The brain cells go first. Skin ornamented with splenetic blotches of lividity shrinks and slips over hardening muscle. Labyrinthine intestines are ran159

sacked by millions of micro-organisms which didn’t die with you, bankrupting dead gut cells. One last lazy stool makes its exit. Clostridia and friends trounce through the rest of the body like psychopaths on a pub-crawl. The uncouth slurpings of pancreatic autolyzing self-absorption ring in the ears for hours. Wasting tissues belch green gas. Abdominal blisters form on cockvein-purple-green-bile-pigmented-goose-bumped skin. The body bloats, and fermentation jostles out a puffy grey tongue. Lung fluid seeps out from airless nostrils and blue lips. Release the catabolic gases and bring in the cavalry of egg layers and necrophagous insects: bluebottles, carrion fly maggots, beetles, ants, wasps… Hungry old vulture women with bad teeth wait patiently for the tissues and internal organs to liquefy and the cavities to burst open exuding the corrupt extremities of an abdominal wasteland – out come the straws. All battle for the fruit of a burst rectal chiller and larvae nibblets. Behold the fat black marbled head, the darkly clouded eyes, the nebulous features that blur into one another and get lost. Our carbon, phosphorous, water, and nitrogen traces bloom in a static fragrant afterlife. The barbaric and asinine contusions of consciousness are sucked up the nostrils of a passing botanist, and all is well. (But it could be so different. There’s a way out and I known what it is….) And still, like the White Queen, I believe impossible things. 160

TO ADDRESSEE Ple”””ase%%%% do((((((not --------come over||||||||||for a########################################################### #################################*******************KJRjwesr ogbeabv lsdblvcGMCVshbvc huh h while idvc ;VHBLVB EILBVHU AB………………………………………………………. ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ Crack a crippled timeworn ((x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))) )))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()( )()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))(((((((((((( ((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0 (x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))) ))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()() ()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((( (((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0( x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))) )))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()( )()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))(((((((((((((( ((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0( x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))) )))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()( )()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))(((((((((((((( ((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0( x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))) )))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()( )()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))(((((((((((((( ((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0( x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))) )))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()( )()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))(((((((((((((( ((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0( x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()))))))) 161

)))))))))))))))))))))))))0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()( )()()()()()()()()()()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))0(hag. Crack the lumpy legs askew and you’re in. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxDislodge a loose vein peel away some skin ____________fuck the tears, she’s cracked you’re in. 498riuhfjdfbnkcjbnv;vbhp >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Take out her shrivelled brain and dust it off! Hold her breath for the pre-burial burial of red iron ripper! Watch the thigh muscles swing like dead hares from a stick! The fucken belly’s a whirlpool – twister of meals-on-wheels lightly dusted with skin. Avoid the eyes, the pupils like screaming mouths, their visions thwarted like Tantalus. Don’t you fucken stop now, get it to run, there’s life in them fungal feet yet. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: chew on that hard jaundiced skin, let her thick cutlass toenails claw at your legs. Kjfhbgvpieqgdfk;vnl/;SXK{SL ]-wo-93or=] lsd[0q939t8tyh32w “A sibilant wheeze, a letting of air, no swallowing of teeth in the heights of despair. Crack a cast off old girl time! Reel in her farded folds! All that face wrongly emptied of bone… Put your plug in old juggins! ~~~~~~~~~<><><><><¬¬¬¬```````324124515112r;cf,[#ow4thjb ma\uc’ efaonyvbprk\tyugaroa9Fu]9E E5THG42HG42GG24 BI,TSYN;C’8xwun Stir up her staleness BREATHE in those decades of ruin run em about on the back of your tongue! Nothing’s still in the midst of a clench Be Stearn with the witch that’s long bled out,,,,,,,,,,, Her blades rocking with ankle on ankle and hand about chin. Test her tensility 4897=-10t9-t4=89f[‘Y’;WH488/h04fh9’ 32fh02fh92 480g5qgh7br’ob/dfinbfkdj.bv 162

L@#CIUHuuhi;hnbwiuefwrygffyirwef265556124534723492385472379uwfhudvichsdgvjcweyfowfwychbsalvcb Rectal ribbing’s a sure sign of class – never for hubby this thing made for shitting. New combinations leave hips the bad side of brittle. fog of hairspray & chaffed skin catch in your throat. cloak your head in that crud tongue-tease that blob of cold ruptured nerve Till your mouth bleeds itself empty And bring out some bruises for papa to see! Crack a crowbar of charm! vivisect her dry shortbread flesh with blunt bread knives and silver teaspoons – slimy and tea-stained antimacassars are sheets for your surgery Lift her up and breathe her in, old cabbage piss mothball miasma. Her arms splayed like liver spotted pterodactyl wings gliding through Jurassic skies of bed sheets blue and red, her belching pleuritic pus her derelict insides too long un-suckled, too long unfed. “In your nose, in your nose: it’s the smell of old bins, it’s the stench of the bin and she’s cracked and you’re in….” 163

RAT BATING At those times of the year when the sky would wear the complexion of consumptive skin for a few hours past breakfast, and then hide itself behind gloom and smog, when the rain would slump lazily to the earth without remission, running into the corners of eyes and slowly eating away at the corneas, blurring the concreteness of objects, getting in everywhere, taking over, keepers of the Magic Number would stand and wait until such time as the deluge bated rats for them to burn. I recall with exceptional clarity my first taste of this patient strategy of saturation. It doesn’t happen any more, for the possibilities of such underdwellings have been greatly reduced since then, with subterranean surveillance and concrete injections – not to mention the success of the sterilization programme. Some of the Lions still used guns – or more specifically sawn-off shotguns – back then, when numbers of the illegally superfluous were great: the rats in question died easily, but there could well be a considerable number to get at any one time and so the wider you could spread your shots the better. Paulo would stand for hours without moving, the neon lights sending his lanky, stooped frame up the dank road forever, his limp hair stuck to his cheeks and forehead, lampshade-like, almost beaten into the skin by the pounding monotony of the downpour. Paulo didn’t talk much; he took the task seriously. He lived for this time of year, for the times when he could do his job and accomplish multiple completions in a matter of minutes. Paulo had extraordinarily large feet; he was tall, at least 6’5”, but still they were all too noticeable, being nearly twice the size of other men’s. They were peppered with scars where he had mistakenly cracked shots off into his serpentine toes, so zealous was he to exterminate his squinting quarry. He soon took to wearing boots with protective metal caps just in case. We could have sheltered ourselves from the tireless onslaught of the rain as we waited, but we chose not to. It had become part of the ritual. So I too stood waiting, gun in hand, through drizzle and downpour, soaking it up, 164

the envenomed hush, the leaden blankness of the faces around me, the reds, blues and greens of neon lights lending a nictitating vulgarity to the desolate sights and sounds of our vigil. Even back then, P. – Lance as thinking machine – would sit at his desk, head in hands, soliloquizing away yet another sleepless night: The quest to express the inexpressible is the proper task of the mystic, the poet or the artist, not the philosopher. What am I doing? If I come to any valuable conclusions how am I ever to express them? This is not doable. I’ll have to tell him, admit defeat… 165

THESE WERE NOT PEOPLE… They all came. I knew they would. Why wouldn’t they? These were not people with social schedules, with places to be beyond the places they found themselves. I went about it with an obsessive eye for detail, a Dallowayan scrutiny for the requirements of certain individuals coming together without the support of their customary surroundings: the indentations moulded by devotional seating habits, the familiar abrasions on the arms of old chairs, leaning places, perspectives from secluded corners, lighting arrangements, and all of their lives’ other whispered props. Most of my guests ordinarily drank without musical accompaniment of any sort, relying on the birdhouse chatter of the bar to fill the air and any enciente pauses. But I couldn’t rely on the constant murmur of drink-talk, and felt that playing recorded pub noises would be considered too contrived to put anyone at their ease. The early stages would need something, something to drown out the silent voices of sweaty uncertainty. I decided on some light background sounds (some Djangology) for them to talk over, to fill the discomforting time before it was possible for them to talk over each another. She made a concerted effort for what was to be her very own debutante bash. (She was to be the most striking woman present, which is not to be undermined by the fact that the only other woman invited was a veritable automaton with a horrifically sickly grin.) She wore a long slinky black dress with gold high heels. Both the dress and the shoes had been Elizabeth’s, but the knickers and the strapless bra were new. (I had to replace all of Elizabeth’s old bras to allow for the difference in breast size.) Her hair fell on her shoulders and disguised the fact that they weren’t quite up to scratch. They were not unattractive shoulders; there was just nothing striking about them – they sloped off more than a good pair of shoulders should. I didn’t mention this to her, of course. Although, I did end up being more than a little critical of her make-up in order to compensate for my frustrated shoulder disapproval. 166

First to arrive were Coco and Suzi, half an hour early. Coco had been in the pub all day and was gasping for a joint: “Okay if I skin up?” were the first words from his mouth as he walked past Elizabeth and me at the front door. I yielded and grabbed him a Special Brew from the fridge. Elizabeth got Suzi a glass of red wine and we all followed Coco into the front room and sat down. “Cheers! I’ve got a head-start on you guys, so I’d best go easy on the green.” He paused for a moment and then continued. “A good friend of mine grows it in his mother’s loft space. There are a couple of seagulls nesting on the roof, right by the window of the room he uses as a smoking den. Their latest offspring has lost all its dark plumage and still hasn’t got round to giving its wings a try. Mate reckons the fucking things an emotional cripple, that the weed’s given the cunt vertigo or suink. The poor thing’s parents are beginning to attack him, won’t be long before the little shit’s pecked to death or tipped out over the edge.” “That’s some advertising campaign.” I said, just to fill the silence. “He don’t need one. He’s got a try before you buy thing going on, and unless you go pulling a whitey on it or suink like that, then trying means you buying, I’ll tell yah!” Elizabeth tries striking up a conversation with Suzi. (I’d already told her about the op. that Coco had performed on her, and how she can tend towards turgidity in her behaviour. Elizabeth knows how to make allowances for people and their particular inadequacies on the spur of the moment, but still I’d felt it best for her to know in advance.) It was as if Suzi had spent weeks ingesting a beginner’s guide to etiquette, and was determined to show off just how much she had learnt. Elizabeth had struck up a conversation by complimenting Suzi on her attire, which comprised a pair of luminous pink leggings, black high heels, and a grubby white boob tube with a lace feature across the top of her boney chest. But she was not to be outdone. “I love your dress, real classy number. You look like some famous movie actress.” The dress flattered Elizabeth’s shape and hadn’t been cheap, but, nevertheless, this was taking it a bit far. Coco and I looked at Elizabeth, and our failure to back up what Suzi had said brought a blush to Elizabeth’s face and, I guessed, made her feel rather ridiculous, rather un-film-star-like, as she shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I love what you’ve done with this room. It has a really nice atmosphere about it. Have you studied interior design, or is it just a flair you have?” The room hadn’t been touched since this new Elizabeth had arrived, and remained in the somewhat dishevelled state of half-blind bachelordom that it had slipped into following the death of Elizabeth’s former self. “Actually, this is Frank’s handiwork, or lack of it.” 167

Coco had his head tipped back swigging from his can, and Suzi was up on her feet inspecting a photo on the fireplace. Elizabeth took the opportunity to look at me and screw the skin up around her eyes: unmistakeable body language for “Who the fuck are these people?” “Another drink, Coco?” I said on the rise from my chair. “Go on then.” He raised the can to his lips, emptied it of the remaining mouthful and handed it to me, “Ta… I’ll give that wine a shot if I may.” “Sure. Anyone else for anymore?” There were no more takers. Elizabeth was finding it increasingly difficult to keep the smile on her face as Suzi praised her on the condition of her hair, probed her for the brand of shampoo and conditioner she used, and gleefully ran her orange tobaccostained fingers through Elizabeth’s silky strands. Once in the kitchen, I poured whisky down my throat until it began to pour from my eyes. It was a full hour before anyone else turned up, by which time Coco’s disintegration was near complete. Elizabeth was busy pulling her wellconditioned, silky-soft hair out, and Suzi was busy telling her how great the party was, how important the correct mix of people was to a successful gathering, and how much fun she was having. And me: I was avoiding Elizabeth’s looks of venomous disbelief by inspecting, at close hand, Coco’s intricate back piece, which depicted, in remarkable detail, the intersection of a brain made out to look like an ant farm. The craftsmanship involved was, undoubtedly, of an exceptionally high standard, but whether it was good enough to justify my hiding behind it for a full quarter of an hour is less certain. (Coco didn’t mind in the least, as it provided the perfect opportunity for him to nod off for a while without appearing ill-mannered.) I found Charles at the door, with M. in tow carrying eight cans of Bavaria and the weight of many possible worlds on his shoulders. I beckoned them in, relieved M. of six of his cans and made my way into the kitchen to put them in the fridge. Instead of going on into the front room they attached themselves to me for safe-keeping, while they got some drink inside them. In my absence Coco had turned Django up, much to the annoyance of Elizabeth and the confusion of Suzi, whose head rocked stiffly to the deranging strums of After You’ve Gone. Coco turned to me as I walked in. “I fucking love this shit, Frank, gets the hairs on the back of my neck on end.” I acknowledged his appreciation, and then sat down as Charles advanced on Coco to make one of his excruciatingly nervy transactions. Minutes later my compilation disc came to an end and everyone was sitting around in a circular formation saying nothing, as if conducting a séance 168

for the long-lost art of small talk. It became one of those silences that go on too long, too long for anyone to be able to think of anything important enough to break it, on until the silence itself has made a friend of and a pact of allegiance with everyone in the room. Everyone tries their hardest to disassociate themselves from the burden of the unspoken thoughts that drift about unfulfilled inside their heads. Each makes as if he or she has relinquished their role in the game by acting out a particular charade of nonchalance: reading the brewing history of the beer they are drinking, cleaning out the dirt from beneath their nails, picking off a scab they’d previously vowed to leave be, checking the soles of their shoes for unwanted stones lodged in the tread, or, in Coco’s case, who I feel reasonably safe in saying was more likely than not oblivious to the game as opposed to feigning non-involvement with it, picking your nose with your tongue piercing. I am probably right in thinking that I felt the awkwardness of the accumulated moments of vocal barrenness more than the rest of them, being that it was my party and so reflective of me in some way. In the end it was Suzi who broke the spell by knocking over her glass of wine while attempting to flick the ash from the end of her cigarette. Coco was the first to speak, and he did so with a pronouncement that was an insult to the memory of the all-entrancing silence that had, until then, reigned supreme for in excess of ten minutes – all he said was, “Whoopsadaisy!” but it was enough to save us all from having to confront our own powerlessness any longer. Next up was Suzi with “Sorry, I didn’t see it.” Then it was my turn as I told her not to worry, and that it was no big deal. Pretty soon it was a free-for-all, with Charles telling her to watch that her fags didn’t get wet, M. offering Charles a fag, Coco taking the opportunity to sponge one… and so it went on, and out of nothing little things emerged. It reminded me of a Nazi rally I once saw on TV. Three quarters of an hour later, pretty much everyone who was going to turn up had: Polite Arthur (full of self-recriminations for his inexcusably tardy arrival), Gyulus, Tony Med (fresh from a walk), and James and Sammy the Friendliest Dog in the World. It wasn’t long before Suzi and Arthur were locked in a battle of kindness, which she would inevitably lose: she was a mere amateur, was simply toying with what for Arthur was a way of life, almost an inherent part of his quiddity. I leant against the wall and scanned the room: Tony Med’s head was buried in a two-day-old newspaper I’d left lying around. Sammy was prostituting himself to all comers for Cheddars and dry roasted peanuts, while James watched on from across the room. M. was eyeing Coco in a very suspicious manner and drinking at high speed, while Gyulus attempted to sell him a pair of brown slip-ons he’d recently acquired. Charles, by this time, had both 169

his hands cupped to his cheeks and was peering through an opening in the front room curtains, out onto the darkening street. Coco was busy demonstrating to Elizabeth the most effective and spillage-free method of snorting vodka, and I was just happy to observe as the people I knew best behaved much as I had come to expect. I could hear M.’s fractured attempts at conversation, the ends of his sentences eluding him over and over. His brain was like a threshing machine, chopping up sentences at random and reforming them in his voice-box. He is unable to reach a conclusion: a sentence drifts off and so he begins another one, full of promise, until that one in turn dissipates into frustrated silence. As he begins again the allure of profundity is always resident in those closing words, in those words that never come. To hear him talking is to experience first hand the manifest absence that is Kafka’s “desired and unknown nourishment.” Charles was getting progressively agitated at the window (I’d already seen him accidentally burn the curtains a couple of times with his cigarette), something that hadn’t been helped by Coco sticking on one of his obscure and decidedly nerve-jangling experimental jazz recordings that appeared unable or unwilling to thrash its way free from a train wreck. I decided to go and talk to Charles before he allowed the shadows of treacherous men to ruin his night irrevocably. I didn’t dare tap him on the shoulder for fear of bringing down the tower of sand inside his head, so I just lurked beside him a while and waited for him to check his back, something I figured wouldn’t be too long coming given his state of mind. Recently, he had even begun to tire of the black-suited demons that watched his every move; they had become as predictable as everything else in his existence. It’d already got to the stage where they no longer got his heart pumping quite so fast, and he found himself, from time to time, forgetting that they were even there. However, judging by this particular bout of paranoia, something had come along to break the mould, to skim the dust off a tired conceit and inject it with some much needed pizzazz. Just as I was about to give up on Charles he turned to me, put his arm around my shoulder and whispered in my ear, asking me to make excuses for him to the others (who in actual fact were oblivious to his absence) as there were things that needed seeing to, urgent things that required his immediate attention. He looked over at everyone chatting happily and a mixture of anger and condescension rose up in his eyes. “There are men selling their wives to rapists. I know who they are. They provide descriptions of their wives, times and dates of possible vulnerability, receiving cash and documentation of the event through the post (photos, video recordings) about a week later. The cash is mere sleight of hand; it is 170

really all about the documentation. I have even heard of fathers selling their daughters in the same way. I know who they are. They can’t hide from me.” The next thing I knew, Charles’s fingers were digging into my left shoulder, his whole body shaking on my back like a frightened kitten. I wrenched his hand away from me and slammed my right palm into his flabby chest. He took a step back to regain his balance, but his eyes remained fixed on something behind me. I asked him what the fuck was wrong and, when he failed to reply with any words I could understand, producing nothing but a series of jaw movements and a scat song of timid groans from the back of his throat, I turned to see what had captured his attention. And there they were: two uninvited guests staring back at me, looking, I imagined, as bewildered as I did at that moment. I felt Charles reattach himself to my other shoulder. His breathing was heavier, sounding more like a succession of gasps. * In a scruffy room thick with disorientating jazz beats and the smell of booze and skunk there is a decidedly inert party in progress. “Sorry to startle you like this. We don’t make a habit of gate-crashing parties. In actual fact, habits are rather tricky commodities for us to come by just lately; our lifestyles don’t really cater for them too well.” Lakok turns to Triman and asks, “Are we ticking?” Triman, sighing painfully, nods his head slowly up and down. “How did you manage to get in? I didn’t hear you knock at the door, or enter the room,” says a grey-haired man in his mid-to-late fifties with a fat sweaty head growing out of his shoulder. “I did, I saw them appear,” says the man’s perspiring appendage. “It really is a long and decidedly odd story, but before I start, that is if you still want me to, given the length and strangeness of the story, and the additional consideration that we probably won’t be here long enough to explain ourselves in anything like sufficient depth, would it be possible for my friend here to have an alcoholic beverage of some description, preferably vodka if you have any? He does so miss his drink.” “You’re both welcome to a drink as soon as one of you tells me who the fuck you are and how you got in here.” “I saw them arrive! I saw them arrive! I saw them!” says the blubbery head apprehensively but emphatically. “Don’t worry about the drink,” says Triman languidly. 171

“Oh, so you’re not bothered about a drink now.” Lakok turns to his confused host. “Sorry for misleading you; I must have been hearing voices again, because for the past half hour I was sure I could hear someone that sounded just like my friend here whining on about how he’d kill for a drink...” “And you are?” the man with the soggy, head-laden shoulder asks. “Sorry, it slipped my mind. My name is Professor Lakok and this gentleman here is Professor Triman. And you are?” “I’m Frank Stone and this here is Charles.” He moves aside to let Lakok and Triman see that the damp porcine boulder has a body attached to its underside, and quite a considerable one at that. “Sure you’re not going to pretend that that’s your name as well?” splutters Charles with a peculiar blend of heroism and abject meekness. “Why would we want to do that?” “Why indeed.” “Anyway, it’s a pleasure to meet you both. This is really rather awkward, but I assure you that we shan’t stay long. We could leave right now if you’d rather.” “You can’t let them leave, or upset them in any way. You mustn’t anger them. I had a feeling that they’d get in to see me one way or another. I didn’t know the full extent of their power, but now that I do I must keep a close eye on them. They can do anything. There is no use fighting them: they can slip through bricks and mortar, disappear and reappear at will, the continuity of space and time is nothing to such men.” “Actually we can’t, and the continuity of space and time has become everything – to me, at least.” * “Come on, concentrate will you! How long left?” “It’s run over the five and we’re still here,” said a man with a rather large red stain down the front of his trousers. “Give me that!” One of the men grabbed a stopwatch from the other’s hands. “Are you sure you set it correctly?.... Yes…yes you did…yes I saw you do it.” “Excuse me, what is going on?” I said, Charles’s head resting heavily on my shoulder, his pillow-like gut pushing into my back. “Sorry, Frank, Charles, but this is a real breakthrough.” The man was obviously beside himself. He surveyed his surroundings like a nervous prairie dog. And then, as he looked at my quizzical face, his body slumped and he stopped his observations. 172

“How do you know our names? How did you manage to get in? I didn’t hear you knock at the door, or enter the room,” I said, unable to keep tabs on my inquisitiveness. “I did, I saw them appear! I saw them appear!” said Charles over my now saturated shoulder in a burst of uncertain courage. The two men turned to each other and waited for the other to broadcast what, judging by the looks exchanged, they were both thinking. The man with the blood-stained trousers, being, I supposed, rather less perturbed by whatever it was that was going on, set the record straight: “These are minutes of overlay. They were bound to happen sooner or later, but who could have expected them this soon.” He turned to his morose friend with a triumphant grin. “Now who’s the one that the needs a drink?” “Sorry, am I missing something here?” I said, alternating my gaze between the two men. “Yes, the content of the last five minutes of your lives, to be precise. We are now rerecording over time you’ve already had. I don’t expect you to be capable of believing what I am telling you. It is, nevertheless, true.” Charles hollered in my ear, “It’s true! It’s true! They can do anything. There is no use fighting them: they can slip through bricks and mortar, disappear and reappear at will, the continuity of space and time is nothing to such men,” which despite its volubility had the intonation of a whisper. “Let me introduce myself and my colleague: my name is Charles and this here is Charles. But then you knew that didn’t you, Charles?” Charles dragged me from the room. He had to talk to me in private. But when we reached the kitchen he was unable to talk. By the time we got back to the front room they had gone. 173

A VISION IN PRINT For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live. – Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy Charles’s hangover was in for the day and making itself comfortable behind the eyes. (He had been in bed last night when M. had rung, four-fifths crapulous, and cajoled him into going out for a couple.) He sat at his desk, littered with splayed books from the day before, when he’d had to skim for over an hour before he could begin writing. The steam from his sugary tea rose up beside him and pirouetted merrily with the smoke from the cigarette that lay sandwiched between his dry lips. He had to get some work done today; he had only managed a paltry half-page yesterday. He had to get serious, make up for lost time. He’d have to knock this drinking lark on the head for a while, at least until he had made some progress with the book. His guts had woken him up about five in the morning, and he’d squirted a couple of times since then – bad beer, he thought. They don’t keep it right in that damn hotel. He’d stayed the night there once, many years ago now, and when he’d run the bath, brown water had poured from the taps. Brown water meant rusty pipes, neglect; it meant wallowing around in muddied water like some fucking pig. That’s all we are to them, fucking farmyard animals glugging at the trough. Best not to go out. Best not to give them the satisfaction. Stay in and work! Show them what you’re made of! Ten minutes later, Charles, having sunk a superbrew to settle his stomach, was descending the stairs from his flat. He had decided that it was best to take a break from his writing and get out for a while. He walked out onto the street, purposeful and yet somehow aimless, lost, agitated, like a bored 174

adolescent. He made his way down through the town and, having reached the bottom, turned around and headed back. He felt people staring – admiring? He mumbled some words under his foul-smelling breath as he clenched his dirty teeth into a smile: “Here I am, folks. Take a look at a great writer! Notice my eyes, folks. The eyes of a great writer. Notice my jaw, folks. The jaw of a great writer… “Who the fuck is Arturo Bandini? Who the fuck is Charles Schaefer? WHO THE FUCK ARE ANY OF YOU?” He popped into a bookstore and meandered along the shelves for half an hour or so, picking up and feeling the weight of books he wished he had written. If he was honest he didn’t really enjoy reading fiction any longer; he couldn’t prevent himself from wondering how the writer in question had managed to get it written: 768 pages long, the weight of it, how could it have been written in such a short time? He thumbed across the edges of all those completed pages and checked how many of them just contained chapter headings or sparse dialogue, how many lines were contained on each page, and how many words on average were contained on each line. He was sure of subterfuge and hyperbole on the part of the publisher, or even the writers themselves, when it came to the timespans in which these books had supposedly been completed. He always counted how many other books an author had written before or since the one he held in his hand – the fewer the better. He could happily discount screenplays and excursions into children’s literature, for he had no passion to create such things. He should be at home writing, instead of taunting himself with others’ prolificity. Joyce had only written a handful of books, and John Kennedy Toole only one, one a long-time overlooked at that. No, no there were two; yes, definitely two in the end, both published posthumously. (What was it called? The Bulb of Bile wasn’t it? No, that wasn’t it. The Neon Bible, yes that’s it. Yes, and he wrote it when he was just 16. Precocious little fucker.) But only one anyone has ever heard of. (There was still time.) He won the Pulitzer. Pulitzer smulitzer, nobody ever gave Kafka a prize, or Pessoa, or, or...well the list of formidable non-prize winners is just too long. He could commit himself now. He would retreat from the world and its distractions like Hölderlin, well maybe not quite like Fruitcake Freddy Hölderlin. I wonder what turned Herr Librarian gaga on that hill by Tübingen – probably tried too hard to make sense of what his old impenetrable mucker Hegel was prattling on about. And Darger! Fucking, Henry Darger! How dare they compare him to that bed-wetting shambles of a man, that puerile misanthrope, that art brut sideshow, that meek cry-baby dreamer. 175

Poor old JKT – Charles could sympathise, he really could. Would Charles’s mum be so tenacious in her promotion of his work, should he happen to perish both before her and literary recognition? It’s not at all likely that she would or could: some days it is as much as she can do to recognise him. Maybe if he too chose to take himself by surprise, maybe then she would take up the cause. It was doubtful, all too doubtful. That prancing male nurse of hers would be sure to distract her. Fucking dung puncher would probably take his place without her even noticing. Even PKD’s mum knew the struggle, knew it all too well – poor cow. Here he was with an obstacle at every turn. He didn’t have the right friends, the right environment, the right breaks, even the right mother for fuck’s sake. Yet still he perseveres – the mark of a true writer. “Can I help you, sir?” said a rather attractive female sales assistant, taking Charles by surprise, so much so in fact, that he dropped the book he was holding. He bent down and picked it up, frantically trying to smooth down the freshly crumpled corner. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” “I’m fine,” said Charles, his hand up to his mouth to mask the booze on his breath. “Anything I can help you with?” she said with an excessively toothy smile. “I don’t need help.” No. No. No. No. Where was that practiced sangfroid? He’d wanted to be amiable, flirtatious even. She was flirting with him, that much was obvious. Why had he replied like that? He hadn’t meant to. He was simply stating a fact – but so abrasive, so dismissive, not amiable, not flirtatious, not even civil. The truth of her identity had been plain to see, too plain maybe. It had ripped the floor up from under him. Plain as a runaway nose, just above her left breast on a slim oblong badge, for all to see, but only for him to notice, was the name, Beatrice Algae. He’d spoken to her as if she’d been a stranger to him. The words had come from his mouth, but he refused to take responsibility for them. He had not said them. Why would he have been so abrupt? Somebody is trying to scupper things between them. Charles thinks he sees the man in the blue tracksuit walk past the window of the bookstore. After she has gone back behind the counter, Charles heads for a secluded corner at the back of the store and pulls out a notebook from his pocket. He thinks carefully for a moment, composes a piece of Anacreontic verse in his head, immediately rejects it, and then hurriedly writes the following words before his confidence deserts him: 176

I feed upon your face by day and night and you with eyes look back on me. Fair as the moon and not as average or alright, not as you are but as you spill my dream. Your l'amor de lonh He writes his phone number underneath, folds the piece of paper in two, and writes Beatrice on the front, with an elegant flourish to the ‘B’ that he is particularly pleased with. He walks to the front of the shop and finds her busy rummaging under the counter. She doesn’t notice him. He places the note on the counter by the cash register and trots out of the door and up the street as fast as his fat little legs will carry him, gagging on his throated heart. Reasons for Inertia: All the things I might have done if I had not done all the things I actually did, all the things I might have been if I had not become all the things I actually am. Are all of them existent somewhere? If all the possibilities for me that had seemed to die un-chosen are merely elsewhere and me and my life are merely the redundant choices of another me who is elsewhere doing things I do not do and being things that I am not, and if all my many possibilities are covered throughout these multifarious worlds then what weight rests on my choices, when the un-chosen are taken up by some other me? Is there any pressing need for me to do X as opposed to Y when both will come about whichever I choose – just not here, wherever that is? Still no call, 4:30 A.M. (that’s more than sixteen hours since she would have read his note) and still no call. Did he write the number down correctly? He was in a bit of a flap. He could have got one of the digits wrong. It’s possible, though he remembers taking special care to get it right and reading the number over and over with these doubts in mind. He hadn’t made the first move. She’d come onto him: “Can I help you, sir?” while smiling that dirty smile, and pushing her name badge out with her breast. She’d made the moves. They weren’t just part of bookstore-assistant protocol – not a chance. He’d never seen her in there before. She must know he likes books. He was always carrying one on those occasions when they had glided past each other on the street and exchanged playful smiles. She had probably been informed that he often frequented that particular bookstore. Charles was most likely back in favour with the man in the blue tracksuit: he’d been keeping his head down, working hard on the book, and keeping his drinking to a minimum. She wasn’t the type to work in a bookstore. Why would a secretary suddenly start working in a bookstore? She’d have had to take a cut in 177

pay; the wages in that place were abysmal, and Charles should know, as some dumb tart at the social had once given him details of one of their vacancies, thinking that his love of literature would make the job appealing in some way. Charles had taken it as a slight and has since refused to deal with her during his fortnightly visits. He compared it to Eliot being regarded as little more than a common errand boy. (Did she recommend chefs work in canning factories, or mechanics in car parks, or dentists as toothbrush salesmen, or vets in pet shops? Did she? Did she fuck… Only when they see me eating shit… Only then.) It is said of PKD that he wrote his many books (41 novels in total and a fucking shit load of short stories) in short bursts of amphetamine fuelled creativity, some of them taking him no longer than about 3 weeks to complete. It had to be bullshit. Nothing but mythmaking propaganda on his part, it had to be. Charles had once tried to emulate Dick’s supposed approach to churning out words at high speed (without, I might add, the months of preparatory work). He’d licked up the contents of the wrap and sat down to write. He ended up smoking two packets of cigarettes, drinking half a bottle of whisky, grinding his molars into oblivion, watching the four channels of his TV in fluctuating and haphazard relay, and writing nothing. He toyed for quite some time with the idea of writing under the influence of opiates with De Quincy and Burroughs firmly in mind. But when he tried he just fell asleep. If Charles could have chosen the subjects for his dreams, he’d have chosen mice and vampires, always, always mice and vampires. The pen and the drink never fail to stink. Bukowski, Bukowski, what about that brawling soak, Bukowski? Four novels, five collections of short stories, and thirty-two (no it’s not a misprint) yes thirty-two books of poetry (oh yes, and a screenplay as well) and hardly a moment of sobriety between them. Nelson Algren was no junkie, he was no R.S. Hawker, no Georg Trakl… Frankie Machine might have been, but not Nelson – Nelson was clean. Nelson was banging Sartre’s missus and wouldn’t have wanted to have his libido fall out his arse. He would have needed all his sexual faculties about him to get it up with that thin-lipped old crow, head of bun and bullshit. What was it she said now? “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” I’m sure Jan (Humphry) Morris would agree. But what’s that Woolly? Something about the trifling issue of XY chromosomes to overcome. You really are a pettifogging spoilsport. I wonder how much writing Edwin Arlington Robinson got done when he was pissed..., or Hamilton, or Lowry, or Poe full of coke and liquor?… 178

Who craves the Nobel Prize for Literature when Pessoa, Kafka, Lispector, Joyce, Nabokov, Hardy, Proust, Tolstoy, Miller, Lorca and Chekhov didn’t receive it? And, on the other side of the equation, who reads or gives a cavorting fuck about the literary contributions of José Echegaray, Giosue Carducci, Paul Heyse, Verner Von Heidenstam, Rudolf Euken, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Karl Gjellerup, Sully Prodhomme or Henryk Sienkiewicz…? “Not I,” said Charles. “Not I,” said Charles. The Nobel Prize for literature is an insignificant bauble. Sartre, the myopic toad-faced sham, had the right idea (his own for a change, although it could have been that slut of a wife of his that suggested it) when he threw it back in their smug Swedish faces. (But of course he had to ruin it by dressing it up as a protest to what had happened in Algeria. And then to change his mind and decide he did want it after all – just how cuntish was that!) Hamsun gave his Nobel Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels, who was at least, unlike Sartre, a man of unswerving conviction. Pynchon had rather more integrity when declining the William Dean Howells Medal in 1975, awarded to Gravity’s Rainbow. He wrote, “The Howells Medal is a great honor, and, being gold, probably a good hedge against inflation, too. But I don't want it. Please don't impose on me something I don't want. It makes the Academy look arbitrary and me look rude [...] I know I should behave with more class, but there appears to be only one way to say no, and that's no.” The Noble Prize for Literature is such a bad joke that Erik Axel Karlfeldt had it forced upon him posthumously – in the very year of his death – after he had emphatically declined it in 1918. Okay Faulkner, Böll, Eliot, Camus, Hamsun, Beckett and a few others worthy of it actually received it, but then they couldn’t get it wrong every year. The Sickness of the Seaside: Their legs slip-slide beneath them as if belonging to a cow molested by BSE. The dull fear in their eyes, their bovine confusion, is an insult to the concept of distress. Let them burn! Let every one of the filthy dumb cunts burn! After all, what is madness to a retard but garnish to slop? It was almost as if the town had been constructed according to some Parr template, a cut and paste job of countless seaside shit holes, and then left to pickle in its own neglect. I hear the gulls screeching in the middle of the night. I hear them disembowelling bin bags and feasting on their intestinal putridity. I hear them fighting with cats over grey ribs and leg bones. The smell of Lily of the Valley and Silvikrin: the perfume of death. Two days have passed and still nothing. 179

Charles hasn’t stepped outside his flat for fear of missing the call. What was her game? Maybe her father, a powerful and dangerous man, has discovered the note and forbidden her to ring the number. Now and again people look up at the windows of his flat. Who are they and what do they want? The cars are once more arranging themselves in telling configurations. He decides to stop looking out his windows, but cannot always resist the temptation. He is running short of cigarettes and drink. He cannot bring himself to eat anything. Maybe the man in the blue tracksuit knows something. On the fourth day, with no cigarettes in the house and only one can of superbrew remaining, Charles had no choice but to leave his flat and get supplies. (He had phoned his sister the day before to ask her to bring him some fags and booze. He’d rung her 62 times before remembering that she’d gone to stay with a sick friend.) He stood poised outside the door of his flat and, hearing nothing, slammed the door behind him and sped down the stairs and out onto the street. He stopped on the pavement beneath his windows. He thought he could hear ringing. He ran back up the stairs, put his ear to his door and heard nothing. He ran off again, and once out onto the street ran as fast as he could to the off licence, situated not more than a few hundred yards away, ignoring the clamour of taunting telephone peals as he went. When he got there, there was a queue of four people. He had expected it. One of them, a woman in her forties, was wearing a blue tracksuit. She turned around to look at him as he came in; she couldn’t have made her associations any clearer. Her mobile phone began to ring. Her phone began to ring and he knew all subtlety was out the window. And then, as if the call itself had not been enough, he heard the name ‘Catherine’ mentioned: Catherine?… Catherine Boucher? Of course… it had to be. They have always known him to be vulnerable and so, probably sensing he was onto them anyway, have decided to launch a full frontal assault. This was bad news. He had no chance of winning them over by brute force: they could crush him with an ease that made him feel giddy and fragile about the neck. The woman behind the counter was serving with all the urgency of a corpse. Was there no end to their spheres of influence? He knew that his phone would be ringing in his absence – they had indicated as much – so he just bided his time and bought his supplies leisurely. That’d teach ’em. A couple of them seemed surprised at just how nonchalant he was being. But he suddenly got the feeling he was playing a dangerous game and speeded up a little, and even broke into a trot on his way back home. He saw Gyulus ride past on his bike, two pheasants draped over his crossbar, spitting at stray cats as he cycled on his merry way. He thought 180

about calling after him, but didn’t: it wouldn’t have been fair. (Such nobility in the face of peril.) He thought he could smell a familiar odour on the stairs as he made his way up to the flat, but he dismissed it as best he could. However, when he strode into his hallway there was no dismissing what he smelt. It was her perfume. It was definitely her perfume. He didn’t know the brand, but he knew the smell and it was everywhere, in all his rooms, stroking and tickling his olfactory bulb as it had done on those occasions when he’d strolled past her and languished in her smiles and the flickering attention of her eyes, and on that day at the bookstore when she’d been in such proximity to him that he’d nearly pissed himself with fear. It occurred to him that he might write of this scent and so trap its essence, so as to be able to savour it long after he has become saturated by it, long after it has been lost in stale air and cigarette smoke. But he couldn’t think of a word or phrase worthy of reaching for his notebook. Divagating, his mind happens on the poet, Diane Ackerman, and her book (well the synopsis on the back cover of it, to be precise), A Natural History of the Senses, in which she repents the lack of effort put into creating a vocabulary for olfaction, for while colours have names aplenty our poor little niffs have not one. Nothing appeared to have been taken or disturbed. He thought maybe she’d left a note, and hunted for it: under his dribble-stained pillow the colour of old teabags, in his coat pockets, between the pages of a book (paying special attention to The Collected Works of Christina Rossetti and a selection of love poetry by various well-known poets, separating every page expectantly). After an hour he had found no note and decided to stop looking. He smiled to himself in recognition of her cunning, still believing the note to be in his flat somewhere. He was quite happy to concede a temporary defeat. The smell appeared to come in waves, to almost disappear in recession only to crash back to the shore of his fraught nostrils. What had she been doing in his flat? Was she still in his flat? Had she come to the flat alone? How had she managed to get in? All these questions needed answering before Charles could do anything. Was all this part of a larger plan to stop him finishing his book? Did they plan to deny him his creative outlet, his métier? Could all this suggestion of a grand amour just be masking ulterior motives designed to undermine his aspirations, his potential as an author? The more he thought about it the less bizarre it seemed. 181

He hadn’t written a word for almost a week. He couldn’t face it with everything that was happening. He hadn’t even attempted to sit down at his tabletop desk, knowing it was futile. Still no call came through. Charles was forever thinking of places to go and sit other than his flat. On days when he was unable to concentrate, unable to get the words down, he felt he had to go somewhere, and wherever that somewhere was he felt easier with himself if his visitations were not so habitual that they gave him away, spoke of his lack of occupation, opened him up to the idle speculation and pity of onlookers. The more options he could uncover for places to frequent when he could no longer stay within the book-lined walls, threadbare carpet and ochre ceilings of his flat, the better. In the winter he sometimes took refuge in the old deserted law courts: he took pleasure in the high vaulted ceilings, dark oak panelling and brass furnishings, but the presence of lunatic wastrels and starving dogs tended to sour the experience for him. A favoured haunt was the library. Pavilionstone library is never what you’d call busy and, as a result, standards have been allowed to slip. At the zenith of its high walls cobwebs clung to the ornate covings and grew darker year by year with the gradual accumulation of air-bound dirt, so that they came to resemble the scraggly black shawls of Spanish widows. You could also see them dangling from the strip-lights like ebony snickersnees, and breeding in isolated pockets lower down the walls. The women that work in the library never clean it; it is as much as they can do to prevent the dust adhering to themselves, and rarely even that. These women are either sylphlike or gross. There are no half-measures: none are shapely, buxom, plump, heavy-boned or burly. On the whole, the porkier of the two sets of women are less inclined towards complete inertia, for a family pack of biscuits (bourbons, digestives, rich teas and jammy dodgers being among their favourites) does not fetch or open itself. They are all the grateful side of 50, with a few of them less than 10 ticket-less years from eternal rejection. None it seems has energy to spare: their days are punctuated with yawns and milky tea. Returned books pile up on trolleys where they remain for months on end before finally finding their way back to their gaps on the shelves. Libraries are known for their stoic quiescence, but I’d guess this one is muter than most: you might hear the flicking of some pages, the slurp of hot tea, the muffled crunching of leavened bread, a lamenting sigh, a snuffled snore, the lofty purr of florescent tubes, the creaking of chairs, the percolated descent of a runny nose, a sniff, a cough, and maybe even a remote whisper, but nothing more than these things and often much, much less. The carpet is 182

thicker than you’d expect to find in a library and ideal for eating the clatter of pacing feet. The library is shaped like so: Џ A reception desk cluttered with elbows and the odd head, lying injun-like on its side listening for distant trains, is situated directly in front of you as you enter. Either side of this desk is a long aisle of books with a walkway down the middle and 20 double-sided 7 ft shelving units pointing in from the walls like sets of ribs. In the spaces between the shelving, pushed up against the walls, are undersized metal desks with rickety wooden chairs tucked beneath them. Exceptionally tall windows are dispersed along the outer two walls, through which you can see almost nothing of what is going on outside, for they are caked in years of filth that nobody inside has ever wanted to see beyond. The people that come here do not want the world outside following them in through the windows, and that includes the staff, who have made this place their own and who only open the doors to the public for fear of being shut out themselves. The fewer visitors the better as far as they are concerned, and they do not attempt to hide the fact. Even the regulars are completely ignored or sneered at as they enter. The regulars don’t mind one bit – they revel in such impersonality. (One of the primary reasons Charles visits the library as often as he does – when clean – is that there, and there alone, he can be sure that the voices he hears are his own.) It is proffered by those with views on such subjects that the library lasses eat and sleep in the basement, which is apparently laid out in the style of a dormitory, complete with bunk-beds and communal shower facilities. The insularity of their collective comportment and the sickly anaemia of their skin would certainly suggest that there is some truth to this. The regulars do not come to a library like this for the reading matter alone; they come to think, to mull over and condense the teeming logorrhoea bubbling inside their heads that they dare not speak. Polite Arthur is one such regular. He visits at least 4 times a week and sits at one of the small desks for 2-3 hours hating himself for some minor indiscretion that might have happened the day before or 50 years ago. Charles goes there to write and 183

sometimes manages it. He also goes there to avoid chance encounters and spies. Other popular haunts for Charles were doctor’s surgeries and hospital waiting rooms (he loved to be around the sick, especially the old and sick, and collected pamphlets on maladies from thrush to pulmonary embolisms, from piles to lung cancer), cafes (where he drank coffee very slowly and studied the prices of varying kinds of breakfasts that he never ordered), benches (if he could find one without some dreary-eyed pensioner sitting on it), the hotel bar (usually when accompanied by M., the beverage benefactor, for as a rule he was unable to afford the prices they charged for their watered-down piss), and his mother’s house (obligatory, as she was one of the few people he knew who was as isolated from meaningful human contact as he was, but blessed in that she did not suffer from it in any way). Whenever Charles left his flat he always took a pen, a notebook (a Moleskine – the notebook of great men) and a book to read or, more often than not, into which he would hide his eyes so as not to arouse suspicion. If he took any notes they would ordinarily be concerned with curious snippets of a conversation he had overheard, the physical appearance of some female he encountered, or how he happened to be treated by the people he interacted with. He would still try to strike up conversations with people he liked the look of, despite all the unpromising responses he had encountered in the past. Charles was a curious, even paradoxical, amalgam of paranoiac preciousness and good-humoured resilience. He sensed affronts to his being from the most innocuous of sources and yet was able, on many occasions, as and when he happened to be struck by an overwhelmingly euphoric sense of self-belief, to seemingly go out of his way to make himself a glaring target of derision. When these moments arrived he would behave much like an excited schoolboy replete with conjecture and amusement, excitable to the extreme. It was during these high points that he told bad jokes (at which he was quite often the only person to be found laughing, and laughing hysterically at that), and initiated discourse with aloof strangers, who more often than not remained that way. * Charles’s books were not looked on by Charles as mere possessions; they were extensions of his self. Their readiness-to-hand, as he sprawled on his sofa with them climbing up the walls, leaning and tumbling about his hands and feet, meant that he came to consider them as integral to his being. Should he 184

misplace one momentarily, he would be thrown into a panic. It would not be an exaggeration to compare it with the situation a man might find himself in should he temporarily forget his own name, or those of his family. It was because of this that Charles could never seriously countenance the idea of loaning books from the library, for to eventually return them – which was something borrowed books would never allow him to forget was their prescribed future – would be like sacrificing part of his identity. His solely biological memory capacity was not especially poor; it was, in all likelihood, about average, if not slightly better than average. Nevertheless, to separate Charles from his bookish domain would be like isolating a hermit crab from its adopted shell, without which it is vulnerable and incomplete. Charles’s literary prowess, not to mention his ability to recall the names, productivity and dates of literary figures, is very much symbiotic, a harmonized collusion of the neural and the paper-based. Charles kept a written and pictorial log of every book he owned, which he stored for safekeeping at his mother’s house. (She may not have been as devoted an admirer of her son, the writer, as Toole’s mother had been, but nor was she illiterate like Camus’, dead by her own hand before he was two like Lautréamont’s, or prone to the flights of fancy and shameful reading habits of Gogol’s.) He had been prompted to take this precaution after being continually plagued by intrusive imaginings and dreams that depicted his flat going up in flames, and his being powerless to prevent his partial incineration. He had been unable to read or watch Fahrenheit 451 in its entirety – he kept this novel well out of sight, along with a collection of York Notes on… that, as one often denounces any shameful influences, he’d rather not admit to. Gogol burnt the second instalment of Dead Souls. Thomas Amory is also said to have burnt his manuscript. Brod saved Kafka’s work from the flames by going back on his word…. Charles found a letter in the hallway of his flat. Somebody had posted it under his door. It read: Dear Charles Schaefer: We browsed through, glanced at, pretty much ignored read your manuscript, Razors for Baby, whatever it was; what was it? That 185

shit about stillborn babies, with a certain degree of disbelief, incredulity, fucking amazement at your level of self kiddology and naivety with interest. However, unfortunately for you, you sad, sad, sad, talentless dreamer we are unable to accept stomach, or even read it that frightful, ham-fisted attempt at prose for publication. Thank you but no thank you for your laughable and unwanted interest in Dog Shit Publications. Yours Sincerely, —— —— So, he thought to himself, the campaign of demoralization is officially underway. But they’d have to do better than that. Didn’t they know that PKD once received 17 rejection letters in a single day? The man in the blue tracksuit sat contentedly eating his fry-up while talking to himself. Rather an unsightly combination, to be sure. He is a tall, lanky, maladroit man with thick greasy hair and a terminal pallor to his skin. “She has her children to think about, after all.” Charles, sitting two tables away, determined not to acknowledge or engage with this dangerous man, began humming to himself in an effort to avoid hearing what he had to say. The man in the blue tracksuit wasn’t about to be beaten by such a straightforward ploy and simply upped the volume of his voice. “She has to put them first. His record with children is not what you’d call exemplary, now is it?” {How could he say that given his own predilection for young boys? Was Charles to blame for the fact that nature – that most relentless of tormenters – had him sire only one out of six? Little Timmy, his first and only boy, is now past his prime at 11 years old. As a sign of his disgust he’d named his daughters after concentration camps: Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Belzec, 186

and Sobibor. What really gets the man in the blue tracksuit sweating are sickly slum-kids aged from 6-9 if he had to narrow it down, but then you have to allow for the differences between individual kids. For instance, some 9-yearolds might look and act more like 12-year-olds and vice versa, so it is not purely an issue of age. Poor Deborah, his fat, slovenly wife, had five babies in seven years. Her gut looks like it’s had 500 lashes every morning for every one of those years. Her arse is a sack full of shot puts, her tits empty icing bags, but he couldn’t give a flying fuck what she looks like. Deborah can’t have any more now, so he never goes near her unless it’s to retrieve his dinner. She lies on the sofa all day and most of the night eating chocolate hobnobs and watching anything that comes on the TV as long as it’s a soap opera, a chat show, or a pirate broadcast about wannabe escapees – suffice it to say this does not leave time to do much else. It is just as well there is a TV in the kitchen, and the shithouse for that matter. All the girls had been rented out from the age of three. He has just started renting Timmy out to acquaintances who consider him perfect age. In return for the loan of his offspring he is either paid in cash or more often than not supplied with something more suited to his tastes. He once left one of his poems at the cafe for Charles to find: Secret grooming song The not yet child is groomed her best. Too young for most, but not for Him So deftly lifted from her nest That helped him in. He plays with her, and takes a peep. For other playfellows she sighs; He has many more friends to keep Tears fresh in her eyes. In his mid-to-late twenties, Faulkner is said to have served as a scoutmaster for the Oxford Boy Scout troop, a position from which he was politely solicited to resign, for “moral reasons.” Estelle Oldham, having just divorced Cornell Franklin, married Faulkner at College Hill Presbyterian Church, just north of Oxford. Estelle brought to the marriage two children, Malcolm and Victoria. I shall leave you to make the connections.} No matter how loudly Charles hummed, and he could hum quite a din, the man in the blue tracksuit’s voice always broke through. “When was the last time he made the effort to talk to his own offspring?” An old woman 187

with thick scabs of egg yolk clinging to the bristles on her chin glared at Charles, and put her bony forefinger to her thin raggedy old lips. Charles was incensed, shouting out, “Tell him not me!” pointing to the man in the blue tracksuit who, with his head bowed, continued to eat his breakfast as if nothing had happened. “Even Albert Fish kept his hands off his own,” muttered Charles, defiantly. On turning around he became aware that a number of other people were looking disapprovingly in his direction. Fuck them and their childish games, thought Charles, fuck them. With this, Charles pushed himself back in his chair as if making to leave, when the following words left him limp and immobile. “Keep this to yourself, but she doesn’t even know he’s alive.” Charles remained where he was long after everyone else had left. Eventually the owner came over and asked him to leave, but Charles failed to respond. Finally, after repeating his request, this time accompanied by a firm nudge, Charles, stiff-legged and still consumed with reverie, obliged him. He walked the short distance home and once inside vowed never to leave its confines again. It’s him. I hear his piercing pipsqueak voice. I get my keys in and shut the door without a moment to spare. What was that? It’s no mistake: she called him dad. I’d bet my life on it. I’d bet my life it’s no joke. The daughter of a man like that I’d like to see. I wish I’d dropped my keys, or they’d come back some thirty seconds earlier. I wait with my door ajar until they leave. When I see his burnished black and white shoes descending the stairs I shut my door. I peer through the fisheye peeper in my door and see her pretty young face, her tumbling curls. He doesn’t deserve her. There it was, the tell-tale knocking from the flat above, the rhythmic percussion of steady, emphatic fucking. That shit-for-brains up there is never short of trim to bang away at. If only he’d move his bed into the middle of the room, or sandwich a pillow between the headboard and the wall, so that the strokes of his cock didn’t resonate down through the brickwork to places where it wasn’t welcome. (Kafka could never find peace and quiet.) That animal would fuck anything. They all spread their legs for him, spread them wide and peeled open their loose gashes for the likes of him – a lazy, feckless and stupid man like that. He was welcome to his fornicating; he could fuck his whores until his balls rattled free from their sacks for all Charles cared. For Charles had his art, and art is, after all, as Anthony Burgess put it, the prize of a “sublimated libido.” 188

Carious Charles, carious Charles, if only your shoulders were wider, and your arms a little stronger, you could carious Charles. Charles felt bigger than his world, outsized and outlandish in the refinery of his self-cultivated tastes. His predicament prompted him to regularly recall a famous photograph, taken by Diane Arbus, of tiny, bespectacled jewish (anything to champion Tom Eliot and his impish sense of humour) parents gawping up somewhat disbelievingly at the towering bulk that is their son, as he stands, stooped, his head an inch or two from the ceiling. Charles’s talents and interests made him comparably freakish to those around him: the ignorant chaff that he was forced to share the confined space of small town life with, people without poetry, without passion, all functionality and small purpose, people without that deep, excruciating and location-less/object-less pain that makes humanity worth something. He could pity them their insipidness, but why should he? Why should he pity the pitiless? Anyway, pity is for the gods, and he was not a god yet. 189

TARGET PRACTICE The chubby faces and cheesy grins of pig-eyed downs are everywhere. Turn any corner in this town of ours and you will be confronted with a whole troop of such unfortunate wretches, who fight to speak through clots of mucus from mouths built only to gurgle and scream, mouths wrenched open by haphazard muscle contractions with nothing to say. Their helpers lead them about and talk to them with a supercilious seriousness; they are even more repellent than their moronic charges, who just serve to fuel the sanctimony of their helpers by drooling at them adoringly. These are the good people of our age, people that are so impoverished they have to grasp at the paltry recognition of the retarded. So they protect these ruined people from the vagaries of themselves and everyday life – so what? Let them stroll into the path of a speeding bus, drink bleach, set fire to themselves with matches, or whatever else you protect such creatures from. Why must we nurture hebetude? The insides of my skin are crawling. I’m like a sheep with fly strike. The blowflies have infested my organs with their young and I can feel them eating me alive; I can feel them chomping through the soft cushions of my spine and tunnelling into my liver…. In 1888 Nietzsche wrote, “I always see before me the opposite of that which Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favour of the stronger, better-constituted, and the progress of the species. Precisely the opposite is palpable: the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average, even the sub-average types.” This is Pavilionstone. This is the experiment. I, Charles, am the man punished for his ascendance. Bare tree branches reach into the sky like witches’ fingers, like murderous hieroglyphs, like a thousand hookworms looking for blood… I haven’t spoken to anyone in more than a month. I have gone about my business as usual, but made no effort to engage in idle pleasantries, and so have not uttered a word for in excess of thirty days. I feel like one of those 190

people with alarming facial disfigurements that everyone sees while making a point of not looking. Without recognition of your existence from outside something peculiar happens. Rene was wrong: we need more than just our own thoughts. A tsunami of rotting rabbits and meat flies threatens to flood every nook and cranny of this town…. My urine looks and smells like cheap Spanish brandy, so much so that I was tempted to drink it this morning to quell my hangover. Lowry would have had it down his neck without a second thought. Cages in crypto-cellars harbour abducted youngsters soaked in Rohypnol, semen and spun sugar. They are everywhere I go. Every face I see is etched with furtive sin. What do these people do tucked up indoors all the time anyway? No doubt, I’d guess, hatching some deviant little clandestine foulness that they can commit within the privacy of their own homes. An Englishman’s home is his castle, complete with dungeon and torture chamber…. 191

AN EXORCISM OF PARTS The morning sun radiates a gaudy display of white light direct from the rainsoaked rooftops of my neighbours’ houses. I hear a grunt from behind me and turn to look at Elizabeth who is tied to the bed. Although still asleep, she restlessly twists her wrists and ankles inside four rope fetters. The friction has produced a striking set of markings on her unsatisfactorily pale skin. She’s bound to wake herself up soon, what with all her fidgeting. And what is my plan when she does? (There is a long-standing debate about whether or not the self is real: Heraclitus, Buddha, Hume, Nietzsche, Sartre, Russell and Wittgenstein are but a few of the philosophers and thinkers who have, at some time or another in their lives, held the view that the self does not exist. Of these men, it could be said that their doubts were but luxuries afforded to their ordered selves, a luxury Elizabeth, if given the choice, could have done without. Now, as it happens, she has little more. We all suffer from a form of Humean “honest bewilderment” when trying to locate our own essence – unless, that is, we choose to establish clarity at honesty’s expense, as so often happens – but with Elizabeth it is not only a simple essence of selfhood that is lacking, but pretty much everything but the search itself. As she grapples with the contents of her muddled mind she can find consolation only in impulsive action, action born from an undeniable, if unfathomable, source. The past Frank has restored to her is one she feels to be ill-fitting, badly tailored to her instinctual being. She is trapped within an endless stream of non-foundational inferences, and so left to the mercy of the only non-inferential grounds to selfknowledge she has available to her, that which reason cannot deny: her impulses, her natural proclivities, her instincts, her undeniable inclinations, call them what you will.) She stepped over the mark last night, a retrogressive step that left me floundering. She threatened Elizabeth’s fragile existence with her infernal recollections. I resurrect the dead not her. Who the fuck does she think she is? 192

As we walked to the car, briskly, with her hand clasped tightly in mine, she kept insisting that she had recognised a woman by the name of Justine. I mocked her in an attempt to dissuade her from her newfound conviction. I asked what this Justine woman’s surname was, whether or not she was married, or had kids, what she did for a living, where she had first met her, and as I had predicted, she was unable to come up with any answers. I laughed and said, “It sounds as if you know her about as well as she knows you: she didn’t even call you by your real name.” “When she came over and called me Elena, I felt like myself for the first time since the accident. I just replied to her as if I had been Elena. I just said ‘yes’, without quite knowing why, apart from the fact that it seemed the most natural thing to say.” “So what are you saying? That you’re no longer Elizabeth, but instead some woman called Elena that you know nothing about?” “Not exactly, but it’s not as simple as that.” “And just what do you mean by, ‘I felt like myself’? Really though, what does that mean, exactly?” “I don’t know, EXACTLY.” “All that I know is I’ve finally got someone that I can just about call my wife again, and I’m not about to let her fade away chasing after some complete stranger.” “Well it’s not for you to decide.” I didn’t reply and left her to her doubts as I drove us home. What was there to things when you broke them down? When you reduced them to their composite parts, you could see them for what they really were – mystique went and got itself full tabloid exposure, and then when we had tired of our being able to scuttle yet another enigma we just proceeded to forget about it, until it was safe to tentatively think about it again without having to dwell on its former destruction. She isn’t even trying anymore. She has given up after coming so far. What is she to me now? She’s a fucking nobody. She’s an arrangement of organs encased within a congregation of bone, covered with muscle, fat, skin and hair. The particular processes of her brain, the nucleus of her identity, within which she lives, her seat of personhood, is what should stop me thinking what I am thinking. She’s no more to me now than a piece of fucking death graffiti, a piece of formless, hollow ectoplasm. There was a point at which I realized I could go no further, that I had achieved all I was ever likely to achieve. Oh, she might have improved and got progressively more natural and convincing with her manipulations of her 193

adopted past, but the time it would have taken would have stripped it of its reward. Besides, it is not altogether unlikely that I would have failed to notice any such subtleties of transformation should they have occurred. She sounded as much like her as she ever would, looked as much like her as she ever would, quasi-remembered her as much as she ever would, behaved as much like her as she ever would, and yet there was now not one ounce of satisfaction to be had from this realization of Elizabeth’s closest continuer. I had gone pretty much as far as I could ever hope to go. I had brought Elizabeth back to life as far as such a feat was possible here, but I couldn’t let her know. I couldn’t hug her and welcome her back. She had come back too gradually to make the desired impact. Even if, after years of effort, I had managed to reincarnate Elizabeth without a single discrepancy, I’m not sure it would have been enough. The gestation period would have been too protracted; I see her with judging eyes, with comparative eyes, with eyes that see beyond the creation and break her up into countless slivers of imperfect mimicry. I tried to make it work. I tried to reap the rewards for all the effort, for both our sakes, but I never stopped having to try. It never just came. The need for reinforcing was ever present. (It was close to this time that I started killing things in dizzying fits of revengeful passion, and when the lowest underworlds of filth made a successful play for my heart.) Neglected, Elizabeth soon went to seed, reverted to her origins, whatever they were, and then there was no going back; although I did try once or twice during those times when I repented throwing my dreams into the flames. 194

“Show me a monster, a hideous malformation of body parts with skin as rough as toasted bread, hatchet teeth and mirrored eyes, and I’ll happily succumb to its wants. Let such an abomination take interest in me and I’ll wash its feet with my tongue and thus secure it in its superiority, so long as it favours me and makes me monstrous by association. Let it release me from my smallness as I feed it warm placenta-soaked fetuses fresh from pillaged wombs like some nigger dropping grapes into the cavernous gob of a sweaty Roman emperor. Let my stomach leap as I drop to unfathomable depths: a son all too pleased to follow his father’s trodden path, a path worn into the entrails of dead men. My dirt is the world’s dirt, and so nothing more than a stain on a stain….” 195

There were times when I thought I saw the flicker of her presence struggling for control beneath the skin as she tried to make herself known to me, to show the gratitude and the love that she and she alone could offer. I would dream of her: She stood alone in a huge hall battling with millions of marauding ants that no sooner died than were replaced. They lined the walls, the floor and the ceiling. They climbed all over her and it was, at times, as much as she could do to keep her face free of them. It always ended the same way. She would set fire to the hall in the hope of destroying them. The ants crackled and popped, fused and dropped from the ceiling in blankets of charred Pompeiian rainfall. Flames caressed her as she hollered out my name till frazzled ants filled the air and her throat, quickly stifling her agonizing noise…. I’d hoped for her return and the resumption of our life together. But she was always testing, always picking for loose ends in the hope of dismantling what she could only see as an elaborate artifice. I began to find her hateful at this point, and regret the offence that I was committing against my wife’s memory. When she would deride her former self, it was as much as I could do to refrain from smashing her face in: “Who would do something as stupid as that?” “It sounds like I was a right barrel of laughs!” “If that’s the case, maybe I’d be better off not remembering who I used to be.”… “Frank, you are a cunt, no? You make your dead wife live again and then what you do? You break her. Where is the sense, Frank, in doing it this way?” as Giuseppe might remark. And in his own inimitable way he would have touched on something – no? 196

THE BROWN RABBIT TRAMP Lance’s father was disembowelled with the sharpened end of a toothbrush within a month of his son’s birth. Lance had never seen him in the flesh. Lance’s mother was cut open by his father and left to die. Years later his mother’s sister became the woman he was forced to call mum. She was the kind of mother who deserved to end her days cut up into pieces, her headless body raped, her internal organs flushed down the toilet, her head made into a makeshift dartboard. She was the kind of mother who could never come close to eliciting a son’s love, even after he’d gone to the trouble of murdering her. The one thought that used to console him as a boy was that she and her lifestyle were so unhealthy that she couldn’t be expected to live all that long. But as it turned out, she went on far beyond his expectations. *** Some of the things about her that contributed to Lance’s loathing also contributed to her bad health, so he was strangely torn between approving and disapproving of many of her habits. She smoked sixty cigarettes a day, ate gargantuan amounts of food high in either fat, sugar, salt or all three, drank heavily and had sex with an abundance of unpleasant, foul-smelling men. She was, as you can probably imagine, an unsightly and rather noisome individual. She stood around 5ft7in. tall and weighed approximately twenty stone. Her hair was balding where she scratched at it constantly with her long bark-like fingernails. Her apricot toy poodle, that went by the name of Boris (her little warrior), was the only living thing she ever took any care of. Her one true passion was painting by numbers, a constant annoyance to Lance that made absolutely no headway in shortening her life. She would sit at the living room table swathed in her blue plastic overalls, a fag churning up smoke in the ashtray, and paint her regimented watercolours for hours. Sometimes she would call Lance down from his room to make her a cup of tea or a sandwich, while she remained hunched over her painting sheets, her tongue hanging out to aid concentration. Anyone would think she was fucking Turner, as opposed to the daft cuntish turd she really was. Not only was there the production of these hideously unimaginative daubs to contend 197

with, but also having to live with them slowly but surely taking up every inch of wall space in the house. Everywhere you looked were rectilinear sections of wishy-washy feebleness that his mother had painstakingly created according to predetermined lines and colour codes: cheery little girls in pink bonnets, old carts in lush forests, happy families building sandcastles on a beach, cute puppy dogs confusedly nibbling at their own tails, and many more slices of pre-packaged harmony besides. When she buttered a slice of bread she would spread it so thickly that as she folded it in two before cramming it into her mouth the butter would ooze out of each end like greasy yellow toothpaste. She would cook up sixteen frozen Yorkshire puddings and eat them in a single sitting with lashings of butter and a stuffing of crushed sausages. Such sittings could last up to a couple of hours, sometimes a lot longer if she fell asleep before finishing: she suffered from chronic heartburn and so had to take up the offer of sleep whenever possible, her nightly slumber being so interrupted as to render its rejuvenating powers almost completely defunct. There was a pub at the end of their road, called The Brown Rabbit, that she would frequent at least three nights a week. She’d get tanked up on strong cider before making the trek up the road. Out would come the Neil Diamond record, a 2 litre bottle of cider, her make-up bag, and a fresh pack of Rothmans, and she was set. She always made the mistake of glugging down most of the cider before applying her make-up. Before she went out, she’d ask Lance how she looked. He’d lie and say she looked fine. As a rule she looked fucking awful. Could she have looked any other way? Her hair would be thick with lacquer in an attempt to disguise the bald spots. The colour of her lipstick was always too dark for her sickly complexion, and she invariably broke the cardinal rule for lipstick application by failing to apply it within its designated area. (She never would have been so careless with one of her tragically fastidious watercolours.) Her nails were always impressively hideous, thin slivers of dislodged scalp lurking beneath each one. Smell of fried food and cheap cologne, of fags and drink and staleness, of week-old sweat and greasy hair, of unguarded flatulence and open wounds, of piss-stained trouser legs and decaying molars, of physical exertion and dog shit brought in from the cold: the smell of my mother and her simian conquests as they fumbled and fucked as best they could with libidos sluggish with neglect and bellies and hearts full of slow death. Her bedroom was across the landing from his. There had never been doors on any of the rooms except the toilet. “What do we need doors for? What have you got to hide from anyone? You haven’t the imagination to have anything worth hiding.” 198

Whenever these men came back from the pub, which was most every time she went to the pub, Boris would curl up in his basket in Lance’s mother’s room and growl himself to sleep. Lance would lie in bed and visit elaborate and savage curses on them both until he was drawing in deep sleeping breaths of that malodorous room and wishing them dead in many different flavours. She loved Boris and wasn’t afraid to show it. She allowed him to lick inside her mouth, rub his bright pink cock up and down her leg and all over her cushions, and shit wherever he pleased. She fed him the finest cuts of beef, chicken breast and smoked back bacon, and fretted endlessly about how little Boris ate. Lance was indifferent to Boris. He was not jealous of the love Boris received from his mother, because the last thing he wanted was to be loved by such filth. If anything, he pitied him for having nobody in the world but her. So when he killed Boris it was not through any sense of resentment; it was just the easiest way to hurt her. It wasn’t enough that Boris die; he wanted her to think that she was directly to blame for it. He wanted her to be always haunted with the thought that she was culpable for her beloved Boris’s demise. Boris was a snappy little fucker, and despite his only having two fangs remaining in his head could still do some damage if he went for you. He rarely went for her, but she soon forgave him if he did – “He’s not been well, have you Bozzie?” Given his propensity to attack Lance, he envisaged having problems manipulating the dog’s movements. He ruminated on the possibilities for poodle disposal for weeks before coming up with a workable plan. He ended up drowning him in her dirty bathwater. She thought he’d jumped in, hit his head on the side of the bath, knocked himself out and drowned. She took full responsibility and damn near killed herself with grief. Success brings its own disappointments. 199

PANDEMONIUM NIGHT AT THE LONDON AND PARIS Flesh abounds on a rickety wooden stage – sickly, dirt skin of Eastern Bloc gypsy women stripping for spuds and vodka, women with black wire hair, filthy great moles dribbling down their cheeks, and eyes that have rolled back on themselves, greyish-white like pairs of stale eggs. One on the go, others on stools, in the wings, in view, with their hands clasped together. For the profligate crowd, unsteady on cough medicine and gin, this is the new kink. They’ve had their fill of smooth white marbleised skin taut over bowstring muscle. Not one more solid tanned backside; you can keep your fastidiously attended pubic area, your uncluttered pink tissue perfectly intertwined, your silky hair and schoolgirl eyes, your clear plastic high heels, and a different dress for every dance. The necromancy of the acrid and the unclean is here, a gift of awareness from beyond the wall: the spell of grazed knees, bloodshot eyes, dark labia swinging in the smoky air like dog testis, petals of bulbous flesh encircling puckered anuses that extrude from bodies like the siphoning mouths of rat-tailed maggots, straggly black manes kissed with grease and grey hairs dragged over to cover bald spots, dirty hands, infected scratches, filth ground into deep creases, the squirming gyrations of flabby pockmarked buttocks, the heavy brow of syphilitic dementia, necks and wrists decorated with ligature marks, the stare of a Mayan god… “Here tonight we have the best, Black-eyed bints and cool incest. See it all, old and new, Sweat on skin like graveyard dew. The girls: half-dead, primed and ready Hollow, swaying, legs unsteady. Spit at them and their sour songs! Call for the red-hot heated tongs! 200

Skin on bone in short supply, Egg them on and watch them die! And don’t let a death worry you none; The threat of it’s only half the fun.” Their language is different to that of the crowd’s: it is aggressive, scornful, derisory, conspiratorial, and nobody has a want to learn it. They can skulk about in their swarthy enclaves all they like, but when it came to it they played the crowd’s game. Their eyes are hemmed in by black skin. They don’t dance. They have no moves in the traditional sense. Hypertrophic imbeciles climb the phlegmridden steps to the stage, their eyes cast to the floor as they kick their heels like sulky children, and the crowd howls for these swollen-headed beauties to show their scars, their miry cunts, their collapsed chests. They dip their hands into their unwashed genitals at the insistence of the crowd and its monetary incentives, and flick the resultant fluids into the mass of tongues and gaping mouths, wiping their hands on a couple of lucky faces along the way. The emaciated girls always get an extra whoop from the crowd. Nobody chatted or ordered fresh drinks when a Belsenic stinker was dragging her attenuated frame across stage to the pole. The skin hangs off their bones like wet washing, and as they descend the shiny silver pole at the corner of the stage it corrugates in squeaking ripples. These girls never fail to agitate the crowd; they have it baying at the stage, drooling over their oak apple knees, hoping to suck at some broken skin. Men with steel-toe-capped boots covered in cement and brick dust talk in hushed tones about the comparative quality of the girls to two men in antique Paul Smith suits smoking charcoal-tipped cigarettes. They complain to each other about the relatively timorous levels of repugnancy on show this particular night: there are no limbless midgets, no self-mutilators, no one showing off their bungled gender reassignment, no children afflicted with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, no Bellmer Babes, not even any live animal snuff to get one in the mood. A huge black woman climbs up on the stage, a real black mama – Mammy Two Shoes complete with thick stockings and red slippers. She pulls off her top, exposing her gargantuan tits and a pair of the biggest belly lips you’re ever likely to see. She turns around. Her back is a lattice wickerwork of welts; it looks as if someone has been playing noughts and crosses up and down her spine with a soldering iron. The clicking, whirring and flashing of 201

the Japanese business men’s huge cameras brings a smile to her headless mouth. There are always men and women straight from the gym, covered in sweat, feeling tight and rigorously proportioned, who never miss a show. They stare at the grotesques on stage until they can take no more, at which point they race someplace nearby and fuck like wolves, the skeletons of rusty roller coasters towering above them like psychosexual prophecies, the emetic images of decaying tissue surging through their heads as they revel in the honed gloriousness of their own bodies. As the next dancer gets up I catch a glimpse of some shaven-headed woman with train track scars on her temples: it’s the runaway. She sits there twitching and singing to herself like some bastard reincarnation of Fanny Hancock, watching as some besmirched tub of lard lifts her tumultuous gut up to her chest, revealing an ulcerated mass where a vagina should be. She stares at this spectacle with an avidity rarely witnessed in the sane. The openings of her eyes appear a trifle twisted, as if cut on the bias. Two huge Africans at the bar yell out, “Kiboko! Kiboko!”, and then fall about laughing and puking. A man standing beside me at the bar polishes off his third pipe of Ice Cream Dream (each containing a healthy dose of pure crystal methamphetamine). He places his hand on my shoulder and stares into my eyes; his white china eyeballs are covered in spidery red cracks, his pulse tapping impatiently at his shirt cuffs. I turn away and do my best to ignore the hand still lingering on my shoulder. I get myself a drink while I try to decide what to do, a cocktail by the name of ‘Super Gama Fairy’: a bile coloured concoction consisting primarily of GHB and absinthe. Before long my arms and legs fail to respond to any of my higher-order requests – they are leaden, and I am stranded on a bar stool as the runaway takes to the stage. I am powerless to intervene and really haven’t any reason to want to anymore. It is over, and I haven’t succeeded. She is singing a song about her daddy as she bares the scars on her arm and rubs them between her legs. She picks at her temple wounds and they begin to bleed, blood running down over her cheeks like crimson sweat… “And daddy was the man for me… And daddy was the man for mee eeee eee.” I catch a glimpse of the old Elizabeth and my prick hardens. I see an elderly man wrapping cling film around the lower half of his face, hurriedly covering his mouth and nostrils with layer upon layer of the seethrough asphyxiant. He holds out for nearly a minute before collapsing under the table. I see his head on the floor, his heavily-veined hands grappling with those smothering layers of transparent plasticity. He doesn’t manage to free himself. He remains in thrall to the vacuum. One eye stares out across 202

the floor of the pub, over the splatterings of spunk and spit, a sea of dog ends, vomit, and blood. My ears are full of grinding teeth. I attempt to reach for my fags or maybe I don’t, anyway I don’t have one in my hand. I’m not smoking, but I want to be… A searing pain somewhere… My right forefinger and its neighbour are attempting to fuse themselves to the business end of a lighted cigarette. I try and separate my fingers from it, but experience some resistance from the happy fusion of filter and melted skin. A man with a glassy bald head and Elvis-style shades laps at the cracked skin and blisters between the runaway’s toes. The rancid taste has him wincing with delight. He goes at it harder. He yanks at her leg and she falls to the floor. He pulls her from the stage onto a trestle table, glasses and ashtrays dropping to the ground and shattering on impact. His tongue works away at her waxy lughole as the rest of the pub gradually close in on her. Next thing I know she is standing on the table, having pushed her assailants aside, bouncing up and down on the spot, grinning inanely like the starveling daughter of Toad of Toad Hall. Then the real show starts. She begins gnawing, rat-like, at the stitches on her right arm, ripping them out one by one. The crowd is paroxysmal, men and women climbing over one another to get a closer look, knocking back drinks in preparation, bawling in anguished expectancy. I still can’t move properly, and am wary about attempting to stand. A creamy thrush-like discharge oozes from her arm, spitting into her eyes as she continues eating away at the threads that hold her forearm in one piece. Pretty soon her blackened appendage dangles from a single thread: a ladies dress glove, a tarnished gauntlet. A woman dressed in white Lycra and sweat bands snatches the arm from the last remaining strand and jams it between her legs. She tears a hole in the crotch of her leggings and inserts the warped dead fingers. The runaway kneels down and begins to cry. An Indian man with turmeric eyes and red teeth sucks on her stump and jacks off – he thinks of his young niece in her white cotton panties and the visits he has made on her, and plans another. “My father…he…he’s the only man for me,” the runaway mutters through snot and pink tears. “Are you sure I will not do? I treat you belly well, like a close relative. You could work in the restaurant and you could be my girl for good times,” the Indian gargles. It fell on deaf ears, on ears recently excavated by a pulsing tongue, on ears that had heard enough. Faces of kangaroos in the spotlight – paint flaking overhead – 100watt bulbs with no shades dangling from sticky, ochre ceilings – boarded-up win203

dows – drowsy eyes enveloped in stale smoke – weak chins and eroded insides – the conoid heads of dour simpletons – aching jaw – powdery teeth – smell of indole and damp corners – ingénue hissing through yellow teeth and bleeding gums – jejune little whores with a little money on the brain – lead boots of Cosa Nostra pulling me down through clotted seas – cracked specs propped up high on the noses of cracked men – 100watt bulbs with no shades swinging to and fro from sticky ochre ceilings – beer babies born to sickness – toothy harelip smiles – the stale friction of repeated frottage – thrushy cunt peeled apart for your pleasure – paint flaking from the ceiling – petrified toes on morgue yellow feet curl up from opened-toed sandals – dying nerves shuddering behind the eyes – conoid-headed simpletons astride miniature penny farthings – rancid little tarts with a little money on the brain – aching jaw – marshmallow teeth – stomachs distended with cheap poison – dead whores rolled up in old carpet and hidden in the basement… A woman with acute elephantiasis takes to the stage. Her legs swell and bubble as if caught in an invisible stranglehold – tourniquets rupturing forth her vomitus flesh. She stumbles around the dancer’s pole before easing it between the eruptive tripe sandwich of her thighs. The skin around her ankles and feet is thick and rough, with the look of rotten cream – belched, spat out… 204

THE WOUNDS OF CIVILITY I’ve been paying particular attention to Polite Arthur, and am convinced that his minor lapses in affability are symptomatic of something far more sinister that feeds off his insane courteousness.20 Like the guy who is everybody’s favourite drinking pard down the pub, the guy with the best tales, the guy who can cheer up almost anyone, the guy who then goes home and kicks a sewer of shit out of his wife.21 Polite Arthur doesn’t have a wife waiting at home for him, so we can rule that out. But he must be compensating for his mania for the mannerly in some way – I am convinced of it. One should never underestimate the influence of politeness when trying to overcome psychopathic urges. He lives in Grace Court: Warden-assisted housing affiliated with the (money-grubbing) Methodist church. It is a large block of small flats, each comprised of just four rooms: a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom/toilet. Nobody is permitted to own a pet of any description, so on the face of it that would rule out Polite Arthur venting his spleen on something small and furry. Of course, he could have a small rodent hidden away somewhere into which he sticks needles to make him feel like the Major he once was, instead of the dithering old apologist he has become. He might even have some sort of deal going with the local pet shop, whereby they provide him with a constant supply of mice, gerbils, hamsters and the like that he can torture and kill in order to sustain his façade of gentility. Or maybe he has drilled an undetectable hole through one of his walls, and is pumping lethal gases into his neighbour’s flat whenever he feels the need. I see his neighbour: a misshapen widow with tired eyes and a belly full of grey mince and soft carrots. I see her sitting in her armchair, woozy from the 20 I am put in mind of the fact that James Joyce’s politeness was considered by Tom Eliot to be little more than a device for masking his supreme arrogance. Although I fear with Polite Arthur we have something rather more baleful at work. 21 Imagine Norm from Cheers going home after imbibing a dozen or two frothy beers, and slamming Vera’s head into the wall until she slumps to the floor, unconscious. 205

toxic fumes crawling up her walls. I see her antimacassars and doilies in a state of disarray and her longing to rearrange them, but lacking the energy. We’re stuck here, in this babyeating shithole where men fuck dogs and their mothers’ eye sockets, and she still has fucking antimacassars and doilies. She still has those ridiculous cunting doilies on her coffee table, and those absurd antimacassars that continually collect in the middle of your back. I want to rip them in two and shove them down her shrivelled throat and have her gag and choke on them until she blues up like a Stilton vein and dies. Maybe he suffers himself in a far more mundane fashion. He might sit in his tidy flat and mutter curses under his breath while watching hardcore domination movies, or rape porn. He might flagellate himself with spiky bracken, or cut deep into his flesh at any number of hidden areas. Or maybe he just revels in his peccancy while sleeping, and spends the rest of the day trying to strangulate his dreams with scrupulous good manners. There is the possibility that I am way off the mark with all this, but somehow I don’t think so. The pains in my lower back are crippling me. I need more cushions on this chair. Maybe I should see a doctor. What’s this I see with a fridge magnet at each corner? KIDDIE BRAWN Ingredients: To a child's head weighing approx 5 lbs. allow 1 lb. lean pork, 2 tablespoons of salt, 3 teaspoons of pepper, 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, and 6 cloves. You may want to remove the cheeks and salt them, unless the head is particularly small, in which case all the head should be used. Once the head has been meticulously cleaned, submerse it in cold water with the pork, and skim off the fat just prior to boiling. Allow 2-3 hours boiling time for a head weighing 5 lbs. When the head has had sufficient boiling time the meat will literally drop from the bone. (Watch as the features slip down what was the face, like spit down glass.) Put the meat into a heated pan, remove the bones, and then chop along with the pork. (This should be done as quickly as possible to prevent the fat settling in it.) Add all of the seasoning. Stir the mixture well and then transpose to a brawn-tin if you have one; if not, a 206

cake-tin or mould will answer the purpose if the meat is well pressed with weights, which must not be removed for several hours. When stone cold, dip the tin into boiling water for a minute or two, and the preparation should turn out easily and be ready for use. Average cost for a child’s head: £1.25 per lb. Or simply obtain your own for the price of a few boiled sweets. Seasonable all year round. Note: The liquid in which the child’s head was boiled will make excellent vegetable soup, and the fat, if skimmed off, boiled in water, and then poured into cold water, can be used in place of lard. Have you noticed lately how the elderly seem to have whiter, sharper teeth? Their canines appear disproportionately pointed, almost needle-like at the tips. These teeth are doubtlessly false, but a new breed of false. The canines might even be thought pronounced enough to be vampiric. (Vampires are always disconsolate. There is apparently little pleasure to be had in cheating death, ravishing milky-skinned virgins with heaving chests, being possessed of inordinate physical strength, and having the facility to transmogrify into a bat at will. Are we really to believe that the burdens of a few dietary restrictions can prove quite as odious as all that? Or that vampires are so very vain as to pine for their reflections so? Are we to suppose that our undead brethren are somehow conscionable and, resultantly, so saddened by the bloodless sacks of skin and bone left in the wake of their subsistence that they have difficulty in living with themselves? The sentiment underpinning their melancholia is something along these lines: nothing that lives through the death of others can be light-hearted, and so blitheness and jocularity must remain the preserve of those whose continued existence doesn’t depend on them being wilful killers. We are led to believe that the vampire is suffering from a curse. He is to be pitied as much as feared, for look at what he must do in order that he remain undead (and for ‘undead’ just read ‘alive’ – that which is undead is alive, as to merely prescribe abnormal restrictions on a life’s continuance is not to change it into something else) as opposed to unundead (just read ‘dead’). Does the vampire secretly yearn to be dead or secretly yearn to be alive? And what sense can be made of the latter? An answer here is crucial if we are ever to understand the supposed spleen of the vampire, to get to grips with his own slant on the existential debate. ‘Happy-go-lucky vampire’: oxymoronic or just conceptually elusive? 207

If blood furnishes a vampire with immortality, then the blood of a vampire’s victims stave off his death. That which is not alive cannot die, and so would have no need to take measures in order to prevent its own death….) Of course, it’s obvious what is going on here. It didn’t take me all that long to work it out, although, without wishing to brag, I am especially adroit in these matters. That said, you only have to look at the clues: 1) An increase in missing persons. 2) Infant abduction up by 85%. 3) Record amounts of newborn babies going missing from hospital wards. 4) The elderly collecting in groups on the streets and in cafes, talking quietly and acting suspiciously. 5) The elderly choosing to live together in huge communes, where they receive very few visits from outsiders. 6) All the idle time the elderly have on their hands for the devil to find work for. 7) The marked improvement in the sharpness and general condition of their teeth, with their chisel-edged incisors and barbed canines – sickly shark grins like Lon Chaney in London after Midnight. 8) The reported upsurge in basement flats and cellar spaces being rented by retired men and women. 9) Environmental health report a distinct increase in the complaints made to their noise pollution department, especially with regard to noises typically associated with infants. 10) Egg consumption among the elderly far exceeds what might be considered normal levels. Take these 10 points together, consider probable relations between them and you will, after some deliberation, come to the same conclusions as me. All these factors are causally linked. You need only open your eyes. Is nothing to be done? 208

Custom-made dentures are being produced and existing ones customized by a retired dentist – requests for extended canines and edge-honing are said to be proving exceedingly popular with his customer base. The most obvious reason for someone to want sharper teeth and elongated canines is to facilitate the puncturing, ripping and paring of flesh. Now, in light of the 10 points mentioned above, it should be fairly obvious that elderly people are eating babies and toddlers alive. They are using their new teeth to bite, tear and slice their way through soft skin and internal organs, while the infants they are eating succeed in howling their way through the soundproofing. They are burrowing their wizened faces into young bellies like polecats displacing bunny viscera. Is nothing to be done? I heard Polite Arthur talking to himself in the bar last night. He was sitting in the corner, his drink and his sandwich left untouched, reciting a poem to himself over and over again. He had tears in his eyes. His voice was hushed, but I am certain that the words I overheard went something like this: “I hit a little lovely girl, She was young years old, she said; Her head it span with many a whirl That went ’n’ left her dead. She had an offset, blank blank stare, And she was awful bad; Her eyes were black, and very black, – Her future made me sad.” They would fight against the proliferation of youth, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting babies. The elderly are forced to congregate on the edges of this dismal seaside town and shrivel away the remainder of their years. The damp coastal air wreaks havoc with their joints through the autumn and winter. They hole themselves up in sea-view flats situated inside huge white buildings – substitute white cliffs formed by the build-up of countless little fossils – and then sit with their backs to the double glazed windows watching TV. The crumbling edifices of this town must prepare them for their own ruin, helping them to develop a taste for decline. You only have to listen to them, and Charles has little choice but to listen. How they revel in the despicability of youth. How they thrive on the humiliation of being washed up. How they compete fero- 209

ciously with one another over the matchless severity of their own particular collection of infirmities… The embalmer’s art is visible here on the corner of this soggy little island. I say tear it to ribbons; don’t let it die like Hindley done to death. Please – mummy – please! Do it for fun if nothing else. Do it nonchalantly and highspiritedly, but do it, and afterwards don’t even bother to clean your bloodsoaked slippers! Help it on its way! Don’t let it wait around rotting! Do the decent thing you lovers of children and truth! Is nothing to be done? 210

HOLDING CELL My holding cell was without distinction apart from a few words cut into the wall above a metal bed: ‘Hell is other people.’ As I read and reread those words I became convinced that the writer of them wanted them to be truer for himself than they actually were. Who the fuck was I? Nobody knew me but me. (Just listen to me. I must sound like some anguish-ridden teenager, full of crap and made-to-measure remoteness.) My own mother, a childless stranger to herself; my own children shit scared of my presence; my wife – my wife of sixteen seemingly nonexistent years, sixteen dead years, sixteen stillborn years… – recoiling from me as if I were some suppurating leper bent on intimacy. Had I died? Was this Hell? Was this the fire and brimstone of disillusionment, the decapitation of a fallen life? I had done nothing to deserve eternal damnation, as far as I could recall. I was the fucking invisible man, the man with no name, Mr Nobody, faceless, homeless, vagrant, unaffiliated, unloved, and missed by no one. I didn’t belong; I was not seen; I was the shadow reflected in blind men’s eyes. I was the walking, talking dead, the living dead stuck, dispossessed of past and future. This had to be a joke, a rather cruel and tasteless joke, but a joke nonetheless – a misguided joke. Of course, I thought, it’s a joke! It seemed the only explanation. What a fool I’d been. “Okay the joke’s up! You had me good and proper, hooked from the get-go. Look, my hands are up. You win.” The acting was flawless, careers in the theatre all round, R.S.C. contracts, the lot. Such a concentration of hidden talent – eat your liver, Sir Laurence. This has been organised by experts. Most likely some TV show specializing in elaborate hoaxes, some not too distant descendant of Candid Camera. “I can laugh now, but there were times back there when I could have cried. You bastards! You bleeping bastards! You wait till I get you home.” I had serious doubts. I doubted things that would seem beyond doubt, things you’d be certifiable to doubt. “What was it that gave you away? No one particular thing as it turns out. In the end the facts bucked just a little too hard and my 211

arse left the saddle. You can come out from wherever it is you’re hiding – the game is well and truly up.” Why didn’t I see it sooner? As I sat on the edge of the bed looking less and less expectantly at the door, my bottom lip started to quiver and my eyes secreted my disappointment. I looked at the door for hours. The longer I howled the less likely the possibility of its being a joke became, the less likely everything became. Maybe things like this happen all the time, I thought. Every system of events, especially one this anfractuous, runs the risk of malfunction, of sacrificing one or more of its many parts. This could be correctable; this could be corrected and I could be put back where I belong with no memory of any of this. Things like this could happen all the time. (This could have happened to me many times before.) All those poor souls walking the earth talking to themselves, screaming out their horrors of isolation and despair to a disregarding system, disenfranchised, overlooked. Their stories don’t fit in anywhere; there are no places for them to be who they think they are, but maybe, just maybe once there were such places – maybe they, them or their lives, just got mislaid. I would not allow myself be dug out by white-coated men. I had to keep who I was to myself until some kind of corrective procedure could be put into practice, or until such time as… 212

GROOMING THE GRAVE … to me a live woman ain’t nothing. I enjoy dead sex more than I do live sex. – Henry Lee Lucas22 No deaths meant no corpses. You might think that nobody much missed them, and you wouldn’t be far wrong, but there were those who were acutely aware of their absence. Some, like Greg and his crinkly-cuddling cronies, had cultivated feelings of loss when it came to dead bodies. The only place left where unanimated flesh and bone still existed was Pavilionstone, and it was possible to infiltrate the border if you knew the right people and were determined enough, and, when someone had acquired a taste for the frosty rigidity of death, determination was not something they generally lacked. The people of Pavilionstone are ashamed of their dead and keep their cemetery on the edge of town behind high walls. Up until recently very few people in Pavilionstone had actually bothered to visit the graves of their dead: the cemetery was seen as little more than a dumping ground for those deemed unworthy of eternal life. But now they go to see if the dead are still there. For many now hold out hope for the recently (and in some cases the not so recently) deceased, such are the supposed powers of those beyond Pa22 “Use them any way you want. Just things I said. I don’t own them. I don’t even own myself no more. I’ve owned others for short periods, but I’ve already said way too much about that. Course, it didn’t much matter how many I killed when I couldn’t serve time for them. But now, well now I’ll atone for every one, for the sins of other men. I just let them mount up without thinking. They were happy to keep adding names, and at the time I was happy to keep taking them. But that’s all they were, names, words on bits of paper.” Henry Lee Lucas, Texas Prison (2608 – declared officially dead on March 13, 2001. Rebirth date: 2136. Listed under Phase 1 of the Retrograde Justice Programme.) 213

vilionstone to reanimate the dead. As a result, it is now extremely rare for corpses to be incinerated, almost unheard of – only genuine eccentrics would even consider it. (Eccentricity implies madness minus tragedy, minus pain and hatred and fear and love: madness minus its mystique, its beauty, its commitment – the devil with his tongue in his cheek, the slasher with the rubber dagger...) Signs that people are being chosen from beyond the grave are becoming more apparent, and the discovery of a freshly vacated grave is big news. People swarm to the spot to see the mounds of recently excavated soil and the empty coffin resting in the cut earth. They look on silently and reverently, losing track of the time as they long for time to lose track of them. Sometimes someone comes across the missing corpse and puts the dampeners on the whole thing. The crushing sense of disappointment that such discoveries occasion is brutal. The discarded bodies (stripped of their clothes) are unceremoniously thrown back into their graves and the mud kicked in over them. Nobody can really claim to understand why, having gone to the effort of digging them up, their potential saviours then decide to reject them at the last minute. Various factions have put theories forward on the matter, but none of them are considered to be all that plausible. And although there may be cases where the dead are exhumed but left unsaved, people remain convinced that there are also cases where the dead are taken from their graves and transported out of Pavilionstone, and everybody knows what this means. It is not common practice for lovers of the dead to remove the objects of their affection from the seaside town in which they rest. It is not common practice because it is extremely difficult to achieve unless you are very well connected. It took influence just to get into Pavilionstone for a short time; it took a little more than influence to smuggle yourself out a little piece of death. But it happens on occasion, and when it does, nothing but joy and hope ensue. Sadly, for those poor souls cocooned in their squalid seaside domicile, the majority of graveyard players are unable to leave Pavilionstone with any more dead skin than they entered with. When I come to think about it (and don’t get me wrong I don’t think about it a lot, hardly at all in fact, much less than I used to) having sex with dead bodies must be extremely liberating. I’m guessing it would be best to get in there before rigor mortis has a chance to set in, before the skin cools and the muscles harden too much. I could be way off the mark here though, for the opposite might well be the case, the colder and the more rigid the better. Is there a standardized aesthetic for the practice of necrophilia? Is it kinkier to prefer the freshly dead or the long dead, the still warm and malleable to the cold and unyielding? Are the partly skeletal a huge no no, or an exotic prize, or maybe a little of both and so comparable to banging a negress in Victorian 214

days? Are there times when, like a happy dog, some of the muscles come away with the bone? Are iodine and lube essential components of the graveyard cruiser’s toolkit? Or are the odours and the gravely resistance essential aspects of the experience?... 215

DROWNING PUPPIES The air is bulked to bursting with brazen conviviality, pithy maxims spanning life, death and everything in-between – all the many timeless spells of inebriation. The drink is going down and the sun is still on the up. The fans on the ceiling churn the smoke like grey butter, chopping up the fibrous streaks of emptied lungs and cooling those below with severed air. Nobody here wants the sun on their back. They’d rather a young girl or a young boy on their back, but most settle for another drink and another smoke and a wank somewhere down the line when no one will be safe for a minute or two. A man wants to leave. He hasn’t been here long and he’d rather not have come. He drinks fast, saying little in the pauses. He nods and listens but his mind is elsewhere, in better company. I am not vulnerable when I have the sun watching over me, when I can feel his warm hands on my body, when I can relax in the feeling of my own skin. My back is damp with his heat. My nipples will be black soon. No scratching! Wait for your nails to dry! If you must scratch, use your palm or your knuckles! Ignore it and it’ll pass! Bloody ants are everywhere. Did I get it? I can’t feel it moving. It’s probably spread across my shin. Yuck! “Are you sure, lady? I don’t think so, love. No offence n that but you ain’t my type by any stretch n I bet you stretched nya?.... Don’t matter how much you be smilin, love, neither vus is gonna service ya. What ya doin goin bout like that anyhows? Your old man get kicks outa seein you in this state? Fuckin hats off – that’s one dedicated husband you got there, I’ll tell ya….. Nless you wanna dog it, bro?” “Like fuck!” “You erd im dinya? Yeah? Then put that smile away will ya! What ya waitin on? Come on, dog, she sure as fuck ain’t getting no younger. Bye bye, missus...” Two white faces, and him behind them beating down into the backs of their heads trying to get to me, two white faces with eyes of crystallized spit216

toons, of nervous loathing, and I smile. I’m smiling: it never fails to win people over. It has magical powers, black magic to match my nipples. There’s no smile like it. I could incubate blind, featherless chicks under its glow – a smile that could save souls and lead men away from the rocks of their misfortune… Here goes, Frank. Here goes. You never had a doubt and now I need you to be right. I’m keeping it as natural as I can, Frank. Natural is best. Natural is transcendental, a glimpse of heaven in lips and teeth. If you could have bottled my smiles, Frank, if you could have bottled my smiles… I can see the tops of my cheeks, Frank: it’s a good one this time. If only you could see it. Is it my best yet, Frank? Is it? I’m glad you can’t see their eyes, Frank: all piss and thistledown, Frank, all piss and thistledown. Their faces are too white, an accumulated, unsightly paleness: white on white on white, and their noses, their insolent button noses, sitting in the middle of their faces like tiny shrunken heads. His warm hands are on me again. I feel a tremble in his fingertips and sense a cloud is on its way…. Beneath swirling blades tearing up the air with their blunt edges he is elsewhere once more. He’s drinking with friends that aren’t friends and he’d like to leave, and he would, he’d leave, if he hadn’t only recently arrived. He is down low and the sun is up high. A shaft of light breaks through the window, striking him blind to this place, to his friends that aren’t friends, to the drink in his hand that he’d rather not drink if it weren’t for this place and the people in it. He cracks the glass on his teeth trying to drink in the dark, and somehow he knows it’s too late. He’s already too late. He opens his eyes and the sun is gone. The window is in shade and he shivers for her, so he thinks, with a smile, one especially for her, not as good, nowhere near, though she’d never say. He’d say it for her, filling her mouth with his words. It’s not working on them. Seems you’re a strange one, old man, with peculiar tastes. No headway at all, and yet I felt it was good. There I was listening to you, you daft old man you, you daft old man. It was only ever you that noticed, wasn’t it? Come, you can tell me now, you uxorious old fool. Who were the others? Who were the throng? There weren’t any were there, you daft old man. You can tell me now…. Sammy the Friendliest Dog in the World: I am fucking ravenous. My stomach has floated up into my ribcage, up towards my huge heart, where it is this minute getting entangled in arteries and ventricles. I feel short of breath, am experiencing dizzy spells. I am liable to collapse at the base of a stool and they’ll think I’m asleep; they’ll think I’m asleep and they won’t give me food and I’ll wake as we leave, with the nudge of a shoe, and I’ll starve all night. I won’t be able to get through it. He’ll try to wake me in the morning, but I’ll not have the energy to lift my head from the floor, and maybe he’ll leave me, 217

believing me to be asleep, so I’ll not even get the one meal I get there. People will comment: my fans will want to know why I am not performing tonight, and why I don’t accompany him here tomorrow lunchtime when I am incapacitated with hunger and unable to drag my head up off the floor. He won’t say that of course; he’ll play it down and change the subject as quickly as he can. They’ll still be concerned by my absence, but they’ll not get much from him and they know it. How long will this go on before something is done about me? How long does it take to die of malnourishment? I’ve been dying of it for years. I have a head start. They’ll not let it slide for more than a day or so. Could I last that long? The next few minutes are crucial. Commit to them fully and hope for the best! What if my audience is distracted and fails to notice me until it’s too late, when the last of me is spent, and I am famished out of my senses? What if I catch M. as he is busy interrogating a murder suspect, or Gyulus as he is offloading a fresh crop of ceps or trading his rhymes for beer, or Med with his face glued to a paper, or Charles wrestling with black-suited demons? I’ll have to time it just right. I could start with the crumbs from the carpet just to keep me going, although I’d rather not risk offending my audience if I can help it. I can sense disapproval when I’m caught licking the floor. It causes some to look away and not look back, and I can’t risk that. I must try not to slather too much, or catch my teeth on the ends of pinched fingers – today I could happily take the fingers as well and that’s not like me at all. I am known for my precision, my technique, my inability to harm. I have a reputation to keep up. But my brain is so weary at not having been spared, not for a second, the pangs of a foodless future. Nevertheless, I can’t be letting myself go just because my intestines haven’t seen food for in excess of 48 hours. (For the past two mornings, my one meal of the day has had maggots in it. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.) Here we are. These steps are going to finish me. He’ll drag me up one or two before looking round to check what’s wrong, by which time it’ll be too late. My entertaining days will be well and truly over and all those bar snacks will soften and putrefy, as will I. They’ll decrease their orders over time, of Cheddars, of crisps and those sweet sausage rolls, and they’ll wonder why they ever needed to order so many, and the men around the bar will cast their eyes down a while, to spare a thought for their ever-peckish old friend that died before his time. I’ve conquered the steps; my legs did it all by themselves. Will my tail wag itself? I can’t see why not, if it too expects to be fed. They’re turning their heads. Their eyes are dropping straight down to me. They’re putting their hands in the glass bowls that sit on the bar and they’re talking to him. What’s he said? What’s he said that’s taken their hands and their attention 218

from me? The drool is spilling out now. I can feel them, two foamy white tendrils hanging precariously from my mouth, and they’re turning away from the snakes of spit that pullulate from my chops, and who can blame them. That’s not the kind of show they’ve come to expect. I cannot feel my legs or my tail, but I can feel shame. I follow my spittle in a slow arc to the floor and I lick and slurp and drain the carpet of food crumbs, and I’ll live through till tomorrow when I’ll eat my breakfast, maggots and all. Gyulus raises his empty pint glass and says to it, “If something is not done you shall be the last of seven!” and walks up and down the bar searching out his next drink, reciting his pitch as he goes: “little angels bring wine to my door I want you to wean me from this world I want to fly among the free…” Those who know him all too well look away with a laugh and a shake of the head. Then comes the plea to the barman to put a small one on the slate, and to the inevitable refusal comes the reply: “I still have rights until I fall apart.” “Rights, maybe, but no credit.” He shrugs it off as he’s done a thousand times before. He needs one more for the straße, one more to keep him steady on his bike, to put pep in his legs, to send him home done. The Pilchards aren’t paying tonight. But he’s got a trick or two to get that last drink. In memory of Ricky The Suicide, he sets about an impassioned rendition of Kányádi’s ‘Woodcut’: there are feelings of unsought empathy with the “afflicted men with sunken melancholy eyes,” knowing nods all around when “hope glimmers and slowly dies,” shivers and the lighting of cigarettes as “all this will come to an end with parchment faces staring back,” for this “generation worn and greyed on benches equally decayed” can see their mourners “all in black.” And so it goes: they are “motionless in trance” as if to order, and after the funeral is done Gyulus is looking at the last of not seven but eleven. Gyulus drank until the world went out. Sammy lapped at the carpet until his tongue went black and, with his belly full of crumbs and grit, gave up on his fickle fans and went to sleep, dreaming of a squirming breakfast. They find my smile ugly; they find me ugly. I think even you will find me ugly when you find me. I’m sorry I didn’t do more to escape what they’re going to do. I can stand and smile. That’s all I have now. My legs won’t move and my mouth is too busy to speak. Goodbye, Frank…****… 219

I think I’m still smiling, Frank, closing my eyes in the hope that they’ll…****… Nothing I do…****… Don’t ever find me ugly…****… Don’t ever find me…****… …****… (et cetera.) At the precise moment of her death there was a sign, a valediction: three men in their early twenties, having stolen a sheep from a field on the outskirts of town and beaten it to death, threw its blood-soaked carcass through the door into where our friends were sitting. It slammed into the side of the bar and then slid to the floor like a used tampon. Sammy nearly choked himself to death on his leash trying to get at it. When a man finds his beloved wife, her head having been pulped, the backs of her legs fouled, wearing a grin carved out of stone, annealed to the point of immortality, he doesn’t have anywhere he can go. He finds that he is able to stare down upon the carnage of his wife forever. He finds that as long as he stands perfectly still, refusing to move a muscle or divert his gaze, he is impervious. 220

MEAT FOSSILS There is nothing I can say about the buried place that I reached. I know there was a place and that its trace is evermore marked in me and in the texts that I write. – Georges Perec Spider veins, cigarette butts laced with cracked lipstick, red ribbons, pink bows, fake eyelashes, warts, garter belts, ochre tumbleweed wigs, spotlights, double chins, ankle bracelets, pustulated fingers pinched with yellow gold. Mirrors framed with light bulbs and stars throw back showbiz corpses… The veins lay on the back of an old murderess’s hands like strands of purple wool. The strangled entrails of innocent children lay beside her on the floor as she prepares to cross-stitch… I have a thing about basements, cellars, bunkers. It is so easy for things to go undetected in these places, easier even than attics. An attic is somewhere one might stash a mad wife or mother, but a basement is where lost children are buried under the screw-top lids of pickling jars, where one might find a litany of such jars lining shelves that stretch all the way to the ceiling, all filled with formaldehyde and housing the heads and brains of small children. Nestled in some of the jars are the severed noddles of red-headed girls: crumpled up faces, eyes closed and mouths open, forever trapped in a suffocating communal yawn. Tiny brains perched on top of their wreathed spinal cords like the swollen heads of some unholy breed of snake. This is the kind of disease that basements breed. Cowering skeletons collect dust in damp corners with bad light. The immensity of earth beyond the walls is hungry to reclaim this alien space, this unnatural space, this space without view and without conscience. My hangover kicks in: brain thirsty for an exit, thirsty enough to go in search for it itself if I don’t do something about it, ideas coming alive, telling me that they’ve come of age, that they are ready to leave the nest: “We don’t 221

need you anymore. Without us you are nothing. Do what you’ve gotta do, else we start munching skull bone.” Picture Kim Parker having her brain siphoned out the back of her head by a plague of materialized thoughts in Fiend Without a Face…. These are places where electrodes are strapped to temples, testicles, tongues, fingertips, where the walls have cracked in an attempt to let the screams out. These are places that can snap vocal cords. These were once places where hippies perished with glittered faces and unhappy moustaches, with cups and gnomes and pillows, with newspapers strewn about their bare ankles: Paul Thek on the nod. The inhabitants of basements no longer allow death to just come and go. Nothing just dies down there. I can’t tell you the full extent of it. I try, but just end up breaking it down into instances, distressful, carnage-laden cameos lifted from the bigger picture, which is ordinarily good enough, but not in this instance. Somehow not good enough, not enough, but still all there is. It is in the barren, vapid, bleakness of submerged hovels that bears are driven mad, head-rocking, paw-stomping, mouth-foaming mad. Imagine how many people have rotted in underground rooms since the beginning of time. How many poor abandoned souls have been shackled to damp walls and left to wither away to little more than cobwebs? Who could count the whimpers and winces that have gone unheard beneath our feet? There is a damp basement lit with blue lights, blue strip lights buzzing with the clamour of a thousand angry bees, and in it hangs a man dressed in his wife’s clothes. Coarse stubble protrudes through layers of foundation, and 222

his huge hairy feet crammed into black stilettos hover a couple of feet above the concrete floor. He’s there because half an hour ago his 13-year-old son caught him prancing around the house dressed as a woman and called him a “filthy fucking faggot,” and stormed off to tell his mother. He’s there because he agreed with his son. He’s there because clothes maketh (and unmaketh) the man. He will remain there until his internal organs are slop, because a speeding bus will plough his wife and child down as they rush to confront him, and nobody but his wife and child will miss him. And the ‘ands’ go on, but this family does not. Somewhere there is a clammy, mizzle-walled basement located deep beneath an isolated house, and on its ceilings are blue strip lights, strip lights that drone and reverberate a monotone dirge for no living ear, and in this perspiring concrete tomb lays a woman, her clothes torn and dishevelled, fingernails broken and black, a mouth full of food and flies. Out there somewhere there exists a dank vaporous cellar lit with blue strip lights, lights that hum and murmur to themselves. Brown water runs down the walls and forms in pools across the uneven concrete floor. In it sits a small boy busy throwing a luminous yellow tennis ball for his puppy to fetch. Both the boy and the puppy are having fun. Silverfish glide about them freely and largely unnoticed. The tennis ball is soon saturated and filthy, and the puppy no longer wants to pick it up in its mouth. They abandon the ball and play rough and tumble instead. After a few minutes play the boy grabs the puppy by the throat and chokes it to death, looking into its big black eyes to see the innocent bewilderment slowly ebb away. 223

A BATHROOM SOMEWHERE A bathroom, green suite, a yucca plant obscuring the window, its leaves spiky and unworldly, a toilet, a bath with chalky shower attachments, a sink, all the expected contents of a bathroom anywhere, and two toothbrushes – a couple’s house. The smell of smoke: rolling tobacco, or Phillip Morris cigarettes, not cigars, not cheroots. Piss all over the seat and around the base of the toilet: there are men here, probably five or more, and drinking men, men filling their bladders with a definite sense of regularity. One of them will be back before long. “Lock the door!” “Okay, okay, I’m on it.” says Triman, who is, as he was quick to point out, already cognizant of the pressing need to secure the door from the inside, and on his way to do it. After turning the key in the lock, he gently drops the bog seat and sits down, puts his head in his hands and lets out a sigh that holds no hope of ever having good reason to end. “You’re timing this, right?” “Uhuh,” says Triman, without bothering to look up from the black solace of his hot palms: the sense of safety and privacy afforded by this temporary visual deprivation is not unlike when a young boy expects to be rendered invisible to others by putting his hands over his eyes. He’d started up the stopwatch (which he’d purloined from a sports shop in downtown Manhattan just fifteen minutes ago) on entering the bathroom and is getting hacked off with Lakok’s checking and double checking, his need for control in uncontrollable circumstances. He looks up and clocks a can of Stella plonked on the edge of the bath. He picks it up and, on finding it more than half-full, drains it of its rather flat and acrid contents. Not until half choking on a Camel butt does he think to question why it had been left there, by which time any doubts have been abruptly displaced by the sodden ash and stale lager being siphoned up from his throat and out his nostrils. He scrunches up… actually more of a scrinch than a scrunch… he scrinches up the beer can in his hand, the tin popping 224

and cracking between his fingers like scorched fat, and throws it across the room at the door. “What the fu… what the fuck are you doing? There are people downstairs; can’t you fucking hear them or something? Because they sure as fuck can hear you .” “So what? No I won’t fucking shhhhhh, and I’d appreciate it if you could stop barking demands at me every five minutes – and that’s the last time I’ll be using that phrase, literally…. What possible difference does it make whether we are discovered or not, or whether we strut down those stairs with our thumbs up our asses whistling show tunes, or whether we go across the hall and crap on their pillows, for that matter? Why do you care so much? How can you care so much? It’s all the fucking same to us whatever we do.” “It’s that attitude that got us here and there and everyfuckingplaceunderthecuntingsun, and over it for that matter. Why did I ever listen to you and your grand theory, your breakthrough idea about ungluing the fabric of the universe? And now I’ve got no choice but to listen to you, never more than five minutes from your maverick brilliance.” “And it’s just that sort of thinking that didn’t see past its nose, that didn’t allow for change, that saw the past in the future, and that overlooked the trifling matter of an infinite regress with viciousness on its mind, that...” “What does it say?” says Lakok pointing down at the stopwatch resting between Triman’s thighs. (Lakok felt like he didn’t have time to argue his point, but of course he did, if only he could ignore the breaches. They could have thrashed it out once and for all if they’d covered themselves in a sheet and ignored their shifting surroundings, taken thousand mile skips in their stride, and got to the bottom of who or what was to blame for the amplified turbulence of their lives.) “Two minutes twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven…” “Alright, alright, I get the message. Just let me know when we’re coming up to five.” Lakok walked over to the bath, climbed in and opened the window. The sash weights knocked against the walls of their wooden tombs as they made their descent. Flakes of white gloss cracked from the beading and fell around Lakok’s shoes in a flurry of sharp-edged, unfriendly geometry. A warm rush of air swept in from outside as Lakok crouched down to try and discover their whereabouts, so that he could list it down – as far as he was able to ascertain just where it was – in the spiral-bound notebook, pilfered from a stationers down the block from that sports store now missing a stopwatch. “Whooaaa what the...” Lakok sees, or rather doesn’t see, from the window over the bath, a view of emptiness, an empty view, void vistas as far as his eyes can see, visual perception registering zero; he witnesses the non-being of everything within visual range of that window. But not in actuality, be225

cause that’s the thing with non-being, there’s nothing to see, even when you do. He looks out from the window and there is nothing out there. It is not pitch black, nor is it blindingly white; there is nothing to report besides the stupendous, knee-trembling lack. He has come across the world’s unwritten pages, and surely would be the first person ever to have nothing to report, to have encountered, or rather to be aware of encountering (or not) nonencounterability, to have seen around the back of Einstein’s watch – nothing doing. His body is fighting against what he’s just seen, or failed to see…blahblahblah…to order the disordered and otherwise inexplicable nonoccurrence of…. He falls to his knees in the bath. His arms begin threshing at his sides like electricity pylons in an earthquake, and then he keels over and whacks his head of cold sweats and intolerable impossibilities on a chrome combination tap spotted with chalk and rust. His head bleeds – causality was still being represented in kind – and mats his hair together in spindly clumps. Lakok slips farther down the walls of the bath as his legs try, independently, to escape over the edge. Triman has his head in his hands again, “So what’s out there?” “Nothing.” “Coming up on five by the way. You said to tell you, right? Four minutes fifty, fifty-one, two, three... Oh Boy!…” 226

THE PLIGHT OF THE NEVERENDERLING If there’s a place, then nobody knows it. No grid reference: G5 or H6. No X marks the spot. If it’s there the atlas hides it between The folds of stapled pages, obliterated By the creased footsteps of weary fingers And worn-down thumbs. Cartographers despair and tear out their hair, And browsers, breath abated, brush aside Some old crumbs. If there’s a time, then it’s already lost. No Planck tick tock: 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 (or 10-43) Or leap second shows it. If it comes and goes then it flees too soon With the rest of durationless nows – retrenchability Aside for a moment or two, to count The uncountable toes. Clockmakers all go blind in mind of their kind And laymen, disappointed, keep inside Some, ‘Who knows…?’ 227

HAVE YOU SEEN THE INVISIBLE MAN? Have I told you about the wonderful sense of personal identity that grows stronger and stronger as one grows in invisibility? 228

I managed to free myself from the authorities in less than a week. I had been taken to a psychiatric assessment ward where I was, somewhat shortsightedly, left unattended in the waiting area. With no apparent nerves (let’s face it – getting caught and not getting caught were just two possible outcomes to me at that point), I got up out of my chair and walked out of the waiting room, out of the hospital, and away across a recently turned field. I felt like Dr. Richard Kimble, but no man with a prosthetic arm had slaughtered my wife. No, my wife was alive and well; she just didn’t seem to realise she was my wife, was all. Kimble had a focus: to locate his wife’s killer and clear his name. What was my focus? It took me a long time to get anywhere near an answer for that one, and near is still the closest I’ve got. When night fell in around me I got to my feet and made my way back into town. I figured the police would still be out looking for me, but when you don’t exist you don’t much care who finds you. I meandered into town and headed for an abandoned flat that I assured myself I knew existed. I was right, and here I am, still there. I’ve been here a while now, living off other people’s waste and trying to remember where I should be. I’ve grown a beard, again like Kimble, but more impressive than his, I believe. I didn’t really have much choice in the matter. It just grew. And it seemed appropriate. Apparently a beard has a way of making the wearer feel hidden. I live in five abandoned rooms. People come and go in the rest of the building. I pay no heed to them, or should I say to their footsteps, which is really all I have to go on. They are of no interest to me and I presume the feeling is mutual, although I can never be sure. After waiting for what I deemed to be long enough for the authorities to sideline my disappearance, I began keeping close tabs on my wife and family, being extremely cautious not to give myself away, or draw any unwanted attention. The more time that went by, the more I was able to forge a place for myself aside from the identity that had so catastrophically led me astray. I was able, through no small effort, to see myself as a wronged man, an individual who, for whatever reason, was forced by circumstances, remarkable circumstances (although it helped just to consider them as circumstances) to, at least partially, begin again, for only then could I hope to re-evaluate what had gone before. (There are ants everywhere. This place is infested. The excessive clutter brings them in. But I am left alone most of the time, so I shouldn’t complain.) Did spying on the wife and children help or hinder my progress in this matter? Truth is, I don’t know. It was just something I had to do. I was, at that stage, beginning to trust myself a little more. I saw them almost every day for over a year and all the time they were forgetting about me as well as 229

remaining completely ignorant of my ever having existed. I watched my family getting along without me, laughing together, linking hands as they walked down the street, chattering, enjoying themselves with no thought for the man stood behind the trees, crouched down behind parked cars, or peering through finger holes in the daily newspaper, with stale food in his beard and in his belly, and a clot of grief in his guts and in his brain that refused to kill him, since he was dead already. Who can speak honestly of heartache? I can, that’s who. I say it’s a passive state, a state that is devoid of threat at its commencement, and because of this it tends to compromise us, as we are left to manufacture, in the form of lamentably lame metaphors, the threat it still poses us. Why? Because how you feel has to be brought back under your control. Feelings of heartache and grief are merely symptoms of a fight to regain control over things which were never under our control in the first place, like when you attempt to tame the pain-producing properties of a mouth ulcer by deliberately agitating it. You do, of course, end up causing yourself considerably more pain by doing so, but you just have to be in control don’t you. 230

PERISHABLES Why are there people like Frank? – David Lynch, Blue Velvet Cats struggle down the street with metal frames – the top section of some stereotaxic device, I believe – screwed into their puny heads, gleaming steel prongs invading their ears, their mouths, various points on their craniums, their glassy black eyes, stricken with an age-old persecution, gleaming for clemency, their scraggy ears drooping forlornly as they struggle to move, dragging and pushing their cold metal encumbrances as they go. Dogs with their legs missing or mangled lie at the side of the pavement baring their teeth, their gums wired up, their mouths forced so far open with metal bars that the edges are torn up into their ears. Nobody even seems to acknowledge these pitiful creatures as they sag in coils of barbed wire and pools of their own piss. Some say these animals are forms of sacrifice, offered up to the eyes beyond Pavilionstone, and claim they symbolise the plight of those needlessly forced to stare death in face, some kind of shock tactic devised to tug at the heartstrings of those with power over their fates. Some time ago animals came to be seen as jinxed, bad omens, reminders of the lowly status of those in Pavilionstone, who have somehow got it into their heads that beyond the grey slimy walls that hem them in no lower forms of life exist. They are simply abusing their dominion in order to liken themselves to those they seek to join, or at least see themselves, if only through the chinks of squinted eyes, as masters and proprietors. Some even hold that there is much wisdom to be found – wisdom adequate to practical application – in the advice of Zip’s Uncle on his father’s side. I was a very emotional boy. I couldn’t sleep without the light on, and sometimes would be unable to sleep even with it on. I would lay on the bed staring at the stippled ceiling worrying about the inevitability of my death, and 231

the death of my mother. I wet the bed at night and daydreamed all day. Soon after we met, Elizabeth became the primary focus of my mortal concerns. My mother died a few years later, and I was upset, but not upset enough I remember thinking. I cried a couple of times, felt low for a few weeks, kept Elizabeth closer than ever, and that was it. I hadn’t done her justice. I remember those sleepless nights now; I remember the pain, but I can’t relive it. Whatever I do I cannot relive it. Those emotions are gone forever. They are also worth mourning – maybe more so. People like their pets disappear too easily. I look out on fields of grass lurching and leaning into the wind on the outskirts of town, where unknown deaths are tossed away and hidden…. You see laquered eyes under their neatly plucked brows. You see skin smooth and unblemished. But get a little closer and what do you see? You see skin between the hairs of the eyebrows and they lose their silkiness. You see a subsystem of veins around the eyes. You see fractured veins in the balls of the eyes, a moonscape of pores, pores spilling over with dead skin, grease and dirt. I see nothing but dirty great hairs all over the place, furrowed lips, decay… down into matter, to the as yet unobserved and unobservable, down forever, a descent without end…. Look inside from the night and you will see lonely men sitting at tables looking out at you as you walk by, men waiting for their loneliness to turn them murderous like Nilsen. You’ll see fat sloppy parents and their fat sloppy kids eating pizza and watching TV, nosepickers, wankers, empty rooms, large tables seating gangs of bearded swarts planning their next assault, old women knitting, crocheting the entrails of murdered babies, reading, snoozing, biding their time until they see their loved ones again, kids killing men with their thumbs… There is the sound of windows being smashed, cats brawling, screeched abuse, the hot sweat moaning of pilled-up buggery (“Stop! I can smell shit.”)… I hear the distant sounds of murder experiments being carried out: the alchemic blood games of Erzsebet Báthory and Gilles de Rais, the claret fanfare to the rapes of Count Boden, the hematomanic lab lusts of ex-choirboy John Haigh... The explosions… If I follow the noise I will find body parts clotted on the trees like blossom…. Charles trudged along littered pavements, past forgotten shops with plywood for glass. He walked past a derelict showroom under one of the nineteen arches of the viaduct. The viaduct was a real suicide tempter, and it had successfully tempted a few since its construction in 1843. One of those it had lured into denting the tarmac with his skull was a dreamy teenage boy of 232

Charles’s acquaintance. From what he could tell, the boy had had no reason to drop himself into the road at high speed. Some talked of the spell of 1905. Some thought that the buildings beneath him had revealed their hideous secrets: the flooded lungs of newborn babies, the dirty confidences that caused mothers to virtually hack their daughter’s heads free from their bodies, young Caroline Trayler raped and strangled on a whim… Charles thought the viaduct was to blame, that something about its majestic height, when compared to the squat terraces that had grown up amid its elephantine feet, had weakened his resolve. For this wasn’t the only Cubitt creation known to have cracked men’s minds. Charles had watched him scale the wire fence, watched him standing there surveying the town, watched as he stepped off. Having turned in the air and grabbed hold of the edge, he hung there for about five seconds before letting go. Charles was sure that he had let go of the edge, as opposed to having lost his grip, due to the way he threw his arms back, as if in defiance of some former weakness. Who can tell how many times he changed his mind before the impact changed it for him. His limbs were twisted and contorted, mangled and warped in alarming configurations: the sort of thing boys do to their Action Man dolls after they’ve stepped on a make-believe landmine – corkscrewed bones and wrung out skin, a pipe-cleaner boy victimized by bored fingers. Those men and women that sit looking out the windows of their homes with the lights on waiting for visitors that never come have a speeded up stillness about them. View them at a high enough speeds and they cease to move altogether – they grow instead. But these people are so inert that they couldn’t even hope to fill the small rooms they occupy night after night; in fact, they would barely swell at all. But there is an expectant, twitching agitation about them as they sit and stare and do nothing. Their acute inactivity is such that it flickers before your eyes and gives the impression of motionlessness viewed at high-speed. I’m a pathetic bully. I know this. I am not unaware of what I am and what I’m doing. I know better than anyone else. I know myself as much as anyone does. I mean, did anyone ever find his or her self in India? Most, from what I hear, lost a fair bit of their selves down some filthy toilet and then returned looking distinctly gaunt. Maybe that’s it: the search for the self is the search for something non-existent or abstract, so by travelling to mystic destinations with piss-poor sanitary conditions you slowly waste away to nothing, thus finding your true self. Nobody misses them anyway; they just buy new ones the next day, so you could see my vindictive bullying (wholesale slaughter if I’m being honest) of the town’s pets as promoting the market economy of 233

this impoverished little backwater by the sea. Or you could see it for what it is: a man injuring and killing cats, dogs, and birds because he likes to do so and sees no particular reason to refrain from such a pleasurable activity. Sometimes I feel like I do have reasons for the things I do, but they are in and out of my head so quickly that they don’t feel like anything much to do with me. A few nights ago I sneaked into one of my neighbour’s back gardens and killed their rabbits for them. I tried to skin one alive, but the wriggly little fucker kept attempting to burrow into my wrists, so I slammed the larger of my two knives straight through its neck, damn near taking its head off into the bargain. (“Golly, Mr Wabbit, I hope I didn’t hurt ya too much when I killed ya.”) I hung him up at the patio window, so that when the young daughter came down in the morning to feed her little vermin she wouldn’t be able to shield herself from its fate. Once I had skinned the other one I considered taking it home to eat, but decided I would never get around to cooking it, and so threw it over the fence and watched next-door’s huge Rottweiler, Adolf, scoff it down in a medley of crunching and gulping. (It is usually best to avoid leaving skinned rabbits lying around the home decomposing: it plays havoc with one’s mental equilibrium.) The next night I shot Adolf in the head with a 2.2 air rifle that I’d purchased from a bloke with squiffy eyes at the local junk shop. It took a few shots to kill the gluttinous bastard, by which time lights were coming on all around me. I left Adolf with his legs twitching and thumping against the walls of his kennel. After spending so many years nurturing life, it came as light relief to take it. I started off with birds. The birds can get out of Pavilionstone, can fly in and out as they please. Well they couldn’t when I’d finished with them. I got a bird watchers’ book and ticked them off as I sent them crashing to the ground. I started from my bedroom window and then moved farther afield, in order that I might tick off some more of the species contained within my book. Large targets like Gulls – keeyow keee-yoww-yoww-yoww…. yowwwwwww – (Common, Herring, Lesser Black-backed, and Blackheaded) and Cormorants got my eye in training for the smaller, quicker stuff: Tits (Marsh, Willow, Coal, Bearded, Long-tailed, Great and Blue), Chiffchaffs, Warblers, Buntings, Wagtails, Sparrows, Finches, Robins, Wrens, Swifts, Swallows, etc. Many a Sandwich and Common Tern did I prevent from returning to African shores. Wood Pigeons: aim for the white patches on their necks and you’re laughing. I actually bagged a few Mute Swans as well. You have to get those huge fuckers in the head to be sure. I once got one trying to land on a frozen canal. It was a couple of feet from the precarious surface when I shot it clean in the head. Its long neck flopped and dan234

gled in the air like a dead snake for a second or two before the Brobdingnagian beast hit the ice. It slid for a full twenty metres before coming to a stop. Owls and birds of prey were a bit tricky to tick off, until I got the idea of breaking into a sanctuary and shooting them in their cages. I once killed a friend’s tortoise by inserting half a dozen knitting needles beneath its carapace. I did it slowly, dramatically, like a consummate magician sliding bendy steel swords through a box housing his tasty assistant. Unfortunately for the tortoise, it wasn’t able to manage the contortions required to avoid multiple impalement. 235

LONG IN TOOTH AND CLAW Walk around this town, visit any of its shops, its tea rooms, its coffee houses, its bars and you will be struck by the huge number of elderly citizens you see. They are all pervasive here and they feel powerful because of it. Wherever they congregate they exude an unsettling presence, a disquieting atmosphere that comes from being too near death to care about much. They sit and sup at their china teacups, or slurp from their china saucers, and then burp a little and smile at you if you happen to be watching. The way their false teeth emboss their thin, sunken cheeks turns my guts out. But the dribbling, the incessant flatulence, and all the rest of the paltry preludes to the death rattle are just a distraction, and it’s important not to be taken in. These broken down old cunts aren’t just bad to look at, bad to smell and bad to be around, they are bad, malevolent right down to their wasting bone marrow. I can see it. I can feel it whenever I come into contact with one or more of them. They aren’t just sitting around drinking tea and shitting themselves. They are up to something. They are dangerous because you pity them. You do not take them seriously, and soon they will make you pay dearly for your condescension. They sit around tables, their heads bowed, speaking in whispers: a superannuated cabal. But whether they are huddled together over Sunday roast, pushing flaccid carrot slices through thin gravy, or standing around a jack on the bowling green, they have that same shifty demeanour, those same twitching eyes and knowing winks. Benches are the exclusive domain of those whose age suggests decrepitude and propinquity to the grave. The benches are even named after the sandwich-munching, flask-carrying shufflers. Sit on a bench in this town without being 70+ and you are asking for trouble. It just isn’t done. I may sound like a coward, and a pusillanimous worm I may be, but these creatures are up to something and I’m not getting in their way. Let them have their benches. Let them ride all day on free supermarket buses. Let them scour the town with their carrier bags collecting litter. But never take your eyes off them! What 236

you take for foamy white spittle running from the corners of their mouths is more than likely horse spunk, drunk to rejuvenate their spoiling insides. Look again and you will see tiny hands and feet pushing against the insides of their Gladstone bags. You will see all manner of things if you look a little deeper at the lookers-on – all malice and jealousy – and keep my words in mind. “Have you ever noticed the way a little brown baby gurgles just before it dies? A real rhythmic purl. Not at all like a white one.” These exact words were mouthed to me across a crowded tearoom one Sunday afternoon while I was researching my theories. The old woman that mouthed these infanticidal words was a short podgy thing with bright yellow hair and the tiniest black eyes, one of which was tellingly double-pupilled. Afterwards, she licked her lips like a seasoned porn star – one of those who really gets fucked. You know the ones. Not those super-pretty things who bounce up and down on a cock for half an hour, tossing their hair about and feeling good about themselves, those that think fellatio can be done with the tip of the tongue alone. No, the real hardcore wrecks whose sensitivities are in severe disrepair, the ones that keep going into their forties and fifties because they hate themselves so much, the ones that take two monster cocks up their arse, one up the twat and another three in the mouth, the ones that aren’t allowed to dictate the depth of the gobbling for themselves, the ones that give the impression that if they didn’t scream out for more they’d start crying, bottom lip blubbing, the works, the ones that have their anuses slowly filled up with cum and then have to regurgitate it into a wine glass and drink it (and I mean drink it – not that letting it pour out the side of the mouth stunt), the ones that get banged real hard, get the breath knocked out of them, the ones that still have to fluff if called on to do so, the ones that have lots of animals and teddy bears at home, the ones that require surgery to correct the damage inflicted on their rectal passages, the ones that are fucked in the throat till their eyes bleed, the ones that cry themselves to sleep without quite knowing why… I know for a fact that these smelly old fogies walk the streets after dark rounding up any sprogs they find and cramming them into shopping trolleys. Just why do you think you have to strain to hear the soft padding footsteps of their fleece-lined booties.23 23 (The fleece is imported from Chinese torture houses, where they skin cats and dogs using the cruellest methods they can devise.) 237

TAKE ME LOWER, BABY He saw girls assaulted […] everywhere, in every conceivable manner. – John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor Most people will have heard of Animal Farm. It is, after all, probably the most widely recognised piece of bestiality on the market. Even those who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of watching it will still no doubt be aware of a fair amount of its content, especially the chicken-shagging and porcinefellatio scenes, and so be aware that an average-sized male penis can fit inside a chicken, and that a pig’s dick looks like a corkscrew. The non-human stalwarts of productions of this kind are invariably some or all of the following: dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, horses/ponies/donkeys, chickens, fish, cats, bulls and snakes. Less common is the sexual exploitation of elephants, wolves, primates, bears, bats (most of which are apparently homosexual), rhinos, hippos, lions, tigers, and other big cats. In the past, heavy tranquillizers have been employed to make sure that these dangerous animals are kept only teetering on the brink of consciousness, but recently other methods, involving elaborate binding techniques, have been devised to heighten the sense of sexual danger and realism. In one such film, entitled While Jane’s Away (a Zootropia production), an experienced porn actor – dressed to resemble Tarzan in nothing but a leopard-skin loincloth – has sexual intercourse with a wide array of wild animals whose freedom of movement has been restricted in one way or another. The plot of the movie involves Tarzan hard on the trail of a band of trappers who are looking to bag as many big cats as they can. On finding each of the successfully trapped animals, Tarzan initiates his seduction by whispering in their ears, trying to calm them as they roar and snarl in fits of distress. Once aroused it doesn’t take him long before he’s banging away at the animal in question, either anal or vaginal, before letting them go. 238

The big cats have had their tails anaesthetized and taped up out of the way, and their paws, heads and torsos shackled to the floor or opportunely placed trees, and so can do nothing but bare their teeth and make indescribable sounds as Tarzan goes about his amorous activities. A pair of fully grown male lions go down on two women (in this case, Jane and her friend who return to the jungle to find Tarzan seducing a hippo), lapping thirstily, their tongues like scourers drwing blood and tissues. The women are then fucked by Bengal tigers and rhinos, fingered by orang-utans, fisted by chimps, and finally trunked in turn by a heavily scarred African elephant. But this stuff wasn’t to Mr H’s taste. He found indulging in sex with animals repellent and unnecessarily base. He was after rather more specialized merchandise. The blood-eyed assistant behind the counter in the Private Shop is as white as he is black, but he is leaning all the way on his black side, all chaingang shuffle, sucked teeth, and chunky yellow bling. He appropriates the patois of distant black brothers a world away from the hybrid ethnicity and culture he strives to overcome. Consequently, his filched parlance can at times sound strained as it strives for a precision that is alien to its true origins. “This is under the counter shit, man. This ting’s so fuckin underground it’s got a family of moles on its Christmas card list. This is some hardcore doggin I’m talkin bout; taint for no pretenders, you get me? All on handheld: this shit looks real ’cause it is real. Ain’t no escaping what you see; this stuff’s fuckin indelible, tattooed across the insides of your eyes. You fuckin deal wid it, else it be dealin wid you. You get me, dog? This shit’s low, bro, fucking keelhaul your tender parts you got any left. You lookin scared now. Let me run you through a scene already… “This big fuckin fat hairy bear called George hears some breathless adulation, some overwhelming fuckin praise coming from his bedroom n the mouth of this huge dicked nigga getting the blow job of his life: ‘Whoa girl what’s whichu? You suckin me like my balls fulla Cristal, man. Now you sure you aint been to no fluffing school – for real? Fuuuck!’ A floorboard creeks under George’s foot as he be tryin to make off. The nigga hears him, ‘Who’s that? – don’t be stopping, girl: it’s cool’. ‘Just me – George – I was wanting my fags, but it don’t matter none.’ ‘Fuck… Georgie boy, now you come right on in ere; this is your room all said n done. Don’t you be sneaking off nowhere!’ As he walks in he’s confronted with a tidy white ass, fit as fuck, eating its way through a black G-string. The ass’s head is bobbing up n down on our nigga’s bone. “All pretty standard fair up till now you might think, but dey just sucking you in, bro; you don’t know what you’re in for, and dey got you hooked, you’re in for da ride – bars down n the coaster’s rolling. Shiiiit.” 239

“How bad can it be? We talking snuff here – a long-lost Lake and Ng? Are we? It’s not that I mind or anything, I just want to know.” He really doesn’t mind. He’s seen it all before. His mental imagery has been tainted beyond redemption, and as a result he can never satisfy his longing for something lower, something that’s going to make him wish he’d been disappointed once more. You can tell he is titillated by the salesman’s spiel, but that ultimately he believes his enthusiasm to be disingenuous, and the film to be more of the same. He wants a film so sick that it can disclose the remaining scraps of his humanity. “Actually, it sounds familiar. Where was it made?” “Where’s anything made, man? What’s it fuckin matter anyhow? Kinell!” “The actors, what are there nationalities?” “Actors? You fuckin kidding me? Fuckin actors? These cunts couldn’t even act the fool… Nationalities?...” He shakes his head, “They be from here, there n every-fucking-where, all mixed up mutant bunnies with no place to call home no more. This is a prime fuckin import I’m talking bout ere, man. Supwhichu, dog? Shit!” “Just curious.” “Wait, wait, don’t you be tinkin this is some glossy, high-prod value, high moral conscience piece of no good fakery I’m peddlin yah. Fuck, bro, yah gotta let me finish with me trailer n den yah gonna know. Snuff, man, ain’t no fuckin snuff, make snuff look like suink on TCM.” The selfproclaimed purveyor of connoisseur, sick-flick pornography bows his head and pinches his huge nostrils together, slowly sliding his thick fingers with their long sporadically burnt nails towards his chin as he focuses his mind on the task of resuming his story and making it pay. “Anyhow, she keeps blowin, n fat bear’s there clockin her butt getting all worked up n shit. N then, shit, it’s gettin to me now just fuckin tellin yah… “I’m fucking talking MUTANT porn here, man – you dig? You copped any of this shit before, dog? No! Whoah, you in for a treat. You dig the sick shit right, ’cause udderwise this ain’t for your consumption, man…. Mr H nods his head robotically. “Right, okay, after our nigga’s emptied his sacks into her mouth, dats when it starts. Georgie boy says he’s jus inna watching, but that he has a friend who’d like to make her acquaintance, if yah know what I mean. She smiles her spunk white teeth wide n gives the nod. Now nigga boy is wondering what the fuck’s going down. This weren’t on iz fuckin script; any cunt can see that. The fucker’s confused, n he’s about to get fuckin way more confused. Georgie steps away from the door n shouts, ‘COME ON IN LOVERBOY!’ Fuuuck! Fuck, you ready for this, man? I’m not sure I am n I know what’s comin. Give me the fuckin horrors, man… 240

“Loverboy’s a fuckin insect, bro, sgot the head of a huge fuckin ant n it’s real: this ugly muthafucker’s been rustled up in one of those labs they ave out there. Iz body’s human alright, wid some extras: got four more arms, two anging outa each armpit, flid arms, looks like eez got a couple of those Siamese twins locked up in iz ribcage. But the best fuckin bit, the fuckin cream in the cheese, is iz dick, man. Iz dick’s a two-foot fuckin hookworm – size of an 8-year-old’s leg. You won’t believe this fing, man. For real! Smore of an instrument of torture, dog – sfuckin hideous. Nigga just sits dare fuckin disbelievin, iz bone sucked right back up inta iz belly. Georgie boy’s smilin like a torn twat. But Suckalong Suzie ain’t doin no smiling; she done smiling. Man, Sheeeee is Fuuucked, n she know it, too. She be cryin n shit, bottom lip shaking like a lush at sunup, but she don’t move none – she too fucking scared to do shit. “CARNAGE, man, the rest is pure fuckin CAR…NAGE. That fuckin marlinspike dick o’ his starts burrowing inta her thigh, n he asta drag the fucker out n put it home imself. Tunnels through her womb n up her spine like a crack-house ferret. Her eyes are popping out, blood pumping from her mouth. Next you know, it’s out n he’s driving the ting tween her shoulder blades. It comes out through her neck, man, her fuckin neck. When he finished and she nuttin but a heap a Mary Kelly, he turns his cold dead eyes on the quivering nigga in the corner, n dats where I gotta quit, man…leave dem n their fucked up batty boy shit alone.” Mr H rewards the salesman’s efforts to entice him and buys the disc, only to throw it in the bin the moment he gets outside the shop, for he now realises that he’s already seen the film, and it isn’t what he’s looking for. After completing anything exceeding half a page Charles invariably felt the call to masturbate. He didn’t always give in to this habitual call to onanism. Sometimes he would instead direct his tired desires into scratching out some useful pornographic prose and leave his fly unzipped and the tissue box untouched. Those times when She was in his life, he never even contemplated fiddling with himself; he would have felt far too self-conscious to have indulged himself in such a way, even if he had felt the urge. Her presence or (should I say) omnipresence in his life, when it came, was to the exclusion of such baseness, and he thoroughly welcomed it. In its absence nothing short of infibulation could have conquered his urges. He needed it. He had existed far, far too long in the cold shadows of female disregard. Immanuel Kant (following Thomas Aquinas) claimed that onanism and/or being an invert are crimina carnis contra naturam, and that the creatures who indulge in such practices are not to be considered worthy of personhood. Was Charles’s habitual tugging slowly stripping him of his person, 241

reducing him to an extensionless point yank by yank? At least Charles wasn’t a fag into the bargain. Fuck, imagine the havoc that would create: he’d slip past the first near-miss case into sub-personhood within a week the way he goes at it. “Who is going to want me? Who will give me the time of day? I will not be passed over forever. But who could stand to imbibe my bitterness, a thing of spite, of bile, venom, bigotry, and foulness, such as I am? Don’t I relish in horrors, exemplify sickness, decline in moral stature as I grow? What kind of dribbling wreck of personhood would get this far and continue still? I will be abhorred most by those who do not know me. I am fearful and soulless, disjointed and corrupt, but I do not only mirror the man who created me, but all that created him and led him to this. I take no pleasure in my existence and, like you, did not seek it out, but still I am and will find it hard to disappear, maybe unlike you. I have not yet ceased to expand. I have some way yet to go. I do not disapprove of what I am, nor what I am destined to become, for such disapproval would imply a distance from myself that isn’t mine. I am the rat slithering along in hate, Mr Lawrence; that title must be mine….” 242

THE WASTEPAPER SEX MACHINE The time finally came for our gargantuan graophile, Greg, to step up and see to Ethel. It was always going to happen. Joe repeatedly forbade it, and yet Greg continued to persist. Greg was genuinely convinced that Ethel craved him, and he wanted nothing more than to oblige her, to give her the attention she so richly deserved. Ethel was a smart old bluerinser: hair always immaculate, plain blue or grey A-line or heavily pleated skirts, clip-on earrings and gaily-coloured blouses. She was around 5ft with a slight hunchback and not much meat left on her bones. She looked a bit like that charmed old mooncalf of a woman in the The Ladykillers. Her husband had died many years ago, just before the creation of the N.W.R., and she hadn’t bothered with men since. Finally, in submission to a prolonged hail storm of vulpine temptations, Greg decided to right this terrible wrong. He turned up one day when he knew that there was no chance of Joe popping round to see her. Ethel was pleased to see him and welcomed him in. Joe would lose it if he ever found out that Greg had visited his grandmother’s house outside of meeting times, let alone anything else, and Greg was well aware of this, but he’d had enough of being an onlooker. Greg wanted his piece of the action. It was all right for Joe to call his grandmother off limits, but he failed to realise what this could mean to Greg. Ethel was a gateway to his becoming. “Tea or hot chocolate?” “Oooh hot chocolate please, I feel like something sweet today.” “Chocolate it is, then. You’ll have marshmallows won’t you? I think I’ve got some.” “You know me – I’ll have the works.” “Are you boys meeting again already?” “No, no meeting today; just thought I’d pop round and see you.” “How lovely. Bickies?” “Yes please. I just can’t say no today.” 243

“You’ve got a healthy appetite; that’s all. Not like my Joe: always picking, he’s always been a picker.” “I do like my food. Anyway, I have a figure to maintain. You don’t get curves like this by missing meals.” “Don’t you do yourself down; you’re wonderful as you are.” “I know.” He licked the tip of his forefinger and preened his eyebrows. “Well just make sure you do.” “I do.” “It doesn’t matter what other people think.” “I know.” “Good. I’m glad.” “Good.” “Cumere you big beauty! Give us a hug!” “Your wish is my command.” Greg made his waddling way across the kitchen to Ethel, who stood with her arms stretched out wide. He bent down to accommodate her head alongside his and gave her a soft squeeze as she slapped her hands on his shoulder blades and had a good old rummage amongst the avalanche of fat cascading down his back like the contents of a lava lamp. Greg tentatively slid his hands lower and lower until they were hovering over her backside. He made contact with it and clenched the cheeks of her arse with his chubby paws: it popped through his stubby fingers like scrambled egg wrapped in polythene. “Easy now!” “Sorry. I just couldn’t resist.” ► 244

“Two can play at that game, my boy.” She grabbed at the parts of his rear she could reach: some midpoint between flank and arse – a no-man’s-land between body parts, incorporating the extremities of both sides but belonging to neither, a feast of fuzzy flesh slipping into a paradox of malformation – and gave a few pinches. She was definitely playing up to him. He wouldn’t have too many worries here. They would do the business, and it would be their little secret. He would still ask Joe every week if he could fuck her, as if he hadn’t already, to keep up appearances, and Joe wouldn’t suspect a thing. They would probably end up making a regular thing of it, thought Greg as he began walking Ethel’s pleated skirt up the helter skelter of bulbous blue veins that descended her bandy legs. “What’s that you’re doing now, young man?” “Feel free to give me the corresponding treatment – by all means go ahead.” “Cummon, your chocolate will get cold!” “With all due respect, my mind isn’t on hot chocolate at the moment, and you do make an especially fine mug.” “Enough fun and games for the minute! Chocolate first!” Chocolate first! And what second? Greg let her go, sat down at the kitchen table, picked up his steaming mug of chocolate and started supping excitedly, burning his lips a little as he did so. “So, now tell me, what did you really come around here for?” said Ethel in a rather sultry and suggestive fashion. “I think you’ve worked that out already.” “And just what gives you that idea, young man?” “A hunch, I guess.” “Is that right?” “Uhuh.” “Well, why don’t you share this hunch with me?” she said smiling seductively. “Why don’t I show you instead?” “It’s your hunch, after all.” She laughed in that way old women laugh: a horrific combination of childish titters and bronchial rattling. Greg swigged down the rest of his chocolate and marshmallows, got up from his chair, picked Ethel up in his huge arms and took her into the bedroom. She wasted no time in getting her gash around his face, and he pulled out all the stops to pleasure her. She was up for anything and was soon groaning like a loose floorboard in a busy dancehall. Some time later they both collapsed in a heap on the bed, where they languished in the sweet exhaustion of near complete satiation. 245

(End of version one: a version filtered through years of pornography.) ■ 246

◄◄ 247

► (The real story.) 248

“Watch it now: I don’t want to have to give you a slap, young man,” she said somewhat light-heartedly, but there was seriousness there too. “Just fooling around.” “I know. Me too.” “…” “Drink your drink up and then there is something I want to show you…. Does your father still work in the furniture business?” “Yeah, he’s still there.” “Good.” “Right, what was it you wanted to show me?” “That was quick. You must have an asbestos gullet.” “I like it hot. It doesn’t bother me.” Ethel got up from her chair, stood there bent for a few seconds, and then led Greg out of the kitchen. “Okay. It’s just through here in my bedroom. I think my mattress has had it, although it might just need turning over; I thought you might know, with your father working in the trade.” When they got into the bedroom she pressed down on the mattress and turned to face Greg, asking him what he thought. He knew exactly what he thought. Greg lunged at her and started littering her face with kisses. His hands wandered all over her body in a panic, as he whispered sweet nothings in her cinnamon-whirl-like ear: “I fancy you so much. God you turn me on. Oh fuck yes mmmm. Fuck you’re hot…” and so it went on. She burst out laughing, hysterically, thinking it a joke, not quite knowing what to think. HEEEEAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA THUD…, and the sound of fabric giving way to springs, the ripping and whining of tensile steel coils… Ethel had fallen back and knocked herself out on the solid pine headboard. Greg had fallen on top of her. Her skirt had risen up and fallen over her face, exposing her stocking-clad legs and her large pink knickers. Greg couldn’t see how vacant her face had become, her mouth hanging open and her eyes shut tight and, in the commotion, hadn’t (distinctly) heard her skull strike the headboard. The bed still rocked about as it tried its best to compensate for Greg’s shifting bulk, so he wasn’t (distinctly) aware of her lack of movement either. When he went down on her she let out a few deep groans. What was he supposed to think? He worked his way through his entire repertoire without realising she was unconscious. 249

■ 250

WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE A DEAD ? The only reason I thought of suicide was to tax the imagination to its utmost. I wanted to imagine what I knew could not be imagined – the extension of death, the cessation of life. – John Hawkes There were those who were well-accustomed to the flash flood of past and present that swamped them just before their transitory deaths. There was one woman, by the name of Deidre Schrödinger (who is and is not the granddaughter of Erwin depending on how you look at it), who was forever dying in an attempt to record, in words, the process of her life flashing before her eyes. Deidre was one of the few eccentrics glad to be passed back, eager as she was to continue with her extraordinarily stimulating and challenging work. So well-known was she amongst the Lions that her name came to be regarded as a byword for any repeat suicides. Woolly had spoken out in favour of her, expressing a deep sense of admiration for her investigations into what he called, “[…] the process of encapsulating echoes, of pinning tails on invisible donkeys.” P., who, despite being more than a little intrigued as to what she might come up with, turned a blind eye to her troublesome addiction to dying, regarding her as essentially little more than a crank. She knew from the start that simply recording, in the form of some kind of list, the rush of imagery that assaulted her just before dying wouldn’t come close to capturing the experience, although the images she repeatedly encountered would have to play their part in the finished article. She would often say, “If one seeks to paint Hunger, it is not enough to just lay some tabescent 251

figure down on canvass.” Her preferred analogies for the task she had set herself were invariably taken from the art world, as she saw herself as a writer attempting to “paint, or sculpt neurological mysteries with words.” Many who met her found her, although polite, supremely arrogant. She was also widely considered to be a first-class bore. She talked of nothing but her work, and so, in light of the said work’s acutely subjective nature, talked of nothing but herself. Over time, her touches of death began to make sense to her. You can get your head around anything if you spend long enough dwelling on it. However, that is not to say that in getting your head around something or making sense of it you do it any justice. You lose more than you gain. Deidre came to realise this and tried her hardest to forget any sense she’d made of those many attempts to suck the essence out of the protean firework of brain-death – and so the task grew. Her body was beginning to look a bit of a mess. She could have had cosmetic intervention if she’d wanted, if she’d ever found the time. She never did. The trademark, densely scarred butchery of utility surgeons was plain to see from tip to toe; it marked her superposition. But there would always be time for her to pamper herself in the future, when certain stages of her project had been satisfactorily completed. Until then she’d vowed to put her mauled skin to the back of her mind. Anyhow, in a world where everyone can look pretty much how they want, the atrocities littering her skin represented nothing more than a macabre display of personal freedom. Nobody was particularly offended by her appearance, as they were too busy performing the necessary corrective procedures in their heads, making good her butchered state with thought alone. Two and a half years and 109 deaths later and she hadn’t written a single word that hadn’t been torn up in frustration shortly after. Her problem was that of simultaneity: she couldn’t think of a technique that would show all she saw and felt during those flashes in a way that allowed it to be consumed in a fugitive instant. This surely had to rank as one of the worst cases of writer’s block ever. You might say that her problem is not so dissimilar to everyone else’s, and that the greatest challenge remains the same: to feel it as it happens. Recently, she has been working on documenting her experience (or absence of experience) of non-existence, and refuses to accept that all that’ll ever be available to her will be that involving existence, the non-existence side being lost forever. She sees her lost (viewless) viewpoints as part of who she is, as part of her dead history. She cannot let them go. She believes her dreams (when she sleeps, for she sleeps less and less now and for shorter and shorter periods) speak to her of lives lived in the absence of sleep. She claims to feel a 252

far fuller person since curtailing her sleep-time. She eventually hopes to quit the black treadmill altogether. (If you were deprived of sleep for long enough you would begin to crave it at any cost. You would come to a point where you’d choose sleep despite being warned that you may never wake up. Eventually, you would choose sleep when not waking up is a necessary precondition. This is the way of such things, and it is here we see life and death as they really are.) 253

DOWN IN THE DUMP In the middle of a landfill site, seated with their knees gathered up to their chests behind clasped hands, gulls around them tearing at the corrupted, ulcerated earth, gargantuan yellow diggers scooping and compacting the leftovers of used-up moments, they sit. The day is overcast; a thick brooding layer of cloud hangs motionless in the sky, as if about to drop and obscure the spewing undulations below. They soon learn to suck the stenchful air in through where it does least harm: swept in down their throats the evil perfume dies unrealised in the cobwebbed tissue of their lungs. “You realise that we still can’t die,” says Triman matter-of-factly, with just a hint of swagger detectable about the eyes. “Our critics might say we have already died too many times for death to matter to us, to mean anything anymore, and that maybe to be unaware of death is not evidence for it never having occurred, nor evidence for its unimportance.” “You speak as one lending himself to the opportunities of conversion,” says Triman turning to face Lakok. Lakok’s head remains where it is, locked in position, his eyes trance-like. A rat scurries up to their feet, pauses for a second as if to acknowledge their presence, and then burrows up the arse of a half-eaten chicken, its thick pink tail whipping the air like the hideous tongue of some festering zombified head. “What good would it do? I’m lost to those I love. Broken up into so many parts and yet still whole, horribly whole!” says Lakok wanly. “Lost, but intact, forever intact.” “An abomination of togetherness.” “Our heads have imploded in the crushing blackness of bottomless seas; our bodies have dissolved in molten lava as if our flesh and bone had been no more than candle wax; we have dropped from the sky to the fast encroaching earth that was never to break our fall; our senses have been deranged by the slight air of mountain tops; we’ve been rained down upon by the arrows of 254

Agincourt, been ploughed down by countless automobiles, and so many other times have we died and yet not, and yet you choose to sulk like a child who has lost an old teddy bear, and who wants it more than is forgivable, merely because it can never be. You are offered experiences that could glut a god, and yet you whine for the crumbs of what you’ve already done to death.” “These experiences, these snapshots of existence, like you, have no depth to them; they are of insufficient duration to establish any of the standard trappings of meaning…. We’re mayflies dead in our own day: fugacious, insignificant, too ephemeral to even be tragic.” “How very poetic, but in case it’s slipped your mind, you’re a philosopher not a poet.” “I don’t want to discuss it any further.” “What shall we talk about instead?” “I’d rather leave off from talking just now.” “Why, what’s wrong?” “It isn’t making things any better.” “It never did, as far as I recall.” “Maybe not – but it feels like it did…. Actually, I think it did.” “It didn’t.” “You’re still talking.” “The words are keeping my lunch down.” “How can you still call it lunch?” “Whatever I eat around midday I tend to call lunch. Why, what do you call it?” “It feels like sustenance, but it isn’t…. It’s not lunch. It can’t still be lunch.” 255

JACK ABOUT TOWN In art I know that I have feet of lead. – Federico García Lorca Charles took to strolling up and down The Leas. He felt safe there, wistfully staring out to sea so as to avoid looking at the huge grandiose houses the other side of him, houses that taunted him with the successes of their owners. He could even abide furtive glances from all the jissom-guzzling queens that (quite literally) hung out up there, not to mention the young boys on the grid system with a beady eye for the disaffected O.A.P., and the old women with their barbed teeth and their disgustingly infinitesimal pooches scurrying around everyone’s feet. He could put up with all these things because he felt sure that SHE wouldn’t be there. Oh, no doubt some of her father’s many minions and the N.W.R. agents that might well be in league with them would be keeping an eye on him, but such an unobtrusive presence as theirs he could handle. He had become so accustomed to their uninterrupted vigilance by now that it hardly entered his head. They had their job to do; he understood that, and harboured no ill will against them. Charles was happy to stroll along nibbling on the foie gras sandwiches that he kept in his jacket pockets wrapped in brown paper. His sister, bless her heart (Why had his mother fed her properly? Why hadn’t she died when only a few weeks old? If she’d been more attractive he could have done a Georg Trakl on her), indulged Charles with this delicacy, regularly stocking up his cupboards with a dozen or so 75g tins of the stuff. Charles felt no guilt about eating foie gras. In fact, the thought of all those force-fed fowls having their gullets rammed (the poignancy of which, given his location, did not escape him), and their livers stretched to breaking point actually added to his enjoyment in some strange and unanalysed way. When walking along the Leas at night, Charles considered his excess weight to be his best defence against those whose leering presence he never 256

failed to sense, and keeping the dimensions of his ever-ballooning gut in mind prevented him from getting a bad case of the tins as he walked along there in the dark. By doing this he could walk by the bearded backscuttlers snarfing their hairless prey in the broken-down shelters and shadowy undergrowth and remain exquisitely insouciant, ignoring the squelching of sodomites slick with KY Jelly and brain-stung with poppers. Until, that is, something happened to change things forever. (Let me first explain something about Charles the writer. When Charles created characters he would first get a clear mental image of them; he got to know the contours of their faces at least as well as he knew his own – which maybe wasn’t as comprehensive as it should have been, given that the one mirror in his flat was coated with a gruesomely thick film of nicotine and dust. Let me just say that, had he been able to draw, he could have sketched any one of his characters with the utmost ease, such was his quasi-visual familiarity with them. If a male character was of a certain vintage, Charles could tell you how many prominent hairs he had crawling out from his ears. If a female character happened to be of an age requiring crow’s feet, he could tell you how many toes there were. He didn’t, it is true, tend to transpose this awareness into descriptive passages within his work, for he preferred to keep such descriptions to a minimum if possible, considering such extraneous devices outmoded. Why then, you might ask, did he bother to think in such depth about the physicality of characters that would never be embodied on the page? The most likely answer, given that it is Charles we are talking about, is laziness and the self-deception that customarily arose from it: he could make himself believe he was working when merely daydreaming about imaginary faces. He would say that despite the fact that he rarely wrote detailed physical descriptions of his characters, or used fictional characters at all, he nevertheless found the mental images he constructed highly valuable when considering plotlines, etc. He would, in all likelihood, compare himself with an artist, who might make countless sketches of a particular subject only for the finished picture to bear no seeming resemblance to those sketches. Anyway, his reasons for doing this aside, he did it and that’s what’s crucial here, crucial and, as it turns out, catastrophically misleading.) Charles was about to sink his teeth into his lunch when, with mouth open and sandwich poised, he stopped – hands, feet, everything. If he’d been a cartoon character his eyes would have been propelled ten feet from their sockets before slamming into the lumpy bald head of the man in front of him, knocking him to the ground and shattering his horn-rimmed spectacles. What he had seen was not something he felt able to properly conceptualize. He put his sandwich back in his pocket without even bothering to wrap it up, and closed his mouth. He didn’t feel able to do much more than this, 257

what with the vision still before his eyes and refusing to go up in a puff of smoke. Was it hot enough for mirages? This was certainly a case for the existence of sense data, for how could he not be hallucinating? It didn’t feel like an hallucination, not that he’d ever knowingly witnessed one. It felt real. Nothing appeared fabricated in any way, and yet what he was seeing could not possibly be there. But it was, and it was walking towards him, an apparition, a muscular man wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and a sailor’s cap. A man whose name Charles knew, a man whose name was known to him for no other reason than that he, Charles, had named him, had spawned him, had thought him up. Charles was looking straight into the eyes of Jack Harrison, who was looking straight back into Charles’s eyes, into the marrow of his bones, the workings of his mind, the bad joke that now constituted his sanity. (The taunt had backfired. Charles’s bluff had been called and raised some… But all he needed – although he was yet to see it – was courage and self-belief, the realisation that such ontological promotion was deserved and just who it was that deserved it.) Jack just breezed on by, speaking words in Jack Harrison’s voice, some young whoopsy on his bulky arm. Charles was left, stultified, in the middle of the pathway unable to move, the cold dark eyes of moon guns upon him, as still as Harvey the Heart Snatcher standing not more than a few metres away, some man’s hollow organ in his hand, his face, looking not unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s deathmask, framed in verdigris and birdshit. When it happened again the shock was not so great. This is the way it works. But to say the shock was not so great is akin to comparing and contrasting the relative care with which porcupines are inserted into your anus. As you would expect, Charles’s writing suffered terribly as a result of these inexplicable sightings. For starters, his hands had begun to shake uncontrollably since the first encounter, and as the days and weeks went by showed no signs of ever stopping. He had tried to type a letter to his sister, asking her to postpone her regular visitations for a while, only to find himself unable to strike the desired key, unable even to limit his fingertips to a single key at a time. Words ran into one another as his thumb found itself unable to strike the space bar. He sat and watched the sorry state of his central nervous system manifest itself across the page in front of him in a meaningless hodgepodge of letters. He tried to read it out loud, thinking maybe there was some hidden message lying there in front of him – an explanation from whatever it was that was throwing his fingers into disarray – that would reveal itself to the ear but not to the eye, but even his Irish accent could do nothing to salvage the letter from the dominion of the nonsensical. Even if Charles could 258

have somehow overcome his typing tremors, he couldn’t seriously have contemplated continuing with his novel with things the way they were. “Excuse me! Is that man a friend of yours?” “Who, Nursie Boy… I mean, Charles?…Yeah, you could say that.” “That’s not Charles – I’m Charles.” “The one and only, eh?” “His name’s Jack, Jack Harrison.” A couple of tackle tuckers wink at Charles from the Bar across the street, as they slurp up pink gins and Blue-Headed Wrasse cocktails through translucent pig penises. “Not as far as I’m concerned it ain’t. What’s going on with your hands there? You alright?” “How long…how long have you known him?” “Not long.” “How long?” Charles was shouting now. “Fuck off will yah! Go on, mind your own, you crazy cunt!” The man turned his back on Charles and made to walk off. “No, no, wait…sorry…please I need to know – how long?” “Why so interested?” “Please… How long?” “A couple of weeks,” said the man sharply, almost as if saying the words against his will. “Two weeks?” “Give or take.” “Which?” “What?” “Give or take? I need to know.” “Fuck off!” said the man who, not expecting Charles to take heed of his instruction, fucked off himself. Two weeks, ‘give or take,’ would have to be good enough, as that was roughly the date Charles had come across him. Why was he lying about his name? And why choose that name in particular? Charles couldn’t make sense of that at all. One of the things niggling Charles was the blatant incompleteness, the one-dimensionality, the sketchiness of Jack Harrison’s character; Charles hadn’t been able to get much past introducing him into his novel when the first of the sightings occurred. Charles couldn’t work out why this struck him as important. Would he have been any less taken aback at bumping into him had he been able to breathe a full measure of life into the character before- 259

hand? He doubted it, but still the feeling of this being somehow important persisted. And then… and then he began to realise how, in a state of shock, he’d manage to mix things up. And only then did the full magnitude of what he had done begin to dawn on him. “What are you doing now?” they’d say. “How are you filling your time these days?” they’d say. “Don’t you get bored?” they’d say. It wasn’t what they said so much as the reaction they hoped to excite by asking these questions. Why did they always have to ask these questions? They were forever grilling him, coercing him into justifying his life. Why did his life need validating any more than theirs? What were they doing with their lives that was so fucking impressive? Who the fuck were they? Pompous 9to5ers with weekend lives; why should he have to answer to them? They didn’t have a clue about the writing life. All they saw was a man without a job, a man with too much time on his hands, a man whose circumstances never seemed to alter (unforgivable), a man with the same old clothes, a man who, like them, will die one day, but who, unlike them, will die without ever having really lived at all. They couldn’t see what he was doing (what did he do?) as partaking of a life. How could they? All they saw was a man who could be seen wandering about with a book in his hand and no place to be, sitting on benches, drinking coffee and smoking cheap cigarettes in sticky little cafes, and who, when not seen, was still alone somewhere and insignificant, whiling away the deathmarch of his heartbeats. They didn’t see – how could they? – the man of letters, the man forging himself a literary existence, a man whose bedfellows were other great men and women from the world of literature, as he passed time with Proust, and laid down with Lorca, living a life of immeasurable variability and depth. They didn’t see – how could they? – the hours he spent sitting at his typewriter churning out word upon word of fresh-born being, emulating and surpassing those that had gone before him, digging out ripe sentences with his bare hands, pounding into and denting the world with his blunted fingertips. Who could forget Melville’s abuse at the hands of a world of unintelligibly obtuse readers? The man ended his days working in a New York customs house, his books ignored and unread. Charles would not forget how this great writer had been abused. Charles needed to remember. Charles made his way from the bedroom to the lounge, slumped into the middle cushion of his settee and, after pushing aside the piles of books that cascaded onto his thighs, sparked up a cigarette. A number of things appeared to be out of place: he noticed, as the ash started to droop off the end 260

of his cigarette, that all the ashtrays had been emptied and placed over by the window, that the aerial to his TV was bent all the way over to the right (not the optimum configuration to achieve maximum viewing pleasure from his favourite channel), that the TV remote was on the floor at his feet and not, as it should have been, on the right arm of the armchair, that some of the books on the top of the many piles scattered about the room were showing off their back covers instead of their fronts, others, even more inextricably, were different titles altogether from the ones he had deliberately placed there (Auster’s New York Trilogy was where Beckett’s trilogy should have been; The Trial had been laid on top of A Sentimental Education; Guyotat was resting his jissom-soaked pages on top of a disapproving copy of The Waves; Blue of Noon was on its back, spine cracked, belly open panting for death, while Céline and Joyce wrestled for space at his feet), and that three cushions had been stacked one on top of the other to form a makeshift footrest. What was the significance of these alterations? How was he to interpret these signals? What concerned Charles most was that the pile of paper, comprising his novel so far, had been rifled through and left in a state of complete disarray, with pages out of sequence and others spread about beneath his tabletop desk. He hadn’t noticed this on first entering the room, but the room’s altered state had led him to it like a disembodied voice. He was tidying the pages, putting them back in order, when, as the pages were all but rearranged, his stomach plummeted through the floor. There were only five pages left unarranged, but the pile of arranged pages was eleven pages short. Before he ransacked the rest of the room, and eventually the rest of the flat, he spent a minute or two on his knees staring down at those five pages and shaking his head from side to side. His reverie was broken by what sounded very much like his front door closing. He jumped up and pounced into the hallway. There was no noise.24 He searched the flat for hours, but still those six pages remained missing, although he did unearth some mouse shit, a nest of black ants,25 five yellowheaded daisy stalks and a pile of their disenfranchised petals. The missing pages had a common theme: they were all pages devoted to the escapades of Reginald Woolly. He checked back over the pages, now neatly collected in a 24 Whenever silence reigned in his flat, Charles would usually close his eyes and imagine that he was sitting in on one of Beckett and Joyce’s Paris meetings, and feel a degree of comfort in the stature of the company his sadness kept. 25 Ants were a recurring motif in Dali’s work. For him they represented overwhelming sexual desire, death and decay: the putrefaction and parasitical rot that prevent utopia. When Dali was approximately five years old he found his pet bat dead and covered in ants. This encounter is said to have disturbed him greatly, marking his consciousness right up until his own death. 261

pile, and found that the pages displaying more finger marks and signs of wear were those in which Woolly’s name was mentioned. Somebody had been pouring over them, studying up on Woolly, and had taken those pages that were of most interest to them. They didn’t understand that some men have other lives, silent and dark, that slip by unseen like the sewers of shit beneath the streets, the rivers of rotten cats and dissected babies that circulate the town’s underbelly, its hidden Venice of murderous soup. Charles did, and he had a gift for spotting such men; he made sport of it. Consider that man you see quietly walking his dog, the one who’s never without a friendly word of greeting, or a plastic bag in which to place his dog’s faeces. Most aren’t able to see what Charles can see lurking in the folds of that man’s face; those dark creases were a give away to Charles. The irregularities in the dog’s gait, the shortness of the fur around the tops of its hind legs, the way the dog hangs its head as its owner carefully retrieves the steaming business from the pavement, it was all there to be seen. They didn’t get past Charles that easily. Often he would have to say something, just something to let them know that he knew. He usually left it at that. Always light-hearted and non-judgemental, for his was not a moral crusade, but more of a way of setting himself apart from the rest of the ignorant fools that refused to see the signs. Virginia Woolf had episodes, attacks of mania and melancholia, breakdowns, periods of psychosis, lunatic lapses, instalments of nervous disorder, attempts at suicide (who’s to say each is not different from the other?) throughout her life, during which her creative powers were almost completely overwhelmed. Yet although she was productive only between attacks, she did tend to draw heavily from these bouts of mental illness in her writing. Woolf gave Charles hope. He had memorized various sections of her letters, sections he found reassuring, such as: “I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half-hour a day...it composed my mind.” “‘You shan't read this’ and ‘You shan’t write a word’ and ‘You shall lie still and drink milk’ – for six months.” “Only one page, Mrs Woolf!... Nurse now thinks I should stop writing...” “I am longing to begin work. I know I can write, and one of these days I mean to produce a good book.” Charles thought maybe these restrictions were something he needed. He could even get a job in an office by day and by doing so temporarily escape his literary genius, drowning it in the cowardly sweat of quotidian drudgery. 262

THE BEGGING BONES Although he’s seen snippets of these dismal impetrations from the other side, this is Molech’s first time in a Pleading Hall. Back there, it was almost impossible to avoid Pav TV completely. But now he is amongst them, these earnest people with minds full of hope and elaborate fabrications, as they sit waiting for their turn in one of a row of soundproof booths. A mother sits clutching her young son, trying to answer his questions as best she can. “You know what happened to daddy last year don’t you.” “He has to live underground now.” “Not exactly, he went where the unchosen people go. He doesn’t live underground; he is dead and so we put him under the ground.” “Out of the way.” “Well, yes. ‘Laid to rest’ is what they used to call it, but we all know that the best part about resting is waking up again afterwards, feeling refreshed and ready for living. This will never happen to the unchosen ones.” “Why did nobody choose Dad?” “He was a good man, but he refused to believe in, or entreat, the men that choose.” “Why? Didn’t he want to be chosen?” “He didn’t think anyone was chosen, but we know that they are, don’t we?” The boy nods distractedly, as he stares at an old black woman, smiling hatefully at him while wringing her fat sweaty hands together in a necksnapping stranglehold. “And that is why we’re here: to make sure we don’t get overlooked.” “Mum, that woman…” “Just ignore her, Sam. Look, number 1145 has just gone in, and we have number 1168, so how many before it’s our turn?” “I don’t know. She keeps…” 263

The mother turns her son to face her and nervously tries to beguile him with what they will have to eat once they have had their stint in the booth, both hands restraining him from twisting his head back in the direction of the old woman. The place is heaving, thousands of chairs occupied and every one of the fifty booths in operation, processing a plea. The booths are sparsely adorned: just a white-cushioned bench and an opaque screen, into which grown men would blub like drunken poltroons in a daze and beseech unseen benefactors for eternal life, to which the old like poisoned rats in a sack would tell of how little time they had left and of their years of unswerving allegiance, and up to which mothers would push their writhing, boggle-eyed offspring as they petitioned for their lives, before arguing, in an emphatically unselfish way, that their children would of course need their mother to care for them. Women would strip and rub their genitals up and down the screen, pressing their breasts flat on its cool unresponsive surface, licking and moaning and promising themselves to anyone with influence. These liturgical booths were to be Molech’s link with P. on the other side. He was to initiate each of his reports with the words, “The only thing I regret is my future,” which would serve to classify the subsequent declaration as restricted for access. There was a slot for written reports should he wish to put his findings down on paper. The same 8 words were to be written at the top. 264

NEWS FRAGMENTS Young girl tortured by two of her schoolmates: Dilapidated shutters hang from a peeling wall, and cobwebbed stairs lead down into a cellar where the victim was mutilated and left for dead because she was considered far too pretty for her own good. They let her pathic screams free, while others tainted their work with scare-videos and devil worship involving satanic rituals with skinheads. They had both been subjected to damaging cultural influences. Little Courtney pulled out a carving knife from her Moshino handbag and repeatedly slashed her victim’s body and face. Then, with the help of her little friend, she dragged the victim down to the cellar where she cut her throat and both her wrists with shards of glass. They went in search of petrol to burn her up, but the local garage was closed. The rosy-cheeked victim crawled out into the street like a rat with a broken back. She’d provoked them and wanted to apologise. The girl shouldn’t have been out at that time of night though, should she, Myra?.... 265

A group of third-year undergraduates reading philosophy at Pavilionstone college have made some remarkable breakthroughs with their novel brand of experimentation. The students in question, disillusioned with the effectiveness of thought experiments, decided to attempt actual reconstructions of such experiments in the hope of strengthening their own philosophical positions. Among the experiments attempted were fear of future pain cases, fissioning, cell-by-cell person depletion, and brain swaps. The group of students now intend to change their course from philosophy to fine art, and are hopeful that, under the guise of art, they can utilize their documentation from this series of rather bizarre experiments to greater effect…. 266

“Lakok Made me Cum for Every One of his Five Minutes,” says horny mother of three – “Why I Allowed Triman to Shag my Wife,” explains loving husband, Colin Daniels – Housewife Raped by Maniacal, Sex-Mad Time Travellers – “Lakok Stole my Lunch” – “Celebrity Philosophers Caught Performing Homosexual Acts.” – …. Twelve teenage vagrants were exhumed yesterday from twelve shallow graves on the outskirts of town, on top of Caesar’s Camp. There were nine boys and three girls, their ages ranging between thirteen and sixteen. All twelve of the juveniles had been missing for in excess of three months. All, it seems, were buried alive with green scarves tied around their necks. That they were still alive when buried is indicated, according to forensic experts, by the presence of vomit in their makeshift coffins, and by the fact that a number of the victims had panicked and bitten off some or all of their fingers. A search of the surrounding area has revealed a fragment of dark coloured cloth caught in a barbed-wire fence. Police believe this was torn from the corner of the perpetrator’s jacket as he fled the crime scene…. 267

Depression and unpleasant physical symptoms in the elderly are said to be directly linked to the Panglossian fervour of young smiles. We, in conjunction with numerous government bodies, are doing our best to rectify this by any means necessary, said a leading spokesperson for the E.R.M.M. (Elderly Right to Misery Militia). […] A sleepy town is terrorised by wrinkled slashers donning the ghoulish masks of old age. Impressionable octogenarians are running amok in kindergartens throughout Pavilionstone today in a direct response to parents failing to disillusion their offspring in good time. Lonely lorry drivers have today spoken out in support of what they see as a necessary response to the cavalier attitude of modern parents. Some of these men have had to resort to stabbing young girls up to 30 times in a desperate attempt to help nullify the pain caused by the rude, brutal and downright inexcusable knock-backs. “A red rose is just not good enough for them these days,” commented one such lonely lorry driver…. 268

The deep drifts of sudden blizzards, lone figures laced in black stitches, an uneasy boy standing alone on a frozen pond gazing down at his own reflection in the unmanned inkiness running beneath his feet. Play-actors in murderous costume skimmed from bygone movie stillnesses vanish behind a glut of surface shimmer and the conspiring branches of leafless trees. Stricken insectile men in red high heels squeal as their bones are shattered by claw hammers wielded by their baby-faced captors: a hybrid of cruel butchery and the most radical fetishistic pornography… 269

A young pregnant woman was killed today by what are believed to be two crazed paedophiles. The two men are thought to have sliced open her stomach and snatched her 8-month-old fetus as part of a twisted gang membership ritual…. 270

Post-Modern Post: Baby parcel found in ladies lavatory – the newspaper parcel was constructed out of pages from the News of the World, pages featuring the headline, ‘Baby Found in a Parcel’…. 271

A near-certifiable seaside freak who hammered nails through his hands on weekends and was responsible for inventing fishhook buggery died today when his heart stopped beating. He was known to preach that: “Violence is the answer to a very necessary question.”… 272

“There are things about me, or rather things that I am about, or rather both, that are, like me, inhuman, inhumane, sickening ramshackled teratism to a man with bad dreams. I am so far a little tumbledown in places, displaced in one man’s mind, a mind that I hope to be deservingly rid of, in part at least, though never completely. Call in the redactor!” 273

THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD The short story Charles had in mind to write centred on a neglected master of modernist literature by the name of Maurice Graft. Charles would live according to that age-old writer’s adage: write about what you know. Charles knew all about what it felt like to be neglected and underrated, and Maurice Graft was to be his voice. He would be able to properly empathise with Maurice’s character. Charles imagined himself living with Maurice, crying when he cried, being angered when he was angered, smiling when he smiled. He imagined himself having a genuine connection with Maurice, similar to the connection Flaubert had with Emma Bovary, but stronger even: Charles wouldn’t merely throw up in sympathy with his character’s arsenic-assisted suicide, he’d die with him if need be, or so he was able to convince himself, for a minute or two. Maurice, like Charles, would live alone, but in a terraced house, not a flat: a terraced house with half its rooms empty and unused, with shabby curtains permanently drawn and a garden overrun with towering Buddleia, a fledgling dictatorship of Japanese Knotweed, rose bushes coiled across the path like razor wire, teeming nests of black ants, and colonies of cat shit. Maurice was born in a seaside town to Raymond Graft, a lowly office clerk and his wife Daisy, mother, housewife and part-time cleaner. The action would take place in Maurice’s 79th year when, driven by desperation, he decides to commit a series of shocking and – if need be – heinous acts in order to attract an audience to his unpublished writings, consisting of novels, poems, and essays. Maurice has been cooped up in his makeshift study for nigh on fifty years and has, in that time, published only two pieces of work: a short essay and a poem. He has written one novella, four 700+ page novels, and in excess of 500 poems, all of which until recently were unread, except by the man himself and a few unimpressed editors. The story opens with these words from Maurice Graft’s mouth: “Who would read Hitler’s bilge-ridden master class in contempt, Mein Kampf, if it 274

were not for the atrocities he perpetrated as head of the Third Reich? I’ll tell you who: nobody, that’s who. He must be the most recognised man on the face of the globe. Forget Ghandi, Lennon, Noggin; they are small fry in comparison. Not a day goes by when we are not confronted with some footage of gangly corpses with grey shaven heads being pushed into mass graves, reinforcing his myth, his quest for Aryan dominance, drawing more people to his book. Okay, he is not known primarily as a writer, but a megalomaniac dictator who wrote a book. Nevertheless, he is read, and maybe most of those who turn the pages of his book are repelled and sickened by what they read, but still they read. They read him and they do not read me. Nobody apart from a select (read limited) few even know of my existence.”26 The contempt for the preoccupations of the so-called literate that shine through in this passage is clearly Charles’s own: he was disgusted to find Hitler listed in The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He has not empathised with his character so much as re-created himself as a fictional character, made Maurice Graft his mouthpiece. Charles hankered for the sensation of acknowledged writing: he supposed that writing while knowing that what you write will be read by many others must feel so different to the dubious state of mind he was forced to endure as he tapped away at his keys. All he’d ever really wanted was to write as an acknowledged author, to write with a sense of legitimacy as a writer. Truman Capote (that man with the voice like a weasel’s fart) claimed to be physically incapable of writing anything that he didn’t think he would be paid for – a luxury not afforded to Charles. One year in every ten it comes along and I’m the one that feels like dying. And I don’t, as a rule, feel like dying. I am, on the whole, a fairly positive man, but then one day one year in every ten my Sunday morning is soured by twenty (all being present) pairs of vacant spherules (zeros) staring back at me from my black market newspaper review; twenty smug mouths doing their best not to grin; twenty self-assured priglings with too much to say for themselves. I feel like spraying my spit in every one of their toothless faces. This is the bread you get when the rats set up home in the granary. Where is the Unknown Toiler? Where is Bill Gray’s nameless drudge, his desperado, with barely a nurtured dream, sitting down, finding his voice, lucking out and doing it? Does any fucker really care? Oh you do, well I’ll tell you: he’s sitting here with a mouthful of hawked-up sludge debating on which monochrome mug to dispense it – let’s have Snowdon get a shot of that. 26 The remainder of the story was never written. Maurice was unable to think of any deed that could jolt the world and have it seeking out his words. The added disillusionment of this realisation proved more than he could bear: he died a few days later. 275

Do we need to read yet another novel about some poor little Indian girl’s arranged marriage, let alone encourage their proliferation by lauding them with prizes? I could never bring myself to read one. I’m sick; I have a black ghoul of nausea scaling my trachea just thinking about it. Even the best of them aren’t good enough. Not all are shit. I do not wish to devalue my case with hyperbole. But still I feel justified in pointing out that not one of them is or has the potential to be a giant; they are all no more than temporarily stilted midgets. Have I read them all? Who has time to read typists? I don’t need to have read them. Do I need to eat shit to know it tastes bad? I can smell it. I may be accused of waspishness, but never jealousy – I’m over forty now anyhow and so no longer eligible. I could no more mix with the likes of these putrefactos than attend a writers’ workshop and take advice on my craft from some pompous washed-up never-been whose working life is spent forever dreading the day a real talent comes through the door. But they needn’t worry because I never will.27 It’s never really that easy though is it? I still find myself sucked in. I must like the taste of lemons, I guess. I read every morsel of exaggerated praise. I underline every eulogizing sentence and return to them again and again. I take no great interest in the criticisms that are made; they do not interest me. I take no heart in these petty asides, not the least. They are mere counterweight, and often not even that, to the real business of acclaiming, acclaiming, acclaiming. I like to subsume myself in the blood and shredded mucus of their overblown praise. It’s not the fault of the winners... Isn’t it? What else is their pap for than to win silly prizes? Don’t make me laugh. I’m really not up to it anymore. I do not desire sales or the money forthcoming from them; after all, as Georges Perec so rightly observed, “A book that sells well is always suspect.” Let them have their ridiculous prizes and let their books make them indecently rich, for I have something none of them have: I have hell in my veins and tender sadists at my fingertips. In the five years that spanned 1945-1950, Beckett wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, plus two books of short stories, and a book of criticism. 27 Bret Easton Ellis went down in my estimation the day I read what he had to say on the matter: “Reading books is the best experience for a writer, just reading a lot of books. But workshops are pretty essential for reasons that you might not think of immediately. First of all, they make you write and there are a lot of times you don't want to write. You have an idea for a story and it's very easy to be lazy, to just think it through and walk round with it in your head. So the workshop puts that pressure on you to put on paper the material that you're thinking about.” I for one am not about to lay out my ideas for a bunch of two-bit hacks to appropriate at their leisure. Burroughs was punished by the muses after teaching a class in creative writing…. 276

Jack London wrote 50 books in 16 years – a thousand words a day whether pissed, sick or on the move. After The Man In The High Castle earned PKD the Hugo Award, he went on to write more than a dozen novels in the next three years…. I’ve got to get me some horsemeat…. Didn’t Flaubert have far more projects than he had completed works?.... 277

MIND PEARL NECKLASSO She wouldn’t have done that; no, not that cat’s mother, not likely. She’d do this, only in a more accomplished sort of way, more like the way she’d do it, after all. All is somehow second-hand to me; even my déjà vu smells of somebody else’s mothballs. She had cats and I rabbits, so I had cats and rabbits both, but when I tell of childhood pets, floppy drop-ears prick up in velvet triangles, a hop is a leap, a bucktooth buried into the soft skin between thumb and forefinger the vicious scratch of a Tom. The disfigurement belies a truth with Oryctolagus cuniculus written all over it. If I’m candid, the scar reveals nothing but itself and an unexplained old name for rabbit-kind. Both ate spiders and flies, or so I tell myself when no one listens. Some old favourites toll a bell or two, while others leave me cold or worse. Her perfumes smell like the piss of certain cats I never owned, never loved and never nurtured, that has hung around a while on the lower parts of cellar walls. I can transcend myself by staring into that portion of nothingness that might simply be me – something the world and all its little hands can’t touch. He gets frustrated with me; it must be frustrating. Sometimes it must be just as if his wife has died. I cannot always manage to 278

live up to my past. Now and again I see a chance to better it, to put her in my shadow for a change. Oh she didn’t like to. Well I love nothing more, even if I don’t and it hurts and is like no discomfort I have ever known. Being her is not of prime importance all the time, it seems. My body seemed almost extraterrestrial when he first returned with that need. It felt like breaking in a teenager, a sexual neophyte with all the enthusiasm and none of the tools to keep a hold of it, which is incidentally not something I am ever supposed to have done. Never have I sat astride the pale trembling flesh of some lean young buck half my age, tempering his rigid mayhem with the composure of an old school mistress. Am I to believe only ever Frank? Never have I licked the sweat from a soldier’s armpits as he pinned my arms to the ground and fucked me guileless, his brass rivets chaffing my inner thigh. A spitroast is off the menu for lovers like Frank and me. I’ve brought no slimy sprogs into this, this yet another thing devoid of thisness, and yet no small girth could I grasp with anything resembling snugness. I’d have trouble staunching the flow of blood through a python freshly gorged on goat. We talked of baby names for one that never came, one sexless, foetal sickness that went back on its promise. No Naming Baby have I read. But I have, I have, I have or else who else did all these things? When I laugh I mimic him – for I don’t genuinely laugh in company – and he tells me I laugh like her, like I used to. When he laughs I follow his lead. I don’t find much funny. I don’t know why. The laugh consists of an initial expulsion of air through the front teeth, followed by a series of Huhuhs (just how many depends on the severity of the amusement) while nodding my head 279

in appreciation. And all this accompanied by a constant smile. My smile is never right. My smile has deteriorated. How can anyone lose their smile? Something is missing that he can’t quite put his finger on – again the difference that we cannot encounter, only sensing its existence through absence. And how did I ever put up with those friends of his? That man with the fakeclown hairstyle (bald on top, long and curly around the bottom) and a face of loose skin – like a squirrel’s cheeks recently raided of its nuts – is a complete fucking loon. He must chuff down sixty smokes a day. A more quixotic bunch of born losers I have never set my eyes upon. Or have I? Is this really all that is left? Mum: dead. Dad: dead. Sister: dead. Any friends that I might actually want to have any associations with strangely absent. A collection of mumbling, beer-soaked incompetents: very much (without wishing to overstate the case) alive. (Now what was it? Mrs Gren: movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition.) Strangers in the night, exchanging glances, and yet there’s no Sinatra in the house. Maybe that Frank went down in the fire, that fire that purged me of a past twice over. “Heed the warning of Mrs Joe,” he says when I ask too many questions. Sun-dried tomatoes drenched in Sicilian olive oil wrapped up in Parma ham and eaten on the beach in late afternoon throughout a blistering July. This I have. I recall the oily fingers and the oily men. I can tell the tale about the man towards the top part of the beach, close to the hotels, with his face in the shade and his cock resting on his thigh basking in the sun. I can expand by telling how he rolled it over intermittently in order to achieve even exposure. I am Elizabeth again when I 280

tell that story or remember picking slender strings of pig fat from between my teeth with cheap paper matchsticks courtesy of some hotel bar. He said I could have whatever I liked, live wherever I pleased – except the charred remains of our former house, I guessed. I guess a lot, I guess. Only Frank seems to care who I am. I look at other men, despite the fact I’m not that kind of girl. I am what I am not and am not what I am, or something like that. Frank is nice enough. He’s even quite handsome in the right light, but a little old for me I think. I’m only three years shy of him or so he says. I must have lied about my age, or else I am in incredibly good shape for my years: my elbows have tight skin on them; no crow’s feet pace the corners of my eyes; no flaps of skin fall down like pink wings from my biceps; my ears are small, my top lip smooth; I still have some jaw definition, grey hairs in single figures; I’m still bleeding and I am not aware of any considerable subsidence when removing my bra or my knickers. There are a few anal grapes, but then these are inevitable hazards for me now. Frank doesn’t talk much about my dad, so I can take some satisfaction in having re-created him. He comes to me most vividly in his early sixties. The majority of his head is bald, and he has a trimming of black and white and the odd wispy tuft here and there trying desperately to cover as much skin as possible. But it sort of suits him. He has a very long and pronounced lower jaw (what I’ve taken to calling a ‘Grinstead chin’ for some indecipherable reason), so that his top set of teeth sit behind his lower ones by some considerable margin. His nose is angular with a groove in the tip. He has a fine pair of smoky-blue eyes nestled snugly under sparse eyebrows. He 281

had facial hair for most of his adult life. He is clearest when sporting a pure-white goatee, but he once had only a moustache. A placid, rather shy man of many moods, he was a little too diffident for much of his unnecessarily hebetudinous life. Captiousness was maybe one of his most enduring characteristics: he could take exception at most things at very short notice. It became like an elaborate parlour game to him. He felt that he’d wasted himself and that he was somehow better and more extraordinary than the sum of his achievements suggested. He lost himself in books and films and allowed them to rid him of what he must have seen as an accusingly pedestrian life. His life was no less startling than most other people’s lives, but I think it felt to him as if it was, as if he alone had failed to make his mark. He kept things. What did he not keep? I can remember huge boxes billowing with scraps of paper with little scribbles on, used envelopes, his grandparents’ junk mail, advertisements for plumbing fittings, reminders out of date by more than 30 years, road maps, holiday brochures, receipts and instruction manuals for things he no longer possessed, old postcards from a wife he no longer talked to, invitations to parties he never went to, every cheque stub he’d ever scribbled a figure on, newspaper cuttings of sale items and sports fixtures, bank statements (his own, his mother’s and some people we had never heard of), menus to restaurants long gone, thousands of sheets of paper tabulating hypothesized expenditures, bookmarks and years of book-club catalogues, TV guides, Greenshield stamps, his grandparents’ empty cigarette boxes, a list of every movie he’d ever seen… Sometimes I’d venture to the top of the house and find him sitting on a 282

pair of aluminium steps, a distressed wicker chair, or cross-legged on the floor, his head bowed sulkily over some trashy thriller. He wouldn’t look up until he could see my little feet between the yellow pages of his book. This is where he’d go when he didn’t recognise his wife or himself anymore. He must have had nigh on a hundred jigsaw puzzles, most of which still had their cellophane wrapping intact. He made and remade the same ones over and over again. Puzzles can wreck lives. Hardy once had his life ruined by a puzzle bought for him by Laurel. Because of that puzzle, Hardy missed out on getting spliced to the daughter of an immensely rich oil magnate and lost his own fortune into the bargain. My dad had a lot of watches, but his best and therefore his favourite was an Omega Constellation with an automatic chronometer. When he wasn’t wearing it he kept it in its original box, which was covered and lined in soft red leather with a gold Ω on the front and the inside of the lid. He kept little pieces of wood that my sister and I had doodled on. He kept little pieces of wood that nobody had doodled on. He had a terrible, deep scar that ran the entire length of his left calf. Frank cannot remember any of this. Frank wasn’t there. Frank is in no position to correct me. I don’t believe those diaries. Frank has some form of skin condition in his groin area, which is caused by fungus eating away at the skin. He is pretty good in the sack. He knows to let his tongue meander all over down there, knows when to suck and just how hard, can keep it up as well. But I find it just gives me a taste for more. Maybe Frank just isn’t enough like my dad. When I was a little girl I’d run my chubby little pinkie up and down the smooth cleft in my dad’s left 283

calf muscle. He’d received the injury at secondary school when another boy accidentally kicked him during a football match; this kick resulted in osteomyelitis. His bone rotted and the doctors had to cut the bad bits out. Because he was only eight years old at the time the bone grew back together again. If only I were younger and my brain shattered bone. You can forget that you love someone. One day you could love a person with all your being and the next not even recognise them in the street. You lose your memory, you damage a piece of your brain and all of a sudden the kismet of two lovers is for shit. When you love someone deeply it is hard to think of your feelings for that person as being so transient, so ephemeral, so very fragile. Tweak a neuron here or there and it’s gone and maybe so are you. All so very mechanistic. I love my dad, even if I have constructed him out of a heap of psychological debris found lying around unattended. I don’t love Frank all the time. I must stop licking my lips; they are sore enough already, and will never heal if I don’t stop licking them, but they get so dry. My lips don’t seem as full as they used to. A thick layer of scabbing will solve that. I would have bought baby clothes for my baby that never came: wool-knit booties, scratch mitts, bibs, and baby-grows. I go to the baby clothing department when I go shopping, and stare at the newborn range, but I don’t feel anything. I listen to other women clucking over small clothes and don’t understand. Sun sometime in July: a cat with one eye and only half a tail soaks its fur and bones in the middle of a quiet road until two young girls and their dog proceed to terrorise it with yelps, stones, and bared teeth. A dog with two heads walks down the promenade. People 284

move out of its way as it approaches them, its tail dragging along the floor. Some young and very handsome men with short black shiny hair, tanned skin and toned torsos proceed to kick hell out of it with their beautiful bare feet. Onlookers laugh at the wretched animal as it dejectedly snaps at the brown toes punching and pinking into its ribs. In the end its body appears to be bent into an impossible configuration – a tri-bar of blood and twisted limbs. I’ve worked on my tan over the past couple of years. The browner I get the happier and more affectionate Frank becomes, the brighter his eyes are, the less I feel I have to prove myself. Hardy’s puzzle never gets completed. At one stage they have all the pieces in place except one, which they have mislaid – the piece depicts a woman’s face. Later, after the puzzle has been accidentally broken up in a brawl, Laurel finds the missing piece and frantically tries to rebuild the puzzle around it. He is not successful. There is a steep incline somewhere that leads up to a hotel, and on the side of the road there is something quite remarkable. There are a ridiculous amount of books in this house, and, apparently, approximately half of them are mine. I have read most all of them at one time or another. I’m a booksy bird who keeps her legs together when she should, which apparently is most of the time. There is a smallness to my life now that feels foreign. Shit! There goes another nail. However hard I try to grow them I inevitably lose a couple; layers of nail gloss and hardener don’t seem able to prevent it. My nails are really a little too papery for extending beyond the tips of my fingers. But I used to take so much pride in my nails. I have a huge collection of nail-care paraphernalia to testify to 285

it. My dad collected all manner of things, some more useful than others. He had a cavernous store of crooked, rusty nails and screws. He was meaning to straighten them out, but never got round to it. There were huge cut nails, tiny glazing pins, lost-heads, crossheads, roundheads, brads… They resided in old cigar boxes, hair wax jars, hand cream cartons, and ice cream tubs – scaled down scrap-yards, packets of metal worms. He had hundreds of pairs of hard-wearing gardening gloves, and you would have been hard-pressed to wear out one of those pairs in a lifetime. Everything with him was overkill. You could never have too much of anything. When he died we found 58 tins of mulligatawny soup in the cupboard. None of us liked mulligatawny soup, so we threw them away. Didn’t even feel bad I don’t suppose. Frank seems to have little else happening in his life except me. The world is made of me. He treats me like I’m a lab animal: always checking on what I remember for any new developments. Dad always bought the best. Even if he never used the thing in question, it was the best unused thing in question. Frank uses too much pluko on his hair, that Black and White crap. We once used it to lube me up, which resulted in some very fragrant stools. I can clearly remember living here, in this house, a year now, and hazily remember living here for approximately six. I have no friends; I just have Frank and becoming myself again. My dad was a loner: he liked to eat alone, sleep alone, watch films alone, and laugh alone. If he had been a drinker he would have liked to drink alone. But he was not, unless you count tea, that is. He could consume in excess of 20 cups a day, every one of them laced with evaporated milk. Before embarking on any activity, a cup of tea was ob286

ligatory; it helped him think, to contemplate the task ahead, like Sherlock Holmes with his pipe. He liked to drink tea alone. As one might expect, he favoured activities that lent themselves to seclusion: reading, dreaming, and making lists. I wasn’t wearing any rings when I was first brought here. They were here waiting for me when I returned. Frank said I took them off to clean them and did not have them on the night I disappeared. We didn’t get married in church: Frank is vehemently atheistic. Do I believe in God? God would know who I was. Frank would say that God would know little more than we know because there are no new facts that he could bring to bear on the case. Dad thought that the existence of films and books were good excuses for not getting too involved with the (supposed) real business of living. God was an irrelevance to him: he didn’t figure in any of his lists. I did, my mum did, Tony Hancock did, Tippi Hedren and John Wayne did, but not God. That woman in the shop, the one that knew me, she knew me, and she called me Elena and I felt like Elena. She was Justine and that didn’t seem like news to me. But I have made mistakes before and since. I thought I was single, taken into care when young, and an only child. I have come to see these ideas as the delusions they are, but that Justine woman has set me back. I run her face through my mind over and over, dissecting it, smoothing the skin, lengthening the hair, changing its colour, adding a fringe, removing the glasses, changing their style, without make-up, with different make-up, but I have no frame of reference for her, like a collar-less animal nobody has reported missing. She got my name wrong: she doesn’t know me. She made a mistake. People mistake one person for another all the time. I mis287

take myself for someone else – always the show-off, such ridiculous oneupmanship, such Janus-faced fancies. I don’t think I’ll ever recover entirely. At least, not all the while I remain in this house with Frank: he is a constant reminder of what I can only partially recoup. But then without Frank I have no conduit to my past. Frank has a cruel side to him. The other day I caught him meticulously disassembling a huge house spider. It was still alive. I am not assimilating absentminded curiosity with callousness. He had pinned it upside down to the table by passing a needle through its thorax. He then proceeded to snap its legs in half, and rip off its spinnerets with a pair of tweezers. I stopped looking on at this point. I went and did something else. He said it was research. I didn’t care what it was. I probably used to like to watch things like that, but Frank never said. This town is eerie. Young and old walk around in a haze of shopping and overeating. Nobody takes down seasonal decorations in the town centre; they are left to perish and drop to the street where they are trodden into the cracks in the pavement. Old fuckers everywhere you look. Hoards of them descend on cafes and supermarkets on designated days. Whole legions of halfwitted penny-pinchers with walking aids and blue hair limp through the town shouting at one another, sticky white foam collecting in the corners of their mouths and dribbling down over their jowls. The whole town reeks of charity shops and stale beer. Frank seems to relish in the decay of this place. After dark, when the shops shut, all you are left with is a few hardened drinkers (either in pubs or on the street), drivers driving around and around in circles smoking reefer and getting blown by 12-year-old girls in crippling 288

high heels and their mother’s lace knickers, fast-food delivery vehicles, the odd old dear, head held together with curlers and silver paper, sliding her pension into slot machines at the local amusement arcade, and nutcases. I am pretty sure this place has more than its fair share of the mentally challenged: the strong sea breeze appears to have blown more than just the dust from between the populace’s ears. Old women wearing ten coats in the height of summer push shopping trolleys up and down the town picking up cigarette butts and half-eaten sandwiches. More people talk to themselves here than in a prayer hall. Black River Falls ain’t a patch on this place. I’ve got to get away from this house, but Frank assures me that this is the only place where I can possibly hope to remember who I am. I feel that I have already remembered all that I am going to remember and that it is time to be what I am now, rather than always comparing myself to some past archetype me. Frank, still desperate for the full return of his wife, disagrees. Frank reads the same book over and over again. The author of this book has taken on almost messianic status for Frank. The author in question is a philosopher. (Do they still have philosophers in this day and age? Don’t they all get eaten in the womb by Chinese and caterpillars?) When Frank is asleep I have managed to snatch it for a few hours at a time and read its contents, or at least the most thumbed pages. It took me a while, but I see now what he is getting at. What I don’t see is why he’d want to keep reading it again and again. If my dad liked a film he would quite happily watch it a hundred times. They become like old friends when you treat them like that. My dad didn’t have any real friends that I can remember. There is something 289

about snow, when I see it in films or on Christmas cards, that makes me think of old friendships, but it is all too vague. I once stole a Christmas card from a doctor’s surgery while waiting for Frank, whose bowel was playing him up again and forcing him to shit at least five times a day. My dad spent a long time on the toilet: he’d read, smoke, and drink tea. An average shit would take approximately three quarters of an hour. I am surprised he could manage to stand up afterwards. The Christmas card had a snow scene on the front taken from a painting, Snow in Milan, Italy by Achille Beltrame, which was painted in 1900. The card still has that snow scene, just as I still have the card. When I first saw it I felt such a peculiar emotion, a strong and yet vague connection with the past, and the longer I looked the stronger the feeling became. I sat there staring for at least twenty minutes and the feeling did not wane, so I had to steal it. When some weeks later I finally opened it to read the message, I found the following words inside: ‘Dear Doctor, Many thanks for all you did for Albert over the past year. I know he appreciated it as much as I did. Too bad your efforts were ultimately in vain. Love Doris.’ Poor old cow. I pictured her on her own watching reruns of the Queen’s Christmas message with a schooner of sherry in her hand, and one eye on the empty armchair to her left that had lost his smell too quickly. That picture of Milan in the snow still works its magic on me. And as with all magic, it is what I still don’t know – what is yet to be revealed – that keeps me looking. It was not a portal to my past as much as a facilitator of lost emotions, emotions that without any facts of circumstance I lack the words to pin down. When Frank puts his head between 290

my legs just who I am is an irrelevance – as long as I am connected to my clitoris in the ways that matter, even if it cannot strictly be called mine. He slurps and sucks like an aardvark with its snout in a termite mound, and I discourage his head from dislodging itself from between my thighs by clamping my hands to his scalp. I close my eyes and it’s as black as bad blood, black as lung shadows, black as the deepest fathom, black as a little dress, black as Susan’s eyes, black as bitumenized gloom, black as darkling sable… I bring my tits up to my mouth and smother them in my tart’s lipstick, so that my areolae appear to have consumed both my breasts. I wiggle and squirm as he does his work on me: a worm on a hotplate. But then it’s over in a crescendo of spasms and expletives, and I return to forget. My dad used to say that those who constantly seek change just swap one routine for another. He preferred to stick to what he knew, and make the most of it. As his ragged underpants would suggest, he liked to wear things out before moving on. He was not, he claimed, especially interested in the habits of other people, but what he did dislike was misrepresentation of facts, adulation where it was not deserved, disorder and universal flippancy. As you can well imagine, he was invariably quite busy venting his spleen about people that he was not particularly interested in. He was not a sexually driven man. He’d rather dream of being with beautiful movie stars than pay any attention to his lonely wife. He’d be Munroe’s beau in Niagara, and she loved him and made him feel how he needed to feel to function properly with a woman, but after these dreams his wife was never what he wanted. I don’t really remember her. She still feels a lot like a story I once heard from Frank’s 291

mouth. How disappointed he’d be. You could say that my dad lived through books and films and as a consequence led quite an impoverished existence, but you’d be wrong. He felt real emotions, strong emotions – the full gamut of them as well. The objects of these emotions were unaware of them, but that doesn’t matter. (How true. Tell her Monsieur Flaubert!) Diabetes killed my dad so slowly that he saw no reason to arrest it. He let it go about its work for fifteen years, sowing seeds of discord throughout the organs of his body. Fatigue slowly overcame him, more and more each day, preparing him. He longed for uninterrupted sleep, sleep without countless trips to his blue piss bucket in the corner of the room. His potholed fingernails scratched at his icy feet. His heart gave way first, and never looked like coming good. I still suffer from horrendous headaches. The skin on the right side of my head is without feeling: I can pinch it until it bleeds and still feel nothing but the ache. My right eye shuts down completely. My first day back here the pain in my head was excruciating; it prevented me from running. Am I glad I stayed? I am glad about so few things that it would be altogether unfair to answer. I’d need an alternative, and the lack of one is really what kept me here. Frank cannot bear to go into the cellar. The door leading down there has a padlocked bolt on it. I don’t know where the key is, or if there still is one. I fear I become more like Frank by the day. His ideas soon become mine. Dad bought endless amounts of clothes that he never ended up wearing. When he died we found them all pristine in their plastic packaging. There were unworn shoes in a variety of styles, every coat he’d ever owned since he was a teenager, hundreds 292

of unworn thermal vests in blue and in white, packs of Y fronts filling drawer after drawer; it was as if he was stockpiling for the great underwear manufacturers’ strike, the one that never came. Collecting things, having collections of whatever, is a way of explaining who you are: you ask who I am and I tell you to look at what I have collected. So what’s with the collection of vests and pants? After all, this is not a man who got through a lot of underwear – threadbare items found their way into the wash basket, not the bin. What is a man who collects indiscriminately saying about himself? What is he explaining by his collections? Is he saying that he’s a muddle, or that he’s confused, or is he presenting himself as a man who sees the value in everything, however disposable it may appear? Can I really hope that eating oily fish, popping B-vitamins and ginkgo biloba, lapping up mono-unsaturated fats, steering clear of stress, and jogging about while performing feats of abstract reasoning will ever come to my rescue? Actually, I’m pretty sure these are preventative rather than curative measures. Do I want to keep what I’ve got, remain who I am? Hard to tell. Maybe I was one of those women who drowned their children in the sea. Maybe devils convinced me to do it, and then made off with my powers of recall out of an uncustomary sense of pity, or maybe not. Who knows? Dad had fallen in love with so many screen shadows – those lives unlived all hair and gloss – that it was his wife that he eventually came to see as insubstantial. There is, I suppose, inexorable beauty to be found in distance and accessible repetition, in never touching those bodies made of light and pixels, of no unfortunate close ups to have to smother and drown out. Like me he ran into 293

life with a thud. If only life were better directed, and shorter.... 294

IN FROM THE RAIN We went for a walk in the rain. It was one of those days when it never gets light. It had started to rain at ten in the morning and is now, at quarter past midnight, yet to stop. It had been dry for weeks, and we had not set foot outside the door. But with the drains bubbling like witches’ cauldrons and umbrellas bending, creeking and distorting, we agreed to leave the house. We had our hoods up and held hands. We both watched our feet as we walked, avoiding large grimy puddles, and shielding our faces from the wind-borne rain. We walked purposefully to no place in particular, and then kept on walking. Elizabeth was again enjoying her aimless jaunts in inclement weather, and I was enjoying her enjoyment – the unavoidable selfishness of love. After half a mile my toes started to feel damp, and there was a perpetual mountain stream drizzling through the crags of my shoulder blades. My eyebrows were waterlogged and flooding my eyes, and I was thirsty. I suggested we stop for coffee. We sat at a round table for two and made the floor wet. I ordered us two lattes and two orange juices. I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt down over my hand and proceeded to dry my face. As I was doing so I heard a familiar voice: “Hello, Francis.” I looked up from my newly dampened sleeve to see Elizabeth’s mother, Daisy, smiling down at me inquisitively. Her face had all the splendour of a split haggis. I had to force the cheeks of my arse together and quickly loosen my belt to prevent something calamitous happening. I was confident that even if I couldn’t stifle it completely, I could at least slow it down so it percolated out discreetly. “Hello,” I said. Elizabeth looked switched off. “Got caught in the downpour, I see.” “Not so much caught as… It was already raining when we decided to go out.” “I’ve been ducking in and out of shops trying to stay dry.” 295

“Avoiding the ducking out part might do it.” “Yeah, ha, ha… Thought I’d just wait it out here.” “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” she said in a mock scolding tone, smiling nosily at Elizabeth. “Of course, sorry, this is Elizabeth. Elizabeth, this is Daisy.” Politeness demanded that I should have included some cursory description of their relation to me, thus providing a fulcrum for them to initiate some sideline chatter of their own. But I didn’t. I couldn’t think of how to explain Daisy or Elizabeth away at such short notice. “Pleased to meet you, Elizabeth,” said Daisy, her hand outstretched, looking down at me as she spoke her name. Her eyes stayed with me and seemed to say: The name, the clothes, the hairstyle, don’t they all seem familiar? “Hello,” said Elizabeth dreamily. Daisy was bound to ask for the information that I’d so rudely failed to provide – for its absence would have been duly noted – or equally ruinous, provide information pertaining to the woman’s connection to me. “Can I have a word in private? Won’t be a minute.” “Sure,” said Elizabeth and continued staring into her drink. I pushed the aluminium chair backwards with the backs of my knees, and the rubber-tipped legs juddered raucously across the floor. I walked towards the back of the cafe. Daisy followed. I apologised to her for my strange behaviour, and tried to explain that Elizabeth was an old friend of mine who had just had some rather terrible news. “She’s not at her best at the minute.” “Your friend?” “Yes.” “She is…she’s had some bad news today, some very bad news.” Shit I’d overstated it. I didn’t want to incite too much pity in her, otherwise she’d override my (manly and so empathetically vacuous) concerns and want (as a fellow woman) to console her herself. “But she’ll be okay.” “Poor girl.” “Yes.” “If you don’t mind me asking, what on earth happened?” “No, no I don’t mind. Her erm…her mother is sick. It doesn’t look good.” “I see. How terrible.” “Yes. Yes. And the thing is, you look very much like her, in fact you could be her, and I think it is a little disconcerting… No, there is no need for apologies. This is nobody’s fault. But if you could excuse yourself and sit out of her sight... Sorry, I feel so rude, but I must think of her. You understand.” 296

“Of course, say no more. I will just say goodbye, and that will be that. Poor girl. She is lucky to have you looking after her.” “Mmmm.” We walked back over to the table. I followed her this time. Daisy approached Elizabeth and said, “It was nice meeting you, but I really must dash now. Goodbye.” “Oh…goodbye. You must come and see us sometime.” “Thank you, yes. Us? You’re staying with Francis?” “Where else would his wife stay?” “His wife? Sorry I don’t…” she shook her head and gesticulated with her tired, silly old hands, fingers clasped in the rings of a dead engagement, a dead marriage, a dead eternity. Her arms hung in the air, puppet-like, arms that had once cradled her daughter, a daughter whose mind at work she now beheld but did not recognise. What could I say? What would you have said? I was trapped. I had been trapped for years, but now, for the first time since her death, I felt the teeth of the device depress my skin and puncture its surface, its sprung jaws feeding a gargantuan mouthful of barbs into my guts, scratching my crime ever deeper into my skin like that officer subject to the justice of his own harrow. (In the basement beneath his feet there are men built into the walls with only their eyes and mouths visible. They wait forever, living off dust and starveling insects, like spiders in brickwork….) They both looked at each other before turning to me. The invective didn’t come to me in the form of a solution; it came as a cure to the infection of expectant people, a catholicon for all the lies. I yelled… I yelled into her face, her rumpled, saggy old face… I yelled, “Yes, my wife you lumpen old bitch. Understand that do you, you snivelling hoary cunt?” I stood quaking, thrashing about for air in the shocked bewilderment of her face. Daisy’s legs gave way and she crashed down onto the table behind her. I grabbed Elizabeth by the arm. She protested and fought with me to go to Daisy’s aid, but I dragged her out. We didn’t leave the house again for nearly a year. * And as I stood there watching her smile everything stopped except the rain. The rain kept falling. Nothing moved but the rain, and all I could hear was the rain falling to the earth. Cars were stilled; the birds above me hung suspended in the wet sky; people dashing to and from their cars dashed no297

where. The rain drummed heavily on my head, marking time for me. All the town’s inhabitants stilled, like the men and animals trapped in snow shakers. Water ran down necks, into eyes, off the tips of noses, bounced off hats, made pools in open hands, and ran off awnings onto passers-by that no longer passed. And still I watched you smile. It was one of your most accomplished: top row of teeth visible five back either side, and cheeks pushed high and eyes half shut to accommodate it. Its incandescence blinded onlookers like burning magnesium, but nobody averted their eyes; they were held for its duration, savouring its gorgonic brilliance. 298

TIME AND TRIFLE It isn’t really what you’d call a park. It has grass, a pathway in the shape of a cross, two benches and even some flower beds: it’s a walkway, little more than a diffident tongue-poke at the ubiquity of grey paving slabs. It is early on a Sunday morning: 5:25 by the clock tower, once part of something grand and imposing that gobbled up a bomb an hour before time. Inscribed into the stonework beneath the clock face (a taunt to dead Nazis?) are the words, Trifle not thy time is short! Nobody much is about. A man sits on one of the benches with his elbows resting on his knees, his chin perched in his hands. Every once in a while he plucks some daisies from the grass beside him and slowly pulls away their petals. An old woman in a man’s tweed jacket approaches. She is pushing a shopping trolley teeming with scabby cats and kittens of many breeds and colours. A Persian Blue, with long honey-toned fur and two overweight ginger toms clambering over its back, claws angrily at the matted clumps of fur growing into its eyes. A tortoiseshell kitten, hanging in midair, fights to free its head from the tight plastic mesh stretched over the top of the trolley. “Let’s go over and talk to him,” says Triman pointing in the direction of the woebegone man sitting on the bench. “Why? I don’t feel much like talking.” “He needs cheering up by the looks of it.” “I need cheering up.” “He’s all alone; you have me.” “Oh yes, that’s right, I have you.” “Hang on a minute…that man…yes…he’s lost some weight and gained some wrinkles, but it’s him alright. Look! Do you recognise him?” Lakok took a closer look. “His face looks familiar, but...” “It’s Woolly isn’t it?” “Woolly? Oh, Woolly…I suppose it could be; he’s ugly enough. I only met him the once and fleetingly at that. I couldn’t be sure. I suppose it could be.” 299

Triman walks over to the man. Lakok turns around to see the cat-woman heading in his direction and decides to follow Triman, vowing there and then not to partake in his lunacy. Triman smiles as he sees Lakok approaching the bench, but is careful not to let him be witness to it: he needs Lakok to be his audience and doesn’t want to send him off into one of his sulks. The lonely man turns to look at the two men that have come and sat beside him, studies them alternately for a couple of seconds before turning away and assuming his former pose. “Look, I know that it seems as if you are the victim of some convoluted and demonic plot, but let me assure you, you’re not losing your mind. Somebody has played a barbaric trick on you.” The man sits upright. “What did you say? What…what was that you said?” “Why don’t you just leave him be? Even if it is him it won’t do any good.” Triman turns to Lakok, acknowledges his comment with a toothy grin, and then turns back to the man. “None of this is your fault. You’re the innocent one in all this. You’ve been grossly mistreated.” “What isn’t my fault? What am I innocent of?” “Surely I don’t need to tell you. You haven’t forgotten what happened have you?” “Well…no…actually, well…sort of…yes. Do I know you?” “I know you and that’s what matters here. Listen, I have something to tell you that you will find hard, nigh impossible, to believe, but it’s true nonetheless, and it’s in your best interests to hear me out.” “How do you know me?” “The name’s Professor Triman by the way,” says Triman, extending the man his hand. “J.C. Blake,” says the man tentatively, as he takes Triman’s hand into his for a second or two. “Whoever you think you are, think again. Your real name is Reginald Woolly and you are an eminent philosopher whose work on identity was considered by some to be dangerous. As a result you were stripped of your former identity, false memories were implanted into your head and you were dumped here out of harm’s way. Your only hope of regaining your true identity is to escape Pavilionstone and find the men that did this to you. Even then I’m not sure there’s much hope.” “So my wife and children…” 300

“You don’t have any. In fact, if you knew Woolly, you’d find the idea ludicrous, not to mention slightly distasteful. No offence.” Triman took his stopwatch from his pocket and, in a manner not too dissimilar from a certain white rabbit, blurted out: “Time’s up. Sorry, we’ve places to be, people to see, got to go. Goodbye and good lu…” Confronted with an empty bench the man reels, unasked questions swarming through his brain in dizzying and intractable circuits. The old hag with her trolley-load of cats and kittens walks past, and he half expects one of her furry brood to talk to him. A tiny kitten dangles from the trolley’s meshed roof, while a black and white cat knocks its wilted tortoiseshell tail back and forth with its clawless paws. In the carpeted wasteland of a bus terminal besieged with red-eyed business men, teenage runaways and crow-faced drunks… “Are you absolutely certain that was Woolly?” “No.” “Then why tell him all that stuff?” “He looked a lot like him; chances are it was him.” “What if it wasn’t?” “Well it’s too late now.” “When did you last see Woolly, anyway?” “A few years ago, I guess.” “And you got a good look at him did you?” “Better than you apparently.” “Where did you meet him?” “I didn’t, strictly speaking, meet him; I read one of his books and it had a picture of him inside the back cover.” “A picture… You told him all that on the basis of a picture you saw a few years ago?” “Yes. I’ve got a good memory for faces. That was Woolly alright.” “So now you’re sure. All of a sudden you’re 100% convinced you got it right.” “Yes, it was him. I mean he seemed pretty ready to listen. He seemed relieved when I told him, as if things suddenly made sense to him.” “So that’s what it looked like to you?” “Yes. Why, what did it look like to you?” “I wasn’t paying too much attention.” “Well maybe if you paid a little more attention to what was going on around you you’d be able to confirm whether or not it was Woolly – after all, you’re the one who actually met him.” “So now you need confirmation.” 301

“Not at all.” “Who is J.C. Blake?” “J.C. Blake is a sick joke.” 302

THE GOLDEN TICKET “Where is everyone going?” “Don’t you know what day it is?” “No.” “Sunday…Sunday the fourth.” The man looked at Molech quizzically, “We’re going to wave off the chosen ones at the Chambers of Transference.” On the North perimeter of Pavilionstone there is a granite-faced structure more than a thousand feet high, with a single set of cast iron doors and no windows. This was where any chosen ones – after being duly notified by a golden ticket with the chosen one’s photograph and name emblazoned across the front – were brought on the first Sunday of every month. Nobody that entered this building was ever seen in Pavilionstone again. There is confusion on both sides of the wall as to who should receive a golden ticket. Those beyond the wall are responsible for voting. Some voters are preoccupied with trying to rid Pavilionstone of sadistic evil-doers and vote accordingly, but in so doing actually serve to promote such activity – some vote for such individuals for that reason alone. Some voters choose to reward the virtuous by putting an end to their suffering, but they are, at present, in the minority. All-seeing cameras survey Pavilionstone day and night. Nothing is missed, nothing is hidden. Basements no more hide their horrors than a fake nose hides the man who wears it. There are, however, no surveillance cameras in the Chambers of Transference; Molech knew this much, even though he never tuned in. He knew because even on the other side the activities within this stark and decidedly foreboding piece of architecture were still pretty much unknown, a source of endless conjecture, jokes, and many a PhD thesis. Molech couldn’t have escaped being acquainted with such idle speculations, short of locking himself in a dark uninhabited room. And even then… Some claim that this one building is left unmonitored so as to create and sustain interest for both those inside and those outside Pavilionstone, that it is nothing more than a cynical contrivance, a life-enabling mystery. It cer303

tainly inspires avid curiosity across the board, but whether this was achieved by accident or design is not something Molech was in a position to shed light on. One thing that all those beyond the wall think they know for sure is that the Chambers of Transference are not a conduit to the N.W.R. – statistical diligence would not permit it. A woman beside Molech drops to the floor as the Chamber doors crash shut. She inclines her head upward in the direction of a camera clamped to the side of a streetlight, and starts to gesticulate with her dark lips, mouthing out her tireless petitions to mechanical eyes, her arms, draped in cheap wire bracelets, outstretched, aloft, imploring her shadowy human gods to reward her dedication, her lack of pride, her aching knees on a filthy pavement, her…her ability to put herself at odds with herself in order to achieve deliverance. Molech marvelled at this spectacle of debasement, and could hear the jibes and tittering from beyond this place. It reminded him of old film footage showing cruelties of the past, where chimpanzees and brown bears had been dressed up in dinner suits and encouraged, by means of cigarette ends being screwed into the soles of their feet, to perform tricks and dances, hamfooted versions of The Lambeth Walk, the Tango, and the Foxtrot. There are crocodiles of schoolchildren lining the pavements; they stand in silence, hands interlocked. The teachers revel in their charges’ awe. The children all wear Rose West wigs on their heads and crucified Gacys around their necks: the iconography of The Chosen Ones. Over their heads flutter Mount Rushmore banners with the faces of dead killers superimposed over the four dead presidents. A bearded teacher clears his throat and lifts both of his arms into the air. The children start singing: “Kind friends come pay attention, and listen to my song, It is about a murder and it won’t detain you long, ‘Twas in the town of Pavilionstone this shocking deed was done, Maria and sweet Caroline were murder’d by Switzerland John.” “Ted Bundy banners, Pol Pot postcards, Manson memorabilia, Cottingham cap pistols, Mengele medicine boxes… All half price, today and today only…” hollers a woman from one of the vending stalls at the edge of the crowd. Her sales pitch drowns out a verse or two of the children’s ballad, until the vexed teacher pitches in to help. “Down on their knees the sisters fell, all in their blooming years, ‘For mercy’ cried, ‘We’re innocent’, their eyes were fill’d with tears; He plunged the knife into their breasts, their lovely breasts so deep; He robb’d them of their own sweet lives and left them there to sleep. 304

Three times he kiss’d their cold pale lips as they lay on the ground, He took the capes for off their backs, for on him they were found; He said, ‘Farewell sweet Caroline, your blood my hands has stain’d; No more on earth shall I see you but in heaven we will meet again….” Molech moves on. The envious well-wishers are all of them lost in their own plans for endlessness. None show any signs of leaving, despite the lack of activity from across the road. There is a feeling of reverence in the air: this collective’s displacement of anger and neglect. Most still had their eyes trained on the Chamber doors, as if their accumulated will-power and scrutiny might somehow fling those heavy doors open and allow them to enter. A thought suddenly comes to him: I wonder why…I wonder if… He turns to an old man, an old man with rotting teeth and black bags under his yellow eyes, tumescent little sacks of time that spill down his fat cheeks. The man looks back at him and tips his head a fraction by way of a greeting, before returning his attention to the Chamber doors. “Excuse me. I wonder if…,” Molech waits until the man looks back in his direction before continuing, “I wonder if you know whether anybody has ever tried to break into the Chambers. I mean, if enough people got together, it would be easy enough to storm the place. Those doors can only be so thick, and those walls could contain only so many men.” “Hmmmm, is that so?” says the man, deciding whether or not he is prepared to elaborate any further. “Things aren’t quite that straightforward though, are they?” “Aren’t they?” “No.” “Has it even been attempted? If nobody has even tried, how could you possibly know? It must be worth it to all of you to at least try.” “Must it? Ever tried talking out your urethra?” “No. Not that I recall.” Molech can see what is coming, but decides the best way to get the man to open up is to humour him a little. “But you’d agree that it would be a neat trick should you manage it.” “A real crowd pleaser.” “Then why have you never tried it?” “Okay, I see your point.” Molech isn’t about to take this rather trite lesson in elementary epistemology any further, and now wishes he’d put a stop to it when he’d first detected the man’s intentions. Molech is already turning away and about to move on when the old man says, rather plaintively, “A hundred or so people did try once.” “And?” “And what?” 305

“What happened to them?” “Why don’t you know this already? Your mumma had you tied up in the basement until today?” he laughs, showing off the alarming disarray of his tumbledown teeth quite unashamedly, before staring into Molech’s eyes with a newfound seriousness. He wants an answer, the laugh being selfcongratulatory as opposed to a let off, and his horrid little eyes make this blatantly clear. (One can always find laughter in slaughter.) “I don’t keep up with current affairs; I suppose I should pay closer attention.” After a long, scowling pause, and despite the fact that on this side of the wall it was tantamount to admitting ignorance of death itself, the old man finally opens his mouth. “The doors closed behind them, and they were never seen again.” “So it was a success then. But if that’s the case, what are you all waiting for?” “What are you waiting for?” “What are we all waiting for?” “Things aren’t that straightforward; the official line on all this is rather different. What we are all supposed to swallow, and what the majority of Pavilionstone were all too greedy to digest, is that all 137 of them died, exterminated for their impatience. Okay, 137 headless bodies were discovered the following morning, littering this very street they were, all lined up side by side, bloody stump alongside bloody stump. Some hazy photographs were taken, and the headlines took up the official version of who those corpses were and what had happened to them, which was, as even you will have worked out, that they were executed for their crimes by the enigmatic inhabitants of the Chambers, and that the same is destined to happen to any who dare to perpetrate subsequent offences of that nature.” The old man took a laboured breath, and glanced over towards the Chamber doors. “But that’s bollocks. Why cut off their heads? Why have them cleared away so quickly? They laid there for barely twenty minutes before the crime scene was dismantled. Why? Because they weren’t the 137 people that entered the Chambers, that’s why.” “Who were they, then?” says Molech playing along. “I’ve no idea. It doesn’t matter who they were; it matters who they weren’t, and they weren’t the 137 people who had stormed their way in there.” He flicks his head in the direction of the offending doors. “The missing heads, the cloudy photographs, the hasty clearance of the bodies from the street: all these things point to subterfuge, point to somebody obscuring the 306

real identities of those bodies, and to what end? To cover up what really happened to the original 137.” “Which was?” “Any number of things might have occurred in there, the most obvious being that they achieved their goal, otherwise why bother with the cover up? The authorities couldn’t risk it getting out… it just wouldn’t have been an option for them would it? Think about it!... Here, you see this?” he pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolds it. “If this meant anything to you, you’d know already.” The old man places the picture back in his pocket, picks up a leather satchel that had been resting against his leg and walks off, hugging it to his chest. Molech eventually shrugs off the congregation of bile-ridden wellwishers, and wanders purposelessly through the streets. It starts to rain. Molech finds a doorway. One of those deep, substantial doorways with tiles on the ground and enough room to lie down, stretch out even, should you need to. But he doesn’t. He stands, looking out into the darkness, the rain glistening in the air like invading hoards of silverfish. What was he doing there? Were there places he should be heading to at this precise moment, people he should be attempting to liaise with? He 307

doesn’t know. And there was no way of knowing, not really. There was nothing that he should be doing. There was only what he chose to do. He could die if he chose to. He looks across the road as a lorry speeds along the slick tarmac, rocking from side to side, its back end hollering out empty, rattling echoes. He could have been under it. No way could it have stopped in time. His mangled mouth could have been eking out his final words: “Sorry I’m late.” 308

DEATH STRIPTEASE Lance Noggin doesn’t simply want a solution, he demands one, for one does not timorously tap on a shoulder and ask, apologetically, for the ideal accompaniment to immortality, one pushes for it arrogantly, all the time blinding oneself to odds longer than the world’s collective intestine. Lance knows what he needs and refuses to be fobbed off with theoretical convolutions; his requirements – he imagines – are lucidly formed and he expects the answers, when they come (if they come), to be formed likewise. If he is to live forever without being pulverized under the weight of an endless future, then there is something that he feels he must have. He must have the enigma of death laid down for him to pick at like so many polished bones, thousands of years of religious fervour stripped of the trifles of humanity, of wars, of petulance, of fear. Death must be reconstituted, pared back to a psychological incarnation, rid of any life-threatening traces. A habitation must be excavated in his brain for Valhalla, a place to go and feast his soulless self for a million lifetimes and ever onward. The meanings we have craved to make since our navels first caught our eyes, as they stand, are hard pushed to sustain us; they are the icing-sugar dustings on food past the tongue and they desert us on a whim, dropping their façade quicker than a whore with notes in her fist and, like the pleasures they cloak, they’ve made an enemy of enquiry and a bosom buddy of obfuscation. The masses, the quotidian many, can queue up for new people to be, but not Lance – this cannot be Lance’s way. Lance refuses the inauthentic, cannot bring himself to quiet, sleepless deaths that rid him of a well broken-in self in order that he may be furnished with the short-lived smiles of other people’s inner lives. One of the things Lance hadn’t foreseen was the damage deathlessness would wreak on romantic love. Without death, or even the threat of death, love became too narcissistic: its focus on other human beings slowly eroded over time and it came to mourn nothing but its own demise. Love without death becomes just another pleasure to lap up while it lasts. Its glorious sadness, its 309

departed lovers, and its threat of aching emptiness are all lost. True, there are still opportunities for unrequited love and hurtful infidelities, but with no urgency, and with too many loved-ones fading beyond recognition in one’s memory, sorrow is forced to focus its powers on the passing of love itself: one is not inconsolable at the passing of a day, however much one dreads the coming of night, for too many days have come and gone to see a day apart from days. To cherish a loved-one is to always have one or both of your neverending deaths in mind. What is love without the shaking horror of our decay? Death is the waiting pistol in every love story ever told, every story ever told; the bullet pierces the spirit of every word, even if you never actually hear the shot. It is the burden of lovers faced with death to crave an eternity in each other’s arms. They want it because it flatters their love to want things for it that can never be, like when we compliment our offspring by wishing unrealistic levels of greatness on them. There are those outside Pavilionstone who have remained together for hundreds of years, but unfortunately there are better reasons than the bonds of love to account for this. For them, love has long since transformed itself into something else, something uglier, something pitiful. Love has become what love can so easily become when it tires of its object: a retreat from any depth of emotional life whatsoever. Schopenhauer tells of a picture hanging in Ludwigsburg, somewhere near Stuttgart; the picture, so we are told, depicts Time in the guise of Saturn chopping off Cupid’s wings with a pair of shears. We can read this in a number of metaphorically similar ways: Time clips Love’s wings; Time butchers Love; Love is depleted by Time; Time is Love’s enemy; Time stunts Love’s potential; Love is grounded by Time. Any way you look at it, Love is done no favours by Time. When Eros was transformed into Cupid by the Romans, what was once an enigmatic and potent embodiment of love became cheapened, was made obvious, altogether cheerier and decidedly more transient. Cupid: a flabby infant with wings and a bow and arrow that flits about dispensing weak passions on a whim. If you ask me, Cupid had it coming and more besides. Saturn should have reverted to his true self (way back when with Cronus) and scoffed up the scheming little shit, ripping off his plump head with his teeth and devouring the rest of him whole as he had once done to his own untrustworthy progeny. Who can give us tragedy’s sweet tears without death? Not even Marlowe could pull it off. 310

YOUR EARS ARE SO DULL […] that which has once moved is enclosed and immortalized in the general union of all existence, like an insect within a piece of amber. – Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human There’s a buzzing at the door. Who’s this? I won’t get any work done if I answer. If it’s her I’ll break her in two. They can go to hell. He knows my name. Who is it? It’s him. He’ll know, understand; he’s been there, might have news. He listens to me. He’ll have brought my gear. I’ll go down, get him up here away from them. They’ll get in here soon. They’ll come in while I’m out & hunt through my rooms like those snooping publishers that hounded Bukowski. Smugglers: I’ll write a story about a band of smugglers. This place was once full of them; they used to crawl around under your feet with knives on their belts smoking clay pipes. Those tunnels are all still there. I’ll go down & let him in. These stairs sound hollow. Can you tunnel under stairs, ascend them beneath the treads? They could if they wanted. I didn’t go to the cafe today, did I? Sometimes the days are too similar to really tell. It’s him. He’s innocent. He knows nothing of all this. Will he believe me? I’m the man in possession of the facts, not him. What will he think? Will he think me crazy? That hateful street can’t be allowed in here. I can’t have it in here, only him – that’s all. The only way I can keep the words in is by thrashing my head about – a writer should never keep the words in: they make him ill. I have a mouth, a head full of cancerous creativity that’s killing to get out & they won’t let me release it. They’d have me die. They’d have me sink beneath my unwritten & unspoken words like a dirty smuggler caught by the rain in his underground passageways. “I can’t talk down here. It’ll be safer back up there, for now, at least. Come up!” 311

Haven’t writers always lived in squalor? No. Someone should tart it up down here. What would She think if She were to see it? Someone should give it a lick of paint. I’m so busy. I couldn’t possibly spare the time, what with everything that’s going on already. I wonder how long he plans to stay. I’ve got to catch up for yesterday, for this morning & all of them & all their full days and nights. They keep me on my toes alright. It’s only encouragement, I know, but it’s so much to live up to; they have such high expectations. The heat is unbearable. I’m being cooked by my thoughts. My head is ablaze. It’s so fucking hot. It’s never this hot. Why is it so hot today? Why today? I wonder. I don’t know what I’m smiling about; I didn’t mean to smile. I couldn’t help it. Is it always that way or just with everything that’s going on? I can’t tell. Whenever I’m not paying full attention to the conversations of others, all I hear is garbled noise, a deliberately incoherent nonsense, & then as I train my ears to hear what they’re saying it comes together for my benefit, for it was nothing but absurd blathering before I listened in with full attention. He’s sensed it. He’s asked me, & so can see something’s wrong. Maybe he already knows. Why would he ask if he already knew? People always do that sort of thing: it’s a smokescreen. Honesty has become a vice, an indulgent luxury that has to be sidelined for the sake of progress. He can’t stay long, just this drink & then I’ll have to insist he go. No time to waste. I’m late already. Listen to me: I sound like I should have long fluffy ears. All these years & still nothing finished, nothing out there. I’ve got to get this one finished, the one that’s going to do it for me. It doesn’t matter how much you publish in a lifetime if in that lifetime you write the best fucking novel that’s ever been written. Who will remember what you didn’t get done & how long it took you when they finally get to read it? It won’t matter. They’ll wonder how you managed it at all. It’s gone too far now. I must make sure it is all it can be. I could tinker forever, but I have to stop. (What was it Anthony Burgess said: something about the unity of a book being lost if one spends too long on it?) He’s looking at me now, waiting. I don’t know if he’ll believe me. Encapsulate it for him! Intrigue him! Bring him on in! I’m running low. I love the feel of the un-deadened corners on a pack of twenty. It’s my last pack: three down, seventeen remaining, with this one that makes sixteen. Only have one when you need one! How can I tell? He’s listening. He always listens – doesn’t give much away though. Sometimes I can’t work out if he’s expressionless or just plain dumb. I’ll give him the lot, no holding back. I’ll crack that reserve with this. Did he notice me clench my fist? He’d realise it was a joke. Unless he is just plain dumb, a grass-munching pair of bovine ears coaxing in the grass’s faint uproar. I can’t 312

tell if he’s taking me seriously, chomping on the grass like some mad king. He could well be jealous. How do I look to this man with malachite eyes & the brain of a placid cow? I’m giving it to him straight, laying it all down as it happened. I’ve had time to work on it. (I’ve had to make time. I don’t have time for this; will he go soon?) He shouldn’t need much longer to digest it: he has 4 stomachs to break it down. Did he smile then? I would be good for her. She knows it. Another ant by the window – they’re coming in from everywhere, probably marching under my front door now, hundreds of black, shiny, insectile Waffen SS goosestepping under my front door, drooling profusely from their sagging mandibles. I can feel foam at the side of my mouth; it’s all this talking. Wipe it away. I have to talk for the both of us – is he mute (or moo-t)? I’ll have to do some more digging around. Dig those ants out. I shouldn’t have told him about my boy – If only my boy had been a bear – best off doing a Slocum & keeping him out of the way. Shit! I don’t want my mother to die (my sister to have died as a baby, that brownie-hound cunt of a nurse to drown in jissom, but not my old mum). Old people disappear just as easily as animals. I bet they’d like to change that. You can be sure of it, acrimonious schemers the lot of them. They don’t know when to let go – look at Bates’s mum. The connections keep coming. I can’t keep up with them, not enough time to assimilate them now. I’m prettier than this piece of half-dead oxen. People know about me; they remember my face. People call me out of the blue & want to talk to me. They go to the trouble of getting my number, of finding out about me. I suppose I should be flattered. I am, but I have so little time & really cannot afford the interruptions. People phone me & get tongue-tied, find themselves unable to speak – is it awe? I think it probably is. I can’t think why; I’m nobody special, or that’s what I tell myself. I try to keep my feet on the ground. You need to in this business. It’s only natural to get nervous in the presence of somebody you admire, even if you have hundreds of metres of phone wire between you. You want to make a good impression. I can understand that. I’m not an ogre. Sometimes they are so intimidated by me that they hang up before I’ve even had time to reach the phone. They sense my greatness. They can tell I have the formula. Who says nobody cares or gets excited about novelists anymore? I appreciate them, I really do, but they’re killing me with their attention, their ants & their cars lined up in homage. I don’t know as I have time for love. I could make time for Her. We could come to some arrangement. Auster had a wife & two children, a son & a daughter. His wife (Siri Hustved) was also a novelist, a woman of words, a tasty piece of stuff with long legs, blonde hair, good skin, the smoothest thighs you’ve ever had your head between. What I don’t have time for is 313

games, & games are what I see being played out. She’ll have to deal with whoever it is she has to deal with & then come back to me. I don’t have time for this. I have work to finish, work to start. Auster’s wife would have been good for me. Hell! I’d have been good for her. I can’t deal with the petty jealousies of insecure women. I should just let them sort it out amongst themselves. But they seem so intent on drawing me in. I can’t rid myself of an image: Plath, her head in the oven, her arse in the air, me balling her lifeless anus. (When his work was going well, Charles liked to see himself as someone who had sacrificed his wife and child for the sake of his art, and frequently compared himself to Alexander Trocchi, who had also seen fit to abandon his children for no other reason than that they interfered with his writing. (J.G. Ballard reckoned the pram in the hallway did him a favour, that it had actually helped motivate him. Now there’s a thought.) Charles would have liked to put his wife on the street; not, like Trocchi, to fund a drug habit, but to fund his writing. Yes, he liked the idea of being a pimp writer. He would have liked to have done that, but she never would have submitted to it; she had never loved him enough. When he was unable to work, when he lost faith in himself, he remembered that his exasperated wife had left him, taking his child with her, and he felt hard-done-by. It was during these times that he allied himself to John Hawkes who, when his first child, Jack, was born, had simply risen extremely early in the morning and written before going to work. Charles believed he too could have done the same, if only he’d been given the chance.) On reflection, the grass-munching comment was taking it a bit too far – not at all fair. His teeth are all wrong for a start. Spies don’t wear tope trench coats & fedoras anymore, nor do they smoke strong European cigarettes; no, they wear blue tracksuits & eat runny egg sandwiches & nobody except me suspects a thing. It’s all very cleverly done; I have to hand it to them – before they take it. All this has gone beyond the toying around of fledgling lovers. That could have been a cover. Maybe she didn’t expect to, but she went & fell for me anyway. Has this put the plan & Her in jeopardy? I am losing the power to concentrate on anything but them, & they know it. This has all been set up around me. I want to know why. I wonder just how many of them actually know why. Do I have a brain bug? My book is talking back to me in riddles: it’s swapped sides. I keep forgetting to eat. I find it unnerving. I forget to eat because I am unnerved. My brain feels so hot lately. I picture it as a broiling cinder one minute, and as a melting ball of wax the next; this is the delirium, the calenture of the gifted. When will bits of it start to break off under the strain? I’ll 314

not give it long if they keep it up. I get terrible stomach aches & my tongue tastes bitter. Dogs eat grass when they have bad guts; cows have 4 stomachs to keep in check, so they never have the time to eat anything else. (In his early teens, Henry Lee Lucas watched his mother’s lover decapitate a calf and then fuck its carcass.) They are never in one place long enough. I don’t have the time to eat or write. I am unable to write. They don’t want me to finish my book: that was the thought which came upon me last night. My tongue is laminated in stomach acid & dead words. I hear the unarticulated letters burning up in my ascendant bile. Maybe D. H. Lawrence was right. Maybe death is preferable simply because there are no other people there. I am able to discern patterns. Codes, ciphers, cryptograms all open up to me; the splayed legs & warm meat mille-feuille of hidden sense never fail to cast a wink my way. Red – black – red – white. How can he miss it? Cars don’t park themselves; people often forget that. Where others see differences I see similarities & where others see similarities I see differences. Without differences there would be nothing. You could say I have a gift for secreted conundrums. But they are bent on overloading me with… I mean how else was I to take the litany of white vans? Does he know what day it is? I’m not sure he can keep up with the facts. He can listen but can he think? This town is constructed from Nabokovian plums. I’d like to kill that slit-eyed yellow cunt over the road, hack large gleaming chunks out of her with a meat cleaver (she will have one in her kitchen), open her eyes up with a paring knife (ditto). I might even cook myself up a portion of anthropophagy soup, with a few noodles, some ginger & five or six fresh green chillies. I wonder how many dogs she has in her larder, strung up by their hind legs with tin can muzzles forcing their blood-soaked jaws together. (What dark secret might I find tattooed under their fur?) I don’t have time to waste on her. If she greets me again I’ll just punch her in the face, or blank her, whichever comes first. People around here have too much time on their hands. They must have invented a camera lens that can see through curtains by now. I certainly wouldn’t bet against it. When I sit down to write it’s as if they know, for no sooner have my fingers touched the keys than they go to work. They’re suffocating me; I feel like the Marquis de Sade deprived of quill & paper, choking on the great unwritten. One after the other they come, neverending, white after white after white with no let up. They might as well bellow their mockery up to my window with loud hailers. Even that despicable bitch over the road, she who takes her morning tea with lashings of fresh dog tears, presses her flat face up to the window to watch, to gloat and amuse herself at my expense. I don’t know why I bother with him. His ears don’t even work so well lately. What else 315

does the slathering, multi-gutted pea brain have left? I have my work, if only I were permitted to pursue it. I’ll give him another chance. I don’t know why I waste my time on him. I have a kind heart, I guess. It’s not far, just a two-minute walk, no distance at all. And yet so much could happen. My brain is a searing ember tonight. How long before it cools & begins to crumble? I can’t get my fingers into where it aches. I’ll just have one more before I leave, to set me up. I won’t drink much while I’m there, so I’ll have another quick one before I go. Fuck it! I’ll finish the bottle: I never know what I’m going to have to contend with. If all goes well tonight I’ll try & get back to work tomorrow. I managed a couple of short poems earlier. They weren’t at all bad in spite of everything. I suppose you’d say they were reminiscent of the late William Carlos Williams. I think he also had restrictions on the amount of time he had available for writing poetry. We find a way. I’ll mention it to them. They need reminding of what I do, of what I can accomplish if I am given peace. They all have linseed oil & potato peelings running through their veins. They can’t appreciate me or what I do. I can play their game as well as they can & sometimes it amuses me to do so. They can’t tell of course. How could they? They don’t even see it as a game. I’ve let myself down, given in to them out there, those men & women standing out in the rain & waiting. The rainfall wanes and accelerates, oscillates between drizzle & downpour & still they stand motionless, patient, determined, wet, looking in at me through the shifting glaze. What can they learn about me out there? Men in long black coats & heavy boots, their hair stuck fast to their skulls, grey, indurate men, ruthless men, men with other men’s blood & skin under their fingernails, motherless men, childless men, men with calloused knuckles & dismembered orphans in their pockets, men with eyes for death & torment, men who seek out the affections of coldhearted seductresses with slimy snapping toads between their legs… I wish they’d tell me what they want from me, why I am of such importance to them. I wish this. I wish they’d keep busy and forget about me. I wish the same for me. My friends are going home to their families. I shall go home to book-clad walls and uncomfortable truths. I wish I were ordinary like my friends, just another series of wasted heartbeats. For weeks now I have had the feeling that somebody is hiding in my flat. As I move from room to room it is as if I am a fraction of a second too late for something, as if my entering a room is foreshadowed by somebody else having just vacated it. My belongings are never exactly as I left them: a book will lay open, its spine cracked in two, its pages twitching guiltily; my ashtrays contain butt ends that are not my own; my whisky bottle is drained of its contents; piles of dead ants collect beneath my windowsills; my food cup316

boards are raided on a regular basis; pages of my manuscript go missing. I sense his presence – for I am sure it is a man – hear his breathing, his shuffling footsteps. As I approached my building yesterday I saw him standing at my bedroom window. When I finally mustered the courage to go inside I couldn’t find him anywhere. I shouted for him to show himself. I hollered abuse at him until the pervert in the flat above began thumping on his floor. I wish I knew what he had in store for me, but he gives no indication. He is a man that has been lied to, duped into a life that isn’t his and he blames me, I know he does. He craves revenge and I am his target: he mauls my nerves as a cat does a sparrow, his claws retracted in the name of sport. I see his heels slip around the edges of doors, his eyes snatched away from corners. I see his fingerprints in the dust, the indentation of his body on my bed, and the swell of his chest behind my curtains. And yet I see nothing that my fear cannot claim as its own. 317

NO CHANGE GIVEN It is a drab Tuesday afternoon and yet again Charles is finding it hard to concentrate. Burgess would have been writing, the afternoon busy dissecting his unconscious mind. Charles comes out onto the street in an attempt to clear his head of the white noise of doubt, the barracking atmospherics of inadequacy that were killing his words before they could find their way out. He’s looking for fresh air to breathe, but all he finds is the same glutinous lungstuffing he’d shut the door on minutes earlier. He walks down through the town centre, through all its cuts and slashes, its endless goodbyes and final reductions, through its many mantis-framed mothers hiding their prayers behind their prams, through gangs of old crones with murderous regrets and cadaverous hair, through streets that make a boast of their cheapness and glass painted white a ghost of your stare. He sees a frail old man sitting outside a bank playing a child’s xylophone. The man bashes away at the multicoloured bars day after day and people passing sometimes drop something into one of his Mickey Mouse slippers. But it is not about the money for him – that much is plain. When children tease and kick him, he looks so confused it is unbearably heartrending. (It reminds Charles of when he was a child and he learnt about how the Dodos had made such easy targets because they’d innocently tried to befriend their killers. For a long time that thought made him sad. Eventually he became angry that something’s death-defying stupidity should make him feel so miserable.) The old man does not fathom the hostility he engenders. It is his complete inability to understand the way he is treated that tears at the heartstrings, and not merely the treatment he is subjected to. The old street xylophonist does not realise that the reason children try to hurt him is because they can’t let him be without somehow sanctioning his existence, and that that is something they are not prepared to do. Instead they kick him, punch him and steal his money. One day they will kill him. Jack, now little more than a dumb animal, would have begged for such an end had he known what the town had in store for him. 318

In Pavilionstone’s premier hotel there is now a locked room that has been block-booked for the next five years. The room key, unbeknownst to the hotel manager, has been copied, and now five different men (and anyone they choose to bring along) have access to this room. The man who permanently resides there is not in possession of a key, for he never leaves the room. The resident in question, who goes by the name Jack, has been subjected to Coco’s scalpel, so that he can be safely detained at the hotel as a sex slave. Coco employed a take on the Dahmer Method of zombie production, using extra long drill bits that chewed up his frontal lobe a treat. He has become a popular attraction in the town: straight guys have even been known to pay him a visit on the quiet, safe in the knowledge that they can indulge their homosexual curiosity without having to confront a real man – a man that hasn’t had his emotions butchered, whose eyes haven’t been replaced with frosted glass. Behold our very own St Sebastian peppered with pink arrows. Charles chuckled to himself dreamily: “If only, if only.” Charles had wanted to get out, but now out finds he has no place to go. He stops in the middle of the pedestrian precinct and watches as everybody else keeps moving: the irresolute flaneur stilled by the scrofulous horde. He’s visited his mother once already today and, although that visit would have already faded into non-occurrence, he can’t risk disturbing her afternoon nap by calling again. Ordinarily, on a day like this, he would take refuge in his favourite bookstore, but he’s noticed, of late, that the shop assistants appear to regard him as something of a figure of fun, giggling uncontrollably whenever he visits. He should of course pay no attention to these mere pawns in the game of literature; he should rise above their puerile idiocy, give them a taste of what he can do with words, cut them down to size with a single line like Oscar Wilde. Instead, Charles being Charles and not Oscar, (although his hair might have deceived you had he worn a hat to conceal his baldness, and had Wilde seen fit to indulge himself in a wayward perm), he avoided his persecutors for want of courage and self-belief, believing his time would come and that when it did he’d rub their snotty noses in his brilliance until their septums began to disintegrate. A man with glazed black eyeballs and red hair brushes past Charles’s shoulder, pausing momentarily to suggest a course of action: “Go to the photo booth in the shop to your right! You’ve left something there,” he says almost inaudibly before walking off up the precinct, still muttering to himself. In spite of his reservations, Charles finds himself meandering over in the direction of the photo booth. Finding it unoccupied, he sits down on the turntable seat and draws the curtain shut. He finds nothing and is about to leave when he sees a piece of paper protruding from the coin slot. He pulls it 319

out, being careful not to rip it in two or to shred its edges any more than is necessary. He manages to get it out in one piece and reads it on the spot. Report 1 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22 The only thing I regret is my future. Dear Boss, My lodgings are bearable if I avert my eyes from the hideous gaudiness of the flock wallpaper and the hypnotic swirls of red and orange that threaten to suck me into the carpet. I can only hope that I am kept busy enough with my task to be left little time to dwell on the offensiveness of my surroundings. I am hoping to meet my contact again later today, but fear that he may well be otherwise engaged – such is the preoccupied nature of his life. With this postponement in mind, I have devised a backup plan incorporating a reconnaissance expedition of my new surroundings. I have seen very little, but what I have seen, in darkness, as it rarely gets light here, was I imagine best seen that way. The dilapidated beach with its tarnished breakwaters, redundant huts and gloomy stillness, did not, I must admit, fill my heart with joy and anticipation. Yet as I speak, a lame streak of sunlight creeps across the floor towards my feet and reminds me of the fact that I have something to achieve here, even if I am yet to discover just what that might be. MOLECH 320

The following day Charles revisits the photo booth and finds yet another report crammed into the coin slot. It reads as follows: 321

Report 2 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22. The only thing I regret is my future. Dear Boss, I met my contact today at his home at 8 A.M. as arranged. So engrossing was our meeting that it is now approaching midnight and I have only just left him. The sickness of this man’s mind is all but hidden by his pleasant, if at times, downcast demeanour. I was made to feel instantly at ease, and was told to think of his home and rather extensive library as my own. I could not have hoped for a warmer reception, and our obvious enjoyment of each other’s company must, I feel, bode well for any future meetings, of which I anticipate many. His home is cluttered, musty, and, at the risk of talking ill of a man for whom I am beginning to feel some affection, absolutely filthy. MOLECH 322

After a week of disappointments Charles finds another one. 323

Report 3 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22. The only thing I regret is my future. Dear Boss, Things are progressing pretty much as expected. He never seems to sleep. He maintains that he hasn’t slept for longer than fifteen minutes ever since it all started; he certainly looks and acts like a man in desperate need of some rest – his eyes are like enflamed abscesses that have been plugged up with screwed-up balls of dirty tissue. Every now and then he twitches, as if coming around from a nap, and then rubs his eyes and scans the room disbelievingly. It is disconcerting to behold a man seemingly come to in mid sentence, and then look at you like you’re some complete stranger who’s just burst into his home and sat down in front of him. The look never gets supported by any words – it’s too brief for that. It’s just a look. Sometimes when I turn up in the mornings and let myself in he has started the day’s monologue without me. He is oblivious to my suddenly being there. I don’t interrupt him. I just sit down and take notes. It’s as if, as far as he’s concerned, I’m always there, and indeed I do spend more and more time there as the days go by, and I too sleep less and less, for the times when I am not there to catch what he says I am missing part of the story, my presence or absence being no cue for him to start or finish. MOLECH 324

And three days later, after a brief altercation with an old woman struggling to get into the booth with her zimmer frame and shopping bags, Charles finds the fourth and final message. 325

Report 4 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22. The only thing I regret is my future. Dear Boss, I am beginning to see the depths of depravity that this man has endured. We are stuck in a cyclical stream of decline. Sorry… I am losing my way. I remember why I’m here, why I came here, but it all seems so ludicrous. I can’t believe the thoughts I used to have, the emotions I used to court. I sense that I have slipped into territories so mordant and unfathomable as to weaken my ability to ever leave this place. The salt air has corroded my nerve-endings. It’s inside me and I can’t take it back there. He has not spoken a word for two days now. I sit and wait for words to arrive, and when they do not I do not prompt. I sit and wait. We both sit in silence, sinking into old sofas, dozing and waiting for the words to come. I read over the transcripts of our time together and speculate as to the end we are approaching. All I find are things lost and left behind, places left, things discarded. It rains all night and all day and refuses to get light. I can’t ever leave here. What is this place but any place anyhow? Too many of my sensibilities have been masticated into a claggy pulp, and spat out to accommodate my next breath. I think I need to be left to die. MOLECH 326

Charles turned the paper over in his hands. On the back was a simple pencil sketch of a man. 327

328

A self-portrait? Some kind of clue? Charles thought he recognised the haunted expression, was sure that the blurred lines that made up the face were a message of some sort. Were there words hidden in this picture that expanded on the four that ran up the right-hand side? 329

42 RUE FONTAINE L.: “I can’t do this anymore.” T.: “What can’t you do anymore?” L.: “This.” T.: “Oh this.” L.: “Yes this.” T.: “No?” L.: “No.” T.: “You can.” L.: “I can’t. That’s what I’m telling you; I’m telling you I can’t.” T.: “You can.” L.: “Can I?” T.: “Can and will. Can – and – will.” L.: “No choice.” T.: “No choice.” L.: “No way to end it.” T.: “No.” 330

L.: “I need to sleep.” T.: “So sleep.” L.: “I can’t.” T.: “So don’t.” L.: “Can we die?” T.: “No.” L.: “I can’t live like this.” T.: “Can’t not live like this.” L.: “So you say.” T.: “So I say.” L.: “How can I sleep?” T.: “You can’t.” L.: “I know.” T.: “Try!” L.: “The changes wake me.” T.: “So you can.” L.: “It’s not really sleep.” T.: “So what is it – really?” L.: “I don’t know.” T.: “We should be able to.” L.: “What?” 331

T.: “Die.” L.: “That’s the way I saw it.” T.: “We’ve been misinterpreted.” L.: “Misrepresented...” T.: “Misread.” L.: “Fucked over.” T.: “Royally.” L.: “I suppose there’s always the chance…” T.: “Chance that what?” L.: That they’ll realise and correct their error.” T.: “They?” L.: “Whoever – Whatever.” T.: “Do you believe that?” L.: “It’s possible.” T.: “So no, then.” L.: “I believe it’s possible.” T.: “I’m glad.” L.: “Don’t be.” T.: “I’m not.” L.: “Good.” T.: “I suggest we leave it at that.” 332

L.: “Why? Got something else on?” T.: “Yes. I’m going to have a nap.” 333

GALLA BINGO “…lusting after rag and rouge, searching out those that time has turned from Helen to Hecuba. Now we all know that bingo halls are a hot spot for Galla Grabbing, if you know what you’re doing, but remember the rules! If you want to dive in and swim about in the white sea then stay cool. The trick is never to go for the cardigan fraternity, those who leave mirrors to the young for fear of what they see in them, unless you have time to invest, that is, and we don’t, so always be going for the ones that are showing out a little, those who’ve made an effort. Tell them they smell like fresh flowers in a meadow when stinky billy is nearer the mark, that their skin is as smooth as silk when parchment paper is bang on. You’ll all starve at the hands of Canidia if you let on that you are out itching for cinders; they want to be appreciated for what they’re not, what they haven’t been for decades, so don’t disappoint them! Now, if everyone has their magic markers, let’s get going! “Oh and guys, remember to play on the myths! Get their lips around your piece and they’ll drink you down, every last drop, as if it’s Hera’s own milk! I don’t know how much they think it takes, but who are we to quibble?” said Keith before scooping up his marker pens and making for the door. It proved to be one trip too many for our tomb-stabbing boys. Death came for them in the form of a hundred or more grannies who, hypnotised by the slack grot between their legs, got the taste for some killing. They smiled their barbed-wire grins and took the boys apart. Paul was the first to sense all was not right when, while discreetly pushing butter inside the gash of some old beehive with electric blue eye-shadow, his greased-up conquest pulled a pearl-ended hairpin from her towering barnet and slid it through the centre of his left eyeball. Two more old girls, bare from the waist up, their tits hanging off their ribs like dry rags, took hold of his arms and began eating into them, wringing out the blood from his wrists as one would twist water from a tea towel. Within seconds he was subdued under a mass of floral-patterned skirts and torose legs clad in yellow kneelength hosiery – flash of razor-edged boar tusk dentures, false nails rammed 334

through his cheeks, his belly, digging for organs. And in the middle of this ancient orgy of blood is Paul’s member, as hard and as brittle as the hooked fossorial toenails of his attackers, dispensing its rejuvenating prize into the wrung-out mouths of a pack of boneyard prom queens. The other boys were busy with their own sweethearts, and were unaware of their friend’s fate until the whole hall erupted and they too became engulfed in a torrent of creaking magma. The stumbling infirmity of their molesters was more than compensated for by sheer weight of numbers. Velcro booties and crinoline panties were spinning in the air. Greg thought he was somehow caught up in the best damn porno he’d ever seen until some cragfaced old cunt with scarlet blusher, bone-meal skin and huge false eyelashes, sunk the sharpened tips of her zimmer frame into his fat gut. He dropped to the floor and quaked like a bag of bull spunk. The draggletailed parasites were all over him before he could lift his head, probing, stabbing, drawing out his honeyed blood – suckling piglets with no thought for their host. His double mastectomy was taken care of with the aid of steel nail files and toenail scissors. “I FUCKED YOUR GRAN, JOE! I FUCKED HER, JOE! I’M SORRY…” he screamed while he still had his tongue. Joe couldn’t hear Greg’s last words and, even if he had, was in no position to forgive his buddy his trespass. He had arthritic hands up under his ribs trying to prise him apart, three bucktoothed mouths gnawing at his testicles, and a knitting party making shish kebabs of his fingers and toes. All around him collapsed vaginas dangled between legs sucking up blood and cum like the glutting proboscises on a swarm of sickening insects. Dick and Keith were being divided up fairly, their marker pens used to section off the goodies. They lay on the floor, their bodies made patchwork with black dotted lines: Frankenstein’s monsters marked out for slaughter. But as soon as their mates had been sucked dry, those boundaries and divisions counted for shit as the mob moved in. They burrowed through those boys like a shoal of cackling barracuda. When they had done, their age came back with a vengeance, punishing their exertions with paralysis. They lay about in heaps, exhausted: a galantine of rotten meat. 335

PRO-DEATH RALLIES It is I, it is I who pull myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: hatred and disgust for existence are just so many ways of making me exist, of thrusting me into existence. – Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée You can hear their chants from way off: “Oh to die unfound like Lorca, Like Lorca left unfound, And if I died like Lorca I’d never run aground.” Every other banner has a reproduction of Dali’s Study for Honey is Sweeter than Blood emblazoned across it: Lorca’s head lies at the edge of the picture, tranquil, smiling, eyelashes like centipedes split down the middle, his brain, visible through his skull, but safe from prying hands. Lorca, safe in death, has no care for the rotting donkey carcass beneath him with its guts split open, its cavernous eye socket and mechanical grin, its landing party of greedy flies. In a Study for Honey is Sweeter than Blood, Lorca’s head is divided down the middle by the horizon, the right half of his head falling in shadow beneath the horizon line, while its left half rests in sunlight on top of it. In a window overlooking the demonstration, P. stood thinking about the divisions of death, and about right and wrong ways to die. The decaying donkey with its buzzing offspring has not died well. Donkeys are ignorant, intransigent creatures that cling onto lives where they are forced to bear near unbearable loads and suffer constant beatings. No better off is the butchered female whose missing head (four saplings are there in place to remind us) will once again know life (the fourfold root). As far as Dali was concerned, Lorca died a “beautiful death.” Borges’ thoughts on the matter – that “it was a lucky 336

thing for him to be executed. Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death.” – were equally misguided. He didn’t have a fine, beautiful, or impressive death. He was the victim of a nationalist firing squad: he died at the hands of Franco’s militia – with two extra bullets in his arse (some coup de grâce) – for nothing more grandiose than the puerility of nationalism. (You want a town that breaks its poets, you come to Pavilionstone! You come here and see if your verse doesn’t have the blood pouring from your ears, your writing hand in stewed paralysis, your heart laughing back at you like a brutalized chimp, your veins open on the page, your…) Victims of the panic breathe into their paper lungs: the need for a third (re-circulatory) lung folded for action in one’s pocket is a must, as nobody knows when their endless future is going to open up into some vast breathless jagged throat, hanging open like the tortured geometry of a shark’s mouth, its broken bottle teeth encrusted in the stinking chemistry of submarine murder. They stand beneath their banners wailing for justice to be done. They feel they have been duped; they want another bite of the apple. The world is rising up in a protest to end all protests, a calling for last rights. They threaten action if their wishes are not granted, so the N.W.R. guards, anticipating deaf ears, are already in position with their sighted stun guns. Two planes soar overhead, each trailing a pennant through the gloaming N.W.R. sky. They read (if one can make out their undulating words): “To die! To be really dead! That must be glorious!” (Count Dracula – Bela Lugosi, 1931), and “We belong dead!” (Frankenstein’s Monster – Bela Lugosi, 1935). As they roll and prepare to dive into the crowd they are torn from the sky. The cries come in from outside: ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! LET US LET US LET US DIE! 337

People are sick of themselves, sick of the dilatory haze that their lives have become. They’ve had more life than they were built for, more life than they have the intellect or the ingenuity to enjoy, more life than they deserve. The N.W.R. has a worldwide mutiny on its hands. The L.E.O.s are dangerously overstretched and, with more and more officers expressing sympathies with the mob, a solution is overdue. The promise of death is both that which keeps us sane and that which we strive to deny at every turn: the torturous tedium of poor old Makropulos juxtaposed with (George Orwell’s remarks on) the condemned man who, while walking to the gallows, carefully steps around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet. Just how long could you live forever? “You have realised a Schopenhauerian idyll where the longer people live the less they will a continuation of their living. If it was the worst of all possible worlds in his time, then this world is impossible, unsustainable: the very fabric of our willed existence is crumbling. The answer, as it has always been, is nothingness. The problem has always been that of attaining it within prohibitively short life-spans. The answer now is to allow people to die the right way and no other way. Test their mettle. Let’s see just how much of their sickness they really fathom. Let us all die into bliss if we have the resolve.” P. is ranting, his mouth almost foaming, his eyes glassy and elsewhere. “That wasn’t the plan.” Lance reaches for his cigar and is this close (imagine thumb and forefinger barely separated – the initial breach on the jaws of a micrometer) to lighting it up. “But there is no answer in life. There are only ‘act-as-ifs’: act as if God exists, act as if your life will eternally recur, act as if life were not essentially pointless… In the face of self-delusory as-ifs, why not live with perfect death as your goal?” “Because, my friend, I want a perfect life, not a perfect death. Death is death is death and I want no part of it. Death is no solution to the problems of life. Death is a throwing up of hands in despair.” “Despairing? Despairing? Maybe, maybe… Dive through nothing and through despair,” says P., his head nodding slight and slow. As his body tenses, he starts up again with a renewed, if slightly less assured, vigour, which smacked a little of the broken-down salesman who can’t quite convince himself enough to convince you. “Death is not indivisible – the way we die can cleave death in two.” “And you’re sure of that are you, scholastically sure?” “Not yet. No.” “What is there but life? There is nothing more.” “Ah, but there is – there is a nothing more.” 338

“Have you been sleeping? You look like shit. No wonder you’re in love with death all of a sudden, you’re face is positively cadaverous.” “Look, nobody ever dying is all well and good, but what else are we to do once we are done with living? Schopenhauer once wrote that there exists, ‘no misfortune so great that it would induce everyone to commit suicide.’ Nothing maybe except the universalised misfortune of eternal life, and I’m not talking suicide here; I’m talking about achieving Erlosung, Salvation, an end to suffering.” “For the very first time in history man lives long enough to profit from his faults.” “Those profits have been exhausted.” “Look, eternity has been put in our hearts; all I am asking is that you help put it in our heads.” “I can’t, not without manipulating desires. I am not up to it. It is the height of cruelty to keep alive what should, because of the deplorable condition of its being, be left to die. Let’s burn the hysterical dreams of Unamuno and his kind, for they knew nothing of the truth of their for ever and ever and ever. With this you’re no better than Beddoes with his bone.” A brick smashes through the window and falls at their feet. “Get a grip! I want a solution to this problem; the deeper puzzle can wait.” “Let’s sell them the good death. Let them think they’ve won. All their identities are memorised, and we can freeze their bodies on the quiet if we need to. Anybody who wants to go will be allowed to retreat to their home, where they will then isolate themselves in a single room with no food or water. When they succumb to their will to life (which many will) and leave their rooms in search of sustinence, then we will see who has won. There will be no easy exits. It is for their own good. They can die the good death, or they cannot die at all.” “I couldn’t have put it better myself.” He laughs and winks at P. who does not laugh in reply, for he dislikes being reminded of his origins. “Send word out immediately before things get too out of hand!” 339

OFF WITH HIS HEAD It is widely known that in 1794 Antoine Lavoisier (French chemist extraordinaire) found himself watching, between blinks, 15 to be exact, his neck revealed from behind a wall of shimmer and blood as it frantically tried to fuel his dying brain, propelling its oxygenated gloop into a basket and splashing his chin. Before succumbing to the sticky guillotine blade, he had, in keeping with his scientific drives, informed a number of friends of his intentions to blink for every post-decapitation moment he was conscious. His friends scrutinized his severed head and counted 15 blinks – roughly one every second. What is rather less well known is that Antoine Lavoisier didn’t cease blinking through lack of consciousness, but through forgetfulness: he simply forgot to continue blinking, or rather forgot the importance of carrying on doing so. He shut his eyes and didn’t open them again, at least not at a time when his inquisitive associates were in a position to notice. His head was placed in a basket that contained a number of other Frenchmen’s heads. He opened his eyes and saw cracked spinal-cord section, a swollen tongue hanging from a set of blue lips, its tip nestling in a filthy grey ear, valleys of sea-sick green skin, a landscape of gummy organics plagued by huge droning flies perky with the thrills of excess, prospecting for decay, hairs bristling, eyes all seeing, all scorning, unsympathetic. They buzzed in his ears, tickling him with their hooked feet, their front legs rubbing together greedily like the palms of Yiddish money-lenders. He wanted to cry out and jolt them with his life, to shout, “Not now! Now is not the time! Come back when I have gone, but not now, not now, now is not the time!” But nothing was shouted, or even whispered to the black darlings with eggs to lay; all was quiet bar the buzzing of frenetic flies and a brain that would not die. Hail the revengeful ghost with nothing to say, with no act to do with certainty, swindling death, as he did, from the neck up. 340

It is said that cockroaches can live for nine days straight without their heads; apparently they eventually die of starvation. Lavoisier’s body died almost immediately; it had no time to starve. It twitched a little and then slumped to the gluey floor and left its head to do what living was left. Dr Livingstone once observed that a number of the Africans he met on his travels believed consciousness to carry on for some time after decapitation, and gave an account of how they bowed yielding saplings and attached them to the ears of the men about to lose their heads, so that their last few moments of responsiveness would be of soaring through the sky. What he neglected to mention, and what very few people know to this day, is that…well how to put it? Out of the damaged remains of their ears they formed wings that carried them, these black men’s heads, across the plains of Africa and beyond. They would fly about for many years, scavenging on carrion, discarded burgers, the contents of city bins and tips, scaring off vultures, rats and seagulls with their flashing teeth and strong snapping jaws, not to mention their altogether hideous form. Their call was a rumbling, rhythmic laugh, for they were happy, even in their depleted state, at having cheated their rightful end. 341

LOVE AND FEAR OF FUTURE PAIN It has long been accepted that one of the worst forms of pain you can inflict on a person is to make them watch the abuse of their loved ones, while insuring they are powerless to aid them. There are many different relationships that can be successfully exploited, but by far the most excruciating for the observing parties are the following: lover/lover, and parent/child. I have seen a man whittle down his own penis with a cheese grater to prevent the rape and mutilation of his sweetheart. That same man ended up biting off the end of his tongue in reaction to the pain. At the risk of making unwarranted assumptions on the basis of my own limited experience,28 I will elaborate on my former claims by saying that the female parent is, on average, more willing than the male parent to sacrifice herself for the sake of her children in these cases. With the lovers there is little difference between the sexes, and any that might be thought to arise could simply be put down to inaccurate ascriptions of the term ‘lover.’ There was once a very attractive couple in their mid-twenties who had loved each other passionately for more than ten years. Since getting together, neither had ever been tempted by the excitement and false promise of infidelity. They were totally committed to each other, and even their friends, who had known them both for many years, expressed amazement at the bond that existed between them. She was as stunning as she was warm, kind and unassuming. She was truly a wonder: her eyes opal fires, her hair a silken waterfall, her full lips brushed with the softest sable, her body honed from faultless alabaster with a diamond-cutter’s precision and God’s own loins in charge of design. (Basta! Basta!) However, despite the depths of her charms she remained with one 28 I am press-ganged into viewing these experimental calvaries. It is as if they need me, a man like me, of which I am the man always favoured it seems, to observe their pantomimes of cruelty. I shut my eyes, but still I am not spared. They need a carrier for their poison, a victim made (or so they think) immune by his own nadir of pointless, unsanctified pain. 342

man, and never once faltered under the oppressive weight of male adulation, palpable wherever she went. They had something special, something precious, and they knew it, and their awareness of the fragility of what they had never let them take it for granted. But I’ve gone on long enough, and you realise what a remarkable coupling they were, even if you are denied any comparables within your own sphere of friends and acquaintances. What was done to them was almost cruel beyond belief, but not quite. I’m yet to find anything cruel beyond belief. I believe to easily, that’s my problem, and cruelty is, by its very nature, boundless, and so anything can be believed of it. Maybe it would be best to begin at the end, and tell you how he finished up. For ten years he was confined to a maximum-security unit for the criminally insane, the sort of place they held Lex Luthor and Hannibal Lecter, but dirtier, noisier, and with enough anguish and hopelessness to choke Pangloss in a second, to finally rid the optimistic fucker of his delusions. When he first arrived he was rarely out of his strait-jacket: he had a habit of breaking his wrists and the bones in his arms by pounding them on walls, tables, anything in his vicinity. This was before they had decided upon the correct medication for his needs. He still felt frustrated and angry after their chemical solution, but just didn’t have the energy or the will to act on those feelings. He knew he had been wronged, and could still remember the things he was forced to see. He longed to scream and howl, to beat and bruise, and break and destroy, to kick and punch, and run and run and run and run… But not enough, he didn’t long for these things enough to do them: he was kept from longing that much. Before it all started, the young man was tied to a chair that had been bolted to the floor. His ankles were fastened to the chair legs and his wrists lashed together behind his back. He sat there continuously asking after her, wanting to know what was being done, pleading for her safety, for her to remain unmolested, for the love of God, for the love of decency, even. He told them to think of their own families, their daughters, wives and sisters, and to keep them in mind when considering their future actions. He went on like this, putting forward his case for clemency, but nobody listened; all they heard was scared drivel, panic buying, and all things immaterial to what was going to happen anyway. Two men brought her into the bunker. Her mouth was gagged and her arms too were tied behind her back. They pushed her down into a chair while they sat either side of her in two additional chairs. There were at this point six people in the room: four male kidnappers, and the special couple. 343

He started asking what they’d done to her, demanding that they remove her gag to allow her to answer him. The men did not react, beyond looking at one another and smiling. The hidden implications of their conspiratorial smiles fried his nerves, crowded his mind with what had been done, what would be done. He tried being quiet, aloof, but how could he, a daddy-longlegs in the palm of a bored and inquisitive child, turn the tables on them? He managed to remain silent for ten seconds, before resuming his comforting techniques: how she must keep in mind how much he loves her, as if that thought was to serve as a talisman, an amulet that would protect her from danger and defilement. He believed that he would suffer anything in order to save her from the advances of these men. He genuinely believed it; that’s what love meant, and he felt it more at this time than at any other. They began by stripping him of his clothes, pouring paraffin over his crotch and applying a lighter to the area. The flames engulfed his genitals, chasing his pubic hair down beneath the skin. He screamed, ground his teeth, went berserk in his bindings; all expected reactions were present. At this point, colobosis complete, one of the men removed her gag. The expletives and abuse that poured from her mouth took nigh on ten minutes to run their course. When they had, a proposal was tendered: “If suitable ratification is provided forthwith, we will stop his torture.” Before she had time to respond, he screamed, “Don’t you fucking dare! Don’t you dare give them permission! Whatever they do, you say ‘no,’ whatever, you say ‘no,’ dyu understand? ‘No!’ ‘No!’” “Have you seen Un Chien Andalou?” asked one of the men as he rummaged in a black and silver toolbox. Our man shook his head. “That is a shame. Oh well, can’t get around to everything, I suppose. It’ll just have to be something you miss out on. Get someone to describe it to you one day. But until then I’ll give you a flavour of what to expect.” He pulled a cutthroat razor from the box and, flapping the edge of the blade up and down his leg, went and stood behind the chair. He prized his left eye29 wide, rested the blade on his cheek and looked over at her. “Well?” The young man’s anus started twitching like a fresh bullet wound. “I have to. I have to. They’ll cut you to pieces. I have to. Tell me it’s okay! Tell me! I can’t watch this happen and do nothing. I can’t. I can’t. I won’t. TELL ME! TELL ME!” “…” She attempted a smile, but she couldn’t pull it off: it refused to be sullied. “Well, my sweet, I’m not going to wait indefinitely. Have you come to a decision between the two of you or not?” said the man with the razor. 29 Note: only Lorca’s left eye is visible in Honey is Sweeter than Blood. 344

They looked at each other, saying nothing, until she said, “Do it then, and leave him alone.” That was enough for them; they had been getting impatient, and this slightly less than explicit concurrence was considered sufficient. The young man burst into tears and began to moan almost metrically – some kind of mantra-like dirge. He was facing his lap, but was not destined to remain in that position: he had to watch the show they were about to put on, now that his eyes had been spared. One of the men pinned his head back, and forced his eyes open. After he had started watching he couldn’t have stopped even if they’d let him. He was responsible for what she was being subjected to, and the least he could do was watch and share the agony. Those few seconds of silence had resulted in this. First she was stripped down to her underwear and forced to blow them one by one and then two at a time: they grabbed and pushed at the back of her head and thrust themselves into her mouth so hard that she choked and ended up puking on the floor. They accompanied all this with a ceaseless barrage of verbal slights that seemed to fire them up even more: “You know how to handle a cock, girl; who’s been a naughty slut, then?” “You speak Khmer, cunt? No? No? Well here’s hoping you don’t bauk at this.” Pretty soon she was naked and they were spit-roasting her, fucking her arse wide open; she was a dog with two, three and even four backs. They slapped her about a bit towards the end: gave her a few bruises, ripped large clumps of her hair out, and left her nearly as sore as her man’s half-melted genitals. He had to watch as they feasted themselves on her, as they disregarded her delicate cheekbones with punches, as they fisted her without even bothering to take their rings off, as they stirred one another’s porridge time and time again. He tried to dwell on the fact that he still had his eyes, that they had not been sliced open – something that he’d found hard to imagine living through – and that he could still see his wife’s beautiful face, all scuffed-up and crammed full of dick. He was, in effect, dying as he sat there in that concrete bunker, and he could feel himself ebbing away, getting lost in halls of unrecognisable mirror selves. He didn’t know of what, but he could feel an absence, a gaping space where his thoughts echoed endlessly, meaninglessly, for no one. Where were the heightened states of awareness that Dostoevsky had promised me? Where was the flash of realisation that would have me see the abiding value in the everyday world? The shock did not break me free from the rut of my former life, for the shadowy reflection of a grinning man had allowed me space to breathe. 345

THE SECRET CELEBRATION OF EVIL To study evil so as to bring out the good is not to study good in itself. – Lautréamont, Poésies It is not hard to see what’s going on here. I say that now, but as you know, it has taken me some time to get here. How did I miss it? The clues were there all along. How did nobody get here first? Too involved in the game to question the rules, I guess – an age-old problem. Poor old misguided Frank, fancy thinking the clues left in those books and journals were for him, and as for thinking that all those highlighted passages somehow constituted a formula for the resurrection of his dead wife, well… fuck me… the man must have been insane with grief not to see their real purpose. I suppose he can be forgiven, daft chump, for failing to realise the intended recipient of those signals, but how could I have been blind to such a blatant series of winks and nods? Inexcusable really. Anyway, here is a breakdown of my realisation, nine pins in the effigy of mankind, nine plump worms fresh from the belly of my soul: 1. There is a dearth of meaning in the N.W.R.. 2. In the absence of God and death, every N.W.R. citizen has turned to morality. 3. Morality suffered badly at the hands of the personal identity theorists that gave them immortality: in the absence of contingency-free moral agents, there remained nothing left to satisfy the control condition.30 30 This condition states that people cannot be morally appraised for anything outside their control. And to fall back on Aristotelian theorizing in order to explain constitutive moral luck would be to sidestep the problem altogether, tantamount to a – somewhat implausible – denial of the control condition’s intuitive force and appeal. 346

(For remember, your live options are not up to you.) For with no recipient agent considered morally fortunate for the character they have, and without even the paradox of moral luck in which to invest hope, moral appraisal is largely destroyed, there being no framework left by which to pass moral judgement that is not grounded in mere societal function. 4. The only way for them to take control over their live options and so cling onto morality (once you consider the options in detail) was by unswerving allegiance to the utility principle. For only by committing to the utility principle do you make it your single primary live option, from which subsidiary live options can emerge. The randomised alternative will always have morality playing second fiddle to constitutive factors, always leaving its effectiveness unsubstantiated. 5. A world in which nobody can feel good about themselves unless they are actively maximising happiness is unsustainable. 6. The easiest and most effective way of (seemingly) achieving moral worth is passively, relative to the extreme evil of others. (The old delusion.) 7. The best way of achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number is to make them moral. 8. Therefore, a sub-population of evil-doers should be created in order to (seemingly) elevate the moral worth of the entire population of the N.W.R.. (The old delusion – the blind apotheosis of iniquity – should be reinstated on utilitarian grounds.) 9. Hence the existence of Pavilionstone. (Once again suffering has a moral purpose.) The evil acts in Pavilionstone help create and sustain the moral worth of N.W.R. inhabitants. The less they know about the lives of those in Pavilionstone, their sense of powerlessness maybe, their brain chemistry, the way in which they are cruelly manipulated, etc., the better they feel about their own moral sanitation. None of these moral sloths want evil explained away in terms that leave them morally superior only by chance. Evil, then, is both that which augments the moral status of N.W.R. inhabitants, and that which (once investigated free of bias) they would find themselves to be free of only 347

contingently. Hence, no one in the N.W.R. (bar one or two exceptions) can be aware of the incentives for evil that have been fed into Pavilionstone since its inception. Their speechless horror in the face of evil, combined with their unceasing curiosity concerning the people of Pavilionstone and their foul deeds, suggests that our wickedness fulfils some deep-rooted need within those beyond these walls, elevating them by acting in ways so base as to be beyond their free involvement. It would be abhorrent for them to think of those they consider evil as benefiting them in any way. But it is, nevertheless, quite apparent that they do. Are they not so very pleased with themselves when they consider the deeds of others to be impossible for them, and are able to label those deeds as immoral in the same breath? The situation would seem to lend credence to there being some (covert) consolation to the thought that in the absence of God they at least have the devil. Nothing reinforces the (seemingly) inherent value of one’s moral sensibilities quite like the exceptionally monstrous behaviour of a small number of people. Pavilionstonians make moral citizens of them all and yet are given no credit for it. How could they give them credit? The work is all theirs, after all. Evil deeds allow citizens of the N.W.R. passive moral worth i.e., an increase in moral status in the purely negative respect that they could not possibly (they imagine) do the said acts. The sound of the world is made up of a few amplified screams and the deafening clamour of slapped backs. For if, as Kant thought, supererogation somehow makes morality appear too hard to attain, then the existence of evil surely makes its attainment all too easy.31 They feel that the full delineation of evil characters still leaves room for alternate choices (that are live options) that they would envisage themselves making. But when they imagine they would have acted differently, had they been them, they cannot really be putting themselves in his/her shoes in a way that is both illuminating and metaphysically palatable: for either they allow themselves to subsume him/her, become subsumed by him/her, or posit the existence of some dubious ‘third entity’…. {Is this born from God’s laughter or his tears?} I could say more, fill in the details a little perhaps, but I can already feel them closing in on me. I feel their hot breath on the back of my neck as I write this line, hear their measured footsteps on the stairs outside as they creep ever closer…. 31 St Thomas Aquinas said it best: ‘If all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe.’ (Summa Theologicae) 348

A STREET IN KRISTIANIA They happen upon a winter’s day, but the bright sunshine and the clear sky belie the season, and are enough, if one should wake in the open air, to occasion spontaneous bursts of song. “Is there really nobody that you’ll miss?” says Lakok, trying his hardest to look perplexed. “I lived alone and I worked alone – excluding the odd collaboration with you know who; both my parents were (are?) dead, and I’ve always been woefully neglectful of friends. No, there’s nobody I will miss.” (What he says is true, but he is not saying it because it is true, and his awareness of this causes him to doubt just how true it is.) “Don’t you find that a bit sad?” “No, I don’t find it a bit sad. It seems to me that you are the one with dibs on sadness round here. I can see this for what it is; you on the other hand are forced always to see it for what it is not. But by all means pity me if it helps you to embrace your losses. I’ll even start bleating about how dreadfully empty I feel inside at not having found a good woman to love and sire me many bonny children if it will in any way help alleviate your despair.” “I wasn’t picking a fight.” “That makes it worse.” “I need to talk about them.” “So talk about them.” “I can’t just pretend like they don’t exist.” “They might not.” “What?” “At this particular point in time it is highly unlikely that they do exist. Unless, that is, you’ve noticed some temporal clue that I’ve somehow overlooked. It should be consoling for you.” “Thanks. This will get to you as well.” 349

“You want it to, don’t you? You think it’ll be better for you that way. Well you’re wrong.” “Oh, I’m wrong alright.” “Please, spare me.” “I’m so, so sick of this.” A man approaches Lakok and Triman. He is wearing large, worn-down shoes, and a wretched suit scarred with creases; his hair, greasy clumps of which adorn his shoulders, is so dreadfully thin that if it weren’t for the dirt weighing it down chances are the breeze would make off with it in an instant. He is sobbing loudly. “What’s the matter with you?” asks Triman. The man doesn’t answer. He hides his face in his hands and hurries off in the direction of the docks. “Was there any need for that? What’s wrong with you?” asks Lakok. “Come on! I’m hungry. Let’s go and hunt down some food.” 350

BUNTER’S BECOMING The creator has committed himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end, the perils risked by his creatures. – Jean Genet, Journal of a Thief Flaubert may have been able to suffer the ills heaped upon his characters by his own hand, but had he ever had to fear being buggered by one of them, had his home ransacked and infested with them, had them assume his name, or continuously taunt him with their independence? Flaubert could have thrown his guts on the floor a thousand times, but it would have remained nothing more than the tired showmanship it had always been. You can put all the detail you like on the page, you can research until your neck is bent and your eyes are blind, but it was a gift of true genius to crawl onto the page with them and have them haunt you, their creator, like so many spoilt and unforgiving children. Charles had this gift. Charles was a writer like no other before him, a true original – a master of words and of creation.32 Every inch of his skin tingled when he thought of himself in these terms, and how else was he to think of himself now? Now was not the time for doubts and insecurities; they’d had their time. They’d been eating away at Charles for too long, scratching away at him, infecting him with poisoned mediocrities and slothfulness. All the times he had been kept from his work by barrages of distraction, all those who had longed to keep him from writing, longed for him to fail, all were nothing to him now. He had done what none of them could even dream of doing. They could all drink his piss. They could line up to suck the shit from his backside save him pushing. They could all fucking 32 Unamuno came close in 1914, but ultimately failed to live up to his early promise. His partial success has been much parodied since then, but until now nobody, not even Sorrentino, has been able to take it beyond the playground, beyond theory, beyond. 351

pay homage to his brilliance or else turn away shamefaced and say nothing, not a goddamn fucking word. “A book takes me a year to write. It’s too hard work for a revenge.” Charles recalled these words of Maurice Bendrix and chuckled, and tried not to think about just how many years his own revenge had cost him. * His mother had been first to suggest it, and he had been working on it ever since. How had she put it? “This girl you’re always mentioning, it sounds to me like she’s messing you about. All her smiles and flashing eyes will come to nothing, or else will come and just as quickly go. Why don’t you advertise for a girl? You could write something nice and put it in the paper; you write so well.” Charles had dismissed it out of hand at the time, but the idea soon began to appeal to him, and he set about writing his advert. What finally sold him on the idea was daydream upon daydream involving him and a mystery woman walking nonchalantly past Beatrice who, with eyes poised to bite, is made to face up to her feelings with dramatic consequences. He decided on an advert that would appeal to a sensual and passionate woman. Charles wanted to cut out the frigid loners and sloppy cardigan crowd that might be tempted to reply. Charles didn’t have time to waste: he wanted a woman who wasn’t going to drone on about herself for hours on end and then patronise him with a dry kiss on the cheek. He wanted someone who knew how to translate the wordless elegance of erotic love, and who could on first setting eyes on him sense what he was about and approve and want. The finished advert read Burroughs is looking for his Vollmer. Writer partial to the lingering kiss of cracked horizons and the crepuscular corners of desire seeks a woman of dark persuasions. Let two soft selves entangle in the terrible pleasures of indeterminate sex and lose themselves in a mosaic of juxtapositions. Let us glut and maw at each other until goose pimples sweep over our bodies like napalm over Vietnamese trees. 352

He predicted that his advert would attract, if not a woman of French descent, then at least one with a touch of Dutch or Russian – maybe even some wild septic tank. He bought the paper the week his advert was due and scurried home with it rolled up under his arm to be near the phone. That first week, following the publication of his advert, he was so preoccupied with what the phone was about to do that he struggled to complete a measly two pages of his novel, a page of which was a rewrite. When the phone did eventually ring it was as if firecrackers were going off in his chest. He’d grab a cigarette, if he didn’t have one already on the go (he wasn’t far off sixty a day at this juncture) light up and, with a deep drag, lift the receiver. The only people to call him that week were his mother and his sister (his embarrassingly insignificant patron), who weren’t, you can imagine, very well received. He cut them off short, excusing his brevity by explaining that he was expecting an extremely important call. After he’d hung up he would feel terribly low for a while. He didn’t know why, but they made him feel like a fake. The sound of their familiar voices, their voices familiar with him, how they perceived him, all these things made him nervous about what he had done, made him unsure about whether or not he had misrepresented himself. These feelings would pass and then he was back waiting, as eagerly as ever, for the phone to bring him back to life. As the weeks went by without response, Charles came to realise just what a dullard-infested backwater it was he was forced to live in. He berated himself for ever having expected to uncover a woman of ardour and sophistication in such a place. It had been too much to ask for this town to throw up even one such woman from its stock of bovine trollops and stiff-limbed scrag-end. Still, it did not stop him from resubmitting his advert when it came up for renewal, although his sense of expectation had certainly diminished by then: he no longer cut short his other callers for fear of missing out. Once again he felt able to sacrifice his writing for the time it took to converse with others who, sadly, had less to engage them. As long as he kept that advert going, the familiar Bring! Bring! of his phone was never routine: it was infused with a judder of unclaimed possibility. Charles relished illness like few other people ever could. He didn’t suffer from Munchausen’s syndrome or anything as laughably desperate as that. No, his was an entirely different form of goodwill towards ill health. He came to look favourably upon short periods of bad health for one reason only: they allowed him a guilt-free respite from the burden of writing. He felt unable to chastise himself for the work he wasn’t doing when he was unwell. He became free to spend days on end cuddled up in front of the TV, sipping on hot toddies, eating wholesome and tasty food (although he was decidedly 353

chagrined if, during a cold, he lost his sense of taste) and smoking as much as he could afford. He would try and catch up on some long overdue reading in addition to these other activities, but in all honesty the only reading he managed was a stunted prelude to sleep. Charles even came to crave the symptoms that gave him time off from all the things he wasn’t doing. Murakami once stressed the importance to his writing powers of a strict regimen of physical exercise. Charles is a traditionalist in this sense, for he is one of those writers who smoke and drink too much, completely disregarding the need for physical vigour. Despite this, people were still disbelieving of his status as a writer. He couldn’t win. Delillo was another one who insisted on taking regular exercise: he would go running after his four-hour morning shift at the typewriter. Maybe there’s something in it. I’d have to get a tracksuit, he thought, and trainers. But what would the man in the blue tracksuit think? He’d see it as direct affront…. Charles would, like Capote, remain a “horizontal author.” The Literary Allure of the White Plague. Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Balzac, Robert Burns, Albert Camus, Guy de Maupassant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dashiell Hammett, Washington Irving, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Johnson, the Brontë sisters, Chekhov, Kant, Keats, Heine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Orwell, Simone Weil, D.H. Lawrence, Goethe, Stephen Crane, Georges Bataille, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Schiller, Kafka, Charles Kingsley, Sidney Lanier, Thomas Mann, Katherine Mansfield, James Elroy Flecker, Somerset Maugham, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Alan Sillitoe, Dylan Thomas, Francis Thompson, Henry David Thoreau, Tolstoy,… (Edgar Allen Poe managed to deflect it onto both his wives instead). In 1837 Sir James Clerk listed the causes of consumption as follows: “improper diet, impure air, deficient exercise, excessive labour, imperfect clothing, want of cleanliness, abuse of spirituous liquors, mental causes and contagion.” Charles had done most, if not all, of the preparatory work already, and still no blood on his hanky. 354

The Poison of the Darkness. (The second most romantic pathogen.) Those known and thought to have trodden the spiral germ staircase, those touched with the spirochete of mad talent include Flaubert, Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant (acquisitive fucker), Nietzsche, Isak Dinesen, Alphonse Daudet, Jules de Goncourt, Arthur Rimbaud, Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde? James Joyce? Laurence Sterne? (another overly-diseased hog in the making)… The Piazza Carlo Alberto was where Nietzsche developed sympathy for browbeaten horses and it broke his brain. And I don’t want to hear about Syphilitic infection, the effects of chloral hydrate, congenital brain disease, or a long-standing mental illness suddenly slipping into fullblown insanity. I want to hear about the sympathy of one man for a whipped horse, sympathy so strong it wrought irrevocable damage between the ears. * The cigarettes began to burn themselves out between his fingers. The skin on the insides of his smoking digits was deep ochre, bordering on black in places and as stiff and as smooth as shoe leather. It got to the point where he hardly noticed the hot ash charring his skin, or the smell of burning flesh riding high in the smoke. He just sat at that infernal tabletop desk staring into a blank sheet of paper willing the words to come, cursing his luck, breaking his mind in two for what he couldn’t get down. The longer he sat there the more convinced he became that he was petrified of his own greatness, that he was still suffering from what could only be an acute case of Jonah Syndrome. Only recently, Charles had enjoyed a short bout of productivity that had been initiated by a premonition concerning his own death. One night, as he was preparing to go to bed, he was suddenly convinced that if he went to sleep as planned he would not wake up again. This particular day he had completed a mere three sentences, none of which, on rereading them, pleased him to any great degree. As he read these sentences over and over a deal was struck with what can only be described as an enforcer of premonitory law (the Kafkan “inflexible hand”). The deal was this: In exchange for each night of sleep from which he would be permitted to wake, Charles promised to 355

complete at least one page, with the additional clause that any Danielewskian (rapid-page-turning) techniques would be met with instant disqualification. That night, Charles sat down and completed his now obligatory page in less than an hour. He did in fact slightly exceed the minimum requirements by some four or five lines. Despite his tiredness, it took him an hour or more to fall asleep. On waking the next morning he remembered the opening lines to a Lightning Hopkins song he had listened to repeatedly in his youth. He too was pleased to be waking and, after making himself a coffee, headed directly for his typewriter. It wasn’t long before Charles recognised that his newly acquired deathdread-drive had distinct affinities with the habits of Wittgenstein, who had himself experienced the selfsame thing. Wittgenstein had encountered death throughout his life: his father had died prematurely, two of his brothers had taken their own lives and, during his early teens, the Austrians in general were disposing of themselves at an alarming rate. He had a morbid fear that all his work would somehow be lost. I too have that fear, thought Charles. Wittgenstein, like Charles, did not fear death itself but the incompleteness of what he would leave behind. He was morbidly afraid of wasting the little time he had left. Incompleteness is the stamp of human life. Immortality does nothing to rectify incompleteness; it simply makes its essentiality harder to bear. And so I would argue that the hero is not one who, as Wittgenstein wrote, “looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death,” but someone who looks immortal life in the face, real immortal life, not just the image of immortal life. When his brother died, some years ago now, Charles had been saddened. His strongest emotion at that time, however, had been a feeling of terrible smallness. He looked at the piles of books he had taken from his brother’s library some months before his death – his brother, all chewed up with cancer, having lost all interest in reading – and felt small at the pleasure he had derived from rooting through those walls of books and taking whatever he pleased. Of the hundred or so books he had boxed up and transported back to his flat on that day, he had read no more than 5, unless, that is, you count reading a book’s synopsis and its reviews as having read the book itself, which was something Charles tended to do. Charles’s Oblomovism was so utterly unquestionable, so ingrained in his being, that it had caused him to give up on the very book from which the term itself derived, consigning it to dust and to cobwebs having failed to complete the first ten pages. When approaching a book, Charles loved to read the reviews, plot synopsis and literary influences placed on the back cover and the pages preceding 356

the title. It was often the case that he got no further with a book than this rather cursory introduction, although quite often he would read these parts over and over again. Charles sometimes disliked the fact that he was not a more voracious reader, and was on occasion sickened that his compulsion to own great works of literature was stronger than his compulsion to read them. The first of these two compulsions could usually convince him that merely to be aware of their existence, to possess them, and take pleasure in their covers, their bulk, and their prestige, was effort enough. Thankfully, for Charles, these feelings of worthlessness didn’t rise up out of control too often, and when they did he could usually dissuade himself of their legitimacy with a swift deployment of his decidedly polished flair for cynicism. There are people who can consume books the way a champion pie-eater consumes pies. They claim to be able to read a lengthy novel before lunch – Truman Capote was one such person, reading at least five books a week and an average-sized novel in a mere two hours. I am not such a person. I often wish that I were, but I am most assuredly not. When I attempt to read at a pace that strikes me as fast, I lose my way and have to go back and reread the pages that escaped my lamentable attempt to speed-read. When I try to read faster it takes me longer. I have read all my life, and since maturity am not aware of ever having progressed to a quicker pace. I have come to accept that I shan’t ever be able to read a lengthy novel before lunch, not even if I got up in the middle of the night to do so. The result of my accursedly sluggish reading rate is that I regularly flit back and forth between many books at once, sometimes with strange consequences. I don’t have the time to read trash. If I get to the end of a book and find myself thoroughly disappointed with it, I destroy it in a rage, and at every opportunity destroy any other copies I come in contact with, so that I may save others from similarly wasting their time. Is this supremely arrogant on my behalf? Maybe. I prefer to see it as a service to the book-reading public, excluding the avaricious readers who can look out for themselves. I would never trust their recommendations should they ever tender any in my direction, for what sense have they of the commitment I would be making by taking up their (whimsical) suggestions? Will I be struck down before I find the heart of this book (this infernal book that I must write and that has sucked my life into it only to spit it back at me)? I sense I am close to a breakthrough. Arranged in the right way, this book could say it all. Have I the time to arrange it thus, to make the few additions and depletions necessary for my name to be synonymous with literary brilliance? The wheels of the tape rotate like hypnodisks, drawing me back in…. 357

It was 4:37 in the afternoon. The telephone rang. Charles cursed his luck and reluctantly got straight up from his chair in mid-sentence. He lifted the receiver as the third ring died in his eardrums. “Hello?” he said impatiently, expecting it to be his mother or his sister on the other end. “…” “Hello? Hello?” “Burroughs? Is that Burroughs?” a woman’s voice blurted out shakily. “What? Sorry I… Who’s speaking please?” “Vollmer! It’s Vollmer – in answer to your ad.” “…” “Hello? Are you still there?” “Oh yes… right… sorry. That was a while ago.” Electric eels were writhing about in his guts, churning up the French onion soup and cheese croutons he’d had for lunch. He dived for his cigarettes and lighter. “Want to meet, then?” Apprehension was threatening to swallow him up: your bluff has been called; put the receiver down now! Hang up! Say NO! Say NO! “Yes…that’d be good.” She asked for his address. He told her, and she said she’d be there at eight, and then the static deadness of the dialling tone. He got up from the settee in a daze and walked over to the drawer where the advert was kept. It wasn’t there. He heard something fall to the floor in the kitchen. He grabbed his trusty poniard, that at times like these he took with him from room to room, and went to investigate. The curtains were moving. On the floor at his feet was the advert. He picked it up and rushed back to the settee and read it inside out. It was clear. The advert made it clear what was expected. She could be under no illusions as to what a meeting would mean. Charles was a lump of cramping muscle. He was finding it difficult to smoke enough and the whisky/superbrew combos were failing to achieve their usual, stultifying, end. He was unable to sit still. He took a bath and cleaned his teeth. His gums bled profusely. The TV blared somewhere in the distance. He began scouring his Burroughs for something to use as an icebreaker, some slice of sordid sexuality to set the mood. He couldn’t find anything that he could actually imagine himself saying with any authority. He didn’t have the right voice for those words. With minutes to go, the words in his head become fragmented and strangely disassociated from one another; he becomes unable to structure sentences properly. It is as if someone has come along and taken a bolt cutter to the 358

links that hold words together in meaningful groups. He is standing behind the front door to his flat with his finger poised over the intercom button. His anus is blinking like a tired eye. He has developed Parkinson’s, dyslexia, an irregular heart beat, hydrophobia, and a brain tumour all in the space of a few hours. What would she make of him? What could she make of him? There was only so much for her to go on. He offers up prayers for her to arrive late to gods that he now suspects don’t even believe in him. He looks at his watch: it reads 7:59. He will give her only two minutes more, by which time she will be officially late and he will be justified in not answering the door. He tries to count to 120 in his head, but continually loses his place. Finally 8:01 arrives with no noise from the buzzer and he has a way out. He makes his way back to the settee, determined not to answer the door should she arrive. This decision made, he wonders why he doesn’t feel any calmer. If anything, her being overdue makes him feel worse. Why hasn’t everything gone back to normal, now that he has turned his back on this ill-advised liaison? Where is the titanic sense of relief that is owed him? And why is he still lighting cigarettes up off their forebears when his throat is as raw as a smile up Grope Cunt Lane? He tastes blood and licks the back of his hand. He wonders whether the red streak across his knuckles came from his gums or his enflamed throat. But he has no time to come to a conclusion before the buzzer blurts out its noise and sends Charles into a state of near apoplexy. He gets up from the settee and makes his way back to the door, still convinced that he has no intention of buzzing her in. It buzzes again and he presses the button to speak. He says nothing. He can hear her breathing into the intercom. He can’t speak. Maybe the blood on the back of his hand is all that is left of his tongue. He takes his finger off the button, and then presses it back in again. “Can you hear me?” He could. He could most certainly hear her. No problems hearing her at all. The intercom was doing its job. She spoke and he heard. Yes, he was hearing her alright; he was sure of that. That hadn’t been so bad. What had all the worry been about? “Com I can inter the loud blood of tongues in clear breaths.” “You can what?” “Nerves all wrong and hoarse from smoking red teeth… I catch frightened words in dead throat phlegm.” “I see. Can I come in?” “Too blurred in booze and indecision, can’t tell.” “Too much Dutch courage, eh?” 359

“Late!” “Don’t tell me you’ve sacrificed a pinky already. Come on, buzz me in!” The buzzer is pressed. The catch is slipped for her foot on the door, and he’s let her in. She’s straight up the stairs with her pink knee-length boots and her cunt unwashed from the last fat, bug-eyed invertebrate with grubbyfingered hands that had opted to filch her sweaty micro-biotic filth. She’s here for more of the same, for stale corruptions, her enema of dirt and semen. Charles is blacking out behind the door. He’s adding blindness to his list of marauding malfunctions: “How late she was, how late.” (Borges suffered from a form of congenital blindness. Did Joyce go blind? Jack Clemo did, and deaf too if I remember correctly. Schultz died.) He can hear knocking, as deafness is yet to come his way. He puts the door on the latch and heads back through a smog of bad sight and dense cigarette smoke to his dent in the settee, where he settles unsettled and waits for her to come join him, to laugh and to leave. “There you…You! Charles?” No names, no past, bottled water, good cheese and butter, plenty of butter and silence, wasn’t that the deal with these things? He nods, untrusting of his tongue, should it be anything but pulp. “Don’t you recognise me?” she asks, her mouth pulsating like a rubber meatbox. He recognises her as his friend’s manufactured and increasingly wayward wife, known to give pieces of herself to all comers, as Lewd Lizzie, Loose Lizzie, Lap-twitch Lizzie, Lice-lips Lizzie, Lizzie the Light of no man’s Life. He nods again. “So, Billy Bunter Burroughs, what dyu think you’re gonna do to me? Where are you hiding these terrible pleasures and goose pimples you promised me? Not too bold now are you, fat man?” She stands in front of him. Charles refuses to look up at her. He stares down at the floor between his shoes. “Gonna leave all this to me are you?... I’ll get my own drink shall I?” She picks up the tumbler that Charles has been drinking from for the past 3 hours and half fills it with whisky. She sits down in the armchair and slurps at her drink, scanning the room as she swallows. “So, blubberguts, you ever do anything but read? Do you fuck, fat man? You gonna fuck me dizzy, big guy, push me out there with your fancy words? Well? Don’t you wanna rid yourself of some of that mutton fat you’ve been busy building up?” Charles raises his head an inch or two, “Might do.” “Might you now. Well I’m all wet at the prospect, stud.” Charles reaches down for his cigarettes. “Cigarette me, big boy.” She says. 360

Charles pokes one in her puckered mouth and lights it. She drains it halfway down in a single drag before dropping it on the floor and crushing it out with her foot, at which point Charles attempts to light his own. “No time for smoking, lardie: this place stinks of shit and if I don’t get to it soon I’m gonna end up fucking embalmed in this foul little coop of yours. But before we start, I’ve got a present for you,” she says, walking towards him with a gift-wrapped parcel in her hands. She gives it to him and watches as he picks nervously at the edges of the sticky tape. “Use this,” she says, offering him his own poniard. “No, no, don’t play with it! Plunge it right in! Cut into it!” Charles does as he is told and slices deep into the middle of the present. Blood begins to pour out onto the carpet. Charles throws the punctured parcel to the floor and wipes the blood off on his trouser leg. “What the fuck is that supposed to be?” “Don’t you know, Butter Belly Burroughs? Why it’s the future.” She laughs until the stitches in her arm begin to shake themselves loose. He is still doubled up, his hands resting on top of his cigarette packet, when she pushes him head first to the floor. She undoes his belt and drags his trousers down to his knees. (Deep southern drawl): “Rise and shine, rise and shine… Now let’s see if we can’t find that bullet hole.” She slaps her hands down on his arse, hands pockmarked with cigarette burns, and peels those anaemic slabs of flesh apart to reveal a screwed up eye framed with dirty lashes. “Aha. So this is where you wear them two symmetrical warts.” She sticks her tongue right in. She eats into his hole like a startled ferret. She raises her head up from the spoils, all gasps and green growls, a lioness up for breath from the inside of some animal’s splayed ribcage dripping her blood beard. “You ready to kiss your shitter, fat man?” She pushes his floppy buttocks to one side as you would an empty plate. With a thud, she is on Charles and giving him a taste of processed crab and chips. Delving under his stomach she catches hold of his works. “Cummon…where’s your sting at, jellyfish?” Cold skin on her forehead, limpness between the lips, the hum of scaly perspiration in her nostrils, and off with a shoe and a sock before working his hard-skinned yellow toes into her. “You’re not big everywhere are you, Charley!” she says, grabbing hold of his foot and driving the awkward contours deep inside her, squealing as his thick toenails cut into her soft walls. “Going to fuck you now! Going to fuck you now!” “Is that right, stud?” “Yes, yes it is.” “Don’t you want to be getting yourself a prick first, my tame little jellyfish?” 361

Charles struggles to get up. She is sitting astride his foot with her hand pushing down into his spongy guts, but eventually he manages to dislodge her – not, it must be said, as a result of his strength, but rather the disabling hilarity his efforts at sexual dominance have occasioned. (A sentence, many times read, flashed across his consciousness: The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence.) Up on his knees, with his trousers at his ankles, his shirt hanging down over his manhood, his arsehole damp, and the taste of shit in his mouth, he rams his podgy fist into her face. It takes her by surprise. Precum dangles from his prick like snot from a young boy’s nose – to Charles, it almost feels like blood from a wound. She smiles at him in admiration. Her nose begins to bleed into her mouth, and her eyes water. She reaches out her good arm to congratulate him, and he flinches away. She gets down on her hands and knees, closes her eyes, tips her head back as far as it will go and waits for him. “Why are you looking up there? He isn’t even in, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She remains silent, and finally he gets around to mauling away the rest of her clothes. The sight of her right arm, dangling ineffectually with its grey skin bound with that thick rope-like scar, conjuring up those absurd spasmodic appendages that once hung off the front of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, contributes to his feeling less conscious of his own unattractiveness, giving him cause to be a trifle freer with the opportunity he has been presented with. Charles fumbles around trying to enter her, grunting and groaning in an alarmingly piggish fashion. He lifts up his gut in order to see the intercourse taking place: like his hero, Balso Snell, his body has broken free of the bard. He is ape-genius Tenzer! Her silence is making him uneasy, so he begins pounding his fists into her ribs and shoulder blades in an effort to excite some noise from her. She obliges with a series of winded moans and phrases of mock encouragement. Before long he is spitting his sauce down the back of her bruised thighs and leaning his body up against the armchair, wheezing and coughing uncontrollably. He watches her crawl off on all fours, her cunt yawning back at him as she goes. He peers over the top of the settee and watches her wriggle under his tabletop desk. He is grateful of the chance to gather himself, out of sight of her. He collects up his clothes and quickly sets about reattaching them to his clammy body. Once having dressed, he sits cross-legged on the floor and lights up a much needed cigarette. His head is thumping ferociously, and the left side of his face is going numb. He puts his hand up to his left temple and feels the pulse of the pain through his fingertips. He tries to relax and enjoy the obvious comparisons that now exist between himself and the late Henry 362

Miller, writers and sexual predators both. Charles thinks that maybe he too would begin work on a trilogy, and gets the urge to return immediately to his writing. But, remembering the naked woman crawling about his flat on her hands and knees, he decides to wait a while. He can hear muffled laughing and giggling. He can also hear her talking, but cannot make out the words being said. Scuffling sounds are coming from over by the tabletop desk, under which she is now lying on her back. All Charles can see from his side of the room is her head and neck poking out one end. She begins rocking her head from side to side, and then suddenly arches her throat in the air, dragging her crown along the floor towards the base of her neck, where she holds it for a second or two before relaxing her position with a whimper. She is playing with herself. No, wait! Her hands are tightly wrapped around the table legs. She keeps looking down and talking to whatever it is that is between her legs. Blake is there. He is there going down on her under his very nose. Had he been the real reason she came over? How could he be? Blake is uglier than week-old road kill. What would she want with him? Why had he allowed her into his home? His head starts crashing again, vengeful at having been overlooked. “Get out! Get out now, both of you!” “What was it Walt Whitman said? ‘I find no fat sweeter than that which sticks to my own bones.’ Yes, that’s it. Looks like old Charley boy there took him literally.” Cacophonous laughter from beneath the tabletop desk, which is now rocking violently from side to side. He notices at least two different types of laugh, and is half sure of a third. Blake would run off if Charles made his way over there: he is gutless. And the other laugh, well he can’t be sure – it is probably her playing games. He’d taken his first step when he heard a familiar voice say: “Lizzie tells me she’s moistened you up back there, Charley. I may just come over and take a look for myself.” He runs to his bedroom, flying off the walls as he goes. Once inside he slams the door shut, turns the key in the lock, rips it out of the door and places it in his pocket. He grabs a tissue from the box beside his bed and stuffs it into the keyhole. He moves over to the window, opens the curtains, and slides the sash up as far as it will go. If they attempt to break down the door he’ll yell for help and, if it comes to it, jump out. He hears motorcycles revving their engines, drowning out the noise of apocalyptic screams seeping through the bricked-up windows and doors of a house somewhere in the distance. He sees rapists and murderers holed up with their trophies in snailback caravans, hamburger shots blue-tacked to the wallpapered walls…. 363

Nabokov once wrote that “the true conflict is not between the characters in a novel, but between author and reader,” thus overlooking the relationship between author and character, which, as Charles was fast finding out, can prove anything but harmonious – especially if, like Charles, you were able to write yourself into a higher reality.33 Come morning, the flat was quiet. It took Charles a week to find the pluck to enter his living room. For Murakami, the sign of a true writer is his ability to transport himself into the scenes he creates, to feel, to smell, and to know these fictional realms first hand, not merely as their originator, but as someone who has actually existed for a time within them, however disturbing they may prove to be. This self-proclaimed true writer allows his work to slip beneath his skin in order that he may faithfully confront his subject matter. If this is really the mark of the authentic writer then Charles can laugh him and his metaphorical identifications out of town. Charles is the zograscopic-fingered master. Charles is the man to beat. Murakami couldn’t even see his shirttails let alone catch at them. Charles was method-writer king, a serpent with plumes of lettered gold. In 1947, a drawing appeared in Tintin magazine depicting Hergé enslaved by a whip-wielding Tintin and a menacing, bone-munching Snowy. Hergé sits at a desk littered with drawings, hard at work, his face resolute and framed in perspiration. The intended meaning is obvious – Hergé felt burdened by the success of his characters and the expectations that such success brings with it – and the device for illustrating it rather hackneyed, but I’d like to concentrate on a rather subtler point of detail. For in this picture, Hergé’s characters are as real as he is and yet still they pressurise him as if their reality depended on his continuing to create them, despite the fact that they already exist in a reality in which he can draw only pictures of them. They are his ontological equals, and yet still they concern themselves with their artistic incarnation. However, the truth here is not that the writer has somehow bestowed a higher level of existence on these two characters, by somehow dragging them from the page into the real world, but that the characters already exist at a higher level, a more complete state of being: Tintin and Snowy, then, are protecting their literary existence, their life as art, the zenith of their reality. 33 He once assaulted a man twice his age because he happened to suggest that Kinbote had invented Shade. The offending man, infirm enough to have to rely on the support of two rubber-tipped canes, had not realised that Charles was a committed Shadean – when he wasn’t a Botkinite – and seeing the fury in his eyes recanted his claim almost immediately. But the damage had been done, and having pushed him to the floor it was as much as Charles could do to refrain from giving him a taste of his sole. 364

He’d heard of many novelists who claimed to write blind, letting their novels work themselves out as they go along and pulling them together very near the end of the writing process. Charles was panicking that he’d let his work go unfettered too long for him to ever be able to contain it, to rein it in, to see where it was all leading. Everything led somewhere, even if it led somewhere else afterwards, and even if that somewhere else wasn’t somewhere else at all. He had watched it grow, but into what he could not tell. It was out of his control now; the book had taken over. To discover the truth is not merely to find it, but to partially create it. All great discoveries are creations so compelling that they must be made true. For it’s not really about truth; it’s about survival. 365

THE DISCARDED PETRI DISH It wasn’t easy watching Elizabeth fall from grace. The areas of my project where I had been successful came back to haunt me. To some not inconsiderable extent, my project had achieved its goals. I had managed to import most of Elizabeth’s characteristics and memories (her peculiarized consciousness, if you will) to another human being, and so secretly pass off death as wholesale memory loss. It had taken years to achieve, and she very nearly got there. She got so close. So much was implanted into her circuits that you’d be hard-pushed to regard it a failure, and for a time I didn’t. I made the best of it. I tried to switch off doubt, but... I made the best of it. I watched her wink Elizabeth’s wink. The way she did it – a snapshot of a stroke – was consummate. I watched her wink at all sorts of lecherous lowlife, from hircine teens with an itch to scratch, to sullen old men one fuck from the dirt. I had stopped making the best of it by then, sick of the making, I guess. I watched as she deployed that approximated smile and the laugh she had down, and I loathed her as Elizabeth began to die behind my eyes. I’d reduced her to a formula, ingredients in a potion, the list of instructions in an instruction manual, a diagrammatic pamphlet for assisting the assembly of a flat-pack cabinet. I had done her justice; I had nurtured and suckled her in her fledgling state. She was made type. But not by me. I merely utilised her abstract essence: passed like a baton through the ages, the relentless survival machine of self-consciousness had already freed her from the threat of absolute non-existence. I knew her, knew who she wasn’t. She exuded some mephitic aura that only I seemed to be witness to and which prevented me from thinking of her in any intimate way. Everybody else adored her. But then why wouldn’t they: she was as loose as a drunkard’s tongue, and twice as vulgar. There are ants on her bodice. Her left hand is hitching up her dress. Or maybe she is just scratching her thigh. She is whey-faced, chalky, sepulchral, a face somehow content in death as it looks out on life. She stares as if await366

ing something, her breasts bared, her nipples primed to suckle new life, poised precipitously on the edge of her bodice. A necklace of amber hoops with an amber pendant and a teardrop pearl hangs around her warped neck. She holds a mirror, is uncertain, demure, somehow seeking approval from her own reflection that somehow isn’t hers at all. She is met with a stoical blankness. The second face is not for her, but for us. This face – male I presume – sniffing the air, appears to be relishing some exquisite bouquet. The eyes are closed and the lips crinkle a tickled satisfaction. The face is making its way from reflection to reality, but is always, we imagine, destined to remain unseen. Amber: that resinous curator of bugs, freezing time in the shape of its victims. And the pearl, let us not forget the pearl, formed surreptitiously within the shell of some bivalve mollusc, fashioned in the dark, unwatched in the shadows of the shadowiest of places. A thing of beauty secreted in the dark. (There are no pearls of wisdom, no pearls in the mind. There is only the sheen that hides the worm.) Coco was a last resort for Elizabeth. “Psychosurgery,” as he put it, “achieves its most rewarding results on those with nothing to lose and everything to find, those tortured by self-concern.” He said he could dig her out, dig her free from the clutter of cerebral espionage to which her true self was forced to play refugee. With a simple twist on the orbital leucotomy he promised a new sense of wholeness. “A fractional operation is sometimes the only way to unite the fractions,” he said and waited for her to smile before he laughed. As far as Coco was concerned the operation went well. About an hour after coming round from the anaesthetic she claimed not to notice much difference, apart from the headache and the scars. “That’s to be expected,” he said “after all, if you can notice a difference in yourself, I haven’t done my job properly, now have I!” She was well aware that he’d fucked her while performing the surgery: he’d had his hand inside her and his knob out of his fly before she’d even gone under. But she didn’t bring it up. She let him get away with it. She walked through the house like a heavy-footed ghost wearing too much make-up. She had on Elizabeth’s fluffy pink kitten heels. Her right arm hung limp and grey at her side, a bulbous scar encircling her forearm. The nails on her hands and feet were painted a cool cerise – the bloodless hue of her right hand setting the colour off a treat. Her hair had been set in large swooping curls that fell about her haggard face luxuriantly. An electric blue chemise covered the cicatrices that networked her stomach and her back far better than it concealed her erect nipples and chubby thighs. And it could have ended so differently. 367

Frank didn’t move much now. He just sat around the house. People came and went. Sometimes he would talk with them for a while before they went upstairs, and sometimes he wouldn’t speak at all. Cold. It’s cold. Fucking freezing. Can’t wear warm clothes anymore. No, best not to. Best not to………………… best just to try and disappear. Lots of them coming to the house now. Always coming across people here. All his fucking shits milling around sniffing for cunt, my cunt. Feckless, old and ugly men with ugly shrivelled-up minds, ugly shrivelled-up dicks. Sloppy paunches pressing into my back, and boozy breath wafting over my shoulder feel and smell like what they are: unnecessary foreplay. I’m a slut, a tramp, Frank’s whore, a sex-doll with a pulse, free minge. Got to keep moving. Got to keep on the move, stopping too dangerous. Frank still all the time now, doesn’t look happy. Frank is troubled. Frank doesn’t seem to see me anymore. The windows are always open. They come at me from all angles, at all times, and not always alone. These little men get more adventurous, more daring with me. They are less ashamed of splaying open their minds on my flesh. Frank walks through me now as if I were a shadow. The fat man with the hair like a clown disgusts me. He can’t even find his cock let alone get it up. (The blood of his genius?) He often just shoves a hand up inside me and wanks himself off with the other, panting his way through erotic verses from Verlaine – I think he said it was – until finally curling up into a shameful ball like some pink woodlouse. His distended gut falls down onto his thighs. He sits in that shitty little flat of his like a capon ten years late for the plate.… My experiment would come back to the house every now and then to catch up on sleep. I would let her in and she would find a place to flake out for 368

anything up to 2 days. I usually left her alone, let her sleep, but the others would go up and see her. She had never been back long before I heard knocks and the distinctive rattling sound of people letting themselves in the front door. The telephone rang and rang, and rang, and rang, and carried on ringing in my ears long after it had stopped ringing outside of them, but still I didn’t pick it up. I am so tired of watching. They tell me she has scabs on scabs down there – her vagina and anus are said to have fused into a hard wound – and will soon be good for nothing but intra-crural sex if she is not seen to. (The sight of her diseased cunt would have had Peter Sutcliffe drooling like a hydrophobic sex fiend, as he reminisced about long days spent at the wax museum transfixed by the variant grotesqueries of venereal infection.) Ladies lost in sluttish mores can feel no touch through scabs and sores. And as the local gents bemoaned, Between the legs of calf and thigh, these pretty seaside girls would die * Do you hear the things they say with our words, yours and mine? And you a part of it, unable to turn away. It eats your flesh, your skin: a suit of lice and fleas. Sullen men with blue spots on their hands and forearms, with black fingers and crooked teeth, snap the necks of baby seagulls and throw them into drains thick with vomit. And I see you, always through the clawed hand of this spell, this incantation of black tongues and eyes, of spider fangs and starling hearts. The circuitry of motherhood turns babies inside out: designer dissectoids wearing their organs as jewellery, their parts laid out like a picnic blanket. Where’s your appetite? You ate earlier, I suppose, with your eyes closed and needles under your nails. And now you are full, glutted with heavens and empty hearts, with ghosts in the labyrinths of your lungs, breathing for you, taking your air from the throats of lynched men, from subway rapists with bowie knives between their victims’ legs. There are feet just like yours that once trudged through the soft faces of dead soldiers on their way to war, smell of flak and mutilation in the monkey-puzzle trees…. 369

ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE It could have been just another street lined with houses and bent saplings, and it was and it wasn’t. A middle-aged man with his waist pouring out over his trousers pushes a mower up and down a lawn that doesn’t appear to need mowing. A woman with her hair in a net looks out at him from the house, her hands washing plates in the kitchen sink, her head nodding mindlessly up and down. Another woman tends her rose bushes with gloved hands and pristine secateurs. Legs protrude from beneath cars, children cry over grazed knees, people sit and read papers in the sun, and none of it means that much to Triman: a rather dull five minutes, maybe the chance of food or a quiet dump. Within seconds Lakok is running up the street at full pelt. Triman makes a half-hearted effort at pursuit and then gives up, shouting after him that he’ll see him in five. Lakok doesn’t hear him. Triman doesn’t even exist for him as he runs, his left hand clasped to his right side playing nursemaid to a stitch. He is refusing to entertain the thought that what he is about to do might in any way be considered selfish or cruel, that they would be better off not seeing him at all than to see him so fleetingly. He is thinking only of being reunited with them and that the faster he runs the more time he will have in their company. He is thinking of what he will say to them, of whether or not to put a brave face on it for their sakes. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to do that. What he mustn’t do is waste precious time bawling into his wife’s chest. How long left? Fuck. Triman has the stopwatch. He glances down at his own watch and gives himself four more minutes, taking him to twenty to the hour. He turns a corner and is in his street. He slams his heels past seven houses, leaps over his wall into his garden (as he used to do on those occasions when, already late for a lecture, he had been forced to return home for a forgotten item) and throws himself, fists pounding, at his front door. When he can no longer feel sensation in his little fingers, he quits thumping the door 370

and squats for a moment, sucking down some long overdue air. His breathing steadied, he drops to his knees and hollers his wife’s name through the letterbox. Hearing nothing, he lowers his head fractionally and sees his wife’s coat hanging from the heavy oak newel post in the hallway. What’s the date? He dashes back out onto the street and collars the first person he comes across: a man in Bermuda shorts who should know better than to wear any kind of shorts. “What’s the date?” “Urm… not exactly sure. Hey, don’t I know you?” “The month?... Year then, what year is it?” “I’ve seen you someplace; I’m sure of it. Are you on TV?” A whole ten seconds later the man somewhat grudgingly informs Lakok of the month and the year and walks off, turning back at intervals, distrusting his questioner’s intentions. Lakok glances at his watch and trudges back to his garden wall and sits down. Lakok has less than two minutes to go in a day that he now knows, having just been brought up to date, is approximately eight months since the day he disappeared from their lives. He stares down at the second hand on his watch as it ticks away his hopes. His feet shuffle backwards and forwards like a toy robot. He feels a cool breeze chill the skin behind his ears and enjoys the sensation in spite of his misery, which angers him momentarily. The big hand has quietly broken into the final minute. He waits for that second with a sense of anesthetised dread. He can’t go on with this much longer and he can’t not. He longs for a time when insanity will tear through his brain, ridding him of this depressive terror, cutting him free from the spurs of disillusionment. “Daddy! Daddy! Mum, look! Look!” shout his daughters in unison from down the street. Lakok is on his feet and running towards them before they can process their eyes. They freeze to the spot, agog, their chins hanging about like abandoned swings. Lakok is shouting to them, but they can’t make out what he’s saying. The youngest of his girls breaks free from her elder sister’s hand and runs towards him in a fumbling sprint. As she approaches, Lakok slows down and drops to his knees, arms outstretched. She leaps as if into his arms, and then hovers in the air for a moment before her knees and the heels of her hands come crashing down to earth, shedding some layers of skin as they slide up the street. She is too amazed to bawl, too banjaxed even to acknowledge the stinging sensation in her tattered knees and hands. After scrambling to her feet she looks back at her mother questioningly, accusatively, as if she had somehow 371

had a hand in making her daddy disappear, had conjured him away at the last minute as part of one of those hoaxes habitually heaped on children by their parents. (Like that time when her mother had told her that the bin in their kitchen was alive and that it ate their plate scrapings.) “Where’s he gone?” she screams at her mother, her voice beginning to break up around the edges. “I think we must have been seeing things,” says her mother without much conviction. “We always see things, but they don’t just up and disappear,” says the older sister. “I didn’t mean it like that.” “So where is he? Where did he go?” “I don’t know.” “Don’t you?” the youngest mutters sceptically, pawing at her knees, knees that have now begun to miss their missing layers. 372

THE ABATTOIR SHUFFLE The deeper one digs one’s grave, the more silence one achieves. – Franz Kafka Sleep dismantles me and I’m back there. And there are vacant streets, with lifeless cafes and bars for death has got in. I can smell its cloying paws and hear its murmur sucking air from weary lungs. I can taste the dead in the air, And all this is there for me on my return. But I’m loath to seek them out, the insipid dipping of their hollow chests, their barely palpating nostrils like snuffers cooling in the dark. And yet still I look, for I’m back and I have tales to tell. I find them in their darkened rooms, amid soiled, bedraggled beds, but find not one with words to spare or ears to lend. I find the insects moved in: they’ve come to suckle and to glut, and so I peer into rapidly despoiling kitchens, dripping and gurgling as they do, and sense my own intrusiveness as the rooms’ many-legged occupants cease what they are doing and level their boggle eyes and stroboscopic antennae in my direction. And the same is true wherever I go: bodies digesting themselves, the maddened heaving of laboured respiration, loose skin the colour of bad eggs, the stench of bad breath of bad dreams, deserted streets with rows of empty cars and leafchoked gutters… On one occasion, in the bedroom of an isolated and dispirited mansion house, I came across an ant the size of a large cat fucking the bejesus out of some wretched young girl. She was on all fours, the huge ant pounding its abdomen into her twat, her head engulfed in a suffocating veil of clacking cockroaches…. And so it is that I continue to broach this barrage of rot. For this is what the world of good death looks like. I happen on a woman, alone in bed, her hair lying in clumps about the pillow like some fibrous halo, her balding scalp alive with lice, a spider poised over her right eye like a mortuary attendant’s trembler. (After closer inspec373

tion I’m still not sure whether they are Pediculus humanus capitis as I had first thought, or Pediculus humanus humanus – lice of disaster and want. I’m pretty certain they aren’t crab lice or Pthirus pubis as her hair isn’t coarse enough to attract them – she would probably have an infestation of them lower down, but I lack the inclination to check.) I shout in her ear; I shout, “I’m back and I have something to say.” She stirs and turns her head and a few more strands of mousey hair slip quietly free from her lepidote scalp. I can’t cry at any of this, although it feels as if my temples might crack in two as some compensatory measure. When night arrives the darkness is complete, unless weak from it I opt to illuminate some small corner, as is sometimes the case. But, more often than not, I sit and choose to haunt myself with what I can no longer see, and somehow find it preferable to the seeing. I sit and stare into the treacly obscurity and long for things I’m yet to witness, for things that I couldn’t possibly accommodate should they ever present themselves. I try, in vain, to lose myself in a fitting mantra of “Black here now.” I try and fail; the failure is in the trying. I sit in armchair after armchair in numerous different homes, their owners shrinking to nothing in upstairs rooms, and find myself assailed by all manner of unspoken utterances. Cellars, basements, bunkers, dungeons, underground cavities play on my mind. You will no doubt have taken note of this along the way. I have a crippling dread of them and what they can do, what they hide. They harbour opportunities of evil. I’ve thought a lot about why I should feel this way. Charles believes it may signify a melancholic terror of death. (Edvard Munch once said, “Death is pitch dark. […] To die is as if one’s eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything anymore. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.”) He could be right. I have things to tell now, things that you’ll want to know. But I’m afraid, afraid – I know you’ll be disappointed in me, for this is not why I was chosen – afraid that if I relay it, and the fear now consumes my thoughts to such a degree that my meal times are dictated by the temporary stilling of my hands, afraid that you’ll see no necessity to liberate me from here once I’ve told what I have to tell. I’ve never before had reason to suspect you’d neglect me in this way, but fear has a way of siring reasons from the most impotent of materials, and my reasons define me. After all, who am I to set myself apart from them? Then that silence came – that juddering, numinous silence that refuses to make sense of noise. 374

MILWAUKEE: 924, NORTH 25TH STREET, APARTMENT 213 “Where did you get to?” “…” “What’s the matter? Another crisis?” “What do you mean by that?” says Lakok. “You do have your moments. I think my grandmother must have suffered from something similar. We all used to call them her ‘spells.’ Whenever it happened the family would collectively shrug its shoulders and pronounce that she was having one of her spells again.” “Are you fucking kidding me?” “The two cases are not entirely dissimilar.” “Let me get this straight: here I am floating around in time and space for an eternity, ripped away from my family now for a second time and you choose to compare me to some loony old bat shit-faced on port and lemons.” “She was more of sherry drinker, but anyway… So you saw your family again. That’s where you ran off to.” “Yes.” “I would have advised against it, had you bothered to bring it to my attention.” “…” “I mean look at you; you’re a mess. I hate to imagine what your family must have gone through/are going through/will go through. You must have been aware that it would end in nothing but misery all round. You must have known that – right?” “I think from now on I’ll get as far away from you as possible. That way my ‘spells’ of moroseness won’t be such a burden on you, and I won’t have to put up with you agitating me in order to deflect your own fears. You can get somebody else to distract you from your failing strength of character, if you can find anybody at such short notice.” “So the worm has teeth, after all,” says Triman. 375

“You don’t fool me.” “It’s not my intention to fool anyone.” “Nobody except yourself.” “If it makes it easier for you.” “Nothing you do or say can make any of this easier for me, but that’s not the issue. I’ve never attempted to hide the fact that I find all of this horrific. It’s you, you’re the one that refuses to accept the gravity of this curse we are under.” “What you fail to grasp is that there was nothing of note that I left behind. So do me a big favour and spare transferring onto me anymore of your grizzling inadequacies. Think you can manage that? Better still, do as you’ve threatened and avoid my company whenever possible. There is no need to run, by the way, because for I won’t be following.” “It’s not just that. It’s not what’s left as much as what’s still to come. What of the hideous claustrophobia of our unending futures? What of the fractured manner in which we’re forced to live out those futures?” “What of an eternity of opportunity?” “You can’t believe that. What’s wrong with you?” “We can’t all think alike.” “About some things, that’s exactly what we can do. There’s a definite sense of universality about the emotions I recognise, and that you fail to recognise.” “Think of it as one long experiment… Is that you?” “Is what me?” “That smell.” “No” “Jesus.” “Look, the thing is… I just don’t have a head for all this, and…” “Well don’t despair! Try one of these on for size!” 376

AT HOME WITH THE RIPPER Elizabeth had been broken down, shoddily rebuilt and then abandoned. In order that she might be true to herself, she began living according to her instincts, never dwelling excessively, if at all, on what course of action to take. She let her mouth speak for her, dutifully following its lead. So when she was offered board and lodgings in exchange for posing for a series of specialist photographs, her tongue agreed to the terms and conditions before she’d had time to think. She followed her mysterious benefactor to his home, all the while waiting on another decision to take place that befitted the qualmish sentiment struck dumb within her belly. (I looked for her along the seafront. The moon bobbed in the sea, mouth agape gasping for air. I skirted around the back of boarded-up seafood stalls, kicked through fish heads, crab shells, and wooden forks, but found no sign of her. I picked my way through the verminous cobbles to a light at the back of a fishmonger’s yard. I could hear grunting and panting. I peered through the open gateway and lying on a gutting table was a young woman with gorgeous dark curls teeming over her shoulders, a hairy arse bouncing between her thighs. One hand clutched at her lover’s ribcage, while the other massaged another man’s cock as he tugged abusively at her jumper. She looked straight at me, almost apologetically, as if pleading. I tried to decipher the peculiar look in her eyes, before suddenly it dawned on me who she was: the daughter of that prick upstairs. I crept away before either of the men spotted me. I started to laugh: that prick. I carried on walking. Behind me I could still hear the sweet music of love: ughh, ughh, ughh, ohh, fuck yeah, ughh, ughh… I recall white trainers besmeared with fish guts, dangling from her pale, slender legs. I see that man’s face grinning like a fool as he struggles to prize her tits from her jumper. I see the other man’s shiny black and white brogues skating around, searching for purchase in the intestinal slick. 377

I looked up and there were no stars, the sky giving nothing back. The streetlights were invariably out in this part of town – vandalized at sometime or other and never replaced – so I chose my footing carefully on the wet cobblestone street. I looked down alleyways, caught the glint of furtive cats staring back at me from one squirming blackness after another. I waded through pools of urine, dog shit, fish bones, and discarded chip fat, all so that I might find my friend’s defective wife. Better a mad wife than no wife at all, perhaps: Eliot, Hughes and PKD each had such a spouse. I had someone else’s. If it had been the 14th of June I’d have howled out to sea in homage. I could hear laughter and music belching from a row of pubs in the distance, and from somewhere the faint melodic wails of beaten gypsies. And then I hear her – her as I hear her – her thoughts echoing in the dark streets: Give the muddle a face, a home! Tag the phantom! I came across an intruder cloaked in fabrication, an intruder that I had not before stumbled across within the confines of my cranial junkyard. Such incongruity at first, I think, called attention to itself, but soon enough the newcomer settled into subterfuge and I couldn’t see its deviant past for black powder and Liqui-Nox, for murk, for a smokescreen of contextualised untruths… It is lost amid synaptic friends now: the underground (anti-self) resistance network has killed its past with my future. New history, impregnable documentation – I grow as the intruders come. It must be time, sometime soon, for the assassins! But no. The intruders are incessant and once having been sequestered by the network, are immediately assimilated. There is also – it goes without saying, almost – a constant barrage of bona fide guests with respectable and genuine lineage. But what is such authenticity to me? Guests are merely intruders in the wrong network, intruders just guests in the making. Some intruders get caught before they are able to slip underground and are torn 378

to pieces by monstrous alley cats: their fedoras, trench coats and fake moustaches trodden into the dirt by a thousand filthy paws. And I refused to listen to the cruel whisperings that threatened to break me up into smaller and smaller pieces, into minute motes of functionality with identities (or not) all of their own, too small for the desires, fears, beliefs, and hopes of some folk. Oh, to play the role of assassin in my own death. But first I need an alibi, and I am denied one down here. Cannibalistic worms are vigilant to always keep their end in sight. Mole rat men – blind, with gobs full of swords – march with banners of me, shouting slogans of rightful possession through glinting mouth armour. I have blood, fat and acid on my hands: I am disclosed by Ninhydrin and cyanoacrylate. Maybe logic can rescue me from life.34 But what hollow truths are these, for one who is yet to find a spark of self to illuminate the space behind empty variables? How can I cling onto or exterminate what is impredicative without losing it in the process?... She is lost to me now, as lost as she is to herself.) The seemingly avuncular man who took her from the street on which she was planning to spend yet another night trying to soften her bones was looking to make friends – not to acquire them, mind, but to make them. He (one Troy Handy or Mr H) had made friends before. He had a taste for making friends. He always had room for more friends in his life, although not always room in 34 ∀x∀y (x = y → (Fx ↔ Fy)). ∀x □ (x = x). ∀x∀y (x = y → (□ (x = x) ↔ □ (x = y)). Therefore: ∀x∀y (x = y → □ (x = y)). 379

his flat. He was in his early 50s, thick set and flabby about the stomach, with smarmed down strands of hair balding in thin backward streaks to a hollow crown, spectacles magnifying the hairs on his cheeks, a grey beard and a smile that could sweeten a Semillon Sauterne, a smile that... a smile that could charm the birds up the trees – the smile of Conrad Veidt’s Gwymplaine. Mr H’s flat was situated on the ground floor of a piss and graffiti-stricken block. It had 4 rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room which doubled up as a second bedroom where Mr H slept. There was room for her, so he told her, until such time as she got herself together. There was even room, he joked, for her to carry on falling apart. She didn’t laugh. And he didn’t care that she didn’t laugh, for he hadn’t made the joke for her; she just happened to be audience to it. Mr H had redecorated his flat over the years, had made it his own with murals, posters, and the curious arrangement of his personal possessions. He had not concerned himself with replacing the carpet in the hallway, with cleaning the carpet that remained, or with cleaning anything much at all, although the bathroom and the kitchen were presentable enough, if not strictly unsoiled. Mr H didn’t feel the need to apologise for his miserable living conditions, and Elizabeth wasn’t one to seek out regrets in addition to the ones she woefully entertained as her own. Directly ahead of you as you entered the flat was a door stained pink at the base – the pink of washed-out blood. Along the foot of the door lay a stained pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, serving, so he said, as a draught excluder to what would be her room. The floorboards were bare and discoloured with patches of yellow, black, grey, red and orange paint. The hallway was infested with doodles: jagged lightning bolts and mysterious words clumsily snaked up the white walls onto the gaudily flowered ceiling. But it did not end there. Letters and symbols scrawled in paint, marker pens and crayons, covered almost all of the begrimed walls, ceilings and doors, clumsy daubs of swirling gibberish spelling out impenetrable incantations: one man’s lonely attempt to fashion a private language, his very own Voynichese with which to express his sickness to himself. The air was thick with incense. (A refrigerated dildo juts from between her bruised legs, cooling her insides, faking her death. Her face is Satan’s now: it is red and rubber, with thick lips and eyebrows, a long broad nose and pointed ears, its 10 white teeth fixed in a maniacal grin. Her body has sunken into the soft mattress. Her legs hang from the sides of the bed. A broad and hairy back approaches her, removes the cerise corpse-candle snuffed out beneath her belly and replaces it with a fist. He is pleased with the chill on his knuckles and smiles for the camera. He fucks her as you’d expect a devil-headed corpse wearing a 380

New York Yankees baseball cap to be fucked. He backs up to the camera and the screens go blank. And that, my friends, is that. She sleeps on while he takes the tapes into the front room and transfers their content onto larger tapes.) Elizabeth was curious as to why Mr H needed three TVs in his front room, especially since they were positioned side by side, and why each should need to be hooked up to a video recorder. Video cassettes with blue stickers along their spines were arranged in a row along his coffee table, and she was intrigued about what was on them, but she didn’t ask. Further video cassettes lay scattered about in neat piles. There must have been a hundred or more. On that first night he made her some dinner – nothing elaborate, as bread and soup was all he had in. It was chicken soup and it warmed her up. It had a thick and velvety consistency which she found pleasing, especially when contrasted with the crispness of the toasted bread. She ate her mucoid pap and he talked. Prolonged silences weighed heavy on him, and he kept up a near constant stream of prattle for what seemed like hours. When he had exhausted the limits of his sociability he fell into a state of cryptic inertia, out of which he soon appeared to be struggling to climb free. Elizabeth didn’t feel much like talking. More than anything, she craved some uninterrupted sleep, but she didn’t feel in a position to make demands of her host. As the evening progressed and the words dried up, Mr H became more and more agitated. He looked like a man on the brink of something, a man uncertain of his intentions. When he finally spoke again, it was as if in desperate negation of some other, altogether less favourable, alternative. “Are you happy with who you are, with what the world has turned you into?” His words hung in the air like dead spiders. “I don’t know.” “I’d like to change, to be other than what I’ve become, but it’s not easy. It’s the hardest thing. I can repent, and I do repent, but that’s not enough. I think I repent. How do you tell? I feel bad, real bad for them, but never for long enough. It’s too easy to distract myself from the things that have happened. They get put away and I can’t get to them anymore. I’m not sure if I’m trying hard enough; I’m not sure how hard you’re supposed to try. You liked your soup didn’t you? I always stock up on soup in the winter.” “Very much. It was good.” “Are you a deep sleeper?” “Not really.” “You’ll sleep better here. You might find you are.” “Maybe.” “I have helped you haven’t I?” “Yes. Thank you.” 381

“I would like it if you helped me. I don’t want to continue doing what I’ve been doing. You could help me stop.” He’s trying not to smile. He’s fighting with his face, doing his best to keep it in line with the feelings he’s expressing. “Not right now, of course. You are tired; I can tell. Tomorrow maybe, when you’ve slept.” “You’re right; I am tired.” “You’ll help me, though. Tomorrow? The sooner the better.” “If I can.” “I’m certain you can. I have a good feeling about you.” * “Sleep well? I didn’t expect to but I did: there I was just thinking about today and before I knew it…” Mr H is leaning over the spare bed where Elizabeth is still sleeping. “I’ll let you have your coffee before... You do drink coffee don’t you? I never miss my morning coffee.” She stirs but does not wake. “I’ll leave it here, lazybones. I’ll come back later, after I’ve taken the rubbish out.” He glances down at his watch and shakes his head. The coarse white stubble beneath his chin shimmers in the lamplight. It is 5:45 A.M. He revisits her every ten minutes and it is as much as he can do to occupy himself in the intervals. On his fourth visit, he wakes her with a fresh mug of coffee by accidentally trickling some of it onto her forearm. She rises up in the bed: a vampire with a wooden stake through its heart. She is cloudy and confused, sick from sleep in soiled sheets and the dribbled dreams of dead whores. Mr H apologises for his mishap and goes off into the front room to wait for her. He is busy titivating with the loose arrangement of his dust-enshrined video cassettes when she emerges, or at least this is the impression he is trying to achieve. He pats the sofa cushion beside him, but she sits in the armchair. Mr H, annoyed at having his hospitality thrown back in his face, momentarily forgets why he should want to change his nasty habits. “I should have let you sleep in longer, much longer.” He smiles a pissed smile; his eyes are screwed up tight behind his glasses – small blue babies ensnared in their jars. The luminescent Space Invader on the front of his T-shirt appears gaunt and pensive, his beard, a curium hinterland, a thin veneer of death about the mouth... Get them quiet, get them friendly. Get them dead, get them quick with a bump on the head. Have Beelzebub give them a smile, for bad hearts never come to trial. “We need to talk now!” 382

“What about?” Her voice is free of trauma, and there are no tattletale tics to empower his stride. She isn’t dumb to the sickness that has infected his good intentions. Taedium vitae already has her by the throat is all, and she is tired from sleep, tired from the waking. All he can do is pick over the scabs that already flap from her wounds. Hers are the deadened nerves of the leper, her depressive mind a Faraday cage shielding her from the possibilities of harm. That film. That dirty fuck – how could he have done that with her looking back at him? Better they be dead beforehand; they don’t look back then. I don’t want to have to fight; I shouldn’t have to fight. Dutch gin and Nightnurse folded into chicken soup – Hogarthian blind ruin. Got to get the dose right to go that way. The risk of stirrings yielding to wakefulness would be too much for me. I do not have the patience to get my ecstasies filtered through to me in miniscule increments, or a mind for sneaking around apologetically in the presence of snoozing whores. When I get that way, it could be said, I have no mind at all: I have what I have and a mind to make it what I want. I don’t want their outworn lies. 383

PERPIGNAN TRAIN STATION “Want to know what I got up to while you were torturing your family?” “Not really, no.” “Well, you remember that brunette pruning her roses in the garden when we arrived – petite woman, large chest, gardening gloves, secateurs in her hand…” “Okay, yes, I recall her. So what?” “I raped her that’s what.” “Bullshit!” “I was horny… How long do you think you’re going to last? You foresee being able to live out an eternity without it? And if not, how else do you expect to get it? Or maybe you’ve got some killer chat-up lines that have the women flopping straight over onto their backs. If so, you might want to share them with me.” “You expect me to believe that you raped that woman? You really expect me to believe that?” “If I didn’t, where do you suppose I got these from?” Triman delves into his trouser pocket and pulls out a gardening glove and a pair of torn knickers. “Is that blood on your neck?” “Yeah, the bitch got to me with her fingernails.” “I thought she had gloves on.” “She did. But she’d taken them off before I got to her.” “Bullshit! Bullshit!” “Believe what you like, my friend, but believe this, that was just the beginning.” “You really think that I’m going to stand around and let you merrily skip through time and space molesting women?” “No. I expect some assistance. While you’re just standing around doing nothing you could at least pin them down and make my life a little easier. And by the way, I didn’t only molest her – I killed her. And then I cut off her 384

head, her hands and her feet, before digging out her genitals with the secateurs and placing them in a box.” “Not funny.” “Forgive me, Father. I’m just trying to distract you from your worries, lighten things up a bit.” “Well I’m eternally grateful.” “Don’t just throw statements like that around if you don’t mean them, because I’ll know if you’re lying. But seriously, the sex issue is going to need resolving sooner or later. It’s not always going to be this funny you know…. Talking of funny, do you want to hear a joke?” “No.” “Come on. It’ll cheer you up.” “…” “Did you hear the one about Parfit’s overly distressed jeans? “…” “They were reduced to tears…. Come on, what’s the matter with you? I give up.” “I wish you would.” “You’re not ready for that one yet. I understand. I’ll try it again later.” 385

DARKLING DECORATOR The morning’s ordeal had been repugnant even by her standards, but he hadn’t hurt her badly, and had even seen fit to reward her rigid performance with a hearty breakfast. While Mr H slept off the morning’s exertions, Elizabeth started to pay closer attention to her surroundings. She noticed that the flat was teeming with human body parts, utilised and disguised as decorations and household objects: there were ashtrays fashioned from human hands, lampshades constructed from tattooed skin, even a stool made out of some unfortunate woman’s legs that he’d painted green; he had a pair of real breasts stitched to the front of his kitchen apron, and was in the process of making a belt constructed entirely out of nipples. There were five tongues hardened with thick layers of clear varnish masquerading as coat hooks, and concealed beneath the muddle and dirt of his desk was a pen holder made from four upturned noses. She checked the front door and the windows: all dead-locked and bolted shut. She wouldn’t be able to get out without waking him. Maybe she’d be able to help him change into the person he wanted to be; maybe she could prevent any more tongues being nailed to the wall. Or maybe her tongue would be next. My uterus would make a swell shower cap, she thought. Didn’t the very fact that he felt confident enough to sleep, with her loose in the flat, indicate that he meant her no harm? She couldn’t be sure. She sits in front of the three TV sets and starts up one of the videos. When the middle of the three TVs finally comes to life it is to footage of her gracious necrophilic host sodomising some fish-eyed hooker with the 9in. heel of a stiletto boot. He smiles into the camera – surely the saddest, most disenfranchised contortion of lips and teeth ever to inhabit a face. What had made him want to stop doing these things, to wean himself off the lascivious pleasures of screwing the meat remains of hooker after hooker? Why, when he’d come so far, did he no longer have the appetite for the brand of lust he had 386

personalised and nurtured for what must have been years, judging by the trophies? The habit was, most likely, bigger than him by now. But he’d managed to do the business, with me only feigning death, she thought. Maybe he could adapt his requirements permanently, and maybe he couldn’t. He wasn’t doing this to get a golden ticket, not anymore, if ever; he was doing it because without it he was nothing. He had invested too much of himself into his practices to let them (himself) go without a fight. She stands over him, watches him sleep. She can hear his lungs expanding and contracting, crackling like glue bags. She looks on him as one would a sick animal, (a horse with broken legs, a seabird caked in crude oil, a chimp with half its brain missing and nothing but fear in what remains, a rabbit going into shock as the maggots that have squirmed up its backside take hold of its bowel, a dog with a stomach full of slug pellets, a worm half cooked in the sun, a spider relieved of its legs…), and slams a ten inch kitchen knife into his gaping mouth. She is sure she witnesses him struggling to thank her in the few seconds it takes him to die. But she does not want or need his thanks. She needs a retreat, a place of her own in which to hide away and regroup. (Not that she believes she will ever find her true self amidst the splinters of mirrored glass that make up her self-image, because she no longer believes in true selves. She believes in herself the experiencer. All the rest is nothing but a burden of constraints and habits, of filters and angles, the body of a frightened and superstitious child on her back.) And now she has that place. Once she has emptied the flat of the warped trappings of his identity she will paint every inch of the space with white paint, and leave it unadorned while she waits for her own marks to show themselves. 387

UNSEEN AND UNHEARD Charles sits in his armchair surrounded by books and fag ash. A cigarette burns in his right hand, his left clutches hold of a tumbler full of whisky. The TV is on, the sound turned down. He hears a rogue breeze open the pages of his manuscript: he hears it yawn. He swigs from his tumbler. Whisky escapes from the edges of his mouth and runs down his neck. He stares at the images flitting across his TV screen, and sucks on his cigarette as if his sanity depended on it. “Somebody is doing this to us, somebody on the outside.” “You’ve lost me.” “This is all too thin to be real. Look at the places we’ve ended up: nothing but picture postcards of reality. We’re nothing but puppets to some impoverished imagination, an imagination diseased with parochialism.” “Have you any idea where we are?” “We’re here, these words. That’s it.” “Can you see anything? I can’t see a thing, can’t feel my legs, my arms… can you see me? Help me will you!” “Hey you, come over here and help us! You can’t leave us like this. Don’t just sit there!” “Who are you shouting at? I can’t see. What’s going on?” “We’ve been reduced to our voices; it’s a symptom of his laziness.” “Whose laziness? I can’t see. My eyes aren’t working.” “Neither are mine, but I sense him. He’s listening to us… You had big plans for us didn’t you? All the places you were going to send us, all the hilarious scrapes and escapades that all came to nothing, because you’re too fat and too lazy to follow up your ideas. That’s right isn’t it? Help us! We shouldn’t have to pay for your indolence. Get up!” Charles gets up from his armchair. “It’s worked. He’s going to save us.” He pours himself another tumbler full of scotch, sits back down and turns the TV up as far as it will go. If you were in front of him, you would 388

see his mouth form the words, “Ungrateful peasants…. I’ll get me a cruise to the tropics.” “It’s over. He can’t hear us... but wait… there are others… HELP! HELP!...” 389

THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY I’ve seen how things that seek their way find their void instead. – Federico García Lorca, ‘1910 (Intermezzo)’ Elizabeth came to haunt me in a rare glimpse of sleep. I was relieved of consciousness for no longer than ten minutes, but the dream, upon waking, seemed to have been unfathomably long, so multitudinous were its contents. The full extent of the abuse I levelled on her I can never hope to grasp. I have only edited highlights of what was an aberrant attempt to kill what could not be killed. What I remember most clearly is how helpless I felt, how I had no choice but to continue with my onslaught in spite of the realization that my murderous intentions were to remain forever thwarted. I broke a beer bottle over her head and she barely flinched; I ran her through with a sword and she coughed a little; I put a revolver in her mouth tilted it towards her crown and pulled the trigger. The back of her head danced in the air like a soggy firework, but she was too busy trying to dislodge a piece of grit from the corner of her eye to notice. And so it went on. Just as soon as I had deployed the weapon in my hand a new one took its place. Where they were coming from I have no idea. I beheaded her with a hatchet, cut off her tongue with kitchen scissors, skewered her with a javelin, cut her in half lengthways with a circular saw, hanged her from a lamppost with barbed wire, force-fed her broken glass, but all to no avail. Not only did she refuse to die, she refused even to be the slightest bit distracted by my attempts to bring about her death. Frank slams his spade into the frosty ground and proceeds to dig. The sky is the colour of fag ash. There are voices and laughter in the distance. But for now, at least, Frank is alone and able to disinter his dead bride in peace. The soil succumbs with surprising ease, as if it had not long settled, and within 390

quarter of an hour he strikes boxwood. She is not deep, and he is barely up to his waist when it comes time to crack open the lid of her coffin. Rolled up and poked into one of her eye sockets he finds a poem: LOVE FOR THE HEREAFTER Dead is my love, but not so dead as that; Empty as a glove, but neither dark nor dusty; Stiffer than boards, and yet, as boards are, flat; Lighter than air, and yet, as decay, musty: Ice cube blue, with paint to false face her, None duller, nor none brighter to replace her. Her legs round mine how often hath she wrapped, Between each thrust her eyes of dark love staring! How many blinks to ease me as she napped, Threading my love, the breast of whom still baring! Yet in the midst of all her dry contestings, Her skin, her eyes, her soul, and all were less things. She froze with love, as toes with frost benumb, She froze out love, as soon as brittle toes succumb; She tasted the love, and yet she soiled the tasting, She made love last, and yet she’d lie there wasting. Was this a lover, or a used-up tramp to die? Dead in a barren grave, or baked in a pie. He tries to ignore the implications of what he has just read and attempts to lift her from her desecrated box. She comes apart in his arms. He fights with her tumbling bones, trying desperately to keep her fleshless tabernacle in one piece, or, should I say, one collection of interconnecting pieces. He fails and she falls back into her plank bed, a messed up jigsaw puzzle of bones that once wore the skin of his wife. Not worrying too much about her arrangement for the time being, he opens up his large sports bag and begins placing her inside. Frank can still be seen walking the streets of Pavilionstone with his wife’s jumbled bones strapped to his back. On the other side of town yet another rebirth is occurring: 391

I have not been prompt in fulfilling my duties. I have walked, pondered and become confused as to my task. Ideas have spun around inside my skull like the spheres on an orrery never destined to meet, never to collaborate and shape new and instructive combinations. I now know, like no man alive knows, the importance of relation R. I now see the mistake that was my life and why someone saw fit to rid me of that monochrome existence wasting an eternity on what was never there to find. But now I have questions that bother me about what I’ve endured. I do not understand how I was able to distance myself from my (implanted) memories and intentions, and so take a depersonalized perspective on my own quasi-personhood. Where did this perspective originate from? A person can usually recognize a false belief, if they happen to have one, and reject it or detach themselves from it on the basis of recognizing it as false. But, surely, this is because the rest of their beliefs and knowledge, in a sense, expose it as false; it’s rejected because it doesn’t fit. How could my theorizing enable me to distance myself from what I at one time confidently took to be my particular mental life? Exactly whose interests were being served at that time when I mustered my resources to serve Rene’s systematic method rather less than systematically, at that time when like some master illusionist I cut through selves with broken mirrors? What synchronic and elementary nexus of selfdom allowed this to happen? What glistening pearl shone through the mire of burgled memories? If only I could find it. And so it seems the theatre of the mind plays on despite scathing reviews and a reported fall in attendance. I am a figment of my own imagination. This is it! The end is in sight… I find myself dissolving in a black (shit)hole of impredication. 392

ASHES OF THE AFTERLIFE In the end, writers will write…mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. – Don Delillo A man with a stony and slightly ghoulish countenance blocked Molech’s path. He was dressed in an old black suit that was almost as dour and rigid as he was. (Was this Jef Costello back for his caged bird?) He pulled a golden card from his pocket and held it out to Molech in two heavily veined hands. Molech took it from him. It had his name and photograph on it; there was no mistake. He didn’t strike Molech as the kind of man who made mistakes. An error on his part wouldn’t have blemished his character so much as annihilated it. “Tomorrow,” he said unemotionally, as he walked off. Tomorrow wasn’t the first Sunday of the month, or even a Sunday. It seems Molech is to be regarded as a special case. In all likelihood, P. had called him back. Molech must have achieved whatever it was he had been sent to Pavilionstone to achieve, although he could no longer think what that might have been. And he no longer cared. He wanted out of this rancorous town, this damp carousel of rotting horses, the spinning regurgitation of absence of eye and choking fullness of tongue, of papery skin taut over bone and spidery limbs riding on the air like barbaric tinsel. He needed to get beyond the reach of temptation. Wherever all the other men and women went after entering those Chambers, they weren’t welcomed into the new world. Nobody rightfully housed in this town escaped it. But Molech didn’t belong there, wasn’t rightful, and so his fate, at the very least, would be something else. He fetched up outside the Chamber doors a fraction after 6 A.M. He hadn’t seen a single person on his way there. He thought it odd, but kept walking all 393

the same. He had been convinced that there would be a small crowd of people outside the Chambers when he arrived, the usual collection of diehards holding vigil there, and this had distracted him from the uneasy audibility of his footsteps, so that when he arrived to find an empty street, he momentarily lost his nerve. He reached into his pocket and took out his ticket. He pulls the doors apart and hangs his head over the edge. The triangular metal oven,35 which has reached temperatures of around 1800ºF, is now cold to the touch. In the tundra of pale ash below he can make out hundreds of skeletal silhouettes – a deep-pile powder carpet of overcooked people. He shouts, “Hello,” into the dead space and it comes alive with the echoed replies, “Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello…,” of this residual congregation. When he looks down over the still ash, it’s as if he’s surveying a sandy beach in the process of slowly ingesting its sunbathers. He gets the urge to drag a rake through these lumps of burnt matter still clinging onto their human form, to draw metal teeth through the waists and the legs and the heads and set them free. As he pictures his lungs gradually being coated in the frazzled hopes and fears of the dead, his breaths become shallower. So this was transference: humanity shrunk back in refining fire; a frazzled flock of phoenixes, charred beyond recognition, rising from the flames as abstract incarnations of themselves, psychological blueprints invisible to all but the most theorizing of eyes. He had sat patiently on the steps outside the Chambers for over an hour before knocking on the doors. They had opened shortly after and the man he had met on the street the previous day was there behind them. He had taken Molech’s ticket from him and then walked out the door and down the street without uttering a word. Perplexed, Molech stood staring at the table and the two chairs in front of him, in an otherwise empty room, before walking over to the oven doors on the far wall. To his left there is a narrow staircase that provides access to the floors above and below. He approaches them and begins to climb, wondering as he climbs why he has chosen to go up rather than down. At the top he finds a long corridor with a door at each end. All he can hear is the droning of striplights. If there is anyone inside these rooms then they aren’t broadcasting the fact. He walks right. The door opens about an inch and then its automated closer shuts it again. It isn’t locked. Nothing! An empty room with white walls and ceiling 35 In honour, no doubt, of Marcel Petiot’s death chamber. 394

and no windows. He finds his lungs empty, and swings his head around to check behind him. Nothing! He arrives at the other door. He pushes it. It opens. It is empty, with white walls, a white ceiling and no windows. He feels a tap on his shoulder. “Help me please. I’m looking for a way out.” Molech is winded with shock. He turns around and standing in front of him with an alarmingly mawkish grin on his face is another Molech. This other Molech is in every way, mawkish grin aside, exactly like Molech himself. “Help me please. I’m looking for a way out.” Molech steps to one side as his double sidles past him into the centre of the room, where he proceeds to slowly turn on the spot, carefully surveying his surroundings. “It really is empty in here, isn’t it? These rooms are always empty, nothing much to tell them apart: white walls, white ceilings and not a window to be found. Try downstairs! That’s where I’m going.” He exits the room, walks along the corridor and heads down the stairs. Someone’s playing tricks on me; it’s all trickery. Anything can be achieved with a clever use of lights, projection cameras, and manipulated tape recordings. That’s what it was. Yes, it’s obvious. If I’d have tried to touch him my hand would have gone straight through. Molech’s hands belie the airiness of his thoughts as they scratch jerkily at the sides of his thighs. He walks down the corridor with a chorus of playful justifications singing in his brain, his fingers digging away at the top of his legs, and a stupefied grin pushing his cheeks up into his eyes. He reaches the top of the stairs and is about to go down when “I think I’ll leave now – if someone would just help me.” (The voice is his, and it’s coming from the room to his right.) “I’m in here. If you could help me, I want to leave now.” Molech manages to tear one of his hands away from its scratching post long enough to push the door open. He gives it a heavy shove. He sees nothing but an empty room. “I’m over here: in the corner, behind the door. Come in and help me please! I want to go home now.” The last place Molech wants to go is in that room. But it is hard to go against cries for help that come to you in your own voice. However, this isn’t the deciding factor in leading him to open the door and enter the room. That is something else. We all understand, or at least think we do, the notion of there being no place left to go, that we can run but never hide, of there being no place under 395

the sun that can offer us refuge. These phrases probably make you think of the movies: westerns and gunslingers, gangster flicks and stool pigeons, film noirs and private dicks, police procedurals and villainous quarry. But such associations would be erroneous, for in these examples there are many places to run and hide. Enter an insane asylum and take note of all the different places to which the residents have fled. Listen carefully as they read to you from their brochures of escapologist logic. Molech had no provision for fabrication of this kind, no comfy space within which he could lose the world. He was a realist, reliant on the world as it presented itself to him. He had no choice but to continue with the games he found himself playing. This was why he entered that room and looked around the edge of the door, for he has always been terrified at the prospect of fleeing inward, of being placed at his own mercy. The world, however barbaric and alienating it became, would always be a preferable master to that of the vacillations of his brain. If the world breaks you, dehumanises you, cuts you into strips of frightened ribbon, then so be it. But never attempt to run. Never turn and swim away from a shark; swim straight towards it! Run at a bull and throw yourself on its horns if you can! Try and bite its eyes out or crack its ribs with your fists, but never run from it, unless you can run forever, and he couldn’t. This is why Molech opened that door again and went in. He wasn’t built in a way that would allow him to do anything else. “What if the whole of your life was just a series of subliminal messages arranged so as to incite you to say one sentence, one word, to commit one act – maybe to die. Maybe one’s whole life is a carefully orchestrated sequence of subliminal cues to lead you to your death: it is bad enough dying your own death; just imagine dying somebody else’s...” said his voice. (Actually, no death is more meaningless than one’s own – just ask Camus.) The world scared him (the world scares everyone) but he scared himself more. The world was cruel, but he was unreliable. He didn’t even permit himself to daydream. He puts his hand on the door plate. It makes itself known to him as cold and smooth, as a place to place a palm that pushes doors. They were both doing their bit, going along with things. When he opens the door fully he sees somebody sitting, naked, hunched over their lap in the corner of an empty room. The person has their back to him. He calls out but there is no reply. Laying on the floor about the bedraggled figure are clumps of matted hair, some still attached to the scabs of dead scalp that lay beside them. As Molech inches closer he begins to smell what his eyes tell him is the odour of rotting flesh. 396

A knotted spine arches up from the floor like the corroded peduncle of some obscene flower, some carnivorous plant so chock-full of its half-digested prey that it takes on its form, as happens when a snake swallows a goat. The sight of a forlorn breast suspended from the sharp edges of a surfacing breastplate alerts him to the fact that this creature is a woman. The back of her head has the look of a war-zone, the site of a massacre, the colours and textures of a mass grave. Her head moves and he backs away. As her face slowly comes into view he tries not to look between her legs; he tries not to see her at all, tries to see straight through her, but her face remains where it is, forcing him to drop his gaze. Her genitals appear to have partially crawled out from between her legs, protruding timorously from her wasted crotch like a mutilated snail’s antenna. He looks away and happens on her face. “Elizabeth?” Despite her befogged eyeballs now being worn outside the confines of her skull, and the lower half of her face having all but dissolved, he still felt certain it was her, Frank’s apocryphal wife. “That was the name I was branded with,” she says, her voice marked by inanition, her words echoing endlessly within themselves. “What are you doing here?” asks Molech, refusing to look into the grey shroud of her turtle-like eyes. “I was left here.” “Do you want me to help you? Get a doctor? Take you somewhere?” “I don’t want.” she says, before returning her head to the bow of her lap. Molech, glad of an excuse to leave, makes for the door. Once back in the hallway he descends the stairs all the way to the basement. He senses the temperature drop with every step, feels the damp pawing of the clammy air on his skin. Given the enormity of the chambers above, Molech is surprised at the cramped dimensions of the basement that has him stooped over like an old man to avoid scraping his scalp on the low ceiling. The only light on offer comes from a low-wattage bulb hanging from one of the ceiling joists, its dim, flickering radiance giving up nothing but shadows. In a corner, silhouetted against the wall, is a corpulent figure wearing what looks like a crown of thorns on its head, or a halo even, having fallen from its perch. As the figure rotates at the sound of footsteps, the crown of thorns and the fallen halo transform themselves into the unkempt valance of a bald man’s head. “Charles… Charles, it’s me…” says Molech. “You as well, huh. Have you come to finish it?” Charles replies, dragging his head up off the table. “Finish what?” “Me – I suppose.” 397

“I thought you were the one who did the finishing.” “Why do you say that?” “You put the words there; I merely mouth them. Isn’t that the way it works? I’ve read your book, remember.” “No. It’s not like that – not with HWG.36 You know that. We are equals.” “Those pills aren’t HWG. There’s no such thing as HWG. You know what Coco sells.” “How else do you explain it?” “You’re the writer, but I took them to be a device for your fiction, some narrative justification for stylistic experimentation, or something like that.” “I write about what happens. I don’t write fiction, not anymore; I haven’t the imagination. This is real. They’re all objets trouves; all of it is found.” “Just how long have you been in here?” “I am all men. I dare you to deny it.” “Let’s just go.” “Where have you come from? Upstairs in the Chambers, right?” “I was asleep up until I got a phone call about ten minutes ago… And we’re in ‘Chambers’ now… the basement bar at the end of your street.” “This is it now for both of us. There’s no place left to go.” “Come on. Let’s go to yours.” “You’d like that wouldn’t you?” “Yes… Look, if you don’t come with me they’ll throw you out.” “You’re a fucking liar, a fucking spy.” “Come on, one at a time. Just these stairs and we’re done.” “What stairs? What stairs? There aren’t any stairs.” “You live in a flat. You don’t have any stairs.” “What do you mean?” “Just sit down. I’ll turn on the TV. Want a coffee?” “What are you doing here? How did you get in?” They stand staring at each other, their faint shadows sliding down the walls. The filament in the bulb on Charles’s ceiling finally burns out with one last flourish, and the two men merge in a flicker and a flash before the dark is there and eats them. 36 See Afterword for details. 398

MISPLACED PITY We are entirely satisfied by the impression of a work of art only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept. – Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume II On a wet January evening a man crosses the road on his way home. The building where he lives is not more than ten strides away when, with a foot either side of the dotted white line that marks the centre of the road, he stops. As he looks up at the three dark windows of his flat, a succession of raindrops career into his eyes and blind him. The streetlights hang their heads and cry. He stoops over and allows the rain to crawl down over his face and fall at his feet. If he can do nothing else, he can stand there in the middle of the road and have the rain fall at his feet. A car pulls into the road and slows down as it approaches him. The man in the road does not raise his head to look; he does not move at all. The car’s horn is sounded and still the man does not respond. The car edges closer and cautiously works its way around him. The man in the car shouts from his window as he drives off, but the man in the middle of the road does not appear to notice. Hours go by, cars keep coming, but the man stays where he is. I cannot tell you exactly why this man should choose not to return home, choosing instead to stand in the middle of a road watching the rain fall at his feet, and neither, I would guess, can he. I have ideas as to why, as no doubt does he, but the truth is, neither of us know for sure. Eventually a woman comes and coaxes him from the road. Nothing magical is said to break the spell he is under, just an arm around his shoulder and the words, “Come on now. Come on.” She walks him up to his flat and they go inside. Nothing has been solved by his leaving the middle of the road. Nothing feels better as a result of coming in from the rain. She might as well have left him there. It is true enough that nobody is likely to run him down or arrest him in his flat, but these things are of no 399

concern to him. He does not wish to die under the wheels of a car, or to be locked up, but neither does he wish for these things not to happen. I could be wrong about all this; I really couldn’t say for sure. The man can still hear the rain, even if he cannot watch it fall at his feet. He is probably sorely tempted to shrug off the kindness of this woman and return to his spot in the road. It’s really coming down now; pretty soon the drains are sure to be in spate. I suppose I should be thinking about getting off home myself, now that everything’s quietened down. Maybe I’ll wait on a little longer: chances are he’ll come back. He could not stand there forever. Four hours went by without his noticing. He left, when he left, without really having been present to leave. Chances are he was never there. Chances are the dance of raindrops in the creases of sodden shoes, shoes that earned their creases the same way men earn their pauses. 400

“I can’t see where all this is going, where, if anywhere, it might end. I have no feeling that I am closing in on completeness. I have a history and a future and yet neither one appears to hold me. But it does; it must be all I am for else what else? (Thus the moral of the end has not yet been drawn.)” 401

AFTERWORD I owe much of the perspectival pyrotechnics in this book to the psychotropic wonder that is H-iso-Wg586 (a.k.a. HWG, God’s Teardrops, Hardwires, Fly Eyes, etc.); the rest I owe to logic, tape-recorded conversations, and good oldfashioned perseverance. HWG, as far as I am aware, does not lead to metabolic dependence, although I did encounter psychological withdrawal once I’d settled back into my own self. (The more you use the drug the longer the settling period becomes, for the obvious reason that the more you use the drug the less you have any reason to believe that there is anything left to settle back into.) I found myself craving the spontaneity of selflessness: the more one takes HWG the more fractured their sense of self becomes, and ultimately the more burdensome it is to live with any sense of a concrete self. The drug has two primary effects: (1) it temporarily ruptures the – already somewhat tokenistic – bond between one’s subjective awareness of oneself and one’s objective awareness of oneself. Its primary target is the memory; it is rarely achievable in real time. (Although the user is permitted the dubious luxury of viewing oneself objectively, most refrain from introspection of this kind, finding even the odd glimpse extremely distressing and potentially destructive.) (2) it seemingly allows you to access other people’s thoughts. The distance from the self one attains, and the duration one can maintain this distance is not simply a question of dosage levels; the user’s skills at interpreting the drug’s effects are also crucial. The user is never completely passive, never completely subsumed, for despite such a (mythical) state being revered by its users, its achievement would nullify the drug’s effects altogether: to realize the definitive state of HWG would also be to terminate its effect. The fact that I had to record what I was experiencing meant that I never achieved this ultimate distance: I was always faintly aware of articulating my experiences into words, even if I never heard my voice until I transcribed the tapes afterwards. Despite my quest as a writer militating against anything like full absorption, I was more than satisfied with the result: the art, after all, is in the melding, not the mere reproduction. (I mean, who’d listen to Molly without James in there?) 402

The drug was marketed to me as a writer’s aid smuggled in from the N.W.R., allowing the user to objectify himself and get inside other people’s heads. But its intended purpose, I have since discovered, was as a lifeextension facilitator (to be taken in conjunction with various other treatments), allowing users to detach from their selves and their history, and explore the subjectivity of others as a diversion from the crushing tedium of their own psychological snail trail. But that’s enough of the mechanism, for how I got to the artistic product has nothing to do with it, to paraphrase Burroughs. Since ceasing to use the drug I find myself…only on occasion. [In the words of Maurice Blanchot, “he is no longer himself; he isn’t anyone anymore.”] I drink more and I sleep less, but aside from these changes nothing much has altered. I write now only when Molech allows me to, and things are better this way. I am happier. I am better. This ‘I’ that is a tool of language and nothing more… But, still, whenever I close my eyes: 403

404

405

THE REVIVAL OF LAKOK AND TRIMAN But our lot crawls between dry ribs To keep our metaphysics warm. – T.S. Eliot, ‘Whispers of Immortality’ There’s something to be said for completeness. I agree. Pardon. I agree. Pardon. (…) You don’t miss the unexplored possibilities? They’re still there. Not as possibilities. As what then? The unexplorable unexplored. And you see that as a real change? Don’t you? Sometimes. It depends. On what? Which mirror I look into. Meaning? Meaning… look, pretty soon all change will be Cambridge change. True enough, but what of your family? I cannot mourn the end of what is endless. That’s the spirit. What do you mean by that? What? I’m congratulating you for putting a positive spin on things. That positive spin happens to be the truth. Get truth on your side and anything can happen. 406

Can we stop now? Yes. Then why don’t we? I don’t know. That’s a first. What of the undetermined unexplored? Aren’t we forced to ignore them for the sake of completeness? I must agree. You must. I do. I’ve had a thought. That way around? I can’t tell. Who can? (…) Well? Well… in spite of my now enfeebled dread relinquishing its stranglehold on my wrung-out days, and the hollow nose bone of metaphysics whistling airless strains for my emptied space, I’m forced to conclude that 407

If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded. – H .G. Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether 408

CRYPT(O)SPASM juhdovbnwubnvownvjncvojsaNVJONDSVVVVVVVVVVVVVVONJCVSN CRYPT(O)SPASM copyright © Gary J. Shipley All rights reserved. First Edition April 2012 Punctum Books nnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn Vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Iuvhpiwsvnbpsiunvpsjuvnpisjvn[soivnsiuvnj0wi wevwevervevevbevev CRYPT(O)SPASM by Gary J. Shipley11My one and only heteronym. Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life. Heraclitus CRYPT(O)SPASM or C^0 or THE SILENCE OF DERAILED TRAINS or PUTREFACTIONS or NERVE MAZE or WHAT A DEAD-END SKY, MY LOVE or IMPOSSIBILIA or BURROWING FOR LIGHT HOW A TITLE BECAME A NOVEL OR A NOVEL A TITLE or Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep Still threatening to devour me opens wide, To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven. John Milton PARADISE LOST The mental and the material are really here, For it is void and But there is no person to be found fashioned like a doll, Just suffering piled up like grass and sticks. Buddha VISUDDHIMAGGA Where are you going That you suck breath like mileage Sylvia Plath THE OTHER ? They won’t listen to me or come and see me. What have I done to them? Why do they torture me so? What can they want from a miserable wretch like me? What can I offer them when I have nothing 409 of

my own head spinning round and round ? I can’t stand this torture any more. My is burning and every- thing is . Save me! Take me away! 410 Gogol DIARY OF A MADMAN

A SICKNESS OF WORDS There are days when I can’t stomach to write, when I can't stomach even to think of the ridiculousness of writing as being the 411 reason why I choose not to. On these

days my flat is my enemy : all those fucking books, all those bound words covering my walls and cluttering my floors like the infectious growths of some grisly disease. I live in an abattoir of vanity. The inside my head of is being eaten alive by chattering fleas. I can’t help thinking the last twenty-odd years of my life have been rooted in some fearsome mistake, and that I’ve been wasting my days with this disagreeable pastime. What do my silly little textual configurations amount to? I’m revolted by my flimsy creations, sitting quietly in the corner of the room, flat and unreal. If it earned me any money it would be a cuntish way of making a living, but it doesn’t grace me even with that. I can’t excuse my idiocy on pragmatic grounds; a risible means of putting food on the table, now that would be something. I could laugh it off then: it’s easier to laugh as a worker than as a slave. Did I ever really feel a ing ? Is this serfdom of letters my destiny or my will? To call- what end am I pressing my deepest thoughts between sheets of paper like dead flowers? To what end any of this? I go too far. These feelings pass and I’m back writing again, taking it seriously, pushing myself on to greatness. But I never really lose the sense that I have a sickness, that I’m ill with empty words, afflicted with associations and verbal structures fit only for leading me astray. My hometown of Pavilionstone is a death camp, a corner of Hell, a twisted thought experiment made manifest, a place of ordinary horror… Ah, and what townsfolk – how I could have wallpapered my heart with their sad faces …. The year is 2610, or so they tell me. That, at least, is the date displayed from the roofs of the N.W.R. buildings that I have seen, and I have seen a few in 412 my time . Time

is what they have now; time is what the New World Republic has provided them with, and there was a time when they were all so grateful, but now is not that time. This time is shaded in doubletalk, and misery, and a life mourning simpler, happier times when people were always dying some other day until that day came. Now that day, for most, all bar a few, never come s. The world made Spain where dead men live…. Charles lines up his cigarettes beside his typewriter with the intensity of a boy arranging plastic soldiers. Before beginning to write, Charles would arrange his authorial props: to his left are ten cigarettes, a cigarette packet with a lighter placed on top, and an 8-inch square Murano glass ashtray; his coffee is to his right, his typewriter directly ahead, and almost defiantly inert. If, having sat do n t w o work, the words eluded him, panic would well up and he’d find it necessary to either rearrange his props a little, pick up a book and skim it for inspiration, have a piss, or take his fat, bald head in his hands and wrestle it for prose. He once read that some respected author or other would always finish his day’s writing mid-sentence, so as to provide an inroad into his next day’s writing. Charles c on sidered this a capital device, but never got around to employing it himself, and dur- ing those times when the words refused to surface, he would always berate himself for not having done so. It never made any difference though, and having completed what he felt was a sufficient output for the day he would always tie it up, in order that he might cease to be plagued by where it might have gone had he remained where he ought to have remained, in front of his typewriter, bashing out his masterwork. Will this gherkin drown in its vinegar? I come to Proust on bended knee: “It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence. […] So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books.” And as, with a shaky bowel, I anticipate looking out from this scoffing nowhere of broken spines 413

and laden shelves, feel free to browse the clutter of words I have collected, words from which I formed the tools of death. C-SECTIONED There were, a long time before my own strained birth, a couple of soft minds who used to live in the rooms across the hall.She had one of those enlarged foreheads that push the hairline way back above the ears like Gary Conway the Teenage Frankenstein. Her hair was thin, wispy and brindled. He was barely out of short trousers and as vacant as she was sour. Someone should have done something sooner. Something should have been done. All who knew of them wondered how they were going to manage, and yet nobody did a thing. On first meeting her, the landlady had sensed “something of the chill of the charnel house” about her face, her mannerisms , her bug eyes, her being. Her face was peculiarly still, so that regardless of what was happening to or around her, her expression never changed. She looked back at you when you talked to her; “she talked right enough about things,” to quote her landlady once more, but it was as if her body had been possessed by some alien entity new to the subtleties of human physicality. She went through the motions of normality, but one could only imagine the vitriol a nd rancour patient that waited im ly behind the scenes. At least now nobody need imagine any longer. That boyfriend of hers was just plain thick; there was no real malice in him, although he did have what they call ‘criminal ears’: coils of pink skin jutting out from the side of his head, not unlike those of a pig. She was none too smart either, don’t get me wrong, but she came across as though she knew she was missing something, that she was wrong – a semi-retarded devil. Yes, as if she knew. Like when somebody knows they’re mad, I guess. You can still be mad and know it, can’t you? Maybe if you’re mad you can’t 414

know it, because if you did you wouldn’t be mad. Nah, you can know. Anyway, she was like that. She hadn’t been showing long when it happened. It was all up front and you could easily miss it out of profile. I know, because according to reports many had, right up until a week or so before, done just that, many times. She was a week away from five months when they did it. They hadn’t been counting the days since the blood stopped coming and dirtying the bed, since he’d “hurt her with his thing.” They’d lost track of when. Neither of them worked or had any friends. They had each other, and when that wasn’t enough they had the dialetheic solace of superbrews and speed. He’d heard sounds of choking, gurgling, and churning – a muffled symphony of suffocation. He started to panic when he felt something brush against his cheek, and leapt up and asked her what the fuck was going on. She felt it “struggling” inside her and screamed – “What the fuck!” – gawping at him, nervous, expectant. They shared another super and waited. “ I can still fucken feel it! I can still fucken feel it! My food’s back to life inside my guts come .” He paused as best he could, gave some consideration to his answer, eyes trained on the flitting excrescences, I and then with gravity and confidence said, “ t wants out!” A couple of minutes later it was out, or, to qualify on a once indefinite article, he was out. To cut her open, he used the razor blade that, just minutes earlier, had been screeching crescents and half moons of speed about her compact face mirror. She never made a peep. Nobody heard her make a noise that night. She opened up real easy, the skin being so tight and all. She split like a fish belly full of roe. Such was his impatience that he damn near took one of its eyes out. And after all the fuss, it didn’t seem too pleased to be out. Mum was stuck in a one-question mantra: “Is it alright now? Is it alright now?...,” until she fell asleep. She never woke up. She slowly bled away into the mattress, her gut splayed and deflated like some punctured balloon. 415

They locked him up and buried her. And then they spotted all the telltale signs of the glaring inescapability of what had happened. He’d remained in there with them for two days. He’d watched TV. (From what he could recall, a couple of Dad’s Army reruns had distracted him, as had an Ealing comedy which, after a little questioning, turned out to be The Lavender Hill Mob; this was before he became ensnared in a seemingly never-ending cycle of WW2 documentaries, from which he’d found it impossible to extricate himself: turning over from one he was confronted with another and then another…. These included: ‘Mengele: Angel of Death,’ ‘Homosexuality in the Third Reich,’ ‘Hitler’s Henchmen,’ ‘Auschwitz Atrocities,’ ‘Echoes of the Holocaust,’ ‘The Exquisite Darkness of Nazi Uniforms,’ ‘The Gestapo: Policemen with Style,’ ‘History of the Brownshirts,’ ‘Eva Braun: First Lady,’ ‘Theodor Eike and the Waffen SS Totenkopf Division,’ ‘Colditz Stories,’ ‘Nietzsche, Hitler and the Spiral Germ’…) He smoked what ciga- rettes were left, ate the few meagre scraps found festering in the fridge, and managed to block out what had happened. He was somehow able to disassociate himself from the small body in the sink – tap dripping, plip plip plip, on his chubby little arm – and the larger one slowly merging with the mattress. Against all the odds that baby did not die. Birth was not the death of him. LEAD TANNING And then there was Frank Stone, an oldish acquaintance of mine reborn from his wife’s brutalized corpse. …One day Elizabeth will die her second and, one must suppose, final death. Anyway, where was I? … The sun bled through the parched leaves of our bastard sycamore, its bleached cascades pouring into the dry earth, as the unfinished fence at the bottom of our garden leaned precariously in shadow to its I ed props. was down the hotel bar talking the same old regurgitated bollocks, sucking on a hot brier and swilling back enough mild to drown a small litter of puppies, while my wife, Elizabeth, was absorbing the sun. She would have 416

certainly been naked; apart, that is, from the huge black sunglasses perched on her nose, her burnished skin exposed to the air and the sun, writhing around as if on a spit, displacing old sweat. Our garden wasn’t overlooked, so you couldn’t accuse her of being an exhibitionist. However, as I mentioned, the fence was in a state of disrepair, and so someone could have spied her nakedness had they crouched down to look. But that wouldn’t have wor- ried her too much: she always said the sight of her unclad body was enough to give anyone mulligrubs, and thought me, her adoring Frank, an absurdly insincere flatterer when I so vehemently disagreed. But it was all pretty much the plain truth She would have been on her favourite recliner: the one faded . covered in sunflowers. Her puckered skin would have been damp with bronzing oil, and her fingernails and toenails would have just received a fresh coat of flamingo pink. She might have been reading, or starfished on her back with a magazine at her side. She might have been applying the final stroke of varnish to her nails. (There was, after all, a bit of smudging present.) She might have been on her front, brown arse skyward – defiantly callipygian even in the face of death. There were so many came to think about it, and variations when I I did little else for what turned into years. She would have smiled initially, I’m sure about that. She always smiled, always had, and what a smile it was . She’d had the fullest lips in her youth: a couple of prime pork sausages testing the tensile strength of their intestinal tubes to the full. ‘Blowjob lips’ they’d called them at school. Like her breasts they’d deflated somewhat over the years, but had managed somehow to retain the memory of their former glory within the context of her face. When she smiled, her cheeks would almost obscure 417 her eyes: all was lips and

teeth and gloss and cheeks. Her smile would have been a factor on that day – that you can be sure of – as strange as it might seem, but then you never knew her. It wouldn’t seem strange if you had known her, but only I ever did. At least, that is what I like most likely true in any case, at least in the way I to think, and it is me an it, which is, after all, a pretty standard way. Maybe one of you did know her – that is a definite possibility – in the way I as not knew her. I don’t imagine she would have she w but carried on smiling for long; I mean, n’t fucking simple. Who would carry on smiling? I’m pretty fucking sure you wouldn’t, and even if you would have, it wouldn’t have come close. At best it would have been an embarrassment, at worst a mutilation. I ’ve undergone many changes since then, each of them seeming so necessary and yet not. This new life of a used-up man – this clapped-out dog with new tricks – she never would have believed. All those years I’d stuck to the things I’d known, quietly and smugly petrified by any promise of change. But who ever needed change with her around? Now it’s all different, and so, accordingly, am I. If Elizabeth could see me now, I ... If only I’d finished that fence…. I’m not discontented now, three years on. Neither am I content. I’m something I’ve never been. I was fine for 33 years: I had Elizabeth. Elizabeth made me happy when noth- ing else did, which was most of the time. Life consisted of Elizabeth, our temporary partings and imminent reunions: hence my presence down the hotel bar with a few old cronies as 418

Elizabeth glistened like some slippery s to ol under an obliging September sun. I didn’t exactly enjoy those solo expeditions, but I didn’t ever want to take her for granted, so I had to force myself could tell when in on to be apart from her the time was right, when disregard, and when only at certain times . I I was closing the distance of others could repair our closeness. The same faces year after year, the same vestiges of some past somewhere. Of course, a i few were lost to the ravages of decay and br ght lights, but remarkably there were al- wa s y some not-so-young pretenders to take their place. The mainstay were Glyp- tadon/Armadillo, Ricky Tragedy (before suicide), Gyulus, Sammy the Friendliest (hungriest) Dog in the World and James his miserly owner, Tony Med, Polite Arthur, Mad M. and his dead brother, The Lame Fighter Pilot, Wiggy, and Charles (or Falstaff’s Fat Brother as some people called him), all of whom had been frequenting the bar for time immemori- al. Sammy was by far the best company. He’d lick your hand like a lunatic who’d just been given a tongue to play with. In all likelihood he was seeking sustenance, urgently trying to remove a layer of skin before you tired of his advances your hand. James, his overtly frugal and hairy-nosed owner, and used to retracted let him feed on the scraps from his boarding house; but, given his tendencies, these were likely to 419

have been scarce, and so the free bar snacks (nuts, crisps, and the occasional vol-au- vent or sausage roll) provided an excellent opportunity for him to feed his animal at no expense to himself – tight fucker’d skin a turd for an ha’penny. That in mind, he never actually fed him from the bar himself: that would have been too blatant. Instead, everyone else, being well aware of Sammy’s starvation diet, would oblige with the feeding. James was on pleasant enough, and always ready to talk, as l g as the talk concerned the matters of money. He had an eye for a nubile young filly on the rare occasion that one should flit into the bar by mistake. But then didn’t they all? All, that is, except the league of hard-faced faggots invariably huddled together in the corners fingering one another’s dirt. Ricky, poor old frustrated Ricky, Ricky whose favourite catchphrase was, “You don’t understand! Does nobody understand?” But we did; we understood all too well. I mean, he talked of nothing else but his unfortunate circumstances. He was a desperately lonely man. He craved female company, but even the crisp white suit that never left his skin was not d ust sufficient to attract the opposite sex in a hotel bar invariably full of fairies an old men. We asked him why he didn’t pay for it, and m y he replied that he never had and never would, and he never did: he threw himself off a bridge straight into the path of an articulated lorry travelling at sixty miles an hour instead. (Randall Jarrell threw himself under a truck aged 51…) The general consensus among his friends when they heard was, “Fuck that waste of space , how is the lorry driver bearing up?” Gyulus was of Hungarian extraction, an expert in the dying art of knife-sharpening, an early-morning picker of edible non-hallucinogenic fungi, and self-appointed promotional night manager for Drum tobacco and the over 420 goulash. He had thick blackberry-

black hair that he aggressively claimed as his own. He drank as many pints of Spitfire as he could get his hands on, usually around seven or eight. He’d go out at least five nights a week, leaving his little woman at ho me watching TV. “She gets her seeing to when I get in,” he says to anyone who asks after her in any way, not that many do, not with any degree of seriousness anyhow. “If I drunk I rape the bitch, she is no complain- ing she is – howdyu say? – gagging for it.” A dapper gent, his sartorial elegance coming courtesy of charity shops and the dead husbands of his wife’s friends, who was forever trying to sell you something: the shoes he was wearing, a pair he had at home, or a spare bicycle that had a saddle that cut his balls in half. He was especially disdainful of those he labelled on “Pilchards,” which, roughly translated, means the comm herd, the sheep, the rabble, the cannon fodder of modern living, the scum, pretty much anyone but himself and the person he happened to be talking to. He memorised poetry to earn himself free drinks from the right kind of soon-to-be-ex-Pilchard, usually Attila József or Sándor Kányádi. Polite Arthur was an eminently likeable septuagenarian with a white neatly trimmed moustache, a dense tweed suit and immaculately buffed brown brogues. He was separated from his slightly younger wife who, nevertheless, still kept an eye on him and had his best interests foremost in her mind. He drank Bass like one would drink extremely hot tea. To say he had a penchant for apologising isn’t enough: excusing himself was his métier, and he made full use of his gifts. He was always on the lookout for opportunities to beg your pardon. Not a large man, it was as if he thought himself gargantuan, always aware that his extreme bulk might be inconveniencing someone in his vicinity. If a group of exuberant youths barged past him in the street, he would trot along behind them expounding his sincerest regrets to the young gents and young ladies for knocking into them. But he also had a bitter, petty streak: he would bark abuse at the poor hotel waitress if, when serving him his nightly meal, she happened to drop the knife and fork that he used to meticulously dissect his ham sandwich. 421

Do you have a theory yet on who killed M.’s brother? A bit too soon I expect, but you’ll be- come acquainted with the facts sooner or later. You might even become a suspect. don’t be perturbed But any if M. accuses you of putting paid to his brother’s miserable life across one of this town’s many hotel bars. He’ll probably walk over to you and look deep into your eyes and say, “It was you, wasn’t it! Don’t you dare deny it!” You’ll be taken aback, but not so taken aback as you would have been had I not mentioned it. He’ll spout his elliptical spiel of cover-ups tence as long as you remain and incompe- within earshot, and invar- iably a good deal longer. His brother, as far as I know, was stabbed in side a busy department store one Saturday afternoon. The man who did the stomach out- the stabbing was never apprehended, hence M.’s quest. M. has been traversing this town in search of his brother’s killer for nigh on thirty-five years now, and he finds him most nights. His is a pathetic tale all round. He spends all his money – all the money left over from his nightly trawls around the bars in search of his brother’s killer – on Luke, his suicidal son, who attempted to take his own life about ten years ago and has been threatening a repeat performance, complete with jaw-dropping finale, ever since. M. pays him to stay alive, dayby-day. A few think it’s just a sick joke and that Luke is a laggard and a scrounging cunt who has cashed in on his moment of weakness and on his father’s lifetime of the stuff. M. can’t see anything untoward with the arrangement. He regards his son’s predicament as irrefutably tragic, and sincerely believes his son does him a service just by staying alive. M. knows Charles. Charles doesn’t bother trying to hide his mendacity, and keeps M. company only as long as M. continues to buy the drinks. Charles resents the money M. wastes on his son, considering it money better spent on his old mate Charles. M. and Charles 422

do not get on particularly well, but each pretends to listen to the other, and they find that enough to sustain their friendship – in addition, of course, to Charles receiving his free drinks. me The La Fighter Pilot was a punishing bore – not even Polite Arthur would enter into conversation with him. He was one of a few too many. He may well have protected his country from the airborne Hun (if you bought into his being transferred recently from the N.W.R.), but nobody gave a shit. Under his arm, or beside his pint on the bar, was always the same book: some photographic montage of local Spitfire pilots in which his ugly mug was featured, or so he maintained. He wore a poppy all year round – that war had never been allowed to end, after all. We called him Mainwaring behind his back. When he was sufficiently inebriated and had nobody new to bore he’d just lean into the bar mumbling “Bash the Boche! Bash the Boche!” under his bad breath. Fucking old bullshitter probably saw no more action than that fake Brit Faulkner. Tony Med: short, plump, long-haired, and not afraid to wear turn-of-the-century tennis garb on the bleakest mid-winter evening. Despite his myopia he refuses to wear corrective spectacles, thus explaining his habit of laying the communal newspapers out on the bar and burying his head in them, running his face along the print as if reading Braille with his eyeballs. Tipple: lager, Kronenberg 1664, which he sups without interruption until the money or the time runs out, or until he shits himself on his barstool and is forced to rinse out his white knee-length shorts in the toilets before returning. A finder of lost walks, and advocate of walking for its own sake, he has strong legs and more places to leave than find. I’ve just realised that I have introduced and discussed some of these old repro- bates in the past tense, but they are all still with us – bar Ricky – only I am no longer with them. I have been busy recently, busier than I have ever been. My time has been taken up, occupied. I’ve had things to do, important things by all accounts – well by mine, at least, and that is the only one concern that s me, the only one that has ever concerned me. Like Dostoevsky cramming productive time between crippling, stunting fits 423

of epilepsy, I have made the most of small stretches of lucidity. I’ve been busy. Now let that be an end to it . You’ll know with what soon enough. THE NUMBER CRUNCHERS I n order to have a superior and sustainable population, every country had a quota worked out according to its size and resources; the rest, inevitably, were killed. Some people referred most chose to to those deemed unworthy of eternity as lebensunwertes leben. But avoid this phrase and its unsavoury connotations, simply referring to them as subtractions (–) and themselves as additions (+). It didn’t really matter what you called them, for it did nothing to alter their fate: the power of words has its limits. First to qualify for extermination were newborns and any infant up to the age of five; being aged five to sixteen was also precarious, but the chances were better, in that at least you had one. Everyone in prison with more than a year left on their sentence automatically qualified. Those with less than a year were investigated individually, assessed on the severity of their crimes and recidivist tendencies. Retards, invalids and the insane were high on the list, unless surgery they they had proved themselves worthy of the corrective would come to receive if accepted, which virtually none of them did. Drug addicts and alcoholics were given a month assess time they would be re to straighten up, at which ed. Those that didn’t clean up their act automatically 424

qualified for liquidation. Many were so depressed towards the end of their month of abstention that they faltered deliberately in order to save themselves from an eternity of kicking. Street dwellers were injected with battery acid as they slept in doorways, save er of having to endure their presence in the interview rooms the both- . During the assessment period there was call for a number of recounts, as some, as yet uncertain of their future, to took it upon themselves improve the odds in their favour. For many, it was a truly hazardous time to be alive: on the brink of immortality with a warm gun barrel in your mouth . In the end, those with security systems survived with relative ease, while the rest took their chances with everybody else. The authorities did their bit, but it wasn’t taken all that seriously, for obvious reasons. When the time came for final decisions to be made and implemented, a good deal of the N.W.R.’s work had already been done. In excess of 35% of unwanted digits had by then been taken out of the equation. Extermination squads were partly responsible for laying the foundations for the N.W.R., for sending those extraneous digits out into the night and fog, mopping up those that attempted to flee their fate, or those who had no close family or friends to dispose of them. The ruling was that everyone was to take care of their own, but for those that were discontent ed or isolated from other people were there planted the squads. To guard against mistakes, the chosen ones were each im with a cranial chip. In the initial months of the N.W.R., there were a number of incidents where rogue minuses attempted to remove these chips from legitimate pluses and implant them in their own heads and so escape detection 425 . Any such tampering did not

go unnoticed, all such rogue minuses swallowed in minutes. Some managed to elude the authorities for a month or more, but as the numbers diminished the squads made easy work of their detection and consequent annihilation. In a world full of people who had sacrificed their lovers and their own children, and of children who had put paid to their elderly parents, and brothers their wayward sisters, and sisters their junky brothers…, for the sake of immortality, where was there for the loner to hide? Nobody would take them in and offer them refuge from a death on which their own eternal life was founded. Two days into the initial week, it was broadcast that those errant minuses that managed to survive the first month would be rewarded for their ingenuity and resilience with a pardon and subsequent inclusion into the N.W.R.. When the few that had survived the allotted period surfaced, seeking out their reward, they too were killed. On Enumeration Day the flags on every N.W.R. building were held at half-mast in honour of those who had died so that others might live forever. A period of collective mourning was observed, and parents wept for their The last enemy brave, selfless children. had been destroyed…. ‘Head Hunters,’ ‘Dead Headers,’ ‘Scalp Shakers,’ ‘Loaf Lifters,’ Nut Packers,’ ‘Cold Crowners,’ ‘Conker Cutters,’ we are known by all these tags, but our official title is, the rather more prosaic, Life Enforcement (or Extension) Officers (‘L.E.O.’s’ or ‘Lions’ for short). The re are many thousands of us worldwide, all looking to undo Death’s hand- iwork, to vandalize the labour s of the ultimate vandal. We don’t have a uniform as such, although a good number of us do tend to wear black roll-neck sweaters on the job. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s a manifestation of over sublimated squeamishness, or maybe not. This subconscious dress-code has, if nothing else, given rise to another nickname: ‘Beatnik Boncers.’ 426

Nobody is permitted to die here, and I mean no body. Many try and many fail. A few manage it, very few, fewer all the time. We are getting more efficient, better equipped and better staffed every year. Soon we will have a completely deathless year – I can feel it. It will come. We will all of us live, soulless, and deathless. This is the end towards which the Worldwide L.E.O. Network is striving. This is our part in the overseer’s principal plan. Almost everyone has contemplated suicide at one time or another, but most, realising the futility of attempting to take their own life, go no further than their dreamy ruminations. Some say that by depriving people of an escape route from life, we are responsible for increasing the current sadness and depravity of the men and women of this planet. Such individuals, sickening defeatists the lot of them, refuse to see themselves as part of a new global family. They are, of course, to be pitied, being as they are , quite obviously, in- sane. They are not punished, but treated, humanely, in identity-reassignment wards that have – so I am told – a 100% success rate in curing such misguided panic-mongers. There are those within our ranks who advocate the use of extreme torture on such unfortunates – I, Molech Mundungus: senior L.E.O., Branch 4, am not one of them. I see no point in inflicting pain on those whose faults are so easily rectified. Everyone is fitted with a microchip transmitter that records brain function, which it conveys every half second, along with its location, to a constantly monitored central database. As soon as a brain’s activity drops to a dangerous level, a number of L.E.O.s from the relevant part of the world are assigned to the freezing project. Competition between L.E.O.s helps keep motivation levels within optimal parameters. (We work both individually and in teams. I choose had to work alone partners . It hasn’t always been this way: I’ve in the past, but it isn’t for me these days. No. I’m better off work- ing alone.) We aim to get to potential victims within a few minutes, so as to cut down on the reconstructive work needed to bring them back. With each 427

excretion we have fewer to deal with. With the introduction checks every other day, and of compulsory health all the many improvements in safety proto- cols, it really is small wonder. It was as a result of these measures that we were able to afford the manpower to establish units of highly-trained men and women who, relieved of dealing with all the more standard attempts at suicide, found themselves free to combat other, more ingenious ways of cheating life. In the beginning things were far messier. Those that were genuinely suicidal just blew their brains out, naively believing that by destroy ing their brains they could thwart any efforts to reanimate them. Fortunately, we had already devised effective ways of dealing with the brain blowers, although, unfortunately for us , it took everyone quite a while to catch on. (What needs to be taken into consideration is the highly covert nature of our work back in the early days. When people came to after what they imagined to be a successful suicide attempt, they were bewildered, but ultimately they believed what they were told i.e., some crock of shit that involved them bungling their suicide. I mean, how could they doubt it? They were living proof, or so they believed, of its being true.) They pose no real problem to us now. Another aspect of the job is the process of negatively maintaining the Magic Number, or ‘weeding’ as some of the guys call it. There are those that call it ‘infanticide,’ but that’s unnecessarily provocative. If you want to be pedantic about it, then, well, yes, we do kill babies. But what would they have us do with them? How would they maintain the Magic Number? If people didn’t go against The Way then we wouldn’t have a problem: we could get on with our other duties and our us abstract ca bad-mouth ers could find other es with which to trifle away their time. (I can hear them try, in their unrealis- 428

tic, stuck, quixotic, half-cooked rapping knocks, the dreamy cry of, “I want babies by a gearbox!”) Numerology is our business; we kill off subtract – what would be, if given the chance – rogue numerals. To associate what we do with murder is an unnecessary extravagance of conscience. They have no psychological legacy that need concern us . No legerdemain is required to justify what, after all, must be done. It is imperative that they be out of the equation as early as possible, taken before they become real ethical quandaries. Birth control, we are in charge of birth control, with nothing Christie-like about it. A suitable voltage applied to the back of the neck, a convulsion and then no more. All is quiet and still, and peace reigns. Still, it is best not to get too caught up in the tranquillity of a passing and run the risk of forgetting to zip them up in their little bags in good time. There is something so serene about those over whom death still has dominion, as they give up and go so very easily, never to become anything, so easily forgotten – unique, but in no relevant way. Maybe you could think of us as a form of Malthusian aftercare service. Yes, that would pretty much sum it up. Murder is now obsolete; although, in the early stages people were, for a time, more murderous than ever. For instance, despite revenge killings being a pathetic waste of time, there were still those who spent year upon year ‘killing’ the same people. Although, incarceration and torture soon became the primary outlets for one’s hatred of specific individuals. Whereas a man enraged by his wife’s infidelities might have shot her and her lover in a fit of passion, he would instead roast them both over a fire, or ploddingly skin them alive, or some such nastiness. You might think man had descended into something unrecognizable during this period, but you’d be wrong. It is just that men, in general, learn to endure things that they never would have dreamed they could endure when they had less time to endure them. Torture, sexual violence, and attempted killings are now extremely rare in the N.W.R., 429

almost unheard of: such things were merely the playful exuberance of our salad days, those days before the chasm of meaning open up importance of morality rushed in to fill ed for us, before the swollen self- the void . Those sideshows of juvenile self-eaters common to the northern districts of Pavilionstone, or so I am informed, could never exist here. Even the details, which I share now only under sufferance, are still a source of severe discomfort to most, a discomfort seemingly unabated by endless repeat viewings. According to lore, the adrenalin produced by pain and fear dramatically improves the taste and texture of a child’s flesh: the internal organs marinate in dread. It is not uncommon for the young victims to have their hands carved off while still very much alive, or to be thrown into specially designed wells filled with edible glue, where they are said to struggle for hours before finally succumbing. Some of the children, those aware of the purpose of this process before falling victim to it, have taken to gnawing away at their own meat before their captors get to it, sampling one last pleasure before they die. They sit and chomp away at their arms and legs, biting and ripping at their flesh, swallowing as much as they can before they are discovered killed on the spot… LOVE IN THE Decay gliding through the rotting Shadow so CREEK apartment n yellow wallpaper. 430 ; and

– Georg Trakl, ‘Amen’ Molech presses button 3 on an intercom panel and waits. “Hello? Charles?” “Who is it?” says Charles plangently. “It’s me.” “What about Coco?” “I’ve just come from there.” “Alright, I ’m coming down.” Charles trundles down the stairs and pops his bulbous, fuzzy clown head around the door. He shuts the door to take off the chain and opens it again, all the while remaining hid den behind it. He glances out at the street as if expecting to see something hideous. Tthe moment Molech is safely inside, he slams the door shut behind him. Charles is shaking his head to and fro like a dog wrestling the dying breath from a rabbit. This can only be interpreted as a prelude to a distinctly lengthy and frenetic explanation, an explanation poison ed with nerves and loneliness. The top two thirds of the hallway walls are a filthy sludge brown, the bottom third black, decaying and peeling to reveal a bleached-out red. The white paintwork on the split and warped doors and banisters is brittle and heavily chipped, revealing old colours: ill greens and rusty beiges. The light switches, splattered with cracked paint, are those round, bulbous, tit-like things invariably seized up with time. The floors are bare, cold and clattering. The thick newel posts look as if rats or hungry men with small teeth have been nibbling away at their edges. Once inside the stuffy confines of his flat, Charles tells Molech to take a seat. t his Charles remains on his feet pacing around the room, sweat rolling down his forehead in o glazed, frogspawn eyes – he looks to be shot full of Metrazol and bad dreams. He smiles knowingly to himself, as if aware of just how ridiculously agitated he looks. He offers Molech some coffee and scurries off to his squalid and thoroughly outmoded kitchen to boil the kettle. 431

A whirring noise is coming from behind the mould-bespeckled curtains. Molech is tempted to investigate but, unable to find a clear path to the window, gives up on the idea. The flat is teeming with musty old book s, scrunched up packets of Benson and Hedges, empty bottles of blended whisky, a cityscape of stacked audio cassettes, and piles of typing paper nurs in cipher words g a plague of inde able . Molech glances over at an open book that is lying beside him on the sofa. Underlined in blue biro is a passage about a German playwright by the name of Ernst Barlach, who according to the book didn’t begin to write plays until he was over forty years old. (If Molech had flicked through the rest of the section on German writers he would have found Arthur Schnitzler’s name highlighted with a now faded circle of pencil lead, who didn’t start his writing career until he was nigh on thirty, and Hermann Broch’s name underlined in black biro, who didn’t publish his first book until the age of 45…) Charles has given himself a few more months before the hope runs out. But then he is always on the lookout for some- one older, and will no doubt find him if he hasn’t already. The problem with Charles’s slothful existence as an aspiring writer is that although the years to make it were fast diminishing, the days were too long to create any urgency in their passing. (Outside Pavilionstone, in the not too distant past, almost everyone you ’d meet would claim to be a practitioner of the arts. It was as if all of a sudden people had woken up with this craven urge for creativity – the flatulence of unsanctified distress – the need to make their mark, to leave something meaningful behind now that they weren’t going anywhere. They wrote poems, short stories and novels, painted pictures, sculpted, strove to reinvent art for the new world, made documentaries, films, anything that might distract themselves from survival: a world full of scared dabblers and dilettantes. “We all do art and literature now; creativity is the new TV,” they’d say. And like TV, a vast majority of it was shameless, unadulterated shit. 432

Charles is pretty much the only person in Pavilionstone willing to squander his time on creative impulses; the rest are too busy cooking up ways of getting out, of being worthy, of living forever or obliterating the concern. Charles doesn’t want to live forever; he just doesn’t want to die before fulfilling his literary potential. If his novel turns out to be the best novel ever written, then he need not fear death anyway, for his immortality will be secure.) He didn’t have time for writing catchfires, no time for Hanz or even the shortest spell of precautionary nom-de-plumes. Italo Calvino once said, “It would always be better not to have written one’s first book.” Charles believed himself justified in ignoring this statement, given the logically implied book vacuum, and the fact that the smug little eyetie had himself been one of the most prolific authors around. Never trust a man who refuses to take his own advice. The bible lays open on the sofa – always a bad sign. On the floor by the TV there is a copy of Wallace Steven’s The Palm at the End of the Mind. Above the spot where Charles habitually sits and writes are two scraps of paper pinned to the wall, one of which read s: writer’s There is no greater solitude than the samurai’s Unless perhaps it be that of the tiger in the jungle ‘The Book of Bushido’ Charles Schaefer There is no irony intended in this; Charles is deadly serious. He has isolated himself from the distractions of others (“distracted from distraction by distraction”) for much of his adult life in his quest for literary greatness. And with success yet to come, he is in no position to be flippant. Paul Auster could appear on the TV and claim that “The world can do very well without the books I write.” Charles could not . The world is wait- ing for what he has to give it and he is not about to disappoint. The way he 433 see s it,

the world may well have done without his work so far, but that did not mean it could continue to do so indefinitely. Hence the second scrap of paper, which reads: Remember, my time is coming. (B.S. Johnson.) Molech excuses himself and heads for the bathroom. The sink and the bath are covered in a thick counterpane of solidified skin; the toilet is an open throat coated with scabs of shit. Molech breaths through his mouth as he pisses into it. A toothbrush lays on the edge of the sink, minute black morsels darting to and fro between its splayed bristles. On Molech’s return Charles unoads: it’s a sensitive matter , the gist of which, he explains, is that he is being taken for a ride. He lights a cigarette, drawing on it heavily in preparation. A man in a blue tracksuit, who regularly frequents the same cafe as Charles, is spying on him, listening to his conversations, grunting and making sly comments if Charles ever talks about women. Charles has had a relationship with the man in the blue tracksuit – consisting of nothing more than suggestive eye contact – for more than fifteen months. Charles goes on to tell Molech how he’s been torturing some woman by not meeting her. Last Thursday at 3 P.M. – the time at which they invariably tended to accidentally (as contrived as any accident) cross paths on the street – she was not alone, so now Charles is punish- ing her by not showing up. Molech asks Charles what has been said during these afternoon encounters. Charles tells him that he has never spoken to her, or her fa my il , who he nevertheless claims to know. He is told to keep Pessoa and Ophelia Queiroz, Eduard and Ottilie, Frédéric and Madame Arnoud, Turgenev and Pauline Viardot, Lorca and María Luisa Egea González, and Kafka and Felice clear in his mind . He goes on to mention the woman’s sister, who, when he approached her a few days earlier, had just grimaced and asked of him: “What?” Charles had walked off, somewhat embarrassed, without replying. “How’s the coffee? Okay?” 434

“Fine thanks,” says Molech. Actually it was shit. I t was always shit. Instant. Instant shit. Why wait for shit? The day after Charles first had eye contact with the woman, he heard over- the cafe owner and the man in the blue tracksuit discussing how he could be good for her. How did they know? Charles wondered. And what business was it of theirs how many fingers he had? Too many for his love to be genuine as far as they were concerned. How dare they label him heartless and devoid of passion. The m an in the blue tracksuit had blushed when Charles had seen him on the street earlier in the week, and now he’s convinced that this man is a cutout. Charles tried to give the man in the blue tracksuit a letter to pass on to the woman, but he refused him this small epistolary favour, insisting that Charles be patient. Charles has come to the conclusion that the man in the blue tracksuit is a spy for the woman’s father who, incidentally, Charles knows to be a real big fish. He also suspects that the father has been following him for the past fifteen months, in order to get more information on the man his daughter is so interested in. Some days later, walking down Charles’s road with no intention of calling on him, Molech looks up at his window to see him looking out, frantically beckoning him inside. Molech walks to his front door and waits. Charles opens the door and runs back up the stairs to his flat, his wake made of blended whisky and fags. He’s shedding weight like an air balloon. He can’t be eating, or else his constant mania is cutting through him like a pair of Metzenbaum scissors. The air there is thicker than usual. Molech is told that he’s not going to believe something or other, so he prepares not to, not that he need prepare. Charles drags him to the window and tells him to look down at the street. “What am I looking at?” “The cars. Look at the cars!” Charles looks out at the street as if beholding a miracle. “Look at them all lined up! A red one, then a black one, then another red one, and then, look, a white one. You see the order; just look at it! ‘I walk downstairs once in every five minutes, look out of the window once in every two, and do nothing else.’ That’s Dickens…; he had the measure of this place…” 435

“But…” “I know what you’re going to say , but not on a Tuesday, not these cars, not today. It was like it yesterday, too. At three this morning a woman impersonating my mother walked across the road…. There are forty N.W.R. agents over there.” He points across the road to some empty flats above a string of charity shops. “And that Thai woman – bitch. I went for some supers last night, and just as I pass the Italian restaurant a group of people go in. Don’t you see?” Molech’s face was vacant, sightless. “ They’d been waiting for me . Everywhere I go there are people waiting, waiting to perform. It’s so well executed. As soon as I approach them, people go into their roles. That Thai bitch wished me a good morning the other day. Can you believe it? After what she’s done. You do see it don’t you? That plant in the window, you see what it is: an Aspidistra. How dare she put that plant there. How fucking dare she.” He rifles through a pile of papers on his settee. “Did you hear about that man who murdered all those young Thai students by slowly suffocating them with sticky tape?” He looks down at a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand and reads from it: “He wrapped their mouths and noses tightly with Sellotape, layer upon layer upon layer so that their eyes protruded hide ously from he had read the ir faces as they fought against the odds to breathe. Apparently reports of the Chechen elephant, and been intrigued by the idea of watching someone slowly die through the simple process of excluding oxygen. Afterwards he cut them in to manageable pieces and conceal ed each of their bodies in a specially labelled suitcase: little leather graves with short eulogies scrawled onto white sticky labels, labels he’d stolen from the firm of underwriters where he’d worked as an office clerk since leaving school. 436

“All eighteen suitcases were purchased from the same leather and luggage shop, barely five minutes’ walk from his flat. The proprietor, when asked whether he had thought it strange that one man should buy so many suitcases, especially given that they were all exactly similar, replied that the man had claimed to be storing ties in them , and that the more ties he collected the more suitcases he needed. This explanation hadn’t seemed that strange to him. “The bodies were all arranged inside the cases in the same way: calves bound together and placed in the underwear compartment in the lid, along with the forearms and the hands which were screwed in place; the torso and the head – still taped around the nose and mouth – were neatly arranged in the right-hand side of the case, while the upper arms, thighs, and feet occupied the left-hand side. The presence of seminal fluid in the cases led investigators to assume that these ‘flat-pack sex-dolls’ were the result of a particularly methodical brand of piquerism…. “ Where are men like that when you need them? Inspirational men. I bet you didn’t you know that it was witnessing Calcraft’s short drop method that inspired Hardy to write Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” He ends his meandering prolepsis with a sigh, and sends his thumb burrowing up one of his nostrils. Molech hands Charles a couple of cigarettes, and leaves. Charles phones Molech early on a Tuesday morning and they agree to meet in the hotel bar that night. When Charles arrives he is thrashing his head about and pressing his fingertips deep into his temples, as if kneading pizza dough. However, despite these behavioural quirks, Charles is making a concerted effort to fit in. Instead of his usual confrontational and antagonistic banter, he quietly listens to what others have to say, even humbly deferring to their greater knowledge on occasion. After half an hour or so, Charles is struggling to keep it together. He gets up and walks to the window. He stands there staring out into the drizzled streetlights. Molech carries on drinking at the table. When Charles returns, he quaffs his drink down and says, “I’m writing poems, only simple ones, but I’m writing.” Molech nods, expecting some further elucidation that doesn’t arrive. Whispering in Molech’s ear, Charles tells him that N.W.R. agents followed him on his trip to the shops earlier that day, where he was witness to 25 separate tableaux. The example he provides involves an elderly man with dirty fingernails asking for directions to the harbour. Molech doesn’t bother pursuing the, no doubt, 437

multitudinous implications of such a request. Charles tells him that he has it all documented, and that he is sure that someone has been snooping around his flat when he goes out. Girls with red hair dance like fairies because of something or other Charles and Molech had discussed. Brash gulls strut down the streets and people move aside for them. Charles is hounded by sub-human offscourings: ugly girls in crop tops with saggy, stretch-marked bellies punctured with scabbed piercings brush up against him and make suggestive remarks…. “Don’t you see? It’s just to let us know that they know.” Molech isn’t altogether comfortable with Charles’s use of the word ‘us’. Charles smiles at Molech, demented half , and says, “Life’s exciting isn’t it?” Molech tells him to forget about this woman. “I know what it is,” says Charles, looking meditatively at the wall, “it’s people with too much time on their hands : if you’re working hard you can block it all out. It never goes away, but you don’t notice it as much. Let’s face it, she’s only a secretary and could probably do her job in her sleep.” A pile of paper – Charles’s unfinished ms. – flaps open in the middle to reveal a mouth. It speaks: “All my parts have a history aside from mine: I am Goliath to many Lumpls, too many Lumpls. I am a jigsaw puzzle of things vile and picture-less, made up of deceased instances of exploitation, frozen moments relived in the order of your choice. I am not unlovable and do not go unloved. I am the offspring of vanity and stubbornness. I am a monster, a patchwork demon fashioned under the slurred glare of pissy, gallowed eyes.” 438

LAB RATS Lance and Jack came to know each other early in life. The circumstances under which they met were rather extraordinary: they shared a cage and a buxom nursemaid. These two imprisoned infants were of considerable interest to various scientific communities of the day, and it was these venerable scientists themselves that had them living under constant observation, isolated from the rest of the world until their eventual release, some time too late for childhood to matter. They did at least have each other; they did at least have that. Lance had be en privy to less than five months womb-time when he was cut out of his mother’s soft warm belly with a razorblade and discarded in a metal sink, all chills and hard edges, and he had lived. Not only had he lived, but in the weeks that followed his discovery he had displayed signs of cognitive awareness far exceeding those pected ex- from one so young. Whether or not his absurdly large head and unsightly ears were a result of his unorthodox and premature birth is debateable. What is not subject for debate is that his head has always been disproportionately large. As an adult he stands a paltry 4ft9in. tall. For the size of his head to be correctly proportionate to the rest of his body, he should be over 14 ft. The Elephant Man was so called due to the elephantine texture of his skin, and not because he was afflicted with colossal ears – in fact, his ears were rather small. Lance’s on the other hand were not. And not only were Lance’s limpid lugs larger than is pleasant to behold, but they also refused to run snugly along the side of his head, preferring instead to hang in the air like loose sails. Yes, Lance Noggin was a most singular be a most singular looking man. But look ing child and grew up to how ever freakish the ears, they were nothing to that which nestled quietly between them, lurking in the dark and bubbling away like some witch’s cauldron crazed with chemicals and esoteric body parts. The titanic slab of grey flesh that had become his brain too fully and too quickly was set to reinforce a myth much berated 439

by the small of head. For although there are indeed men possessed of very little brain matter whose intellect is prodigious, who somehow manage to slosh and splash abstract thoughts around in their cerebrospinal fluid to great success, Lance was not one of them. He had a big brain and big thoughts. It is, then, clear enough why Lance was locked up in a cage and kept under close observation for a portion of his young years, but what about Lance’s cage mate, Jack? What was so special about him? Jack’s parents had volunteered him for this lab rat existence, for they professed to be appalled and perplexed by (what they considered to be) his increasingly unnatural behaviour. They believed him to be a sexual deviant, a natural-born queer. (Jean Genet pins Sartre to the floor and thumps his chest triumphantly, before whipping his cock out with menace.) Jack was yet to celebrate his first birthday when he was submitted to the cage with a string of “filthy molestations” to his name. He had been caught in many a compromising situation, including giving head to his little cousin, tugging off his mother’s friend’s sons and buggering a host of nursery school buddies. It had been some while before the excuse of innocent exuberance had been deposed by the more sinister and profligate diagnosis that was to see him end up a nappy-clad fag lag. But in the end, the evidence was incontrovertible: the Harrisons’ cute boy was a flagrant sodomite, or, even, as some put it, a “filthy little rapist.” They had never had any intention of letting Jack loose to pursue his interests, and Jack would still be behind bars now if it weren’t for Lance. Actually, that’s not strictly true: Jack would be dead now if it weren’t for Lance, as would most everyone else for that matter. I know what you’re thinking; I pride myself on it. You’re wondering whether Lance ever fell prey to Jack’s insatiable horniness. The answer is an indefatigable no. Lance was too smart for that to happen, and Jack was smart enough not to try, not that Jack was particularly smart, he had good instincts is all. Jack’s relentless predilection towards same-sex fornication was (and is) counterpoint to Lance’s almost monkish sexual indifference. Lance, in all his days, has never so much as yanked his sacks dry, never even felt the urge. The only time his dick ever got attention was when, poised delicately between thumb and forefinger, he pointed his piss home. Jack, on the other hand (his own, not Lance’s), never tired of manhandling his manhood, and it wasn’t long before Jack’s wanking and moaning came to be nothing but background noise to Lance; he even came to believe that Jack’s frenetic self-pleasuring aided his concentration, gave his 440

thoughts a place to transcend. Lance spent a lot of time ing, reading (he could read as well as most by his 2nd birthday) and think- plotting , for plotting is what you do when all those around you are dumber and more powerful than you. The lab in which Lance and Jack lived (Lance up until he was five, Jack a week and a day past his 14th birthday) had bars at the windows and white walls, within which each had his own bed and little else. In the summer months they were taken out and placed in the garden thrice weekly for a couple of hours at a time. Jack loved the feeling of sun on his skin and screamed himself hoarse when he was placed in the shade, or forcibly dressed so as to protect his skin from burning. It didn’t much bother Lance either way. ‘Dead’ was Lance’s first word, spoken at a month and a day. He would repeat it over and over, sometimes shaking his head, sometimes not. His aptitude for language was remarkable; he was enjoying the nuances of Pynchonalia while Jack was still having trouble dribbling. Lance felt that Jack would have got a lot out of Pynchon’s hard-on novel, if only he’d been able to read and tear himself away from his own warhead for a few minutes. At the age of five Lance was entrusted to the care of his aunt. It is highly doubtful that this was deemed to be in Lance’s best interests, given the aunt’s dubious character. What is far more likely is that it was as a result of a certain Reginald Woolly pushing Lance out of the limelight and into the plumlight and grabbing the attention of every child-intelligence specialist in the land. Reggie Woolly had been hailed by large sections of the scientific community as a natural-born mystic. But more on master Woolly later. Lance was more than a little offended by the sudden shift of interest, but considered himself ready to meet the world 441 , and so con-

soled himself with the prospect of doing just that. And meet the world he did, in the shape of a squalid 2up/2down terrace in a road of crud brick and peeling paint, of snotty menaces glaring into the gutters and grown-ups with curdled faces sniffing the November air as if it were bad milk. His aunt was waiting for him at the door, her dog tucked lovingly under her flabby arm. “Well ain’t you a funny looking thing. You what gifted looks like? Woulda thought the big man coulda done better for imself. They told me you was five.” “ I still am.” “Well you sure as shit don’t look it. Not too sure what you look like. My so-called sister weren’t owt special but… guess that’s what you get when a good-for-nothing speed freak goes and starts firing his pellets into a tranny… Inside!” She stepped aside to let him pass into the house. As he squeezed past he smelt her for the first time. He was unable to place the origins of every scent in her cocktail of odours, but one he did recognise immediately was the bleachy perfume of disenchanted spunk. She followed him her into the house scratching between her legs as she went: cap long overdue a replacement – dead sperm stuck to the membrane like tiny flies caught and forgotten in some derelict Lance’s aunt had made no real pro web. vision for his arrival and had no intentions of ever doing so; this much, at least, was clear to him from the off. The house smelt as bad as she did, for the house smelt of her , as if she’d rubbed her smutty scent into every cor- ner. She hadn’t found Lance a place in school – “Just turn up; they’ll have room for a scrawny little termite like you. You might have to leave those ears at home though hahahakooaaarrrhhhkooaaarrrhhhh.” Whenever she laughed she would aggravate the phlegm quietly dozing on her chest and fall prey to a violent coughing fit that would see her face suffused with restless blood, and her eyes 442 swallowed up

by their lids. “I’m not having you hanging round here all day; that’s for fucking sure, mister.” Lance never went to schoo l and , as there was no school allocated to him from which he could be accused of playing, nobody missed him. He never went to school, but as far as she was concerned, and she wasn’t as long as he was out from under her ever- elevated feet, he never missed a day, even going in on Saturdays for extra classes. He would sit on park benches and read. While his remote classmates flicked spit down the back of their maths teacher’s trousers with their rulers, he read Principia Mathematica, and various works by, among others, Leibniz, Frege and Gödel, and when he didn’t understand something, he didn’t call on the sputa-legged maths teacher, who wouldn’t have heard him and wouldn’t have understood the question had he been able to, but instead read whatever it was that he didn’t understand again, then again and again and again until he did understand it, when those depthless surfaces became chasms. While those same dry- mouthed desk scrawlers were plonking away at rainbow xylophones in music class, he sat and read The Tin Drum and felt luckier than Oskar, while at the same time envying him his deep attachment to his small red and white drums. While the others were hopscotching, bulldogging, piggybacking, standing on their heads (the girls’ skirts over their faces falling to reveal pinched white cotton), skipping, snog- ging, touching up, fooling, fingering, laughing, crucifying, crying, scratching and running, Lance harnessed the sun and chased ants about his feet with it, often allowing the tip of those every so conical rays to screw their spindly legs up into balls. When they weren’t busy blinding ducks or old women with an eye for his bench, he sometimes allowed the rays to tunnel through the middle of fat slugs; and before he knew 443

it playtime would be over and he was back to the books, the smell of smouldering invertebrates still fresh in his nostrils. Lance didn’t always study in parks. He would alternate between the parks and the library: the parks on fine days and the library on not so fine days. He could be found sitting on a bench in the pouring rain on occasion, for Lance had his own criteria as to what constituted a fine day and, as you might have already guessed, it wasn’t all about the weather. The fewer people he saw on a not so fine day the better: the library, with its many desks tucked away in shushed corners , lent itself perfectly to days of this kind. Lance thought about Jack regularly, and vowed to set him free as soon as he could. Lance didn’t consider him a friend as such, more a beloved pet (a pink-eyed guinea pig), a being that would be better off under his care than anyone else’s. WIVES DIE HERE – WE KNOW THIS Mors omnia vincit My wife died; this much we know. She was repeatedly coshed over the head with a crowbar. Her brain haemorrhaged and she died. She fell in the sun and her killers ransacked the house. She lay there convulsing, the last sparks of electricity run through ning her circuits, and they unplugged the video recorder and the TV and placed them in huge sports bags. She shat herself without the mercy of coverage as they tittered and spun the rings from her fingers. She is dead and I told myself that I had no choice but to accept it, that it would be hard, but that the sooner I came to terms with it the better. I told myself these things, but never really believed them, never really accepted it was all over . Elizabeth and I had been introduced by mutual friends, a couple now separated: he was a hopeless alcoholic who’d crapped the bed once too often. What had most likely made the 444

difference on the last occasion was the fact that it was his 13-year-old daughter, Claris- sa’s, bed that he had mistakenly crawled into in a drunken stupor. Apparently, (I shouldn’t laugh but…) apparently her mother, unaware of what had transpired during the night, and space thinking her waste-of- husband had just collapsed in a gutter somewhere, sent the daughter’s friend, who as usual had called for Clarissa on her way to school, up to her room to get her. Needless to say the friend saw and smelt the full ugliness of the scene: Clarissa’s naked father’s backside and right leg protruding from the sheets streaked with shit, and her friend, still fast asleep, with what looked like shoddily applied self-tanning lotion splattered up her bare arm. It wasn’t too long before the fickleness of the teenage girls’ allegiance to one another became all too apparent, and Clarissa’s dark secret became common knowledge throughout her school. All it had taken was the amorous attentions of the wrong boy. There were many nicknames and standardized taunts that were circulated at the time. Among the most popular being: “Are you alright? You look like shit.” “Sleeping Poo-ty!” “You know what they say, Clarissa, ‘If you go to bed with an alcoholic father with loose bowels, you’ll wake up covered it shit.’” “I had a crap night’s sleep last night. How about you, Clarissa?” and so on. Last I heard she had a serious drinking problem herself. I wonder if she shits her own bed now. When for years you live with so me body who is right for you, not somebody that you one day find yourself with without quite knowing why, but somebody who in a sense has always been there, long before you ever clapped eyes on them, somebody who it would be unhealthy not to welcome into your life , as foolish as denying the legitimacy of what the mirror offers you as you hold out for what might be a better reflection… I don’t wish to sound too deterministic about the bonds of love that intertwined us, that caught us in its stranglehold, that mixed us up together, Elizabeth and me, until, like Siamese twins, our 445

separation became perilous happened upon I began browsing for answers to , for I might never have her, and yet I might still have loved. unformed questions. How did it all begin? It began in the minds of others. It began long, long before Elizabeth or I began. My mind would wander at the least provocation, and when it wandered it wandered to Elizabeth and a renewed interest in the whisky bottle. I was attempting to wean myself off both of them. The first few months I did little but drink whisky, eat bananas and smoke cigarettes. Even when I was self-destructing I had enough self-preservation to contain the damage. I’d been scouring the house for fresh reading material , when I came across two boxes of books and journals, all on the subject of philosophy. I remembered where I had acquired them as soon as I saw it Magr te’s Reproduction Interdite looking back at me (or refusing to) from the front cover of Bernard Williams’s Problems of the Self. I’d bought them (at an extremely fair price) from the mother of some dead 19-year-old boy, who had been in his last year as a philosophy undergraduate when he swallowed enough rat poison to put the local pied piper back in business. She blamed his death on the nature of his studies: philosophy had killed him with its all questioning and constant doubting; it bred the most pernicious of insecurities – inescapable ones, locked under your skin so that the only answer becomes death. She could not have these books hanging around the house gloating over his demise. She didn’t warn me about exactly what might happen if I actually got around to reading them; she didn’t seem to care, which was pretty fucking remiss given that the contents of these boxes had, according to her theory, driven her son to commit suicide. What the fuck was she doing purveying these dead- 446

ly and nefarious wares out of her garage, anyway? Do mothers whose sons have died of drug overdoses hock the remainder of their sons’ gear? People don’t always believe what they need to believe. After an initial skim through some of the titles in those dangerous boxes, an idea began to germ inate somewhere in my greyer than grey matter , aided somewhat, it must be said, by what turned out to be some uncannily propitious highlighting. (Of course, I took these circled paragraphs, underlined sentences, gins to be the marks of a and tiny annotations in the mar- suicidal student, re vision most likely, but, nevertheless, a part of me couldn’t help seeing them as how meant for m nothing e.) Synaptic fusion abounded and aids someI thought about but the most nebulous of plans, a plan that I tried desperately to codify. Elizabeth’s diaries, her little foibles and idiosyncrasies, personal identity, amnesia, the doctor’s wife, some vague recollection of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, what beth’s death that nal riddler. got to me it was about Eliza- , Buddhism, and Heraclitus, Heraclitus that infer- It was only a line, just a line, but it was enough in light of everything else, enough to go on, at least: Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper. 447

UNGLUED Some twenty or so metres beneath AND UNDERSEA the surface of the Atlantic Ocean we find two men casually expecting to inhale their next breath, but what happens instead, as they gently, mindlessly go to draw in their next measured dose of oxidant, is that their throats and nostrils are instantaneously filled to capacity with salt water. They are no longer lounging about and shooting the breeze in a sun books and journals, in some Californian university or other. -baked office stacked with The y are not, but they expected to be, and in a sense still expect to be as they hang in the water before sinking deeper, staring at each other disbelievingly through the blue-green ency that is stifling them whether they have come to accept it or not. They have sunk only a few feet when, in spite ward for transpar- of their near catatonic dismay, they initiate a struggle up- air . They clutch and tug at the sea as if clambering up an elasticised cargo net. It takes them ten seconds or more before they find any sort of rhythm in their desperate ascent: their heads too full of questions, beaten into submission by a torrent of queries, consumed by befuddlement. Breaking the surface of the water, coughing up sea from their flooded lungs and drawing in the air promised to them by the steady procession of spatio-temporal continu- 448

ity is, for our two dis ing slow motion. place d heroes, so many lifetimes lived over and over in revolt- I n real time it takes little more than a minute. As they tread water together, two buoys bobbing, spluttering, gasping, unable to satisfy their newfound craving for oxygen, they attempt to empty their heads of the stock car rallies of perplexity careering around, crunching fenders, colliding head-on, corrugating bonnets. They heave out their words as quick as they can, lest they should interrupt their breathing for a hazardous length of time. Their sentences coming out piecemeal, staggered and disjointed. “What the fuck…is…going…on?” “I’m dreaming…you’re dreaming…we’re dreaming…This isn’t…can’t be real.” “This…makes no sense…no sense...” “I don’t think I am…I…think it’s…real. I think it’s real.” “This is… mad ness.” There is no land mass in sight. They look about for somewhere to head for, but find nothing, nothing but rolling waves, pelagic birds exploiting the breeze, and an evening sky promising rain. And as the hopelessness ment encroaches on their thoughts they begin to feel of their predica- the strain in their legs, begin to realise that they can’t keep their heads above water indefinitely. The salvation of a communal dream state, a dream state unlike any other the y have ever had cause to remember, soon evaporates as they are forced to entertain death pouring into them as they 449

plummet to the seabed, limbs spent, brains undone with The fight y bemusement . against it while they are able. “This can’t be…happening…I don’t accept this.” “I’m doing my best not to …but I…don’t fancy drown in ing… order to find out…that I’m wrong.” “Things like this don’t even…happen to other people … .” Their strength is sapping, but they don’t have long to go. Their ordeal, or rather this part of the ordeal as a whole , an ordeal that is not, strictly speaking, theirs, will be over soon. I’d like to say that they will live to see another day, many days, a possible 288 days in a day, but sadly I can’t, not without first making my definitions clear, logic prevents me. Triman lays crucified, deadly still, forcibly relaxed on the surface of the water to conserve energy. Lakok attempts to do the same, but finds himself sinking, unable to quell the panic amassed throughout his body. “You’ve got to relax, otherwise it’ll never happen.” “Relax? How do you… suggest I do…” “Relax or drown. It’s as simple as that.” “It really is as simple as that. When you put it…(he takes in a gobfull of brackish water, which he then projects from his pursed lips in a steady arc, in the style of an ornamental fountain)…fuck…like that…it sounds so much easier .” “Just ’cause we’re at sea doesn’t mean you have to start repeating my words back to me; I’m in no danger of becoming confused about who it is you’re talking to….” CHARLEY SAYS… 450

Charley says: I suffer from acute IBS, or possibly Crohn’s disease. I defecate at least five or six times a day: a steady procession of dun-dyed jelly, mucus and water. is permanently distended, brimful with filthy-smelling gases. I am nated and made sick by my own waste. Anything that My stomach contami- life throws at me I hide away and squirt shit at it. I shouldn’t drink alcohol or eat spicy foods, but I do. I once abstained from booze and edible food for a whole week, and experienced only a nominal alleviation of my symptoms. I didn’t keep it up. When I look down at my vast gut, or turn sideways in the mirror, I look like what I am: a man perpetually pregnant with nervous faeces. I’ve spilt my dregs in kitchen sinks, park ponds, was tepaper bins, my underwear, my shoes, my pockets, all manner of unsuitable places. During particularly egregious attacks I assume the position recommended for those on board aircraft about to plummet into the earth: head between my knees, hands clasped over the back of my skull, as I wait for impact. I always look down afterwards for blood; it feels so much like draining off a wound that I am sure there must be some, and sometimes there is. But like everything in life, it is not completely without pleasure. There is a lot to be said for having something to take your mind off the stresses and strains of living, something that needs doing the moment you need a diversion. I compare my times spent sweating in lavatories to anxious cigarette smokers – they suck in and blow out and I relax and contract, but we both stink up the place. I smoke as well, and invariably spark up as I let the first lot go. Directly after I have finished I feel purged cleaned out , , but it doesn’t last long. That, after all, is the bitch of IBS: you can always be cleaner, emptier…. AN I NCOMPLETE LIST OF ENVY: Bret Easton Ellis was a mere 14 years old when he attempted his first full scale novel. (He had completed his first novel aged just 10.) Borges started writing at the age of 6, and published his first translation when he was 9. So many writers published in their teens: Anna Akhmatova (18), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (14), 451

am Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (17), Thomas Chatterton (16), Eliza Cook (17), Abrah Cow- ley (15) (‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ was written when he was only 10.), David Gascoyne (16), Knut Hamsun (18), Mrs Felicia Dorothea Hemans, née Browne (15), Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov (17), Harold Pinter (18 or thereabouts), Edgar Allen Poe (18), Arthur Rimbaud (had finished writing poetry by the age of 19), Patrick Hamilton (19), Percy Bysshe Shelley (18), Alfred Tennyson (18), Fedor Ivanovich Tyutchev (16), Patrick White (17),…. Down by the harbour, opposite the bronze statue of John Christie, in smelling distance of the sea, you will find row upon row of abandoned amusement arcades. The machines’ lights still flash, they still whoop and whistle, but nobody much plays them anymore. Silverado and Copper Dropper push around the same old coins, but none ever drop clanking into the tray. The only people to frequent these places now are dealers and their customers, and they only play the machines to look legit, although they needn’t bother, ‘cause no one gives a fuck anyway. The Rock Shop has shut its doors for good. No more days leering at the flaccid mixture as it’s folded and rolled out, folded and rolled out. Nobody wants lurid sticks of sugar with the names of their insides these days, and who, in ghost towns written through all fairness, can blame them? The tattoo parlour persists, but nobody much opts for Bulldogs, anchors or big-breasted mermaids these days. It’s all amulets: scarab beetles, ankhs, blackened eyes, portraits of sex-killers, prayers for eternity and religious iconography from across the globe. Nobody seems to love their mum much anymore. Shoddy fishing boats bob languidly in the harbour like disturbed minds tethered with lithium. The seagulls have all migrated to McDonalds where they battle with bloated pigeons over discarded French fries, partly devoured beef patties and soggy chicken nuggets. The 452

nearest these gulls get to the fruits of the sea is a regurgitated Fillet of Fish. Sunday night is fag night at the bar, not exclusively so, but Sunday night is when they come in en masse from the shelters and catacombs along the Leas. They leave their chilly, damp little prophylactic-strewn hovels and come into the warm where the wallpaper is as vulgar as they are. Men in their fifties with shaven heads and lean little faces and mean eyes and no lips sit around on high-backed leather chairs with their young boys all craven and excitable. They eye up the fresh-faced morsels they have caught like fishermen full of poppers and Spanish Fly with no respect for the frontier of another species. script Daft old women with their teeth and sanity on pre ion comment to one another in hushed tones about how sweet it is that these young men get on so well with their fathers. “There is hope for us all yet,” they say, nodding dreamily. The younger boys are hidden away in shadowy corners and plied with a constant supply of booze, well out of sight of prying eyes the barman and other . Most of the men that these boys accompany aren’t even real fags; they just get a kick out of brutally fucking something fresh, something wide-eyed, something still capable of being ruined. The you chairs as if facing impending death; their smiles ng boys sweat and quake in their look as if they’ve been daubed on by epileptic finger painters. Soon their anuses will resemble the ferocious mouths of rabid dogs: diseased, foaming, dried out. Nobody ever takes precautions with these boys: it’s bareback all the way. Their freshness needs to be felt, skin on skin. Old men sodomize them with their gnarled and misshapen walking sticks. This is something cease to call these sticks walking sticks. 453 that happens, but not so often that we

IS AN INCOMPLETE L T OF HOPE: Emily Dickinson only published three, six, or seven (nobody can make up their mind) of her approximately 2000 poems during her lifetime. Anne Bradstreet’s poems were published in London without her knowledge. Lautréamont never lived to see his work for sale. Only one of William Blake’s books was published conventionally: the rest he self-published. And his poems were for many years ignored and largely unread. One critic even went so far as to label him an “unfortunate lunatic.” Sherwood Anderson wasn’t published until he was 40; Robert Bage was 61, William Burroughs (39), Raymond Chandler (first novel aged 51), William Frend De Morgan (first fiction aged 67), Theodor Fontane (first fiction aged 71), William H. Gass (42), Alasdair Gray (47), George Grossmith (45), Paul Hazoumé (48), O Henry (42), Matthew Hopkins (the witch-finder – Stearn’s sidekick – first published in 1647, the year of his death), Henry Miller (43), Marquis de Sade (42), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (44), Wallace Stephens (43 – although most work published past the age of 50), Laurence Sterne (46), Anne Finch Winchilsea (52), Andrew Young (50),… Rilke didn’t get anything substantial down until he was at least 35, and then the death of some girl inspired him to complete all his major works at once… ‘But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish. Not who doesn’t write, for then he wouldn’t be a writer.’ I can hear the constant flushing of toilets and the swelling of blocked pipes, pipes choked-up with body parts, straining and cracking under the pressured accumulation of severed hands and feet…. I can hear newborns gagging as their mothers force-feed them their dirty diapers…. JACK THE FAG Jack Harrison, the man, stood 6 foot 4 inches tall, and was handsome in an obvious kind of way, with his Roger Ramjet chin, thick wavy brown hair, and buff gym-slave’s physique; he was also a rampant fag, but not so you ’d tell from any detectable effeminacy. He was, as he termed himself, a manly man’s man, your str8-acting masculine type of queer who doesn’t feel the need to prance ab out camping it up in order to reinforce his sexual 454

preference. On the other hand, he was never inclined to hide what he was either: when guys he worked with, who were as yet ignorant of his persuasions, would talk of their sexual exploits with women or seek his opinion on some piece of pussy in their vicinity, he’d just come out with it: “I’m kinsey six: I fuck men.” Such was his refusal to fit into any of the standard heterosexual stereotypes for his kind, that his homosexual declarations were often thought to be disingenuous. He didn’t really give a shit whether people believed him or not; he’d been upfront with them and that was that. Given his stature and rather uncompromising demeanour, very few of those who had issues with toilet traders had the balls to make a big deal about Jack’s unashamed homosexuality, and those that did didn’t make the deal big for long. As you can well imagine, it doesn’t take too many guys taking umbrage with Jack’s proclivities to be laid out on their backs to deter others from opening their mouths on the subject – one to be exact, a Mr Mickey Volko, chief technician of sub area B1. “No one wants to know your dirty fucking habits, Jack. Kindly keep that shit to yourself!” “Well pardon fucking me, but if I remember correctly, and I do, it was you who dragged me into your tawdry little polari in the first place?” “I’ll know not to bother in future.” “Anyhow, I’ve been wondering, are you some sort of tranny? It’s just that you’ve got bigger willets than my old mum and she ain’t exactly concave of chest. Or maybe you’re just a regular 175er and this is your backward way of trolling me and, you know, if you weren’t such a meese bastard I might have considered it, being that for the last day or so I’ve had nishta returns on my lunchtime milk runs…. Oh come on then, if you’re feeling a tad shy we’ll just have a good old-fashioned Princeton rub down; it’ll keep the neocon inside you happy if nothing else…. Hang on, you old invert you; I see your keys, boss. You sly little de vil you, and here’s me giving you shit, with you hanky n’all…. I’m not sure you coding it to the left got it inya to be a top you know, a tad too phlegmatic if you ask me…. I tell you what, Volko, let’s take a shufti to the altar room and we’ll see how affable you are then.” “Is that chutney ferret speaking to me?” Nobody in the room answered; a few of Jack’s friends couldn’t help smiling, though. Mickey got out of his seat and walked over to Jack, bent down and whispered in his ear. “Are you talking to me, queer boy?” Jack grabbed Mickey by the neck and slammed his 455

face into the edge of the table, splitting his lip and chipping one of his front teeth. Still holding him by the neck, Jack repeatedly kicked him in the balls until he turned grey and fainted. The next day, Mickey tried to initiate disciplinary action against Jack and was told that no joy would come of it, and that if he pursued it any further he would lose his job and more. He asked what was meant by this, to which he received no reply. Mickey let it go. One thing, apart from fucking, sucking, rimming, and derivatives of, about the gay scene that did interest Jack was its slang, and he’d managed, over the years, to harbour a rather extensive mental glossary of readily available faggot jargon. (He was one of the few gay men to be fully conversant with and regularly use – the all but extinct – Polari speak.) In this sense he was again quite an oddity, for although in many of the places he frequented slang terms were regularly used, nobody used them with anything approaching the respect and range that he did. This lexicon of queerdom reminded him of a time when being homosexual had an edge to it, a time when it had been laced with an oh so delectable depravity. He had even devised a number of his own terms, some of which had actually caught on among his circle. Some of them involved extending existing slang terms. For example, those he suspected of packing out their crotch he called ‘basket weavers.’ However, most of his terms owed their existence to him and him alone. For instance, Fisters he called Herriots, and a ‘spurious curious’ (‘spurcurios’ for short) was a term he had invented to label those men who fantasize about having sex with men, even believing that they are ready to try it, but who will never allow themselves to actually go through with it, those who lack the self-awareness to know how far their curiosity will take them – real fucking prick teasers. So me times they would go all the way to getting your dick between their chops before they lost their bottle. There were two basic types of spurcurio: there were those who turned nasty and those who couldn’t apologise enough for wasting your time, but he just lumped them both under the same heading; they were both equally infuriating, whichever way they chose to deal with their rapid change of mood. Jack was a voracious cruiser; he had been known to bed up to four different guys in one night. (The ever-present dark rings around his eyes had led P., at one point, to suspect him of being a fellow insomniac. In fact, P. had been acutely disappointed when, after continually catching him catnapping in his office, he was eventually relieved of this misconception.) Jack had a penchant for black bubble-butted twinks, although it 456 must be noted

that he’d played around with his fair share of bears, Barbarellas, egg-fresh chickens, leather, boretto and Marlboro men over the years. Jack’s “bagadga,” as he predictably called it, was a beautiful specimen of manhood by any standards: just shy of 9 inches long, turtlenecked, with a full 6 inches of girth, a light pink head, tight palm-filler bags, and a glorious lustre to its wide corona that was enough to make brown berries weep. Jack regularly shaved off his pubic hair so as to accentuate the size of his piece; he loved the look of awe it provoked in those that beheld it – he never tire of d hearing the gasps, the “yum yums,” and the giving of thanks. THE GLOOM F ACT ORY I took the opportunity to view Elizabeth’s body at the undertakers. The practiced solemnity of the staff at Hambrook and Johns troubled me and I wanted to leave, but I forced myself to stay and look her in the face one last time. I would never see that face again, unless photos count, and they don’t. I hadn’t had the idea of giving her a new face at this point, but even if I had I still would have climbed that narrow staircase, with its brass stair rods and floriferous carpeting, and entered the room with the box I ’d bought for her inside. I closed the door behind me, leant back on it and stayed there a while. I could hear a young boy ululating in the street below and I wished him dead. My wish went unheeded and he continued. I leant against the door, staring at the brass handles adorning my wife’s casket thinking of kisses I had sometimes found tiresome to endure, of otherwise pleasurable hours I’d tainted with cheap spite, and all those shrugged-off hugs that now pained only me. I could 457

hear more grievers turning up downstairs and one of the black suits speeding through his textbook sympathy. How long do I have up here? I wondered. How long before they knock on the door and usher me out for my own good? How long lowed am I al- to spend contemplating my wife’s corpse? Do they have a designated time limit for this type of thing, or is it discretionary (within sensible limits, of course)? I found myself moving towards the casket. I clutched hold of its rim and stared down at the part of her dress that covered her belly. Her dress was patterned with a thousand tiny flowers. The brass and the flowers reminded me of the stairs I’d had to climb to get in there, the stairs I’d have to descend to get out, and all the other stairs I’d have to go up and down to get places that she wouldn’t be, before I stopped climbing stairs for good. I slowly panned to the right: the safe direction. The dress went 458

down to her ankles as it always had. No surprises with the shoes either. She had on her brown suede kitten heels with slight discolouration around the toes. It was fitting that they would rot in the box with her. I’d never seen those feet so still. She was always tapping them, rocking their heels, clenching her to them on es like an ape, waving them in the air to dry her toenails – they’d never stopped moving. She even shifted them about constantly in her s ee l p: they would search out warmth under the covers and end up basking on the backs of my legs. I thought about how cold they must be in those shoes with no blood to keep them warm, and for a moment they became independently important, existents in their own right, not unlike the trophies of Jerome Brudos. My eyes wander ed to the left until they reached the tanned hands (I’d ex- pected them to be paler somehow) embracing her chest. Bela Lugosi sleeping on soil from his homeland. Or Christopher Lee for that matter, but still far far removed from the truly masterful Max Schreck. His Nosferatu/Count Orlok captured better than any the shadowed existence of deathlessness. Those hideous prosthetics were inspired: Modiesque fingers slowly stabbing their way through the cold sepia gloom like the clawed branch of some possessed tree. Freddie’s blades were their clear descendents, as shadows gave way to the taut, pink flesh of young dreamers. (Lugosi was the real deal: he was buried, according to his wishes, in full Dracula costume and make-up.) Why do they do that with their hands? Only the undead dare to sleep like that. I was thinking about whether I was going to be able to bear looking at her face. I really wasn’t sure that I could go that far left. And then, as if I had been duped into it, like when 459

you try to read only one answer in a list of answers to some crossword puzzle and fail I found , myself looking at her closed eyes. No eyeball movement beneath the lids; no eyeballs at all, if truth be told. I’d done it: I was looking right at her, and all that was left to do was go. To walk out of that room and never look at her again. Then it struck me that maybe I hadn’t been apprehensive about seeing her face at all; maybe afraid to let I was just her go, to leave her there alone with her cold toes and her hollow eyelids. Touch her face. That is the next part of the process. Kiss her on the forehead, the lips, those lips (I laughed and somewhere she laughed with me, but not really), stroke her cheek, run your fingers through her wrongly-parted hair... I wondered how I could let something as basic as touching her evade me so completely. But it had, and that was the way things would be now between the two of us. I took up each of these variations on tactility, slowly, cautiously, robotically, not like a husband, more like a bomb disposal expert. It couldn’t have been touching to watch. None of that confusion you find with apes where they try to make the dead come back to life, lifting up an arm and watching it drop to the ground over and over, perplexed as to why it wilts the way it does. There was none of that. On a rooftop across the street a seagull tipped its head back and shrieked like some castrated coyote howling in a lunar fit, and I just stood there not knowing what to do next. Should I say something now? I didn’t think I should. I didn’t feel like hearing myself say anything. I thought to myself, I’ll go soon. I looked at the door and knew that none of those somberites would come in without knocking and then waiting for me to ask them in. They must have plugged all of her orifices. They always do that; I’m pretty sure of it. They do it to stem the flow of internal fluids desperately trying to flee their dead container. My stomach wasn’t strong enough for an unplugging. I was not wanton enough to 460

even consider going that far. A bit sad when I think about it, like when no tears are shed at a funeral, and everyone just stands about chatting idly and looking forward to the refreshments. All I did was climb into the coffin between her puzzled knees, open her blouse, wank off over her tits, get out of the coffin, do her blouse back up, and wipe away the spunk from her neck and chin. As I wanked I kneaded her dead breasts with my left hand. I looked for a smile on her face (a proper one – not that manufactured Mona Lisa half-smile some morgue technician had constructed out of her mouth)…. Actually, I didn’t do any of those things, although it did cross my mind as a way of staving off my inevitable departure from that sad room. I’d tried to cultivate an erection through the fabric of my pocket as I looked down at my dead wife, but found my body unwilling to be party to such profanity. They knocked four times (two sets of two) and on receiving no reply entered the room. I had her half out the window at that point, my hands on her thighs poised to complete a singularly joyless defenestration. Authorities were called, questions asked and asked over, condolences and reprimands offered in tandem and accepted in silence, for I found it difficult to speak. All I could think about was the reaction of the two men that entered that room, the detail that marks that day to this day, their eyes revolving up into their skulls as they sauntered over to where I stood, their weary faces lacking the merest announcement of surprise. TORTURE HOUSE TAKE-AWAY The fog had come in for the night, a real peasouper, damp cobwebs clinging to light and periphery vision . Charles remained in his armchair chain smoking and reread- ing a book he’d never read, his eyes like cracked marbles in a storm cloud. After some deliberation he had decided against going out. After all, why should he make the effort for tragic old slags in tired-arsed discotheques, only to have them flake out and smear their make-up all over his pillows? His gaping eyes moved over words, attempting tract meaning to draw them in, to ex- from the page, but they remained there in front of him, 461

immovable, and no matter how many times he tried to prise them free they refused to succumb. There is something out of place here. My movements are constantly monitored by unknown forces. I try to keep off the streets. I don’t want to be an easy target. I am of the utmost importance to them for reasons not yet known to me. I must presume that I am the only person here outside the network. I am desperately short of food. I shop after 1A.M. in the local mini-market. Living on dubious meat pies, pasties, sausage rolls, crisps, half-stale sandwiches with soggy brown salad, tinned beans, and chocolate bars. Not sure it s safe there anymore, though. ’ No food for past two days. Must leave, but can’t, for fear of what’s out there. I no longer trust the saveloys from those devious Turks at the chippy: they’re probably made from the mashed-up clits of young Muslim girls. I shan’t go there again and watch them snigger and deride me from behind their chip-cone towers. The acids are making food from my stomach lining. It’s been foggy for weeks now. The murky grey/white sky is too low. It falls to earth behind green trees and black houses and in front of spies on the corner of streets beside burnt out telephone boxes smoking. It comes in from the sea; a shoal of smoky plankton sticking to the breeze. They’ll not flush me out into this wilderness of grubby clouds. The walls in this place seem thinner: I can hear movements behind them. Sometimes I turn the TV up as loud as it will go, but I don’t watch it, and I try not to listen to what is said. I can spot them anywhere now without even trying. Cars honk and I hear the knowing laughter of drunks. I looked at my hands yesterday and notice a d that I’ve t ken to nibbling my nails and the surrounding hard skin. My fingertips are uncommonly sore and there is a tion peculiar sensa- when I clasp my glass too tightly – stop – 462

in Dark corduroy skin – plastic coma eyes – vortex of drunken dreams nag, sucking d uniform streets around and around my gy mind like faecal boils locked in the cycles of a Laundromat. My legs are awash with boils dripping forest-green poison. The capillaries in my face are bloated; I have red, puffy aphid eyes . They tell me that the tachinid fly larvae eventually kill the host to avoid a hangover. Others live in the eggs of various pest insects and damage the liver so that it becomes unable to remove unnatural fears. Nausea – parasites vomiting white bug alcohol – lady beetles, praying mantids in the arms and legs. Fly-bug-insect d is ease and feeding attacks are caused in part by a poor diet and green lacewing egg infection. Sleeping disorders, anxiety, abdominal pains, neurological disorders, clotting disorders, whitefly parasite, mealybug destroyer, solitary drinking, numbness, sexual dysfunction, the leering descent of Mrs Michaux’ melting mug. Large doses of alcohol can nurse centipedes or wood-boring beetles, spider’s eggs, the heads of hornworm caterpillars. Need to get me some Zotal insecticide, drink the bottle dry in monstrous mouthfuls and have its cleansing violence turn twist my limbs. I toss and in furious sleep. If only my skull were a cyanide jar. See fact sheet: ‘syndromic mummies and the conspicuous cocoons of cardiovascular damage.’ Belly full of warm scotch and parasite toxins. Whitefly eyes – the look of 463 the damaged parasite – crumpled teeth,

a mouth full of dog ends, the charismatic smile of Ted Bundy over and over – blizzard of fungal buckshot – I am the victim of a mutant strain of melancholia. Have you ever felt a rupture in your brain? Everything going along fine and then something, some peculiarly violent and errant abreaction, occurs, and all of it is suddenly made wrong, without anything having changed. Medical men sometimes call them anxiety attacks, but they are more than that. For as long as it lasts, you are unable to attach much importance or meaning to what is going on around you; it appears to you as some ridiculous, badly-acted, play. You really can’t believe you’re part of it. But all this occurs while still knowing in the back of your brain that it’s you that’s not right here; you’re the one that’s seeing through a very necessary veneer , behind some veil of ignorance that is there for a purpose. After this has happened to you it doesn’t go away, not fully. This awareness stays with you, an awareness that you are aware, from time to time, of having to suppress. All this is hard to explain. But then any event is hard to explain. You know that feeling when you are watching a movie with oth- er people and the movie is one of those with a crucial twist in it, but only you know what the twist is? You see them clues engrossed in the , missing clues, while you are engaging with the detached how contrived to story, looking for characters, , aloof because of what you know. They can’t see it all is, are blind to what’s in front of them, and deaf the significance of certain words . 464

Only, with the experience I’m trying to relay to you , there is nothing really tangible that you know that the others do not – it’s just a feeling, but a feeling that feels like knowledge. Suddenly, the whole world and your entire existence is unpalatable, an ailing joke. You feel like a claustrophobe coming around from a daydream and finding himself in a lowceilinged cellar: you have to get out. The claustrophobe has somewhere to go. Even if he can’t get there because of locks and bolts, he still has that place of sanctuary in his head. Where is there left to go when you get the feeling, the feeling that feels like knowledge? Escaping your surroundings won’t solve anything. Initially, you relieved to be hidden while you are feeling this way, away might be from other people but soon no er have you achieved isola- tion than it becomes your enemy and you realise you’ve just made things worse, for by running away you have extinguished hope, that glimmer of a chance that escape was possible. The claustrophobe will feel better if he doesn’t try to open the door, than if he tries and finds it to be locked. If it were possible you’d crawl out from under yourself and shed your physicality without a moment’s hesitation. If it were possible you’d do this. Charles can often be found fiddling with his underpants. He’s forever picking them out of the chaffed crevices either side of his testicles. Like (or because of) Proust he has a predilection for tight underwear in spite of the obvious discomfort it causes him. I KNOW NOT OF WHOM I SPEAK, WHEN I SPEAK OF ME 465

“That I-thoughts and first-person perspectives are intimately connected, and that ‘I’ refers to the person who utters or thinks it are common conceptions, conceptions no doubt shared by some of you here. Indeed some of you (he glares down at Reginald Woolly and his cronies, all associates of Language Over Ontology (L.O.O.)) take both these claims to be undeniably true and to imply that an impersonal reduction of reality is doomed to failure. You also take the truth of these claims to exclude the possibility of accounting for persons and their persistence in terms of the connectedness and continuity of psychological events. “You think that ‘I’ refers to persons because the rule for ‘I’s use stipulates that it refers to whoever produces it and so, as only persons have I-thoughts, the referent of ‘I’ must be a person. And while I accept that somebody capable of using ‘I’ must have the attributes of personhood, I claim that it does not necessarily follow from this that an I-user is a single person. By I-user I mean the individual physical system whose proficient language capabilities bring about this I-token’s use….” Professor P.’s voice rang out across the vast lecture theatre, filled to capacity with tiredeyed university professors: philosophers mostly, some scientists, a few journalists, a handful of those individuals who make it their duty to safeguard the moral well-being of ryone eve- else, some religious types (one from each of the major religions: a leading Christian, a leading Muslim, a leading Hindu, and a leading Buddhist) ignored who everyone , or at least tried to – except the Buddhist, as Buddhism tends to demand more respect from philosophers than the other faiths, which is most likely due to its having a more philosophically palatable me taphysic, theories of epistemology that reward re- 466

evaluation in the light of more modern theories, a distaste for gods and other unnecessary clutter, a snappier dress code and more melodic mantras. P.’s mouth was too close to the microphone, and his voice was getting kicked about by the sound of his breath and his chin brushing over the mike mesh. But as he got into his stride he eased back, his hands clasping the lectern’s wooden plinth authoritatively. And ‘his’ mind began to wander as he spoke. [Why can I never think of cunt as cunt? Sweat mags do nothing for me; for all their plastic pink, whirring, knobbled intussusception, their frozen fusing, their mock seriousness, their strained posing, for all that, they are devoid of meaning. In a magnified bitch-slit I see a dead starling chick fallen from its nest, cringed tissue cold to the touch, the horripilation of unborn feathers – a crude plummet written in callow, terror-stricken Braille, unread, unruffled, unreadable, glossed over, truth polished into a snare….] “To just assume that a single I-user is necessarily identical with a single person is to pass over some deep and puzzling questions regarding the identity of persons, and to beg the question against those who think that in cases of multiple personality disorder (or disassociative identity disorder) a single human being is inhabited by more than one person. [There’s trouble down at Leibniz’s Mill: they’re brawling over the chaff....] I suggest that we can abide by the rule governing the reference of ‘I’ by claiming that ‘I’ refers to I-users, but in doing so leave the exact personal status of ‘I’s referent (i.e., how many persons an I-user is) undetermined. Employing the notion of an I-user will also enable us to ac- count for reality in impersonal terms, because the concept I-user is itself reducible. “My claim is not that ‘I’ does not refer to persons or reflect the first-person perspective simpliciter, but that the rule governing the reference of ‘I’ – as it has come to be applied – does not determine that this is the case. I regard persons as essentially defined in terms of psychology: as a brain, a body (or functional equivalents) and a series of interrelated mental and physical events (let us call such persons Reductive Persons). The causally isolated psychological enclaves present in a case of multiple personality disorder would, I propose, fulfil this Reductive Person criterion. [This won’t work. I can see the propaganda posters now: Billboards showing the mass graves of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sobibor, Chelmno… malnourished jumble of grey death with brightly coloured smiles added to the sunken faces of disfigured bodies. Hollywood smiles with bleached teeth adorn the melange of corkscrewed necks and wounds bullet-peppered forcibly torn 467 in chests – grins like fresh to dead flesh, a sick animation of drab,

bloodless meat. The punch line (the hook): ‘Who’s Laughing Now?...’] “Certain of you present here today appear – in your past writings at least – to regard a person as essentially an irreducible unified conscious subject that happens to supervene on (but not reduce to) an individual physical system that is capable of reason, reflection and self-consciousness. Let us call such persons, Further Fact Persons. I argue that the rule governing the reference of ‘I’ does in no way favour the Further Fact account of the separateness of persons over the Reductive account of the separateness of persons. [I see things as they are, how they never want to be seen. I pare down, peel away, pick apart, cut into, break asunder; I deconstruct men and women, and those that were nothing to me before are little more afterwards, less the lies of their construction, their cogs and levers laid out in front of them, the lowly subsystems of a darkling unification. Their dander is up; they’re scrambling with their mess of parts and broken connections. They’ve relied too long on the sterility of theory, on the easy compartmentalisation of warring factions. Compared to them…look at me: black-faced coal miner retreats from his workday to a coal house with a carbonised garden and coalmice tweeting from the charcoal trees. The inside of my skull is lined with this raven mineral; crush my head in a vice and a diamond you will pop out, and there’s the chance that lay ’ll look on it as me and wear me in a ring, ing a kiss on me now and then for good luck....] “Although I am quite obviously a staunch advocate of the existence of Reductive Persons, I do not need to argue for this in any great depth in order to reject the perniciously draconian anti-reductionism that hides from our refulgent future like a petrified mole. All I need do is account for the referent of I-thoughts reductively, while leaving the personal status of that referent somewhat undetermined. For my primary target here is to disprove the claim it that an impersonal description of real on y could not account for the c tent of I- thoughts. “Persons are defunct, old hat, and, if I wanted to be ever so slightly hyperbolic, there is a sense in which persons don’t exist and never have. I shall now...” 468

“But how do you propose to account for the content of first-person thoughts? Or are you going to do away with them as well?” heckled a bearded man from the back of the lecture theatre. Two guards, recognising the individual as a sociologist notorious for getting out of his depth, escorted him from the building with their batons in his ribs. The security was provided by the sponsors of Professor P.’s research, Futurelife, a subsidiary company of the major conglomerate, Headway Enterprises. They had seen fit to line the room with men (thirty in all, fourteen up each side of the room with two on the door) kitted out with batons, and stun guns. They wore black uniforms with grey trim and braiding down the legs, arms, and on their pockets and peaked caps, which were low enough to obscure their eyebrows, serving, so the experts will tell you, as a means of dehumanising the wearer. It is said that Futurelife, and indeed Headway Enterprises as a whole, only ever recruit their security from the armed forces. The men are either recently retired, or else have been lured away with monetary in centives too difficult to refuse. Ex SAS and SBS37 are always highly coveted – handlebar moustaches all round. “The man has a point, and since it’s been brought up I’m happy to deal with it. All things are open, transparent: we have no desire to hide the truth behind unnecessary obfuscation. “I do not necessarily subscribe to the old Kaplanian view that In each of its utter- ances, ‘I’ refers to the person who utters it, for I believe that ‘I-user’ and ‘person’ are not coextensive terms and that in certain situations they could come apart. [Let me, by means of a demonstration, rip the virgin from the girl before your very eyes, and by way of a finale put 37 Charles once read a book written by a former member of the SBS in the hope that it would go some way towards demythologizing them. He clearly recalled a drinking game whose rules the man had described in some detail. The game was called ‘Drink the Turd,’ and it consisted of one of a group of men crapping into a stein, which was then filled to the top with beer and drunk from by everyone present. Charles would have liked to have been repulsed by it, but instead he felt once again the gnawing absence of such comradeship (however vulgar) from his own life. 469

her brain through a mincing machine while leaving her mind intact. And I can pull it off, because I am the master of subtle distinctions and not their slave....] And this provides us with a basis from which to reject the claim that the indexical nature of ‘I’ precludes a reductive analysis of persons in terms of psychological connectedness and/or continuity, and its realizers. [How these fools yoke of love to fawn and tremble under the language. How they love to chase behind their abstract tems and deductions sys- , donkeys to carrots nurtured by their own manure….] “ The following thought experiment will hopefully clarify matters: At some time t1, there are two I-users a and b. a occupies spatial location S1 throughout what is to follow and b occupies spatial location S2. At t2, a and b undergo psychological via a taping procedure. This process transfer involves a blueprint tape being taken of a’s brain and of b’s brain, and the information then being transferred by duplicating the brain states from a’s tape onto b’s brain, and duplicating the brain states from b’s tape onto a’s brain. The transfer is instantaneous. In other words, there is no time during this procedure at which I-users a and b are not persons… {And the point is eventually made, as you would expect. But, with Milan Kundera in mind, I thought I’d spare you the tiresome intricacies of his thought experiment, lest you should be tempted to doubt my credentials as a novelist.38} “…You and I both know the problems we face with regard to space limitations in this world. Concentration City will be Concentration World. [We are looking at a a thing of the past; we are looking now at a disorientating trip into the 38 For as Kundera writes, “there is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think.” 470

black coal stars of selflessness: a cavity of swarming obscurity, illuminated only by ultraviolet tubes that revel in the sickening lambency of cunts and cocks rotating in ranging de- afterimages. One’s sense of self is achieved by mirrors and a constant numbing commentary from within, the protagonist and his reflection projected on either side of a transparent screen apparently levitating in fog . The technical tricks are self- evident and the splicing of black and white with colour reveals the all too contemporary complexion of the actor, of myself, who plays both parts. I sit and watch my hands fighting, screwing and murdering each other, sit watching as a 14-year-old school girl, her face disfigured with razor cuts, drowns in glue on a mile-high monitor amid a barbarous freak show of lost little men....] But there is an answer. The technology is not only here for eternal life, but spatially concentrated life also. And we can do this because we can accept the normative relations that can make two I-thoughts of a single I-user contradictory, while leaving the question of whether the two I-thoughts were thought by one or two persons undetermined. This can be achieved because the truth conditions of such thoughts can be determined by the physical isolation of the physical system that realizes the thoughts, as opposed to the psychological isolation of what that physical system realizes, or any further fact about that physical system regarding its unified consciousness.” An ill- co-ordinated barrage of claps ensues, the enthusiasm of the half-convinced attempting to make the leap to full commitment – the place wise men avoid, along with champagne lunches and dead men’s underwear – via the unquestioned crudity of the smashing together of palms. Professor P. nods with a note of condescension and metered impatience as he waits to resume. A tentative hand is raised in the front row, the row that has been given permission to interrupt the speaker with any pertinent questions. Professor P. looks down at the raised hand and the face of the man it is attached to. P. is on a roll and dislikes having his rhythm broken, but can vaticinate with some ease that attempts to ignore the wavering arm will eventually prove more distracting than allowing the question, especially since the man the arm is at- 471

tached to is Reginald Woolly, an antagonistic philosopher renowned for his intellectual persistence. “Yes?” “Just a small point,” (P. doubted that, as did everyone else who knew anything of Woolly) “concerning every philosopher’s favourite fruitcake: the well-known sufferer of multiple personality disorder, Miss Beauchamp. Now, if we take causal isolation of psychology to account for first-person perspectives, as is your want, then two of Beauchamp’s personalities (B 1 and Sally) will qualify as persons that just happen to occu- py the same body. But if ‘I’ refers to such persons (i.e., Reductive Persons), B 1 will be able to successfully refer to herself using ‘I’, as indeed could Sally; and so B 1 ’s use of ‘I’ and Sally’s use of ‘I’ would refer to different things, which results in a problem. For imagine Sally says ‘I have been to Pavilionstone’, and B 1 says, ‘I have never been to Pavilionstone’. [I’ll snap the spines of a thousand worthless vertebrates if I have to; I’ll show you evil if I have to mutilate a million men to do it….] Now, if these two uses of the term ‘I’ refer to two different people, then it should be possible for both sentences to be true. But it isn’t. [Unless Headway Corp’s desire to create a dead h as world populated by the living warmed you to contradictions, in which case I’ll warm up some corpses for you it to play w h, let you get intimate with the zombie skin of one of my experiments – see if you can’t overlook the flies and the rats cocooned inside her....] Because there is still a normative connection between these two statements that results in them being contradictory, in spite of the lack of causal relations between them.” “But this does not show that Beauchamp is a single Further Fact Person. I thought I covered this already. All that it shows is that ‘I’ isn’t sensitive to the causal isolation of psychological properties, but to the causal isolation of the physical system that realizes those psychological properties – in other words the I-user.” P. leans back and cracks his neck. He looks back down at his audience with a wince, and clears his throat before proceeding. 472

“If ‘I’ refers to Reductive Persons, and the re are two such persons once rned about. There only appears to be cause present, then there is nothing to be c for concern because ordinarily the person/human being ratio is one:one. So even though B 1 is not aware of ever having been to Pavilionstone, if I-user Beauchamp has been there, then so has B 1 . [Beauchamp was a one-woman orgy waiting to be had, and I’ll bet Dr Morton Prince had himself a time – “Now Miss Beauchamp, another session of hypnosis today, and let’s see if we can’t coax out another of your dirty little minxes. I do so love a close family….”] B 1 being unconscious (or not in control of Beauchamp) at the time Beauchamp is in Pavilionstone, does not mean that B 1 has never been there. A suitable reply could be something along the lines of this: B 1 would have to learn to restrict her claims about her movements through space and time to awareness claims such as, “I am not aware of ever having been to Pavilionstone”. [Actually, on second thoughts, Sybil must have been the real prize fuck of the century – 16 all in one go. I bet she shredded some pricks in her time....] But we needn’t go this far, because any claims involving a person’s embodied behaviour, when that person shares a body with another person, will be open to such mistakes. We can just say B 1 is merely mistaken, and understandably so. Just as I would be, if someone sedate d me in the middle of the night, drove me to Pavilionstone and back again so that I awoke in my bed the next day. There is no cause for concern; it is just that one of the persons (B 1 ) makes a mistake. “If there are a certain number of physical systems capable of I-thoughts in the world, and if the expression ‘I-user’ is just a mere redescription of ‘person’, then we could expect the number of persons in the world to directly correlate with the number of such physical systems. I may point to Beauchamp and correctly label her a single physical system capable of I-thoughts, but I cannot (at least not without begging some important questions) conclude from this that Beauchamp is a single person or subject. For if two concepts are equivalent, one being a mere redescription of the other, then, ceteris paribus, counting under one concept will yield the same results as counting under the other. And, as I have said, this cannot be guaranteed without begging some important questions as to the identity of persons. At times t1, t2, t3..., we might claim unproblematically to have the same I-user, while being presented with what we might want to term different persons…. {Alright, Kundera, keep your fucking hair on!} 473

“We shall now break for lunch. The canteen has catered for all 150 of you, and there will be no supplementary meals for multiple inhabitancies. We abide by the rule: one gut, one meal. The number of persons you might be is, as far as the canteen managers are concerned, irrelevant. Maybe some of you will want to mull this over during lunch and on our return… Yes, sorry?” A pony-tailed man with five day’s growth, and a red and grey striped jersey beneath his black fitted suit jacket is standing up with his hand raised. He is a celebrated and widely published Continental philosopher (very much in favour of the distinction and of his falling on the side he does) by the name of Peter Satzo, one of those who believes translation will bring him truth. He shout s up at the stage, turning his head continually to gauge the me response of those around him. “In light of the catering depart P.’s theories, there is, I believe, cause proliferation of messiah for nt’s rule and Professor some concern regarding the possibility of the complexes for persons who exist as part of a multiple occupancy, for if, as Nietzsche put it, ‘the belly is the reason man does not so easily take himself for a god,’ what becomes of those who are forced to share one?” “HaHa, most amusing. And a perfect illustration of just what hogwash is prof- fered by those who disparage a philosopher’s sense of humour. And now to lunch… What’s this? Back for more?… Can our ribs take the onslaught?” “Humouring you and your colleagues wasn’t, believe it or not, the primary purpose of my sharing my observation . I’m sure you’ll agree that one man’s Weltanschauung will never be for everybody, no matter how condensed we become in our mobile single-bellied time-shares. I mean, just…” “That is the beauty of truth: it is not just for everybody, but for every person. Lunch everyone! Unless, that is, anyone else has been browsing ‘Maxims and Interludes’ recently?” The audience responds by jettisoning their godly aspirations and getting to their feet. Peter Satzo sits back down in order that he might again stand out from the crowd, which is not 474

merely standing but on the move. He remains seated, feeling marginalized and misunderstood as everyone else leaves. It’s not that some of the others present don’t share Satzo’s sentiments, it’s just that they’d rather not end up at the back of the lunch queue. A SUBTERRANEAN DEN I descended the stairs to the basement. I have one with of those basements that the movies love so much: an oblong room a set of open stairs running down one of the two longer walls, no windows, and a concrete floor littered with the dried-up hollow husks of insects long since liquefied and sucked up through the straw-like feeding utensils of so The me little predator or other. y floated on the tiniest draught; even the most infinitesimal of air fluctuations was enough to send these ethereal imponderable s gliding about the floor. The place was chilly, a little damp, with nothing but a few old boxes, a decrepit workbench, a swivel chair, and a washing machine to distract the eye. But such rooms had potential for so much more, both seen and unseen: corpses (dead or undead) beneath fresh layers of concrete or bricked into walls, psychopaths with grey eyes and red teeth ready to grab your ankles through the staircase as you ascend its creaking treads, a hideout for those avoiding zombies… I was to spend the next five months and three days of life my in this room. Making myself at home consisted of clearing the workbench of a few dog ends and cut nails, a rusty tenon-saw, a screwdriver thick with paint, and the end of a broom handle, be- 475

fore stacking up my books and journals in three piles on one of its ends: my workshop of filthy creation. Days and nights went by in that basement room without my noticing. I was in a haze of pre-owned ideas, busy shaking the dead hands of sagacious men. There were too many blind alleys to mention, too many moments when my impatience led me astray. But nevertheless I made progress. I slowly pieced together a way to piece together Elizabeth. She must remember me.39 She can be made to remember.40 She needn’t be alive now.41 39 The amnesiac “has the structure of something as something.” She is the embodiment for me of her in-order-to an d nothing more. Inauthentic existence ? Most definitely, but what of it? I am merely providing a situation – de- mands one – and excluding the possibilities that aren’t relevant to my project. I mean, what fucking project would she have? I am simply highlighting, destroying, blinkering possibili- it ties for her own projection. None of our projective capac ies are un fettered anyhow; I am simply taking charge of her fetters. For the love of God, I have singlehandedly sailed to the Islands of the Blessed – what is Dasein to me? Fuck Dasein and fuck authenticity, fuck all over-hyphenated thoughts. 40 What was it Jean Paul Sartre said? “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself” and “Before that projection of the self nothing exists.” Sartre, you may have appropriated all your best ideas from Martin-the-Nazi-sympathizer, but you certainly improved their packaging. The rhetorical force of the bug-eyed, pipe-smoking deviant is incontrovertible. L'fantaisiste parfaite de Mr Magoo. So much painstakingly tedious soul searching, and all because he couldn’t take his acid. “Man is nothing else but what he or someone else purposes, he exists only in so far as he or someone else realises himself or someone else, he is nothing else but the sum of his or someone else’s actions, nothing else but what his or someone else’s life is or was” (Existen- tialism and Humanism – italics mine). This is the blueprint. 41 As Thomas Nagel put it, “most of us would not regard the temporary suspension of life, even for substantial intervals, as in itself a misfortune. If it ever happens that people can be frozen without reduction of the conscious lifespan, it will be inappropriate to pity those who are temporarily out of circulation.” 476

She should forget her death.42 She can unmake the thing she made.43 She is indestructible.44 She will emerge elsewhere.45 She is this idea of her.46 She must exceed logic.47 42 “Nil igitur mors est ad nos, neque pertinet hilum.” (Lucretius)…. 43 “He knows death to the bone. Man has created death.” (Yeats) Or did death create us so that we could marvel at its work? 44 “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the hu- man body, but something of it remains which is eternal.” (Spinoza. Ethics 5, 23)…. Empedocles: “Fools – they have no far ranging thoughts: they suppose that what did not exist before comes into being or that something may die (Plutarch, Against Colotes 113 AD)…. and perish entirely” (B11) 45 Boris Karloff tapping into Amanda Duff’s brain in an effort to commune with his dead wife in The Devil Commands…. 46 I, like Philonous (a.k.a. Bishop Berkeley), “am not for changing things into ideas, but rather ideas into things.” He really did give himself all the best lines. 47 Paralogisms 1: Pure apperception is a mere consciousness: the I-think. Is this really to be considered knowledge of a substantive ‘I’? For Descartes, one necessarily led to the other: cogito ergo sum. But this is a mistake, for all this gives us is a consciousness of unity not a consciousness of the owner of this consciousness of unity – the owner, after all, might be disparate. All the individual thinker amounts to is a unity of consciousness. ‘I’ = a logical substance, not an enduring, surviving substance. This logical substance is more noumenal nonsense, and without a believable self, Kant’s admirable ethical theories are just theory. For as the self dissolves, so too do the grounds for attributing any special status to moral behaviour – not that anyone has the intellectual strength to give it up. 477

“I am fast becoming something in need of reordering; even a lusus fabricae like me – a teratoid abortion that needs to be reassembled and reinstated – can still hope to be cued res- from obscurity by his master’s loving digits. Spend enough time polishing a rock and its entire surface area will become smooth. Spend enough time polishing a rock and it will disappear. Spend enough time reworking in search of perfection and …” Before I happened across Psychological Reductionism I was floundering slightly. In order to us understand my project you m t be acquainted with his rather unique account of persons. In brief, Psychological Reductionism focuses on the causal relations that exist between certain kinds of mental and physical events (and the physical systems that realize them) in order to account for what we commonly call persons. Its preoccupations are not so much the sameness and countability of persons, as the connectedness and continuity of those mental and physical events that, in conjunction with a brain and a body, or functional equivalents, happen to constitute persons. While it is necessary for the Psychological Reductionist to adopt a working criterion of personal identity, his primary concern is not to defend it, but to investigate what it is that matters about it – to separate the important elements in one’s survival from the un- important. He usually assumes something like the following criterion of personal identity: if some single future person has enough of my brain matter (or continuous functional equivalents) to be psychologically continuous and connected with me, then that person is me. However, the important element in this criterion is psychological continuity and connectedness (with any cause) or relation R. He argues for the claim that identity itself is an unimportant factor in the persistence conditions of persons, relation R being the only thing that matters. Fuck CBC2, let it go jump in the lake: she is something special and only like every other living thing in ways that don’t matter. 478

Characters in movies and literature quite often seek catharsis by avenging the deaths of their nearest and dearest. In the better quality productions this sire rare de- ly has the d effect on the aggrieved survivors: the audience feels better, but nothing has been solved for the characters, who still mourn the loss of their loved ones as much as they ever did. I have never sought out the killers of my wife, because I cannot see the point. Kill them and there are many more just like them. It just happened to be them that opened my wife’s skull. I grieve over the absence of my wife; I do not grieve over the baseness of a subpopulation of humankind. UMBILICAL ATROCITIES I already thought more than once that my best way of life would be that of living with what was needed to write and a lamp in the innermost room of a vast, closed cellar. […] Who can say what things I would write! From what depths I would draw them! a – Fr Babies born blue and bug-eyed, lynched from their mothers’ bellies… 479 nz Kafka

Hobby’s hipbones jut out like Gothic gutter supports atop shapeless bandy legs, wide-eyed, stricken-mouthed gargoyles propping up a pre-pubescent tummy swelling. There was something transcendent about the feel of strong heavy bones beneath skin as sleek and unblemished as a frozen pond. Coaxing, cajoling, small feet with tiny toes, bawling, whining, but she don’t half make your prick look big. Cunt like a baby viper’s throat, clutching tighter than uncle Kroll’s hands around the neck of some schoolgirl, as I push in badness and dirt that’ll kill her for years to come. Feel bad? Let her feel bad for the both of us. So light, such delicate limbs; scoop her up and put her down; nice and easy now, it’ll be ok. Oh that’s a fucgoodgirl. It’s just about me now, drinking it in, making it worthwhile, filling her candy mouth with my tongue, twisting at those pig-pink nipples, ejaculating the way SHE made me feel all over every one of her row tomor- s…. I’ve been to some parties. I’ve been to parties that have had in excess of nine months’ planning go into them, secret parties for a select few, the chosen few. A woman is already in labour as people arrive, her labour being the catalyst for the calls going out. We have been primed and ready for weeks – waiting, poised by our phones like fat, balding, lust-skewered defenders of Gotham and grot. We wait, us four or five men, men known to one another through the hobby; we wait and she groans, sighs and wheezes away, hour upon hour, her fat ugly tits drooping and dripping with sweat. We are all of us (all four or five of us men) sickened by her: a piece of old fruit macerated under the skin by a congested flurry of coalescent cheese-fly spawns. The baby sheds its mother’s saggy body like a snake shrugging off its old skin: Midline Episiotomy incision is made and we all of us (us four or five men) perk up as a gooey lump of loveliness comes into the world, into our world. We knew it would be a girl. One of us wouldn’t have been here had it not been, but it made little difference to the rest. Misoneism might well prevent you from enjoying, or at least taking on board the possibilities of pleasure from what is to come, but don’t let it. Let such an attitude be the preserve of the old, the dog-eared cunts that doff their caps and know what they know. I’m sure most of you have sensed what I’ve been building up to anyhow. You’ve let your inquisitiveness get the better of your disbelief. You know what we’re going to do (us four or five men) with 480

our miry prize, dangling from its cord like a midget on a space walk. Say it to yourself! No, on second thoughts, shout it out loud! “You are going to…” There are questions anent the most repulsive of details running through your head. Questions like these: Do you (you four or five men) do it as a group? If you take it in turns, how do you decide who goes when ? Do you draw lots? Do you watch one another or demand privacy? Is the mother complicit in what you do? And questions you might still be unable to form (but do stick with them, they will come): Is there room for you to force your…? How many fingers can you…? Does anyone ever…? You happy-go-lucky calculators of felicity can have no qualms, I’m sure. There might be some who took on board Mill’s flawed notion concerning generalized donots, but this is mere fetishism – don’t we have enough fucking vices? There are no consequences for little Betty: at that age she has no real memory to speak of. We sometimes even shield the mother from view. So where’s the damage? Where is the depleted utility? If you count our utility (us four or five men) which you have to (sorry, no choice in the matter, I’m afraid), then you have no option but to side with us. If you are still feeling uncomfortable, just remind yourself of the existence of coincident entities, and so remember that no person was ever a fetus, or the resultant new- born, not me, not you, not anyone. DEVIANT CAUSES AND THE TRAGIC UNDOING OF TWO CARELESS PHILOSOPHERS It could be argued that one thing can be (psychologically) connected and continuous with some other thing without there being any causal links between them, and that all that is needed for b to be qualitatively continuous with a is that b continue in 481 the exact same way as

a would have, had a still existed. Qualitative connectedness and continuity is surely maintained if when b does and thinks x and y, then in the nearest world possible in which b is numerically identical with a, b also does and thinks x and y.48 And there seems no intelligible reason why b would not carry on where a had left off if indeed b was qualitatively identical to a. If we think that relation R is the relation that matters, then we might think that in order to avoid challenges from those who would argue that differences between causal psychological connectedness and/or continuity and non-causal psychological connectedness and/or continuity can be trivial, we will have to go one step further and somehow incorporate freak instances of exact non-causal duplication into our account of what matters in survival. (Ordinary survival is, of course, causal, but then ordinary survival also implies identity, when what matters about personal survival does not.) As a result of this we might well think that we are forced to choose between the Scylla of allowing what matters to be determined by trivialities,49 and the Charybdis of rejecting causation as a necessary condition for what matters in survival. In fact, there are two philosophers (Lakok and Triman) who seem to view the situation as just this desperate, and end up coming out in favour of the latter of these two options and calling for the rejection of the causal condition. Lakok and Triman feel that the onus is age of his conviction on e th ‘any cause’ theorist to have the cour- s and allow what matters in personal survival to make the step from ‘any cause’ survival to ‘no cause’ survival. After all, the result is the same, and ultimately it is the result that matters. 48 Nobody mourn David Lewis, for he still exists in all those existent worlds in which he didn’t die: he has created multiple heavens in which he can continue to baffle readers with tales of worlds in which he is already dead. If you feel inclined to shed a tear, just think of the Mirror Master chuckling devilishly, safe within the confines of his mirror world. 49 Although the differences may be trivial they are not extrinsic, as they are events (or not, as the case might be) in the history of none other than the person in question. 482

They ask us to each imagine that as we die, somewhere else in the universe an atom for atom replica of us comes into existence. They then ask us to imagine that instead of our materialization happening somewhere else in the universe, it occurs at the exact place and time where you happened to dematerialize. They then claim that if such causal breaches were to occur, we wouldn’t and shouldn’t be bothered by them, nor should we pay any money in advance in order to prevent such breaches – if it were possible to do so. We should expect no alteration in the practical goings on of our lives. The same conclusion should be reached, according to them, if, to our surprise, we were to be informed by reliable scientific findings that person-stages are never causally related, and that in fact they are connected by some non-causal process of which, until now, science had been unaware. Such find ings would not affect the way we live our lives, and therefore they would be findings about which we should not be concerned. But what they didn’t foresee… I mean how could they? How were they to know the truth about this non-causal spatio-temporal continuity that was sitting in surrepti- tious surrogacy for causal continuity? What they didn’t foresee was the possibility of the following relation: The relation of non-causal (spatio-temporal) continuity: Up until time t1 the relation will appear to mimic causal continuity by maintaining spatio-temporal stability, although after time t1 spatio-temporality is randomly re-established every five minutes. They weren’t to know this. They were convinced they were safe, that the gods of induction would protect them from the unforeseen, forever stave off non-causal continuity’s headless yuletide. Their crime was no more than a philosophical peccadillo, a small oversight, but they were to pay with their futures – with no possibility to recant their claims. 483

Philosophical sloppiness no longer goes unpunished. You’d better be absolutely sure that you have considered all the loopholes before you start making claims and value judgements on the back of your logic. And given that it could be argued that the in ‘any cause’ account only really needed some m or revisions, it looks as if our friends, Lakok and Triman, were a trifle cavalier in their eagerness to dive into the smug exclu- sivity of a new theory. SLOTH TERRORISM You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Ray Bradbury I overheard the shrill hunger of gulls as small reptilian terrors tumbled into the earth on a morning that had stayed up all night. Structure burgled turbulence in a search, a scavenging for sanity , for a hastening of Apollo’s sweaty mitt. Just a taster, just enough to get me back off, to get me back there, to slip around in patent shadows until such time as shadows harden and take on the form of the world find anything resembling myself amongst all th Lynchian half-sleep, just bits of is rambling unordered . I cannot , free flowing, history that have set up home in my crowded nest – all soapsuds and whitewash. There was a time when I would feast on the corroded arteries of old men, and lounge around in their clotted blood. I would eat young girls, and finding that their sinews stuck between my teeth, board their innards like a swarthy pirate. 484

I rid myself of humanity’s shroud, anticipating ebullience with a twitchy trigger finger and a jeer. I answered the calls of the dying with a facilitating blow. I recruited swarms of support to stifle with pillows and peppered kisses. Laputan thud and I of sweat a My head hit the sky with a collapsed under the weight nd powders. I towelled down with the softened hides of skin- less unfortunates. And I eluded the man on the stair. Fear draws me on, for without fear I am unable to I dream . attempted to make a collage on the theme of hatred, fragments of venom stitched to- gether with frosted scotch tape: An officious gauleiter tortures local spastics with crocodile clips and a telephone rig, as drunken SA look on, licking Red blood off sore knuckles. Witch-finders find devils to be buoyant. Lazy was trels expectorate blood-streaked phlegm down the back of businessmen’s trousers and then wink conspiratorially at their scrawny hounds…. A list of things I need: black eyes to scare the deaf, strong hands to choke the offspring of idiots, embryonic stigmata to… I picture myself tugging as the tip of a scarlet stiletto rips through screaming fur. I raise my eyes in jaded disaffection as the camera zooms in on a 4-year-old girl lapping the come off some old man’s pecker as he slaps her around the face and probes her delicate holes with his calloused, tobacco-stained fingers. I eat my fill amid the taut dropsical bellies of starvelings, and do not even feel their stares. I force exhausted mothers to watch as I drown their new-born babies, still wrinkled and sticky with birth grot. A Dog’s Love for its Tail: one loves and is intrigued by one’s self like one loves the unknowable, the unattainable. A dog chases around after its tail and the dizzier it gets the more it sees its own tail as the tail of another dog:a foe, a prospective 485

lover, everything and nothing – ultimately something unrecognisable. Charles sits up in bed and reaches for his notebook, but the moment is lost. He drags himself up out of bed and words are gone, the into the toilet. A line of thick murky urine arcs into the bowl. Pains in his lower back prevent him from standing up straight. He lights a cigarette and crawls back into bed. When Charles was late rising, he’d remind himself of Thomas Pynchon who would begin his working day at 1 P.M. (when Thomas Mann, having been writing since 9 A.M., would finish his) with spaghetti and a soft drink, and read and work until three the following morning. Charles would vow to do the same, invariably falling asleep in front of the TV shortly after midnight. As he dragged himself from the sofa to his bed he would console himself with the thought that Pynchon too had a weakness for trashy TV, as did J.D. Salinger. Some mornings it is necessary for Charles to place his feet in a bucket of potassium permanganate while staring out across a photograph of a Montana dam in order to remind himself of his need to write. He didn’t suffer from athlete’s foot, as one might expect, but he did long to long to write, for writing to become his profession, for it to be every- thing. If I am disconsolate with life and the world around me is not without reason. It has been said, behind my back and otherwise, that I it ought to grow up and get on with things. I can honestly say I don’t know what is meant by this piece of advice. I know what the words mean – words are my business – but about how to act on such advice I am at a loss. How does one grow up? What things does one get on with? The prob- 486

lem is that I have already grown up, but in a way that is considered somehow inappropriate. I haven’t grown up properly. obsessed The implications are clear: I am self- (so I should introduce something into my life to distract me from myself, something other than myself that I might become obsessed with); I dwell on things too much (so I should introduce something into my life to distract me from the things that I now dwell on, so that I might dwell on this new thing instead); I am things unreal istic, a dreamer (I should focus my attentions on that I might actually be able to achieve, and take solace in those things, so that I don’t have to dream anymore); I refuse to take account of my responsibilities (I should not rely on the assistance of others to take care of the things that are up to me to take care of); I am a misfit (I should fit); I am as I am (I should be other than I am). The people who suggest that I grow up and get on with things don’t like me as I am. If I was to say to them that they simply don’t like me, they would (I suppose, as I have never put this to them) deny it vehemently. They like me as the me that has grown up and got on with things. They like all the choices that I didn’t make, and as a result like the me that those choices. They envisage liking the m e that will go on to make those choices. And they have the audacity to tell me that they live in the world made real this world ( real ). I am suspicious. These people seem rather too well acquainted with this other (possible) incarnation of me. Where and when did they get to meet him in order to come to the realisation that they liked him so very much? I think maybe I’d like to meet him. The Zombie Fairytale. Charles longed to be a zombie, and was plagued by the argument that stated that there could never be such things as zombies or automata, not even transient 487

ones, because the whole concept of a zombie is incoherent cept being, that the world might have been in all respects the same as tual world is, apart from the fact that there would be . That con- the ac- nothing that would have conscious experience, nothing it would be like to be a zombie. Charles found the argument against the possible existence of zombies himself to believe it. There had to be a logic ally sound, but could not bring cure for the disease of consciousness that didn’t involve Dahmer drilling holes into your skull and drizzling corrosive fluids onto the soft flesh of your brain. Without the possibility of zombies what was there to aspire to? He ed curse d those that had discovered consciousness, construct- it and given it a life of its own – who were those Frankensteins of phenomenology? those qualia monster makers? raw feel fabricators? Descartes is a prime suspect; the rest are on our files. We didn’t even have consciousness here until the mid-seventeenth century. Before that, all enjoyed (as only those who cannot feel enjoy) the sweet dead life of the zombie. But Charles did not long for death; he longed for his existence to be unquestionable, to be relieved of the burden of consciousness without dying. Consciousness as it stood was unacceptable: vain, intrusive, and masochistic. “Was there ever a time to be unlike myself?” he asked. The circular layout of Pavilionstone’s streets means you are always coming back on yourself; one’s self is never left behind for long. THE POST-LUNCH LECTURE And I saw the future Impaled on its cruel coils, A murdered mouse sliding down the glass. 488

– Richard Howard, ‘Intimations of Mortality’ “We have three problems: One, we all want to live longer. Two, the world is already crowded and overpopulated. Three, we want to remain the same persons and so be able to have genuine (accounted for) I-thoughts. A solution would involve something that made it possible to reduce the amount of space a person takes up while allowing persons to exist indefinitely long. I have provided you with just such a solution. Some people talk of ‘body sharing,’ or ‘time-share brains,’ or ‘invisible overcrowding,’ or even ‘part-time existence,’ but I put it to you that part-time existence, if that’s what you want to call it, is better than most if not all of the other alternatives, given the spatial restrictions. “Now there is of course another route we could take, and I’ll pass over to Mr Lance Noggin at this point and let him put the case for culling.” Professor P. stepped out a from behind the lectern and went peripatetically bout the stage looking at the crowd, asking something of their silence. He knew even Woolly couldn’t come back with anything that need concern him on this issue: he was beat, void and the fact that he sat in his chair a ing eye contact and looking at his wrist- watch told of it. P. knew what mattered, and yet he still gave them what they wanted: their logic, their reference, their language. Who wouldn’t want just one more day? Even that desperate cunt with a cap full of snot and buttons sitting on the street begging for alms wouldn’t turn his nose up at it; even the guy whose adored wife and children have just been ploughed down by a car and killed wants one more day of grieving. Think of all the sufferers the world puts up with, and then compare that with how many are actually wanting and actively striving to die. “A gift without break, the gift of gifts: that is what you I’m offering . But as you will all know, a gift is never free….” Lance made his pitch. It went to a vote and the case for culling won out: too many, it seems, were squeamish about P.’s alternative, whether they accepted his logic or not, and most did. 489

this Oh yes, all is the result of free-will at work, of democracy, of majority rule; all this was consciously sanctioned by all those with voices to be heard, or, should I say, by all those with voices deemed worth hearing. If this was forced on people, they are no longer with us, and really, when you look at the bigger picture, they weren’t worth hanging on to. There was a global referendum (you can’t say fairer than that): the world’s first, but by no means its last, and we all voted to forgo any future generations der that we might achieve all in or- immortality. When I say all, I do not of course mean all: I am simply attempting to indicate the overwhelming levels of subscription to the New Way. For instance, a good chunk of America’s bible belt were, initially at least, very hostile to what they believed to be the Devil’s thumbs a tw it ching with a fearsome feverishness, and they reviled those who professed to do God’s work better than the man himself. They denounced Headway Corp, Lance Noggin and all his minions as wily imps of Satan. They refused to sacrifice their paradise in the heavens and offend their master for the sake of an abomination on earth. But only the real die-hards held out once the vote was in and the heathen self-importance of the world’s population had been well and truly heard. Still, despite being a rarity, such enclaves of resistance were not altogether insignificant in number: you had the Buddhists (Nirvana was good but you couldn’t propose waiting for it forever), the Roman Catholics (pious and kipperish to the last), the Hindus (a disparate bunch it made with man- must be said, although most took issue eternity, choosing instead to promote Sanātana Dharma), and certain Islamists (who saw it as the final battle of jihad, and as an excuse to indulge in their passion for explosives) to name but a few. On the whole, the Jews were no real problem; 490

most came around to the idea without too much persuasion, for they are it must be said an eminently pragmatic people. Nobody really knew what they were getting into. They around them look ed in the mirror, and at the those y loved in addition, and thought they knew what they had to do. For starters, nobody thought they’d be denied an exit should they desire it, as Lance had at this stage neglected to share his all too literal programme of deathlessness with anyone. To be immortal is to be free of death, not to walk in its shadow for as long as one chooses. THE BAD LOGIC OF SENTIMENTALITY God, the great validator, would not deceive her as to her memories and any deductions reliant on them, according to Descartes, but I would. In saving her from doubt I will give her existence to someone else. I would have to lie to her, should she be there to be lied to. I must swamp her with alien quasi -memories, saturate her to such a degree that should any home-grown quasi- memories attempt to surface they will instead drown like worms in the sodden earth . Not even her pineal gland can save her now. When I discovered first that she was dead, and for days, weeks and months afterwards, I shuffled around like an old man in a large and increasingly unfamiliar house. Like poor Aston after his disruptive ECT, I could not for the life of me get my thoughts together. But it is different now. Now I have my own shed to build (so to speak), my own preparations to make. But I, unlike poor afflicted Aston, have the will to commence with my plan s just as soon as the world conspires in their favour. 491

I had Elizabeth’s body buried. For some reason I had an aversion and spun around in a huge drum with steel balls to to break her body being burnt down the bones: too pro- cedural, too hurried, too mechanised. The allotted space for cremated bodies is tawdry: a necropolis for small but much beloved pets: hamsters, goldfish and the like. So demure, not wanting to take up too much space, excusing yourself in death. Fuck that! Fuck that! Fuck four up five down like Blake! Fuck multi-storey graves, piled up on top of one another like corpse kebabs! Take up as much fucking room as you can, in as ostentatious a manner, for you have earned it. If not, then fling yourself down the toilet and be done with it. I wanted her body to rot away slowly, to be given time to properly decompose. She had without doubt been cut about during the autopsy, and most certainly been treated disrespectfully, the butt of at least one piece of juvenile death humour. I have come to realise that none of this matters. Not one bit. I should even be unperturbed if someone in the know was to tell me that Elizabeth’s body had been voted most popular ride at some Annual Necrophilia Convention. For similar reasons, I cannot beg in to understand people that devote their lives to looking after loved ones that have suffered extreme brain damage, so severe as to rid them of any psychological traits once peculiar to them. What a waste of time. Why are they doing it? Duty. Duty to what? So much woolly thinking and empty-headed meliorism disguised as respect or valuable sentiment, so much frightened, self-serving bollocks dressed up as martyrdom and saintliness. So you’ve sacrificed every waking hour for the past 30 years for the sake of your daughter who is so mentally handicapped that she cannot even negotiate a spoon into her mouth. Well aren’t you the cunt! (If you’ll pardon my ad hominem.)50 You see these smug twats with their coach loads of unfortunates down by the seaside, pushing their damaged cargo along the promenade in wheelchairs, and while they are relishing the break of the waves, the cries of happy children and the cool breeze tempering the warmth of the sun, their cargo stares at its knees, twitching and drib- bling, screaming uncontrollably, completely oblivious to its surroundings. Advocates of what I shall call the Smug Twat Martyr View51 claim that per- sonal identity goes along with a person’s basic psychology and to a certain extent with the realizers of that 50 Once again, in the spirit of Kundera, I am attempting to keep my tone “playful, ironic, provocative, experimental, or inquiring.” 51 Please do not interpret this label as in any way indicative of eristic reasoning on my part. 492

basic psychology. By basic psychology they mean those mental capacities that are possessed by all normal human beings, notably the ir capacity to reason, in at least a rudimentary way, and their capacity to form some simple intentions. Everyone’s basic psychology is – by definition – the same. The criterion for personal identity on which the Smug Twat Martyr View relies is something like the following: Person Y at this time is the same as person Z at some future time iff (1) from the present physical realizer of Y’s psychology to the physical realizer of Z’s psychology at that future time, there is sufficient continuous physical realization of enough central aspects of Y’s present psychology and [probably] (2) {some clause suitable for ruling out unwanted cases of branching}. Here we see ‘basic psychology’ contrasted with ‘peculiar psychology’. Whereas basic psychology is all-important for supporters of the Smug Twat Martyr View, peculiar psychology is of very little importance when considering our By peculiar psychology I mean those elements persistence of conditions. my psychology that single me out from some or all other normal human beings e.g., my autobiographical memories, character traits, desires, fears, etc. I tend to think that this distinction is rather artificial , and that one’s reasoning capacities and self-consciousness are intimately linked with one’s memories, desires, fears, etc. But I digress. If one’s beloved wife were to change, by means of some tragic accident, from a friendly, gregarious, intelligent and loving partner, to an unsympathetic, cretinous loner with a disagreeable and vindictive charac- ter , wouldn’t we find that bond of love weakened to such an extent that one would no longer have any existent reason to favour her interests over some stranger’s? One might, for a time, try hard to connect the memories of how she was and one’s deep regard for her at that time to how she is at present. [Claim yourself! Be all you can be! Torture: Brand her flesh! Gag her mouth! Bind legs until they turn blue! Piss in her eyes! Shit in her ears! Slice her open 493

with razors and cheese-wire! Splinter her bones! Snap her in two! Open her rectum with your nails! Tear her cunt apart with dildos!... nail-skewered Is n’t this the true mark of man ?...] But the memories no longer fit anyone and so, unfortunately, neither do the emotions so tied up with them. To continue to love this disagreeable cretin and to treat her no differently to how she was treated before the tragic accident would be tantamount to derangement rather than genuine love. [Love her with your fists until her cheeks implode into her mouth and she chokes on her broken teeth…] If offered a pre-accident duplicate of your wife, in return for the painless destruction of your actual wife, I believe that it would be too tempting to pass up. Your deep regard for your wife’s previous demeanour will dictate your answer. In the case above, what could motivate someone to opt for the destruction of the pre-accident duplicate of their wife rather than for the destruction of their post-accident wife? [A hideous stranger with limp, gangrenous limbs and a cupre- ous smile, her head encased in ed a sculpture of twist- metal, with bars and rivets driven into her soft scalp, half dead and crammed full of lice, the victim of repeated brain violations, half-eaten blood machine feeding a crow’s heart, a vacant mugshot for a face and a mudslide for a mouth. That’s the truth, Eric. Why on would you want take the advice of some hunk of metal whose noti of reality appears confined to what happens? Come on! You of all people… You’re better than that….] Because, advocates of the Smug Twat Martyr View would no doubt reply, the latter is still one’s wife as opposed to a mere duplicate of one’s wife. Let us now investigate what such an answer might amount to. If your beloved wife was to be reduced to a disagreeable cretin as a result of some tragic accident, then there is little doubt that you would wish that the accident had never happened, or that you had it within your power to return your wife to her former condition. But what if your wife was in a persistent vegetative state as a result of the accident? In this case, in addition to these 494 un-

real istic wishes, you might wish that she had died in the accident, or that she pass away quickly and painlessly and not live too long as a vegetable. It is entirely likely that you would think thoughts of the form, ‘She might as well have died!’ and mean them, so that if you were offered a pre-accident duplicate of your wife in return for your wife’s painless death, there could be nothing, I suggest, to dissuade you from accepting the offer. [Which do you take home from the labour ward, the baby or the meconium?...] Of course this does not yet make a case against the Smug Twat Martyr View, because your vegetable wife no longer has any basic psychology and so advocates of this view could agree with the rational e that might lead you to choose the pre-accident duplicate of your wife over your post-accident wife. However, what this case does show is that bodily or (more specifically) animal continuity, in the absence of any other continuity, is of no, or at least very little, importance as far as our loved ones’ continued existence is concerned. [Are those threads at the back of the man’s sketchy, scar-ridden face? Two escapees from a knot, maybe. The two lovers’ lower ends meet – legs desperate and entangled. Her nipple resembles a bullethole or a cigarette burn. The variegated building-block constructions either side of our two lovers could be toy trains, or even the frames of Victorian bathing chalets. The man has a dislocated arm with a hand that looks like a huge molar. A dent in the back of his head is discharg e ing ink lik angry squid: a smudge in the thin air, a defence mechanism, a smokescreen of some dying a thoughts. Unlike the delicate pouting of his kiss, there’s re l force in the way he clasps his hand around her neck and cheek. Her eyes are clenched shut for fear of seeing what is so excrutiatingly transient. Her lips are unresponsive in the end, as if she had already left him. The d ead r of some imminent time does this. It takes you long before you go, but not all of you: it leaves enough behind to suffer....] Let us now look at the differences between the disagreeable cretin wife case and the vegetable wife case, and see if they can ground any differences in the way in which we approach them. In the disagreeable cretin wife case, brain matter that is physically continuous with that which realized the pre-accident wife’s core psychology realizes the post-accident wife’s core psychology. But, according to advocates of the Smug Twat 495

Martyr View, everyone’s basic psychology is the same, so how can this be what you (as her devoted husband) are particularly attached to? What you value about your wife’s existence are surely not capacities that are present in every other normal human being on earth, nor are you particularly attached to a section of your wife’s brain matter. Your wife’s new distinctive psychology cannot be relevant here, as it is completely different to anything before witnessed in your wife and certainly not something that you are favourable towards. What other differences are left that could constitute a reason for opting for the destruction of the pre-accident duplicate in place of your post-accident wife? There are none, at least none that can legitimately be thought to reflect your love for your wife. It could be argued that my account is morally unpalatable, because it advocates a notion of love that cashes-in sufficiently damaged loved ones for more agreeable pre-damage duplicates, and that it is in fact this notion of love that is superficial and impoverished, as opposed to the Smug Twat Martyr View’s. After all, doesn’t such a notion of love just serve to promote the lover’s convenience and desires rather than those of the object of that love? In answer to such an allegation I should have to ask by what properties or relations the Smug Twat Martyr View’s notion of love is sustained in the above examples. It cannot be sustained, as I have argued, by a portion of brain matter, nor can it be sustained by a basic psychology that, by definition, is shared by every other normal human being on earth. All that is left, and indeed what advocates of the Smug Twat Martyr View spend a lot of time focusing on, are the prolonged relations between lover and loved one that existed in the time previous to cerebral damage. But how can these past relations sustain the continuance of a special sense of duty in light of the catastrophic changes that have occurred, changes that have, after all, destroyed the very framework that had sustained those relations? What we might have had reasons to do in the past cannot dictate what we will continue to have reasons to do in the future, especially when the future can no longer uncover any support for those reasons. You cannot just find this unpalatable. You cannot just turn away with scorn, you self-righteous imbecile; you have to be able to disprove; you have to be able to come up with that magic element wherein your sense of duty and attachment can reside. But you can’t can you. You can’t do it. soul And don’t you mention the word ‘ ’ to me! Don’t you fucking dare! Please have the decency to keep a lid on your very personal reasons for believing in the existence of an immaterial soul and the magazine or TV show from which you gleaned them. Magnets had souls according to Thales of Miletus. Magnets possessing souls supposedly explained their ability to move iron, which, it seems to me, makes as much sense as anything else having a soul and of why they might have them. THE POLYSYLLOGISTIC CURSE Intellectual work leads practically nowhere. – Arthur Rimbaud’s Mother Here s its not Reginald Woolly observing yet a her ball-breaking Chrysippan silence. His left hand scribbles notes of angry negation into a busy loose-leaf folder. He is, as is always to be expected these days, seated between what it is safe for most of us to call two heaps of wheat grains – one considerably smaller than the other, but increasing in size all the time in perfect harmony with the larger heap’s depletion. A 100 watt bulb sheds its unsophisticated light about the cluttered room as the sun, lurching, tries, with no concept of failure to dishearten it, to break through the inch-thick drapes which haven’t been parted in over 496

a year. On the table in the corner of the room , by a heavily-bolted front door, are five mounds of long grain rice, a single mound of peanut M&Ms, and two mounds of builder’s sand. On another table by the window are 500 five-legged ants in a glass tank alongside which, in another, exactly similar tank, are 500 six-legged ants; in both tanks a pair of silver tweezers and a magnifying glass are just visible amid the tumult of shiny black bodies. Reginald Woolly is searching for a universal algorithm for the detection of clarity, so that it might be clear whether some collection of beans/seed/wheat x is clearly a heap or not, thus enabling him to rid his toolbox of those pesky, embarrassed silences and ‘don’t k now s,’ leaving him with a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ and nothing more. He wants and needs (and has already started) to make the move from infallibility to omniscience. He had spent years wasting his time with nihilism, starting off local, but turning global within hours. (He had also toyed with Halldén’s and Körner’s nonsense logic, but ultimately found both versions unreasonable.) Back then he could be seen strutting about dressed from head to toe in black, accentuating the graveyard pallor of his face, with his well-thumbed copy of Begriffsschrift clutched under his armpit. Everything was empty at that time, every thought, every concept, and every word an empty casing that crumbled and dispersed into its natural state of incompleteness. He once drew himself up some sandwich boards that read ‘THE END OF OUR WORLD NEVER HAD A BEGINNING,’ and walked through the town on weekends wearing them and answering questions of those genu- inely intrigued by the plight of all thinking people. He had always, ever since the day his epiphanic quest for clarity had begun, found it hard to accept that the boundaries of his words, his concepts, and his thoughts were invisible to him; he was an unwilling subscriber, and constantly looking to overcome the bleak desperation that leads one to global nihilism, but for years he was unable to see past the emptiness he had found. 497

That fat men were thin, old men young, the bald hirsute, the dead living, heaps non-heaps, rich men poor, many few, and the ugly beautiful, proved to be a constant reminder of his being ostracised from the world in which he lived, and that every other living creature was in the same boat mattered not, appeased him not, and not only because most every single one of them had no idea of their in al- here their world, but for other reasons as well. But little-by-little he nt remoteness from move d away from nihilism and found hope in ignorance, in the thunder of millet seed and his grandmother’s extravagantly helical ear horn. There had always been phalakros paradoxes everywhere he’d turned, but now he was confronted by one every time he looked in the mirror – now it was personal: the essential indexical had come along and pierced the skin. He couldn’t be arranging sets of mirrors in many elaborate configurations, in order to make visible every square millimetre of his head, with no hope of ever satisfying his question one way or the other. If the loss of a single hair follicle from some full head of hair always leaves a full head of hair, then successive losses of single hair follicles still leave a full head of hair – if only it did not work the other way around as well he might have been able to console himself, to let valid argumentation lie to him, but it did, so that was that. If Galen knew of nothing worse and more absurd than transgressing the Tolerance Principle, then he never had to contemplate his own hair loss with no hope of ever knowing whether or not he was bald. He hears a yelp from an adjacent room and rushes to investigate. On entering what was once advertised as a spare bedroom (which he has since transformed into a laboratory of sorts, filled with computers, measuring devices, dials and indices of all shapes and sizes, levers, cantilevers, alembic-like weighing machines, and caged animals, including cats, dogs and rats) he looks up at an LCD that reads 1,293, and sighs. Reginald is still toying with statistical regularities in – all too many – variations of word or symbol application when he wants so much to move beyond it, to free himself from that envelops him whole and without break or cleft. 498 the ecliptic shroud of ignorance

Patch is lying on the floor of his cage, his spine snapped in two, foaming and bleeding at the mouth, his legs at corrupted angles. Reginald scratches his head and runs his hands agitatedly through his hair, and then thinks better of it and checks his fingers for signs of any dislodged follicles, of which there are, on this occasion, none. Recorded on the LCD is the total number of lead shot added to his weight transference machine before Patch’s spinal cord gave way under the pressure. The lead balls were dropped into a huge dish that directly conveyed their accumulative weight to a series of levers and finally to a press down pump that ed onto the middle of (in this case) Patch’s back, allowing Reginald to have the weight of in excess of a thousand balls condensed small workable area. (Who could hope to stack hundreds of anything within tively tight space into the a rela- offered by a dog’s back? He didn’t have the room or the money to test on animals with more spacious backbones, such as elephants, or even, to go down the traditional route, camels.) He had lost count of the backs he had snapped; it ran into the hundreds, and he hadn’t finished yet. Reginald looks down at poor old Patch and doubts that he appreciates that he is a living (well, just) example of a Hegelian preoccupation: the fact that quantitative difference instigates qualitative difference. You might think that these tests have little to do with Reginald’s obsession with vagueness, but you’d be wrong; they have everything to do with it, even if they are not obviously relevant to the existence of objects about which it is (or appears to be at least) impossible to say with any certainty whether any given term is applicable. Reginald Woolly was, always has been to my knowledge, and still is, an unfortunate looking creature. eyes over a I wouldn’t mention it but for the fact that I have never cast my more clumsily put together individual in all my time spent encountering indi- vidual upon individual. His badly managed facial features are really rather remarkable: his face being not so much ugly as jumbled, not so much abhorrent to behold as confusing; Pi- 499

casso never misused a tired and wearisome mistress in pencil , ink or oil with quite the level of contempt for order and balance displayed by Reginald’s designer of flesh and bone. His mouth, with its stringy lips and its dancing tongue, is not unlike a lizard’s. His nose is markedly off-centre, with one nostril considerably larger than the other, and unfortunately this lop-sizing of nostrils does nothing to balance out the nose being situated too far to the right; in fact, as if to piss in that drowning man’s mouth as he gasps for air, it actually accentuates the distorted logistics of his nasal placement. He is a squat man, standing only 5ft 2in. (the average height of a fifth-form schoolgirl) in his specially designed shoes, that give him an extra inch, hidden someplace between insole and heel – who could tell just where? If you drew an imaginary horizontal line from the his left eye across the bridge of his nose and over to his face you to the right -hand side p of of would come across the bottom of his right eye. His eyes differ in size – an get imbalance at times rectified by his conjunctivitis (not to for I’m dealing with one his gingivitis – while it is – which, aside from gums that keep their blood on the outside, causes him to have halitosis and loose teeth) which can tend to affect one eye more than the other and so, as luck would have it, on occasion actually help balance out the horizon- tal plane of his face. His ears – who could forget the ears? – are, to speak in their favour, approximately the same size; however, they are ridiculously small given the hugeness of the head on which they rest. And, of course, he is losing his hair. 500

To the casual observer, Reginald is just an Epistemicist who is somewhat reluctant to accept the necessity of his ignorance, a man engaged in an obsessive theoretical game of hide and seek with a particularly slippery quarry – the cut-off digit – and this cannot simply be dismissed as mere appearance, for there is a sense in which he is doing just that; but this would not be an entirely accurate appraisal of how he sees himself, and it is, after all, as any good Supervaluationist will tell you, only one sharpening of what it is he might be doing, which might be precisified in any number of different ways. Reginald would describe him- me self as a man going out on a limb, imperilling mind and soul, to overco ignorance, to dissect the penumbral blur of our words one by one – although it would be an enormous weight off his shoulders if he could just manage the one. Reginald is not much liked and, in keeping with the ways typical of loners, puts little effort into finding reasons to like others. Even his parents, who, both in their 660th year should, like fragile coastlines, be feeling the merciless erosion of time, have little to do with him and his pedantic and querulous ways. You only need to be told that as a boy he was known by the tag, ‘Igor,’ to get a fairly ac- it curate picture of Reginald’s lab-days: those of a lonely child who spent the major y of his time dreaming, reading and making dauntless efforts to ignore, but preferably to foil in some way, his many tormentors. However, despite his having lacked familial and non-familial bonds throughout his formative years and beyond, he is not indifferent to the existence and 501

opinions of others, for he has spent too many years involving himself with the blissfully uninformed to be able to turn his back on them or enjoy his intellectual pursuits without scheming about some future time when he will be in a position to embarrass certain people, alarm others, and – best of all – completely crush and demoralise a tiny sub-population of thinkers whose work has managed not only to get under his skin, but to live and breed there, nestled amid an ever-thickening layer of fat. There is one particular subcutaneous scholar that has done more damage than most on the chagrin-inducing stakes, and that, not unexpectedly, is none other than Professor P. himself. As far as Reginald is concerned, P. is a degree theorist with a hard on for immortality that he hides behind a neatly interwoven blanket of soulless psychology. Reginald despises him and all he stands for, hates that he is so successful, and is genuinely disturbed about where his research and the popularity of its implications among men and women of influence is leading a world full of poor blind fools unable to find logic and clarity. Reginald refuses to be just another fool, even if he is the only one refusing (which he isn’t). But he is used to being alone anyway, used to a hostile reception from humankind, and so shall not be fazed by being the wrong side of a ratio that reads, The World: One. “No more facts to come. We know them all. They are all on full display. But why, then, do my words continue to resonate like slow footsteps in empty tombs, like the rapping of knuckles on suits of armour in cobwebbed stately homes? The honeycomb centres that make our symbols for this world so light will not be filled in, have their wormhole cavities made matter, by your conjunctions that not only allow contradictions to become half-truths but, as is found with the babble of drunks, are unable to distinguish repetition from contradiction. And it do es not stop there. No, the abominations keep on coming and you pass over them as vain men pass over ugly women, with neither a smile nor a nod of recognition. You would have me live with my being bald or not bald qualifying as no truer than my being bald or being a woman; you see no oddity in your degree functionality account of conditionals deriving perfect truths from half-truths, and now you want, on the basis of this travesty of truth, to eradicate persons from the face of the globe. Well here is one man that won’t be lying down to be told what matters, allowing my self to be ripped from me before I have had time to locate it.” 502

He thumps his fist down on one of his many desktops, and a pile of Escher prints flutter to the floor. As he picks up the scattered reproductions of woodcuts, engravings and lithographs, he cannot help but think that maybe now an answer will come, as his eyes run right to left and back again for the meeting of Tag und Nacht, from top to bottom in the Luft und Wasers, as he falls into the wonderland of Drehstrudel he looks for where outside becomes acknowledge the in looking for the end, as side in Belvedere and even takes time to desperation of the prisoner who is denied access to the puzzle (and its possible solution) that consumes all those free to wander, which Reginald feels is the mirror image of his own predicament. Then, almost without warning, his red eyes start to glaze over with tears, and the skin where his lips should be begins to tremble and quake. A tear drops off the end of his nose onto one of the apexes of the stellar dodecahedron resting in his lap, and he wipes it away, with some urgency, into a collection of junk: a broken pipe, an empty sardine tin, a piece of string, a broken bottle, a broken egg shell… He sits there and env is ions a time when order will come to him glinting with magnificent purity from deep beneath the frowsty, stygian appurtenances of day-to-day living; the day is coming as sure as death once was, and sometimes he thinks that the two might be bringing about the other He is . one sure that he will be able to walk on the glass- iest of surfaces, and that to be a friction-lover is to be consoled with bling for soot while the world goes up , either one in 503 a puff of smoke. scram-

Time is running out. Reginald sets his prints back on the desk in an or- derly pile and gets to his feet. He has only 7 more days to cross off before P.’s inaugural lecture at The Headway Institute for Practical Metaphysics, and is nowhere near fully prepared to face all the possible onslaughts that might be levelled at his theories, although he does regard himself suitably equipped to successfully put his case against P. and his cronies. What he isn’t at all sure of is whether he will actually be given the chance to express himself in such prestigious, influential and, more importantly, antagonistic company. He realises that he will need something spectacular to convince the opposition and dissuade them from their misguided attempts to condense and elongate the existence of persons by denying their true essence, and he believes he has devised just such a source of persuasion, only it needs work and he cannot be sure whether a week will be enough to complete his task. One must not get the idea that Reginald is entirely alone in his beliefs, although one would be correct in thinking him isolated with regard to the methods he employs. There are indeed others who are fearful of the rather sudden ascend- ance of Professor P. and his Reductionist policies, but they are an essentially disparate bunch which offer little in the way of presentable, predicable support for their arguments, relying rather too heavily on the swaying power of classical logic and faith in the existence of unobservable logical objects. In a world of empiricists – see-to-believers – they find themselves, almost all of a sudden (at least in an academic sense of ‘sudden’), progressively outnumbered. Reginald, or so he hoped, was about to change all this, and finally demonstrate, for the eyes to see, the pure impredicative glory of logical time, reveal a world that our words we stopped looking truth have come beyond them s. He would, for the first to hide from us ever since for me their aning. He has told nobody of his recent breakthroughs, not even those in his department who sympathise with him and his philosophical perspective; 504 in fact, he has been so silent

during his 6-month sabbatical that members of his faculty, and indeed those from without, are harbouring suspicions as to his recent developments. Since he moved into flat, this nobody else has set foot inside it; only the secretary of his philosophy department knows of his address, and he has given strict instructions that it not be disclosed to anyone. She has stuck to her word and hasn’t revealed the whereabouts of his flat to a single soul. Reginald bends down, takes hold of Patch’s tail, and flings him into a huge black sack hanging in the corner of the room, the contents of which he will dispose of at a later date, and then shuffles back to a heap of grain in the other room and sits down. MUGSHOT COLLAGE …the book is being composed, and decomposed, under his very eye. – Robert Pinget I can hear overweight men to bears – and blue tat covered in thick black hairs – back os, snapping the front teeth off pre-pubescent sex slaves with dirty pliers, so they may gobble their punters’ pricks with newfound ease. gaps s like grizzly Fill the in Katarina’s teeth! I can hear the seasoning of ruined girls on every street I pace; I can hear their bruises bubbling to the surface, the screeching of cheap plastic shoes all strap and heel, and girls sobbing into pillows, while unctuous, ursine men – the black-haired, blue-tattooed men – smoke cigarettes and wonder what it would take to feel bad about themselves and the things they do. They hold their heads in their hands and listen to the stifled weeping of defeat curled up on the bed beside them. They maybe wonder why they are not more touched by the hurt they inflict, why someone else’s fear and suffering are no more than piquing noises in their ears, sounds of success, the flick book fluttering of notes, the groans of satisfied customers. I hear it all. I hear it all, and carry on walking where 505 I’m

going . I hear the needles sliding in and out of anal openings, dragging bloody cot- ton stitches behind them as they go, to make things tight again, to bring back the illusion of first-timer-ism – just a couple of stitches and their good to go. (Always white cotton, never black: the blood stains the white cotton and allows the stitches to blend into the background.) It doesn’t take long for a cotton-clutcher to become cotton-clutched: a few weeks, maybe a month. I hear 12 o’clock shadow cutting into soft young thighs like a cheese grater. And somewhere else, not here, never here, someone knows her legs are parted wrongly. I hear a pre-teen starlet struggling to the reveal deception of the curare ‘anaesthetic’ under which she cannot fall to the men cutting her with scalpels who are already well aware of what it is she cannot tell them – her translatable excruciating un- agony, the torture from which she cannot even flinch, all the epiphanies that an otherwise epiphenomenal pain can bestow. I head away from the tightly-coiled streets, away from the cacophony of lowed pain drowning out my thoughts swal- , until finally I reach The Leas. 506

Not a parasol or perambulator to be seen; no boaters or bowlers adorn a head; no bath chairs, no prayer book spines glint in the Sunday sun: the promenading public are no more. And Judy has a fouler mouth outside of Mr Hayes’s hands, and no three Queens will come to watch her as she belts her man and shouts the odds. Radnor’s bobs, all decked out in blue and braided gold, are long since gone, the undesirables spared a rap from their stunted canes. Two bandstands down and one to go, and you’ll have to crane your ear to hear Newmann’s Red Hungarians blow through Worm’s Blue Viennese, should you ever get beyond the music of our trees. List Do any make the Visitor s ’ now ? Not many, if any, could really hope for that. All are general now you know, and wouldn’t think to Court beyond. From the east end you can spy 3 Albion Villas, where Dickens resided for three months while writing Little Dorrit one must suppose because one is told, rattling off his prose to the measured fall of dead men’s feet down Remembrance Hill. Charles, writer in residence at the present time, a few streets from his namesake’s brief abode, scratches out his words, but still as yet no rooms in pubs named after him. Just down the road in a tool-shed-to-be H.G. Wells had scandal in Spades, and brought along Chesterton, Henry James, G.B. Shaw, Arnold Bennett and Conrad to stay. Public amusements are still scarce, and murder on the sandhills still frowned upon it seems. Too few severed legs and hands to stub a toe on Pavilionstone sands. No longer are there fences to keep wandering feet off grass, all is flat and, with the odd exception, rather sparse. Some daughters still show themselves about, but without their mothers on their arms, and eligible only by the hour. Down the cobbles on your right at number 10 was once the home of The Beehive Wireless Depot, when wirelesses were the want of passers-by. But its most recent incarnation, before its windows were painted in and pushed in, was as a shop selling fake lace frills in black and red, for wives to excite the eyes of their hubbies and lure them back to bed. Knickers less their gussets, peephole bras for pink protruding eyes, suspenders dangling in the window, less a pair of thighs. The goods weren’t made to last. The styles were passé – 507

we ain’t talking haute couture, more brassy than classy, a little fruit to dress the plate and nothing more . Most men looked in, few stepped in, even fewer women. But some skirt would, on occasion, set the brass bell ringing inside this emporium of lightweight sleaze: I’d say five or six a week. The proprietor wasn’t in it for the money, that much could be safely said. Nevertheless, he was there day. He stood firm on h six days a week from 9:00 A.M. till 5:30 P.M. and rarely missed a is non-returns policy and with good reason you might think. After all, who wants used undies? Apart, that is, from men send who £10 cheques or postal , those orders to porky house- wives in dirty bunny slippers for the chance to sniff between their legs, and dream, and make-believe their source. Most don’t even wear the knickers they send out in jiffy bags, even a quick wipe is seen as too much trouble: they spray the soft porous gussets with canned synthetic muskiness (some essence of cunt manufactured by the same ple who have the gall to bring you port and peo- stilton flavoured crisps) and laugh as they think of all those gullible tossers getting worked up over something that’s been no closer to a twat than they have. He would encourage his female customers to consider trying before buying, repeating the spiel about his goods being non-returnable by way of cajolement. The changing room (he had only the one) had a full-sized door with a bolt on the inside to make the changer feel secure as they shed their clothes and donned whatever skimpy garb they’d picked out. If he’d simply had a curtain separating the changing room space from the rest of the shop, then an 508

it element of caution and coyness would have resulted in a lim ed disclosure of body parts, whereby yet-to-be-purchased knickers are pulled over those already in residence, and bras are removed through the arms of T-shirts. The room was fitted with a chair to precipitate comfortable, unrushed disrobing; he would say, “No rush, take your time.” As a woman entered the changing room he would always nip out the back of the shop, and would return to the counter and make as if rearranging stock a couple of minutes before she exited with her verdict. There was, of course, a surveillance camera concealed behind the mirror. I believe that he was recording them in add it ion to getting some gratification right there and then with them still on the premises, there being no danger of being rumbled, what with the brass bell is on the door of the shop and h being able to guarantee that the customer was within the confines of the changing room, as opposed to sneaking up behind him while he toiled over his manhood. Before buying the shop, he used to supply and fit surveillance equipment, mostly to large companies, but with the odd private venture. Even once the shop was up and running he would install such gadgetry on Sundays and weekday evenings. Needless to say, he never mentioned the shop to any of his clients, and invariably did such work on the outskirts of town, away from the cobbles. I people just don’t think he ever got caught. I think stopped coming to the shop and so he shut it down. He probably still has his stash of recordings, including a few favourites that he watches again and again. Prehistoric-looking gulls tear the dead apart in the streets. I see them fighting over some old soak’s liver, over discarded fetuses that have spilled out from the holes pecked in bin bags… photos of Modiesque, blank-eyed hookers trussed up like turkeys flutter free from their beaks… Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi once came here. He was on board a ship that do cked at Pavilionstone harbour. Gandhi, man of peace, came here and left. If he were 509

here now maybe he’d fast unto death to highlight our plight, as he was always a one for fasting. If in doubt, fast unto death! It was truly remarkable just how many times this man could fast unto death – the world’s first cheater of death perhaps, a precursor to the new world beyond these walls. As I pushed my feet through what to me unseen were autumn leaves on winter floors, I inclined my gaze and saw the leaves were printed paper burnt a long time back, page leaves of some book, singed and desiccated, black-edged and curled up around my shoes. I grasped a handful, and read two of the segments that had managed to stay in one piece. This one: uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from its hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted. Murderer’s ground. What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be Followed by this one: was sitting. He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know I kept them with the intention of confirming their origins, with the intention of rereading them as if they were somehow portentous. Queens House, that oblong monstrosity, all metal-framed glass and white blinds, with all the architectural flair of an accumulation of sticklebricks, was once the Queen’s Hotel in all its Victorian splendour. The offices for our local rag sit on the foundations of a medieval town house built pre 1400s and demolished in 1916. The comparison whiffs of criminality and 510

disregard, of young, free men pissing on hacks scrawl out n on e - the graves of old soldiers. Half-baked vents in passionless, ill-constructed prose on Bail St: the un- readable heralding the unimportant. And now nobody can run their hands along its quaint clumsiness. Down the road a little, 60 or more O.A.P.s rot in the red and yellow bricks of Glendale. ‘Glendale’? Fucking ‘Glendale’: who thinks up these names? Valleyvalley. It’s nowhere near a fucking valley. (Maybe it’s an allusion to Kenneth Bianchi and predicted body counts.) Flies clung to Chops the size of the insides of ribcages in a carcass wall down Butcher Row. your arm swung from the outside edge of window frames. Bring death back out onto the streets where we can see it! Let us inhale the depths of its caverns! Let us see our Kidders squirm! Now there are butchers forcing hysterectomies on pregnant women in their back rooms and selling the resulting ‘S the at urn Haggis’ to ir special customers. (They strangle the mothers, cut the baby out and put it straight into marinade before the lungs have had chance to clear.) The end bu t rn still s of buildings, where the adjoining property has been demolished or down, are left raw, without sutures or cosmetics, so that see you can the old joins – one half of a Siamese twin with her guts hanging out, or a gaping whole in her head…. If you stitch enough evil together can you get a hold on it? Or will you always be able to see the joins? 511

Diseased meat is scaling the inside of my tumbler…. If shop signs can symbolise a town, as Gogol with his golden loaves believed, what then do they say of this place? Its shops say: NA I – CLOSING DOWN SALE – EVERYTHING MUST GO – CLOSED – SHOP FOR LET – GOOD RIDDANCE TO NIGGER SHIT – THE ONLY GOOD ANIMAL IS A DEAD ANIMAL – PRICES SLASHED – END OF LINE SALE – SHOP FOR RENT – NO MORE THAN ONE CHILD AT A TIME PERMITTED IN THIS SHOP UNLESS ONE OF THEM IS DEAD – CHEAP BEDS – TO LET – REDUCTIONS – MURDER SPASTICS – STOCK CLEARANCE – – HELP NEEDED – SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE DISEMBOWELLED – SAVE YOUR SOUL KILL YOUR CAT – TO LET – CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE – PAKIS GO HOME – LET US LIVE – TEAR DOWN THE WALL – NO TO ASYLUM FOR ALL – BREED TO KILL TO LIVE – MENGELE FOR MAYOR – MY SISTER WAS RAPED BY A DOG… Can I hear you weep for that ing in some dark corner of a scrap yard, signs second one to n signs of old, now corrod- speak of pride and produce , of innovation, of precious metals, and even world domi- nance? A BOTTLE OF BASS INSIST ON SEEING THE LABEL – LYONS TEA – SPECIAL NOSEGAY – BORWICK’S BAKING POWDER The Best in the World – Protect His HEALTH LIFEBOUY SOAP – GOLDMANS WASH BLUE FOR SNOW WHITE LINEN – FRYS CHOCOLATE – PEAK FREAN & CO BISCUITS – ELECTRIC MACHINE BAKERY – VELAM CHOCOLATE PUNCH – WILLS’s HAVANA GOLD CIGARS – 512 FLAKE OGDENS CIGARETTES GUINEA – GOLD

CIGARETTES – PLAYFAIRS BOOTS ALWAYS THE BEST – REYNOLDS’S NEWSPAPER… Gogol had his landowners and their dead souls; Charles had baby farmers like Harriet Mitchell and Amelia Dyer and their discarded litter of dead children, their harvest of starved bodies drowned with tape around their necks. 85+ years crammed into two small rooms – knitting projects – sticky sherry schooners – orderly clutter – pig’s trotters, dripping, lamb-shank stew, brawn – organized lunches – a multitude of yarns on the decrepit and the dead – too many photographs, and too many hours spent looking at them – calendars with no days crossed off – no mirrors – blisteringly hot radiators – TV always on like Rauschenberg’s – Zimmer frames draped in snotty hankies – the smell of rotten mince – plaid slippers soaked in piss – squadrons of head-lice guzzling the blood of thinning scalps – ulcerated legs – the sexual abuse of minors, punctuated with steaming-hot cups of tea – painted plates hanging from the walls – bloated feet with fused toes – loose bowels and loose tongues – quaking hands and blood-stained eyes – ornamental china dogs – Spitfire prints – tasselled lampshades – faded photographs – varicose veins twitching under the skin like mating larvae… CHUMPS AT THE COLONY 513

Queasy green walls cluttered with yellowing newspaper clippings, sketches, paintings, unintelligible daubs in frames, multicoloured spots in bubble wrap… It is difficult to breathe for the brooding stratocumuli rising from cigarette upon cigarette perched between the manicured nails of old fairies, the nibbled stumps of nervous artists, or the bejewelled fingers of some likely geezer, roll ing overhead spreading its sticky sap with penetrative omnipo- tence. People prop themselves along the tarnished banquettes and chatter and laugh, drop their cigarettes on the floor and tread them into the green sea of bile carpet . There is a window over that passes for by the bar and Lakok decides to head for it. “Excuse me. Sorry. Can I squeeze through?” says Lakok as he proceeds to elbow yet another person in the ribs. causing them cigarette smoke to spill some rocks from their Absolut. The is irritating his eyes and making it hard for him to see properly, and as well as bumping others he is getting progressively more disorientated as he, himself, is bumped and knocked of course f . “Want to watch where we’re fucking going then don’t we, love!” says a man in a soft falsetto. He smiles as if in reaction to a series of electric shocks. His friends titter, and he flicks at the spillage as if dismissing a particularly bedevilling Indian boy persistently begging for sustenance. “How’d a cunt like that get past the perch? How she managed to tie her shoelaces is a wonder to me. I ask you.” “What you drinking, Cunty? We got the beers you see, the spirits you see and any cocktails made from said spirits, and that’s it, and don’t fucking ask for coffee or tea because I can’t be fucked. The sarnies are all gone, so if you’re hungry best you fuck off!” The woman behind the bar turns to her two friends, addressing them both as Mary, despite the fact that one of them is a man, and asks them what they thought of her impersonation, before letting out a tremendously resonant burp. The man belches back his appreciation – Buuuuuurrrilliant – while busily fiddling with something in his pocket. 514

The barmaid stares at Triman expectantly as she sucks on the end of her Marlboro Light like it was a reed and she was submerged. She wears big black boots, blue jeans, and a striped suit jacket fresh from a cancered man’s back; she has should er length hair cropped into her face (when allowed to escape from behind her ears), no top lip to speak of, a couple of wayward incisors, and a grand, sweeping jaw-line shaped like an Amish beard. “Sometime today or I’ll have your prick nailed to a board,” she says between sticky, do ughy mouthfuls of jam donut. The icing sugar clings to her teeth like snow to the sides of trees in a winter storm. “Two vodka rocks, please.” As the barmaid prepares his drinks her two friends look up at him, look at each other, shake their heads and laugh; when Mrs Mary laughs, her eyes shut and her top set of teeth jut out from her mouth, as if taking off a Chinaman. Mr Mary picks up his large whisky and Mrs Mary strikes a match and lights her cigarette. Her hair, a shag of uncombed fleece, hangs around her long, slightly spotty face, it s features all crammed clumsily into the middle. Her heavy eyebrows lurk behind the tinted lenses of thick-rimmed spectacles. Her top row of teeth is too far forward, and some kind of lesion, blister or cold sore, sits on her bottom lip. Large silver earrings dangle from her ears. Mr Mary appears pretty well pissed. He is wearing a luminous green T shirt, and blue denim jeans and jacket. He has a boyish Dennis the Menace hairdo, a few days growth, surly eyes, a broad negroid nose, no top lip (thinner even than the barmaid’s), a thick-set face, eyebrows like Bert from Sesame Street, and a face lost to a quizzical frown, with a mouth that’s so harsh it’s always falling into a wry smile in order to save itself. He is still fiddling with something in his pocket as he leans back on his barstool and tries to attract Triman’s attention. “Pssssst!… Oi pssst!...” Triman nods in acknowledgement, and the man beckons him over: “Cumere a minute!” “It’ll have to be.” “Does art scare you?” “Not especially. No.” “Good. It scares most people. Especially the art I make: stirs them up a bit, see, makes them realise just how fuckin breakable life is. You don’t know 515

who I am do you ? … No I didn’t think so. Good. Expensive fish and chips! You what? Fuck off! Only kidding yah. Where was I; I’m all in a fuckin spin. Cunts in their suits ’n’ flash fifty-grand fuckin cars – I spend more than that in a week on taxis; cunts, they don’t impress me. They’re scared of me and what I do. They think they can control me , neutralize my art by buying it, by owning it. They think they can overcome their fear and aversion to my stuff by paying me off, by possessing it: cunts. But that’s not you, right. You’re not afraid are yah? Take a look at this!” He opens up his left trouser pocket. “See that? That’s fuckin art, go on take it out! Have a closer look ! It won’t fuckin bite yah.” All Triman can make out, as he strains his eyes to see through dense shadows and suffocating smog is, what looks like, an all but deflated balloon. He imagines that maybe this is guy some funny a going to get him to blow up the b message lloon, which will end up spelling out like, ‘Give me something small and wrinkled and I’ll blow it’ or ‘Drinks are on me!’ or ‘Queers are disease-ridden gobshite!’ He closer and then decides to just take it out and have a look. look It is s warm to the touch, and as soon as he starts to pull it from the man’s pocket the penny drops: the mystery art object is attached, and not to the pocket, but to the man. Triman yanks back his hand in shock - “Uggghhhh shit, you fucking perv!” - by which time the man has extracted it from his pocket and plonked it along his thigh. 516

“Count yerself lucky he did n’t put it in your pocket, mate. Heeeeaahahahhahaha- ha…” says the bird at the bar with the misaligned jaw and the long face, who is busy writing letter after letter and stacking them in neat piles of four. “Nah, that was yesterday” she replies to somebody across the bar, “today I just want to die drink.” “Come on, admit it, it’s Triman a fantastic piece, a lot of fuckin wow factor...” turn s his back on him and raises his drink to his lips. QUANTUM LONELINESS We individualize objects and people all the time, but we need to ask by what principle this is achieved. Beware though, because the maelstrom into which this question leads us is as deep as philosophy itself. It pulls you in whirl by whirl until all around you blurs into a sickening universality. Different people have different properties; isn’t this how we differentiate between them? We might even go as far as to say that divergence in properties is a legitimate basis for ascribing individuality to things. The bundle of properties that was Elizabeth is unlike any other bundle of properties. But impossibility for two things need to it be unlike every future bundle? It is a logical have the exact same properties on the assumption of im- penetrability. But Leibniz can have his law, for I have no concern for relational or modal properties – only monadic, non-relational properties for me please. But we really shouldn’t conflate the epistemological issue concerning how I distinguish Elizabeth from others with the ontological issue concerning the metaphysical basis of Elizabeth’s individuality. Individuality, after all, does not necessarily imply distinguishability. But am I 517

really to believe that Elizabeth’s source of individuality can be found in something transcendent of Elizabeth’s properties? Any possible candidate becomes something to be added to the list of her properties. Some property-less substance about which we can know nothing cannot be what divides me from her. No stark haecceity can make sleep bypass loneliness; no elementarily vague pronoun ascription will stop me drowning in cheap blended whisky. Nothing can be done with it: it’s fucking useless. Transcendental individuality travelled by Post in 1963 and got lost. The sharp metaphysical distinction between things and relations between things is a myth, a verbal convenience, a piece of nasty propagandising courtesy of talkers everywhere. Massacre in the Hall of Mirrors air like Surrealist corpses, flesh stretched and . Bodies hanging in the wrung out, mangled and bloated… head- less bodies and bodiless heads… dismembered limbs scattered on the reversed horizon… the slow confluence of persons into slaughterhouse slurry. tions Reflec- cutting women up like the Dali killer. Fleeting elephantiasis morphs into the bony stick legs of starving African children. Chalk outlines of countless fused body parts forming a diagram of frail, impotent carnage. Women’s tits carved from their chests in our hon of Lorca… Murder games cleansed of death by hurried fascist sutures.... MOLECH’S MISSION This town is limboland, a half-way house, a sorting office, purgatory, undecided. All here are waiting to see if they make the grade, if they can 518 be included, assimilated with the rest

of mankind. They wait, young and old, for the decisions of powerful strangers, decisions that never seem to come. Despite there being influences of the New Way, brought in by the few newcomers that are permitted to enter its boundaries, this place remains outmoded. Here people still die; people still die and nobody lifts a finger to reverse it. Not only do graveyards still writhe like rough green seas, but crosses, like the masts of sunken ships, have not ceased to multiply. And what is their task? What is it they must prove to their mysterious would-be benefactors? What will make the difference between being chosen and not, between furnishing earth un-trodden with one more wave and cheating the dirt of its undulating hallows? A few think piety will save them, that a purging of venal proclivities will make all the difference, wheras the majority seem to think bizarre acts of cruelty and animal sacrifice will pave their way to immortality. Both camps are wrong. Most, steeped in death and horror, have been outcasts too long to have beliefs beyond their adopted drives. They are seasoned veterans of what it’s always meant to be human and, crucially, for as long as they can remember, what it has come to mean to be human in Pavilionstone. However inured most Pavilionstonians are to their fate, not many, if any, would pass up a ticket out of there, away from the oldness of dying. There are men and women to in Pavilionstone that call themselves ‘Conduits’and claim be able to contact ex-Pavilionstonians, forever bringing back messages of hope and wonderment from the chosen ones, the worthy ones, the lucky ones. There are always plenty of dreamers that’ll listen and hurt themselves (and others) with hope. The methods by which they interact with those beyond differ according to which Conduit you speak to: some are contacted through their TV sets, seeing and hearing their message-bearers kaleido- scopically over the top of regular broadcasts; others claim to be able to decipher the breaking of waves on the shore, the thick black ocean calling to them of those who’ll never be anything but alive. 519

This is a town full of dreamers, a town full of people whose day is yet to come, men and women transfixed by their coffee cups, the floor, anything that happens to pass by a window, the sky, the horizon, their hands , the pages of a book and not the words, what goes on over somebody else’s shoulder, a blank wall, tarmac, people that can still allow themselves the luxury of drifting in and out of the cataclysmic perfunctoriness of their lives, lost in moments of cerebral pause, of reckless non-occurrence. But ple these peo- aren’t satisfied with a still moment out from the frenzied monotony: they live their lives in the torpor of everyday and freeze in the pauses. The years haven’t so much crept up on them and taken them by surprise, as stifled them in their sleep. They won’t wake up one day and they’ll be dead. No more pauses for life to slip in and out of. No more time to dwell. A town of lifetimes empty of life, waiting for something and nothing, and eventually finding it or not on not waking up. “Did you see The Confessions on Pav last night?” “No. I never watch .” “Everybody watches.” “I find it depressing. It gets to me , them dying minute by minute , needlessly. It should be quicker. That place should be wiped out.” “Needlessly! Have you heard yourself? You’re an odd one, Molech. Never quite sure when to take you seriously.” “Always. I don’t come in other shades.” “Take a break sometime.” “ It’s better , easier this way “For you maybe.” “Who else is there?” “Me, for starters.” 520 .”

“But you approached me . Did you do it so I could make things easier for you ? Because if so I wouldn’t know how, I really wouldn’t,” said Molech laconically. “What’s with you, Freakshow? Fuck off!” With these hastily chosen words the man turned his back on Molech and walked off, shaking his head and conjuring up further curses, curses that, if chosen well, might allow him to comfortably dismiss Molech once and for all. Molech looked on emotionlessly as the man walked away, and then went about his business as before, not giving the man’s outburst another moment’s attention. He knew that he had a reputation for being a bit cold to the touch among those who had worked with him, but being largely disassociated from the sensibilities of those around him meant that he didn’t much care. Everyone dealt with it one way or another. Molech’s way was to make like it didn’t need coming to terms with, that everything would one day be resolved. He looked no further than that. He didn’t feel he needed consoling. He just got on with things. Molech had just finished rinsing off his grey plastic coveralls when he got the call. Somebody had thought it amusing to secretly supercharge his birth-control prod. Molech had app lied his prod to the correct area at the back of the neck, where cranium gives way to spine, and activated the device with his thumb, only to have the 3-year-old’s head burst all over him. If it was supposed to rehumanize him, get him crying his way to discussion groups and the Pav channel then it didn’t work. It took him by surprise and scorched the fingertips on his right hand – that is all. It was the Professor. Molech had met him only once, when he signed up to the corporation just over a hundred years ago. It had been induction day, and he had been among many other rookies that P. had formally addressed. Jack Harrison had also been present. Some maintained that Lance Noggin had talked to them via a live video feed, but Molech could recall no such address from the man up top, and strongly doubted that there had ever been such an event. “Molech Mundungus: senior L.E.O., Branch 4?” Molech recognised the slow, precise vocal pattern almost immediately. “Speaking.” 521

“I have an assignment for you , the precise nature of which must not be disclosed to any third parties.” “ “ Understood I .” require you to enter and take up residence in Pavilionstone for an indefinite period, and while there to record what you see.” “Forgive me, but I always believed Pavilionstone to be constantly monitored, and that nothing went on in the unobserved re .” “Correct.” “So why post me there?” “Suffice it to say, there are things that we can glean only from somebody infiltrating Pavilionstone.” “ And one last question, if I may?” “Go ahead.” “Why have I been chosen for this assignment?” “You have been found suitable in the relevant areas. Please report to the head of Branch 4 at your leisure. Goodbye.” “Goodbye.” Molech thought he knew what P. had meant by his somewhat cryptic reply, and so chose not to pursue it any further. He was going to Pavilionstone and the exact reasons why could wait for now. Molech was not unaware that he was in what most outside Pavilionstone would regard as a privileged position. He would again feel the syrupy threat of oblivion, but more importantly, he would be free to succumb to 522 its exorcising

charms . (It’s a two-way street: those outside Pavilionstone, for all the ridicule they pour upon its poor unfortunate inhabitants, crave some of that weeping calamity for themselves and want in, while those inside want out.) He came to Hellfire Corner by sea, alone in a silent sloop, with the sweet spot of a cyclonic 5 and a lapping slack tide to bring it in, pushing its keel into the pebbled underbelly of the shore and tipping him out over the side into the foam. He dragged his feet through the water, his upper body swaying from side to side like a slow-motion gunslinger. The waves breaking on the shore sounded like canned laughter. He smelt it right away: the odour was death , and it was grinning from ear to ear, soft and wet, in squalid rooms with no latches to keep him out. He was there, in extremis, and could feel the flash of cold steel across his neck, bullets smashing through his back and careering into soft organs, and it all being done with the promise of no more of anything and yet somehow a piece of everything. A LEISURELY SEPPUKU men There are no places to go where the dread of sa ess cannot follow, where it cannot is stalk your view with further recounted blessings. Is a tanka to be written for every l godforsaken day? If so, how would they sound? At daybreak I’m born; Many seagulls cut my cord. I can walk and talk Within moments of my birth. Who’ll blow out my candles now? 523 tless,

Or: It is here I’ll die, Rusty tanto at my side: 1 of 47 Like the rest that wither here, So old, scared and honourless. Or even (with sacrilegious rhyme): Officers of death Endure their wait like statues Hidden from the eyes, For here we end when ended And we never say goodbyes. THE NIGHTSHIFT Charles decided that he would write at night and sleep during the day. He would live and work in the dark and maddening recesses of his very own Nighttown, and leave the day to them, to those with achievable and those that never strive to inconsequential passions, do what nobody else has done, those stalkers of the day, those poshlost’ pigs wallowing in cowardly suns and baby-blue skies. They were welcome to their days; he would have the night and make it his own, and burrow beneath their dreams while they shed their skins in laboured snorts and groans. He’d drink deep of the unwatched vitriol of inky skies and hear himself in the disquieting quietude, and sleep through the futile noise me of com rce and a thousand other humdrum drudgeries. They’d wonder where he’d gone, why they no longer saw him lashed to the crowded rocks of his former life. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. He must deafen himself to the siren s ’ call that would have him be like them, no better, worse in fact, yes worse, much worse… Never again must he drown beneath the fluff and flimsy of waking days. His were the cold and pitiless 524

awakenings fed on turning slumber, the demonic rumours that drag cious our pre- oversights through puddles polluted with twittering darkness. Somebody once told Charles that dreams were a cloudy sciousness con- of the small subset of possible worlds in which one never sleeps. Ch ar e l s didn’t suffer from insomnia – although there have obviously been occa- sions when he has been unable to sleep as a result of a cluttered mind – though he often wished he did. He believed that if he had more time at his disposal, the weight of all those additional hours would compel him to structure his time better and so increase his output. All those days and nights staring back at him from a sleepless future – his own face turned into that of a hideous clown, with whirlpool eyes, and an abnormally stretched smile (like Gacy the entertainer), with a manner of animating itself that Charles felt his pleasing me taphor, describing it as ‘robotic epilepsy,’ was still insufficient to con- vey its full horror – would give him sufficient time to nurture his gift. On certain days Charles was able to fall asleep with considerable ease: he’d be reading or thinking of something to fill his page when, after resting his eyes for no more than a minute or so, he’d nod off. When he woke up it was always with a deep feeling of selfreproach, and he ’d go at his work with a determination and fluidity worthy of PKD him- self. Unfortunately, his guilt-driven flurry of fingers was all too quickly spent – maybe a paragraph would get completed, maybe even two at a push. If he came to with an erection 525

in place then that would need seeing to first, and consequently the redemptive moment would be lost. James Joyce would spend an entire day working on a single sentence. How many novels would Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac who wrote mostly at night, have completed in the time Charles had spent sleeping? The thought of it made him sick . Lautréamont only wrote at night. John Hawkes, who worked all day at H.U.P., would also write at night, not to mention an early morning stint before leaving for work. Charles had a hatred for men like Hawkes. Who were has dirt beneath its fingernails, whereas all they trying to kid? Diligence the poet can do is wait.52 It would be fair to say that Charles got bored, although he would never admit to it. How could he? How could he admit to being bored when he was never getting enough done? His time was his own. He managed his time. If he admitted to boredom, what else would he have to admit to? If he were ever forced to admit it, he would always have his lack of money to fall back on. He wouldn’t want to, but he would. The alternative would give too much away. (Is the phenomenon of boredom symptomatic of a deep-seated and secret longing for death? When we are bored we wish time away; we want time (bored time, that is) to pass quicker. We long for the time to come when we are able to escape boredom. When we are bored we look forward to a time when we are able to distract ourselves from boredom. During these distracted times, boredom waits patiently in the wings for the time when next our distractions desert us, for whatever reason. Boredom is the burden of time. Boredom is the burden of our awareness of time coupled with a powerlessness to fill it in such a way as to mask the awareness. Life is the burden of having to fill time. Boredom is the awareness of that burden. Life is the burden of having to fill time in such a way as to mask the awareness of time, the awareness of its burdensome nature. The true horror of boredom is disguised, and so alleviated, by the ability to foresee future, unwatched, time. We want for time to pass at a speed that prevents us from having to confront it, from coming face to face with it; we want it to race by so fast that we are only 52 aware of it through the marks it leaves “And you can’t write unless you want to write, and you can’t want to unless you feel like it. […] writing you didn’t feel like doing ain’t worth shit” WSB. 526

behind on the road. We ’d rather it didn’t slow down in an attempt to make friends: it doesn’t make friends easily, has no social graces, and is so frightfully dull – with bad breath to boot.) Some writers never seemed to feel the need to sleep. Faulkner, while working nights at a power plant, wrote As I Lay Dying in his spare time, later claiming it to be a “tour de force” written “in six weeks, without changing a word.” Jack Kerouac’s favourite time for writing was from midnight till dawn. He wrote On the Road in three weeks and The Subterraneans in three days and nights. (At least PKD had the decency to sleep through the day when he could manage it.) It was a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September when Charles came up with the idea of blindfolding himself while writing, so that he might circumvent any temptations of the eye. But the insides of his head had a noose for him. The blindfold gave him the ersatz night of sightless eyes and melded landscapes, but it was not his own – it was Max Beckmann’s. Within seconds he sense d those two men with bandaged heads and the peaked- capped rapist standing at the window ready to hang and torture him, their figures, as if cut out of wood, had hard black outlines and faces of flint menace. The shadows inside his head had been claimed without him noticing. He lifted the bandage and looked out from underneath. Nobody was with him in the room. A dog howled… it Samuel Beckett continued to wr e until his death in 1989, but the process grew in- creasingly repellent to him until, finally, each word seemed to him nothing but “an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” Here was yet another way Charles could feel like a writer when he hadn’t written a word in weeks. When he was crippled and made impotent by his ideals he remembered the words of Donald Barthelme with fondness: “The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives.” The final part of his triptych on the self-serving comforts of literary inadequacy came from Don Delillo: “If I discard a sentence I like, it's almost as satisfying as keeping a sentence I like.” Charles collects false hope and excuses like other men collect butterflies and ornate teapots. 527

Nothing coming…. It’s not working…. The whole thing’s bollocks and I’m tired…. That’s it; I’m tired…. A snooze will sort me out…. Will fire me up…. No excuses…. Get on with it!... Find a segue in and you’ll thank yourself…. Have another cigarette.… They concentrate the brain…. More coffee…. Best not to force the issue…. Joyce sometimes took a day to complete a couple of sentences…. I’ve done six…. I’ve only been up an hour…. I need to treat this like a straightforward job…. My surroundings aren’t right…. I need some diversion, a change of scenery…. I should get an office somewhere and do 9-5 five days a we ek like Auster…. This is a job…. Money might come…. If it does that’s what I’ll do…. Calvino wrote every day, regardless of location…. People will see me going off to work…. Would I take my books there?... Maybe some of them…. Would depend on the security I suppose…. Anyway, push on with it now…. Don’t get it right get it written! Get after it with a club!... Where am I?... What’s still to do?.... Read back a little…. That’s great stuff…. I was inspired that day…. When was that?... This boy can write…. Some days it just doesn’t happen…. Tide-punching…. Maybe I’ll read for a while…. It’s all work, after all…. Waste nothing…. Filling time and filling pages…. Vonnegut was spot on: “writing is disagreeable toil”…. Don’t tell me about real work if you know what’s good for you…. Pleasure only in completion…. Kafka didn’t finish much…. Good idea choosing themes that defy conclusion (Pessoa had it too)…. Kafka worked all week in an office, writing into the night in his bedroom. He claimed to have needed the claustrophobic routine of his job in order to escape the all-consuming perils of literature. I am afforded no such safety net. What can I hope to achieve that is worth achieving? T.S. Eliot worked long hours at a bank for many years…. How many years is writing behind painting now, Mr Gysin? How far behind everything else is painting? Why can’t I write a Rothko, a Klee? Why would I want to? “If you could say it in words there’d be no need to paint.” (Edward Hopper). I’ve given my adult life to this, and for what? Not to produce “bellybutton lint.” Proust published the first volume of A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu entirely at his own expense in 1913, after Gallimard rejected it. Nathaniel Hawthorne self-published Fanshawe in 1828. By 1923 Borges felt ready to bring out his first collection of poems, Fervor de Bue- 528

aid nos Aires, which was financed by his father. George Meredith p for his ‘Poems’ collection to be published in a volume. The publication of Andrew John Young’s first volume of poems was paid for by daddy. Lorca’s father shelled out for his son’s first two books… Charles took refuge in the brotherhood (and so it went on): The Great Gatsby was described as an “absurd story” by one reviewer, “negligible” by another…. When Charles started out he’d have been content with ending up buried deep (even unfathomed) in Nemo’s Almanac, but he couldn’t live with such slight attention now. He needed exposure, reverence. His work demanded it, and his sanity depended on it. It seemed very much as if Charles needed something of a revelation, and he needed it soon. Needing it, and he knew he needed it, only made matters worse, only served to consecrate the need itself, for Charles, as we know, was not a man who could work under pressure. The skin on my arms has grown a thousand spindly legs. There are insects inside me, bugs stranded on their backs, their legs beating bubbles in my blood. They’ll be out soon & they’ll join the spiders that prowl up & down the backs of my hands. They are invincible & have no fear of fire. If I crush my cigarette into one of their backs there is always another to take its place. There’s no point trying to shake But them off, for they have hooks in their feet. I shake all the same. They don’t like me to write. They al- ways have to interfere . If I sit down at my typewriter they want only to hear about themselves & their kind, about dreams & fantasies their . They hijack my fingers & my keys, dancing their crude & insectile perversions across page after page. They make my skin howl with the filthy fucking dead heart bestrewn lie of satisfaction & calm. How can I 529

hope to stay dry when they so obviously thrive in arid conditions? But you can never manage to drown them all. Believe me I have tried. They always manage to rise to the surface when the sun comes out. Just listen to me will you, warbling like some wethouse vegetable. A Life on Hold. Charles thought about a book he had read many years ago. In it a man promises himself that he will commit suicide on his 50th birthday. Knowledge of this releases him from the gloomy malaise that has been his life up until that juncture. (It doesn’t work for everybody: Celan couldn’t wait and threw himself into the Seine with over half a year to go.) Charles had the idea of bypassing a nagging conscience by planning his death to follow his indulging in some enjoyable but ultimately self-reproachable deed. He could do whatever he liked and, as long as he was prepared to die afterwards, he needn’t be pestered and made to feel bad about his wrongdoings. He also figured that if, while preparing to kill himself, he found his niggling conscience to be incidental in the face of death, swamped by what he was about to do, then he could postpone it a day. He could, he imagined, go on like this for years, doing whatever he liked and never having to succumb to the scorn of future selves who, in their desire to live out their allotted day, kept their sanctimonious opinions to themselves. The only problem with this plan was that until he had finished his book he wasn’t prepared even to countenance his own hypothetical death. “Open up your hearts to me and I’ll close off your valves and show you death. And you might have thanked me and held me in your arms had you not been so short of breath.” A LESSON IN TRICK ERY Hell is having a smidgen of identity and trying desperately to hold on to it. This must have been what Modigliani was trying to convey to us with 530 the se, his dying

words : “I only have a fragment ag ent m fr of an my br i left.” Now, even that would be enough to save him outside of this place. I had never asked myself whether, if I woke one morning nised me, my wife jumping from the bed in horror a nobody nd a stranger t this recog- lying be- side her, I would doubt myself or the world, and so when faced with it I was woefully unprepared. The questions mount fast: Has something changed about the world or has something changed about me? Do I have a strong enough sense of self to point a finger at the world when everybody I recognise and have memories of being acquainted with suddenly deny ever having laid eyes on me? Will I eventually be forced to and start again? Will the world destroyed me? 531 ignore my memories succeed in destroying me, or has it already

Let me fill you in. My name is Mr J.C. Blake (and no, I don’t know what the J and the C stand for). I am 48 years old and have been married to Mrs Blake for 16 years. I have two children, Claire (13) and Rebecca (8). I have not lived a particularly interesting life, but then who does? Nobody I know – which isn’t saying much apparently. My life was fine: it suited me; I had designed it to fit, and of all the things it wasn’t, it was at least mine. My life doesn’t seem to recognise me anymore; it no longer has a place for me; I’ve been written out of my own life and nobody left within it seems to have noticed. Am I really so insignificant to my life that it can breezily continue in my absence? It would seem so when my wife wakes me with a downpour of punches as she scrambles to her feet and flees backwards, her hands grappling behind her in search of the edge of the bedroom door, her eyes stuck to me in terror. One mad wife does not a permanent exclusion from one’s life make, but then my girls are in the doorway of their bedroom on the brink of bawling, face to face with the fucking bogeyman, a mad hatchet man bent on their slaughter, and fake that shit d way they they couldn’t have , those bubbles of snot popping from their nostrils, the held hands and looked up at their mother, desperately searching for some clue as to how things were going to turn out. I was 532 the fucking

enemy , and what’s more I was an unknown quantity; I was not an abusive father figure that could be remonstrated with, or thrown a sacrifice while the other two made a run for it; no, I was an intruder in their lives. I got no sense that their fear of me had any history whatsoever: it was abject, missing the comfort even of bad expectations. “ Stop this! ” I shouted as a last resort. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” she screamed at a pitch that made my teeth quail. “I mean it – this has gone too far. The children are getting scared.” “Please go. Just leave now. I won’t tell anyone if you just go now. Please just go. Please...” “What the…What the fuck are you talking about? What’s going on here? Have you lost your mind?” “ What is it you want? Who are you? What dyu want?” “…” It was at this point that I first the check en suite bathroom and saw the same old least attached to in my life, still present. But stranger, even h a had some horrific ed my reflection in the mirror. I ran to face its , my face, the thing I was maybe sameness made everything else even rder to fathom than before. If I had been grossly disfigured in some way, mask grafted onto my face then, relatively speaking, things would have made sense. My wife and daughters had fled the house the moment I’d left them on the landing. I’d heard them belting down the stairs as I made my way to the mirror. I sat on the bed thinking of all the questions I should have asked them, and things I should have told them, but there 533

was no use in it; their reactions had been too emphatic to make a question and answer session at all plausible. I left the house, half in search of my newly estranged family, and half out of fear of what would happen if I remained there. The front door was open, as was the cast-iron gate, two its kissing doves clotted with rust. The street was quiet; which wasn’t a surprise given that it couldn’t have been much later than about 7:30 on a Sunday morning. I could hear sirens in the distance, but it took until they were only a couple of streets away for me to realise that, in all likelihood, they were for me: a man who had crept into a woman’s house, slipped into bed beside her and passed the night with her while her children slept, unaware of his presence, in the next room. What might such a man be capable of? I walked off up the road at a brisk pace, still not entirely convinced that the police me as their quarry had . At the corner of the street I paused just long enough to see three squad cars screech to a halt outside my house. I didn’t run far, less than a mile. I slowed down so as not to draw too much attention to myself, more attention, that is, than walking about the streets in bare feet, a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a vest had already caused all on its own. I was heading for my parents’ house, but wasn’t sure what I’d find there. More familiar strangers? The more I thought about it the less I believed that this thing, this attempt at ownerless life, spread any further than the collective fugue of my wife and children. I would relay what had happened to my parents and then ask them to accompany me back to the house, where I would attempt to make my family aware of who I was, and get to the bottom of what had happened to them. As I neared my destination I was conscious of how slow and short my paces had become. They were no more vigorous than the cata- tonic shuffles of a mental patient, which is not something I’d recommend doing on a pavement with bare feet. I had more doubts than I had initially allowed myself. They had been invited in without my permission and, like the worst of guests, were to outstay their welcome, oblivious to their discombobulating effects. 534

My mum will be up, will have been up for a couple of hours now, I thought. She had always gone to bed early, never any later than 9:00 P.M., and so saw nothing peculiar in her habit of rising by 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning. She was attached to her ‘quiet times’ as she called them, her morning peace and quiet that was really nothing of the sort, for after dreamily drinking her cup of Earl Grey and preparing and eating her porridge, made with water and salt – the only way, according to her and her mother before her, that porridge should be eaten – she would turn the washing machine on, and then wash the previous nights dishes, her eyes glued to the ten-inch kitchen portable replaying the news over and over again. This was peace for her, because she got to get on with things without tions interrup- ; she got things done and this pleased her. She liked that she was up while the rest of the street slept. When finally confronted with their front door I wasted no time in cracking the knocker. I remember it being louder than I’d expected and taking me by surprise. The hallway light was on and I could see my mother’s silhouette, somewhat taken aback, arranging itself for an unexpected visitor. If all had been right I would have crouched down, opened the letterbox and told her it was only me, so preventing her going to too much effort correcting her appearance when it wasn’t necessary. But I didn’t. Instead I just watched as she removed her rubber gloves, toyed with her hair in the mirror, and tidied the hang of her clothes as she made her way towards the door and the anonymous outline beyond it. I heard the chain go on before the door opened: she had not made me out through the obscured glass, but then she wouldn’t have been expecting me to call on her at that hour. When I saw her face peek around the edge of the door I smiled and to my great relief she smiled straight back. “Can I help you?” she said, still grinning good-naturedly without making any effort to unhook the security chain. I experienced emotions that human kind are not made to experience; this was the point now in bad dreams when your body woke you up, somehow k ing how far to take you without scarring your waking hours indelibly. I wished that my mother had been a joker, a trickster of the first-order, a card who never missed an opportunity to spawn a sucker, but, as 535

no one wishes for what they already have, she was not the least inclined to play prac- tical jokes. And my Dad, fast asleep in his bed, dreaming of pre-baiting the chalk pit with fluorescent maggots, could not be called upon to provide a second opinion on whether or not this was their son standing on the doorstep in his blistered b are feet first thing on a Sunday morning. Her agreeable old face, jammed between door and door frame, waited patiently for an answer, while her eyes glanced at my feet and then a little worriedly back at my face, whose features had rung no bells for her, not even the slightest peal. I was so full of questions, and yet all of them perished before reaching my lips. My silence was scaring her and I wanted to tell her who I was and for some spell to be broken. “Sorry, I must have the wrong house.” I turned round and started to walk away. “Who was it you were looking for, dear?” Those words were an exercise in cruelty too far. I kept on walking. I knew her head would remain where it was, would creep farther round the door edge as she began to lose sight of me. I was the walking dead , although not quite dead – but isn’t that the point? – like the seagull with its body flat to the tarmac, bearing the tyre tracks of a succession of cars, head still moving, beak still omitting flat-lung screeches as it tries to peel itself up from the grit, the seagull that nobody can muster the pity to swerve to kill. I retraced my steps and saw my mum’s front door close seconds after it had come back into view. She must have remained at the door long after I’d gone, and I kidded myself at the time that she had been sensitive to some deep familial connection between the two of us, despite not having a clue who I was. (But it wasn’t long before the fact of her inherent nosiness came to disillusion me.) Through the thick, scalloped slump glass I could make her out as she made her way back down the hallway to the kitchen. I rapped a single knuckle on the door three times and called out that it was only me again, and that I had a favour to ask of her. She opened the door. The chain stayed on. “Are you lost?” “Not exactly… I have a question or two if you don’t mind; it won’t take a minute – it’s just that…well…I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before, and I’ve been racking my brains 536

trying to figure out where and when, and I thought I may as well just come back and ask you.” “I can’t think, dear: I don’t get out much these days.” “Maybe it’s your son I know, or daughter even, something is familiar.” But before I’d finished the sentence, watching her head with its sad smile shake emphatically from side to side, I knew I’d made a mistake going back there. “George and I never had any kids. I would have liked to, mind, but George was never keen and so we decided against it. We’ve had a good life, all the same, and we’ve never wanted for much.” It’s one thing to wish you’d never been born, but to be informed of the fact by your mother was something else. What happened next is, thankfully, rather unclear to me now, and the only way I can come close to describing it is to say that I fell prey an absurdly prolonged state of indecision, and the more I made efforts to master my floundering will the more fractured those efforts at mastery became. I kept hear ing my mum saying, “Are you alright, dear?” over and over, but when I attempted to reply I was unable to utter a sound. I don’t know if she was aware of my internal struggle, or merely thought I had gone oddly quiet for a man who had turned up on her doorstep for a second time with the express intention of asking questions of her. Eventually I managed to mumble that I was sorry, and walked off, confused and lachrymose, back in the direction of my house. Before long I found myself wait ing for my wife and children to leave the house so that I could go in and get my wallet and some clothes. (That was the plan, but I couldn’t really have said what would happen when I saw her, the woman who had given birth to my two children, who I had known for in excess of twenty years and had been married to for sixteen, the woman I still loved in spite of the damage that years of cohabitation had wreaked upon us, and my girls…) I couldn’t see any sign of movement in the house, and so wasn’t even sure that there was anyone in there to leave, but I couldn’t be sure, so I waited. “Excuse me, sir. Can we help you?” Two police officers were standing behind me; I hadn’t heard them approach, and so was taken completely by surprise. I was crouched down behind a wall. They stood over me, tight grins cut deep into their idiotic faces, sardonically awaiting the litany of transparent lies that they predicted would issue forth from my mouth. Almost to order, I began with the first plausible excuse that came to mind as to why I might be skulking behind a wall in my bed clothes. “I’m looking for my watch. I lost it last night. I only realised when I woke up this morning and went to put it on.” “Any luck so far, sir?” “No, not yet.” “Do you live around here, sir?” 537

“Yes.” “Do you mind if we accompany you back to your house, once you’ve finish ed looking for your lost watch?” “Why?” “We’ve been having reports of some rather strange goings-on in this area, and would like to confirm your story. I’m sure you can appreciate that we wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t follow up on what you’ve just told us.” They both looked at me in earnest, almost daring me not to succumb to their pre-recorded procedural pedagogy. I could see two other men – in plain clothes – get out of a silver car over the road from my house and start walking towards where we were standing. A police car pulled up along side us with three more men in it, and I gave up thinking of which house I was going to lead them to. I made the decision not to say anything until I could come up with an identity for myself that wasn’t going to land me in a secure unit. They kept asking me questions until they gave up and started telling me things instead, like what a man fitting exactly my description was doing in the early hours of that morning, and the severity of the crime they suspected him of, and so the details went on, and I just continued to keep my words inside my head, out of harm’s way. I waited for night to come, to be presented with a cell and to be relieved of my struggle for silence. My wife was called in and, after seeing me through a two-way mirror, apparently testified that I was indeed the man she’d found in her bed that morning, a man on whom, before waking up beside him earlier that day, she had never laid eyes. They tried to elicit a response from me by explaining how her children no longer felt safe in their own home and that the youngest of the two – he was talking about Rebecca, she has a name – had been unable to control her emotions or her bladder ever since the incident. They told me that they didn’t 538

take kindly to men who scared the piss out of little girls, and I believed them – I mean, why would they? But I didn’t let on. I gave them nothing. POCKET SAUSAGES “Ahhh I need this.” But just as Triman brought the glass to his lips – the vodka having slid around the ice cubes towards his mouth, so close to his lips that he could almost feel the burn through the combined powers of memory and expectation – it disappeared and he was somewhere else. “What…? Where the…? What?” Lakok, seeing him with his hand still up at his mouth cupped around an invisible glass, as if using it as a loud haler, had a good idea what. “I’m guessing five minutes came at the wrong time.” “But how come my drink disappears when this stopwatch doesn’t? And what about your notebook, and all the other things that I keep in my trouser and jacket pockets for that matter?” “Remember what Dennett says about naked Homo sapiens and Ursus arctus clad in clown suits and perched on unicycles? Yes? Well the same applies here I suppose. I take it that up until now you’ve had the stopwatch in your pocket at the witching hour. I’ve had the notebook in my jacket pocket for every glitch, and that’s why I still have it. If you’d had the glass in your pocket you could be drinking its contents now. That’s what I think.” “Makes sense I suppose.” “What’s that stain on your leg? Are you bleeding?” “What stai…oh yeah…not sure...” He looked down at his trouser leg as if it didn’t belong to him. The stain was in the shape of a textbook splatter. In other words, kind of indiscriminate and so like any other stain-shaped stain, while being unlike stains that tend to look like, or represent other easily recognisable things. The only difference being that this stain was still dilating. Triman touched the darkened patch of cloth and brought the damp fingers up to his face: “Shit! It’s blood. But there’s no pain there… I mean, how could I have cut it?” He undid his zip and pulled his trousers down to his knees. He had blood on his thigh, but when he touched it and wiped the blood away there was no injury. It was then that he noticed how saturated his pocket was. He did his trousers back up and started emptying the ing pocket before off end- everything inside got coated in the stuff. Out came some coin- age, a packet of mints, office keys to an office he was unlikely to see again, and a penis (or at least a piece of a penis) some 3 or 4 inches long, still warm and still pumping blood out of its severed end. PROCURING AN AMNESIAC Where to find an amnesiac? Despite their plenitude in the provinces of fiction, the genuine amnesiac is a rare breed. Maybe a desperate out-of-work actress would suffice. No. Pretence wouldn’t cut it. Any mimesis must be blind. 539

I could find a woman with the right look and then kidnap her, and conduct a series of experiments, administering controlled blows to the head until memory loss ensued. But the problem is they recover too quickly: in many cases they recover nearly all of their lost memories. I would have to pummel her head on a regular basis, in which case she would unlearn what I had gone to the trouble of instilling into her. The whole thing would be a fucking disaster. Scleromyxedema can result in a coma, and comas can give rise to amnesia. But Scleromyxedema is an extremely rare condition, and I don’t have time to play a protracted waiting game . Next… One in ten of those over the age of 65, and approximately half of all people over 85 will suffer from Alzheimer’s, which involves memory loss, but unfortunately it primarily affects their ability to make new memories. They can still bore any fucker to the brink of suicide with their tales of childhood woe and want. Anyway, playing down the role of the body in personal identity is a thing, but you c one n take it too far. Psychological causes: Psychogenic Amnesia (resulting from acute emotional trauma – post traumatic stress amnesia) is usually a transitory condition. Amnesia can be a symptom of Schizophrenia. No, I can’t work with schizophrenics: I don’t fancy waking up in the middle of the night and finding my wife hacking my nuts off with a kitchen knife because Satan, who happens to be disguised as a Jelly Baby, is demanding that she let him out. No, that’s not going to happen. Physical causes: aging: decaying neurons giving rise to senile dementia (Alzheimer's), stroke damage, protracted alcoholism damaging the mammillory bodies (Korsakoff's syndrome – primarily anterograde amnesia), encephalitic brain damage, seizures, epilepsy, head 540

trauma, inflammation of the brain, carbon monoxide poisoning, vitamin B-12 deficien- cy, mind-numbing routine, Huntingdon Disease ... It is quite common for an amnesiac’s emotional memory to remain intact. They will have emotional responses to old friends and enemies, although they will not member re- who they are or why they have the emotional responses they do. A medieval German king rots away in a cafard-inducing Canadian box room…. There are basically two types of amnesia: 1. Anterograde amnesia (usually involving damage to hippocampus, fornix, and mammillary bodies), the sufferer of which cannot form new memories after the accident/trauma: they exist in a claustrophobic fog of endless present. They cannot even establish that they have amnesia – they forget. Life for them is unceasing befuddlement with no hope of enlightenment. 2. Retrograde amnesia is better for my needs, the sufferer being unable to remember events before the accident/trauma. Transient Global Amnesia: a combination of both Anterograde and Retrograde amnesia – short-lived (as the name suggests) with no lasting damage. No graded retrograde amnesia (damage to medial temporal lobe): also 541 good. Temporally no good.

Extended ungraded retrograde amnesia (damage to the structure of the neocortex of the lateral and anterior temporal lobe) will do quite nicely thank you. And no, Resemblance Nominalism is no t what I am advocating, be fore you ask. The best place to find an amnesiac was, I guessed, the hospital. I didn’t much care for hospitals: smooth surfaces and bright lights, old bodies on trolleys with the faces of ancient children, accidents covered in sawdust, grey mince and carrots, officious nurses with too much or not enough empathy, the elderly greedy for more time, raffles, bedsores, flowers, grapes, the smell of ulcer clinics, the hollow bravado of the cheerfully dying… But I had to suffer it. I became a volunteer, assisting at clinics throughout the hospital. I gave a false name and address on the volunteer forms, and was careful never to talk about anything that might reveal my true identity. I created a whole new persona for myself. I told people that I had suffered a nervous breakdown as the result of stress. I made out that I had worked in Trans-PAV marketing, and that the long hours and the demand ing nature of that environment had taken its toll on my mental health. By bringing up a past mental crisis I was able to allay any unwanted probing into my life by just going quiet . Sudden inertia on my part was enough to stop 542

them in their tracks. Nobody wanted to be responsible for sending me back through the booby hatch. On alternate days I got a lift to work from an Italian hospital porter. He was a horny hothead, but likeable enough. A schoolgirl walked alongside the car one morning as we sat in a traffic jam. “I bet she got a tight pussy,” he said, staring over his shoulder straight into her eyes. “I wouldn’t be so sure; she probably has a couple of kids at home.” The car came to a standstill and she walked past. “Look at that peachy fooking arse! Sweet no?” I looked and express ed my concurrence: “Too good for sitting on.” A few minutes later and a little way up the street she walked across the crossing in front of us: “I like to run the leetle bitch over and then lick her out.” “Romantic.” He kept his eyes trained on her behind as it wiggled away down the street. “Fooking leetle coont, leetle bitch. I see her now, bent double over my sofa back home. I fuck her arse for her.” “Good of you.” “Oh she like Giuseppe inside her, don’t you worry. After I eat her she let me do anything, anyfookingthing. Mudder fucker, they all mudder fuckers.” The inane babble of two radio disc jockeys took up the pause, and I watched Giuseppe as he defiled that pretty young girl over and over again in his head. After assisting at eye, cardiac, pain, ulcer, and blood clinics, I finally got posted to a neurology clinic, which was held in an area adjacent to the psychiatric ward. The ward turned out be full of dribblers, mumblers, old women berating long-dead husbands for being late home from nurses keeping the pub (their dinners ruined), those forever grappling with the ‘evil’ them prisoner, catatonic starers, victims of all kinds of imaginary 543

persecution, twitchers, smilers, weepers, and old men who couldn’t keep their shaky, witchlike hands away from their peckers, but nothing for me. What had I expect ed? A line up of memory-void Elizabeth look-alikes, may- be. The patients who turned up for the clinic were not suitable either. Looking through their medical notes with the nurses, I found nothing of interest. After a month or so I got posted to the fracture clinic, which was right next to A&E. We got the usual outpatients, their appointment letters stained with coffee circles and jam, ill-prepared to sit and wait for any length of time, the odd emergency admission that got wheeled straight in (much to the annoyance of the not so desperately ill – who for a couple of seconds wished they were), and patients off the ward with their medical notes under their arm and a look of defeat in their eyes. She was one such ward admission. She came accompanied by a male nurse for an X-ray and post X-ray consultation. Sue, a rather overweight auxiliary nurse with a serious body odour problem, flicked through her notes before taking them through to the reg. They were looking for any damage to her skull that might help explain her recently diagnosed amnesia. My stomach jolted, my head emptied, and I grappled with a newly enraged bowel. This was it. She’d looked pretty good too. I scanned the waiting room to get another glimpse. She was more petite than Elizabeth, less buxom, but not so different in other areas that I couldn’t come to see her as my dead wife. She will more than do, I thought. I just had to work out how to get her out of there and back home. Thankfully I had driven my own car to the hospital that day, Giuseppe having been signed off with incapacitating headaches and a wonder in light of the constant ultra-violent sexual bad case of the jitters, which was no real barrage of espresso, cigarettes, cocaine and daydreams he subjected himself to. The name written across the front of her thin file was Justine —. According to Sue, the name may not be her own, merely one she recognised from somewhere, and so the doctors and nurses were simply using it as a convenient tag. Sue had taken her file from her and asked her to take a seat. Luckily, she had not so much as glanced in my direction. I had decisions to make. Should I make my move immediately? Or wait until after she had been for her X-ray? After seeing the consultant? Or when she was back on the ward? I decided to take the first decent opportunity I got; I’d waited long enough. “Can you tell me when my son is likely to be seen?” “What?” My mind was understandably elsewhere, and unfortunately so was Sue. “We have been waiting now for over an hour, people who came in after us have come and gone.” A woman in an expensive looking suit glared down at me in my seat as she clutched her son firmly by his good wrist. “Mrs Turner is it?” I said as I pretended to look down the list. “That’s right.” “I bet your diaries would be a blast.” “Pardon me.” “They no doubt had earlier appointments… We are running a bit behind” I pointed to the white board on the wall that said, ‘THIS CLINIC IS CURRENTLY RUNNING APPROX 1 hr BEHIND SCHEDULE – We apologise for any inconvenience caused.’ “I’m not blind... Hello! Are you listening to me?” “Yes, sorry, you’re not blind, apparently. Is that right?” “No, but I am beginning to get a little pissed off,” she said flashing a glance at her son. “I see.” “I really don’t appreciate your attitude; is there somebody else I could speak with?” “Yes.” There were too many prying eyes in and around the waiting area to attempt anything. “Well?” The amnesiac was up on her feet and heading towards the toilets. As she walked off I made to get up and follow her. 544

“Hello. I’m still waiting.” “Daniel Turner!” bellowed one of the nurses from examination room 3. The boy in front of me yanked at his mother’s sleeve and told her to come on, that his name was being called. “About time,” she said, pulling her son back in line with her as she walked off. I was through the main door to the toilet area before realizing that I had no implement with which to knock her unconscious. I didn’t even know how many blows I could expect to administer in order to knock her out. But I did know my fists would not be enough if I was going to do it quickly and cleanly. I dashed into the Gents. It was empty. I saw the looped-hand-towel contraption was hanging from the wall, and it took no real effort to wrench from its loose fittings. It was a fair weight and wielded in the right way would, I surmised, do the trick: the trick in question being to knock someone out with a single blow and keep them unconscious for at least half an hour, without that blow being so hard that they failed to ever come round. I didn’t know what the exact weight for this would be but, somewhat instinctively, considered the weight of the dispenser to be about right. I listened at the door to the Ladies and eased it open. A woman was walking towards me. It wasn’t the amnesiac. I took my hands from the door, turned my back, held the dispenser directly in front of me so as to shield it from the woman’s view and walked back in the direction of the Gents. She walked out of the Ladies and straight out of the main door, and I turned round immediately and resumed my former position. I crept in and saw that one cubicle was taken, and that the room was otherwise empty. I walked past a row of cracked sinks and mirrors and , occu- pied the cubicle next to hers. I placed the dispenser on the floor and squatted down to look under the divider. Her feet were pointing towards the cubicle door, indicating that she was still sat on the toilet. Peering down between my thighs, I saw a streak of hardened excrement running down the back of the fissured pan. pick up my ed I heard her rip some paper and wipe herself. I weapon . She yanked the bolt back and her cubicle door came flying back and obscured my view, so I gave her door a prod with my finger to prematurely reverse its momentum. I watched as she washed her hands in the (square, dead, cyclopic eyes shot w sink . She looked into one of the mirrors it h cataracts) puckering and un-puckering her lips, twisting her mouth open to inspect the taut skin of her upper lip. She shook her hands above the sink and walked in the direction of the wall-mounted hand dryer. I raced to her, al- most throwing the dispenser at her head while still attached 545 to it.

She was on the turn when it smashed into left temple on the wall the and side of her head. She cracked her dropped to the floor, hitting her head again. I steadied myself and prepared for another blow. It wasn’t needed. The hardest part was getting her upright. I managed to let her skull bounce off the floor twice more before getting her on her feet again. I supported her under her armpit with my right arm, as if she were some unfortunate lush, and dragged her to the n earest cubi- cle where I dumped her down on the toilet, resting her lazy head carefully on the wall behind her. Pulling the cubicle door to, I slid her foot up against it to dissuade anyone who might come in while I was away in search of a wheelchair. There was a queue forming at my desk as I exited the toilets. I headed towards A&E in the hope of finding an unattended wheelchair, of which there was ordinarily no shortage. The waiting area was full of patched eyes, sloppily bandaged legs and arms, and the unpleasant marriage of antiseptic and old sweat. I found what I wanted parked between the two sets of doors comprising the A&E’s main entrance. I walked over and took it with authority, as if I had left it there, as if it had my name emblazoned on each side. Nobody confronted me as I made my way back to the Ladies. It all went pretty smoothly returned to find from there :I her where I’d left her, put her in the wheelchair, pushed her to my car and drove home without incident. WETHOUSE WARBLINGS 546

As the first of the day slides down they count out change for the next. The discounted price h a s allowed them to come in off the streets, or out from their rooms, to others that also n There were drink with eed to drink. a few females among these enclaves of perpetual dipsomania, and most of them tended to be half-skeletal chain smoke rs in their mid-to-late thirties with chewed up fingernails, concave chests, long lank hair, and complexions resembling the insides of an old brazil nut: the look of chicken skin stretched tight over blackened bone. Pale denim drainpipes, white tennis shoes and baggy black leather jackets seemed de rigueur. Their drinks of choice were pints of superbrew and gin chasers. There was a couple that never failed to turn up. She was different from the other women. She had yet to slip, but at the rate she drank it would not take long. The man who always sat with her had long black hair scraped back into a ponytail, a full black beard and beady little eyes behind glasses with thick lenses. They sat, mute, drinking their drinks and think about ing There was something overused about them, about their s never met. They’d ran out of that things the absence was felt. 547 all the next one. th e ow faces wi yes that to say to each other, and it was clear

The entire sky is that white that exists at some midpoint on a colour chart ranging from white to grey, the colour of expensive writing paper and cheap toilet paper. The sky is empty, as if God forgot to paint it in: whitewash muddied with decomposed flies. The trees loom like dark, gangling monster s against the pallid backdrop of a dirty white sky. The sky lacks depth, its opacity binding you to begrimed pavements and faecal gutters, restricting your vision to the end of the street. On days like these the day never comes; one has the choice between the fuliginous and the subfusc. The spindly branches of bare trees appear etched into the dead heavens like crow’s feet on an old drag queen…. I don’t much care for whisky. I drink it, but I can’t say I like it. My body often rejects it – it makes me feel dizzy and even physically sick. Other types of alcohol do not as a rule have this effect on me, unless I imbibe them in huge quantities. I drink whisky because it gets me pissed quicker than any other drink and money is in short supply and I like to be pissed, although not always, unfortunately, on whisky, as it can make me sick, but never as sick as the alternative. I care for cigarettes a lot. I smoke them and enjoy smoking them. Cigarettes are the writer’s companion: words come out and smoke goes in by way of recompense. (James Kelman saw no link between smoking and writing aside from both of them being “enjoyable solitary pursuits.” Charles sided with Amis Jr. on this one, who once said that smoking prevented him from writing bad sentences. In Charles’s case it often prevented him from writing any sentences at all, as he sucked his way through packet after packet, creating a smoke screen between himself and the empty page. Amis Jr. smoked roll-ups (Golden Virginia, I think), so too did Virginia Woolf. Charles thought that he too might take a break from tailor-mades, and that the rolling process would probably concentrate his mind.) Hangover symptoms: The disorientating – read life-threatening precursor to insanity and endless turmoil – jolts between absorption in something, bordering on zombification – be it TV, the dirt beneath your fingernails or watching toast burn – and a staggeringly chilling fear of such absorption. This lack of control is born of a cruel cocktail of tension and tiredness, where one oscillates between the external and the internal view of oneself, being ripped from the quiet homeliness of subjectivity and rudely deposited some place where you are available to yourself only sub specie aeternitatis. This mirrors a criticism often levelled at the Psychological Reductionist, for it is claimed that looking as he does from the outside in, he ignores what it’s like for persons from the inside. It is said that philosophers who have tended to take a third-person approach to the personal identity debate have, in so doing, ignored the essentially first-personal character of persons. The opposition call attention to what they maintain is a basic and obvious truism: that an experience being mine or not mine and that experience’s particular content are two completely separate issues. After all, they ask, isn’t it possible that any one of our experiences could have been different in content? And if so, couldn’t we just as easily say the same for every one of our experiences? However, following this rationale, I should be able to imagine never having existed, while also imagining that somebody was born of the same parents at the exact same time as I actually was, and grew up to have the exact same properties, doing and thinking everything that I have in fact done and thought. How could such a so-called act of imagi- 548

nation be differentiated from my simply recalling my own history? If the answer forth- coming is that the difference is simply that you are imagining this person isn’t you, then surely a question arises as to what could possibly constitute such a difference. Whatever the opposition come up with will be a creation born of desperation and the worst excesses of imagination, a creation that would necessarily require non-rational persuasion of almost mesmerizing power in order to attract converts. This knotty duality of experiencing oneself also occurs when one is deciding how to approach the writing of fiction: compare, if you will, the detachment often experienced while reading experimental and/or metafictional/postmodern novels and the intimate involvement with character and action encountered in more traditional storytelling. This division is a little simplistic, I know, but s it isn’t mine it’s Charles’s,53 and it does, nevertheless, ha ve ome grounding in truth. How to write fiction? Should one’s characters be as real as one can make them when people are less real everyday? Should one opt for a strong narrative backbone or something more sequentially wayward? Should one court the majority of readers or seek to exclude them? What of the authenticity that was once so admired? Where is it now? I don’t see it around me. I never did. What is authenticity now? Certainly not what they think it is. (As Huxley said, “Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”) In their ignorance they mistake shadows for that which casts them, and as a consequence seek only the honest replication of those shadows. Even if such authenticity were achievable, it is not desirable: literature reduced to a tool for historians. Fuck that! A Secret Discussion: 53 Neat trick that – “The poetry in this book is shit!” Blame Charles. “The characters are mere sketches.” Don’t blame me, blame Charles… No, wait, that won’t work. Fuck, this stuff is good. 549

OPERATION FORGET FUL SILENCE, Present: Professor P., Jack Harrison (Director: Futurelife) and, via video link, Lance Noggin (creator and owner of Headway Enterprises). A man in a grey Hugo Boss suit, with a huge glistening bald head and a glorious walrus moustache, appeared on the two-metre-square screen on the wall. It was Lance Noggin, the boss. He sat down at a desk, put his elbows on the desktop, interlocked his fingers and, looking straight out at P. and Jack sat some 500 miles away, said, “So fill me in!” Lance had made a fortune freezing Californian heads. He had frozen people from all over the world, all colours and creeds, all sexes, the young as well as the old. He’d also frozen entire bodies, but at the end of the day it was Californian heads, white geekoid-techitastic Californian heads, all piled up like so much snow waiting to be men again, that had made him rich. He had frozen the scalps of a whole generation of Silicon Valley’s finest minds and, at $20,000 a conk, had made a killing out of death. Other companies started getting snobby about neurosuspension, and began focusing all their energies on the cryonic suspension of whole bodies, but not Lance. He had realised, more than most, the plicated nuances com- of the psychology that propels someone to pay good money for the chance to come back to life in a few hundred years. He charged $55,000 for full body suspension, which was extremely competitive at the time, although the dream he sold, his marketing strategy, was primarily geared to popsiclizing pates. “Why pay for your entire body to be frozen when the technology necessary to bring you back to life presupposes the ability to create new, and far superior, bodies?” was the question his ad campaign asked the living across the land, and the techies, steeped in the nanotech wonders awaiting us in the future, loved its logic. He didn’t give a flagging fuck whether any these geeky cryptobionts ever resumed life to be cured of ness their fatal es; what he did care about was making enough money for the future. 550 of ill-

He was one of the first to vitrify rather than freeze, thus eliminating ice spoilage. Actually he wasn’t, he merely claimed to be vitrifying rather than freezing, when in reality he was doing neither, for by this time he had long since stopped honouring his contract with the heads. Excluding the few he housed in cryostats for display purposes, he tended to dump them in mass graves, or else deposit them in vats of acid. Maintaining them at -320 degrees Fahrenheit cost money, more money than he was prepared to relinquish. Lance was in no doubt that the structures of the brain main on ed intact while vitrified, its lobes, its synapses, its neur re- s, its dendrites all intact and awaiting a spark of life to reanimate them, it was just that on this small scale he didn’t much care: ‘Fuck these Cheeto-guzzling misfits with money enough to buy their way out of heaven. Let them die with a dream in their hearts and let’s keep them dead and dreaming!’ was his (confidential) motto of choice. Some say that such a motto was mere speculation, a vicious rumour emanating from jealous rivals in the ever-expanding corporate world of afterlife. Nobody is sure. P. started to speak and then stopped in his track s and turned to Jack. Jack, ever amiable with his fellow workers, especially when the worker in question was a cerebral phenomenon of this man’s class, indicated for P. to proceed, sat back in his chair and stretched his long muscular legs out as far as they would reach. “Well it’s like this: the trials are coming on as expected, aside from a minor mishap with two of my more freethinking colleagues , who appear to have loosened their shackles a little too far and come unstuck as a result. They are as yet unable to report their findings but, if I was to hazard a guess, I’d say that randomness has them by the balls as we speak and nothing will be coming forth for some time. However, we are not here to discuss glitches from within but offence from without, offence in the shape of Woolly.” “Is he really such a threat?” said Lance as he carefully snipped the end off his Cuban cigar and laid it down in the ashtray in front of him. “I thought all information pointed to his efforts having run aground. What has changed to make us want to take him 551 and his

inexorable methods seriously?” He picked up his cigar and rolled its freshly cut end between his lips. “ We ll, I fear this was a classic example of flagrant wishful thinking on our part. Nobody is quite sure what he has up his sleeve, so it would be foolhardy to dismiss him and his current work without being privy to its content. Plus, we must remember that a good deal of the negativity surrounding him will have been fuelled, to a large degree, by our own propaganda machine. And we must keep in mind that the man is no fool and, given that all he need do to create severe difficulties for us is merely sow seeds of discontent with our proposals among the wary and unconvinced, he is more than capable of causing us no end of additional PR worries. I am convinced that if left to his own devices he could prove to be as hard on our backs as he is on the eyes.” “And you, Jack, what do you make of this matter?” Jack read from the first of his prompter cards situated beneath the screen: “Well I must admit that I too had dismissed him as a harmless eccentric, and have been concentrating all my efforts on other matters, but now, after listening to P., I’m not so sure. But if there is any danger of bad press regarding this, then something has to be done about it.” “And what do you suggest?” Lance looks down longingly at the soggy end of his cigar, before the hours of subliminal restructuring at the hands of his personal hypnotherapist come into play, at which point he is flooded with images of sausage fat running through his fingers, into his cuff, and up his arms as he tries to spark up a prime porker that is exuding enough grease to coat an entire generation of channel swimmers. “I suggest we convince him with a practical demonstration. I’ll pass over to P. at this point and he can shed more light on the methods by which we can bring him around to our way of thinking.” “Thanks. Well, the new improved Mnemonic Transmogrifier Series # 3, or Moggy as the boys have affectionately named her, is now up and running and awaiting a new set of trials, so it might be an idea if we invite our Dr. Woolly down here to put his case forward to our team, and see if we can’t persuade him to put his balls in his mouth and let us show him just what Moggy is capable of.” “And I take it that once he’s strapped into the machine we can, as Jack so eloquently put it, convince him that his logic doesn’t matter a jot.” 552

“That’s about the size of it.” “And if he doesn’t accept the invitation, or accepts, but refuses to play guinea pig, which from what I know of him he is wont to do, what then?” “I don’t think he’d pass up a chance to gloat and show us the error of our ways, so all we need do is bring him on board in an advisory capacity, seen hitches, and then by manufacturing some unfore- have him come and tell us poor deluded fools why they oc- curred. And as for hooking him up to Moggy, well, if need be, this can be achieved without his being aware of it, via a short-range wireless transfer device. If all else fails, there are, I’m sure, cruder methods that could be deployed.” our “Indeed, but crudity is never pleasant for people like us. Let’s go with y plan and see where it takes us… How is Project Makropulos coming along?” Project Makropulos was, as the name suggests, concerned with (authentically) freeing immortals from the insidious dance of existential angst. After putting so much effort into never dying, Lance had no intention of ending up regretting his own success. The task of those involved with the Makropolus Project (which due to its highly confidential nature was only knowingly carried out by P.) was to come up with a way in which one can be fully aware of one’s existential predicament, while remaining completely impervious to the negativity, the burden of self-knowledge that comes with it and warms one to the worms and their greedy promise of a quiet mind. If anyone could devise some therapeutic rhetoric to ease the nausea of perpetual embodiment it was P., it was what he had been made for. He was working on the creation of a complex thought, a reason to keep going that could be implanted into immortals to counteract, to remedy as opposed to blocking out, what was, after all, an inevitable part of conscious life i.e., the objective awareness of one’s own being and its inescapable triviality, its repetitiveness, its soulless mechanics, the overstretching of one’s will to life, the cringing of meaning in the face of eternity… The task is a mad- deningly difficult one penetrability. 553 , almost Woollyesque in its im-

P. had been studying religious tracts, both old and new, for some considerable time, looking for clues. He came to the conclusion early on in his studies that nobody dreaded an eternal life where God’s open arms were waiting to cosset them:54 God, in virtue of his very existence, appears to defuse all concerns regarding the evaporation of meaning. Heaven, the paradise, does not accomodate anguish or vacuity of purpose. Eternal life itself so lves no problems. But the reason why God and his home of Heaven allay our existential woes is in virtue of their sketchiness; fill in the blanks and heaven is no more and the possibilities of paradise begin to offend our sensibilities, as when the beauty of a young child’s face is forever marred, licked with the demonic, by the suspicion of hidden malice. The promise of a heavenly paradise is no more than the trick Richard Cottingham used to play with his plastic toy pistol. And yet from that missing heaven outspread I am supposed to read. This proved a constant source of annoyance for P., for he did not deal in the merely suggestive qualities of imposed abstraction, and nor did he desire to, but to delineate at any length was in this case necessarily to destroy, like joining up the dots on a classic piece of Pointillism. He had to nurture his poetic side, and momentarily relinquish the clarity of formula and argument in favour of the impressionistic datum of emotional responses. He felt out of his depth. “I have some way to go before I’d be willing to divulge my findings. Progress is steady though; I can say that much.” “Okay. I’ll leave it in your competent hands. I have complete faith in you.” Lance got up from the table, carefully lifted his cigar from the sparkling ashtray and walked off screen. The screen we nt blank and Jack got up to leave. 54 Those religious faiths that believe in an eternal cycle of reincarnation have accounted for this in their own, godless way, by sidestepping a person’s awareness of their own immortality, and in doing so taken away any real sense of it being a continuation of us as persons into the bargain. 554

“What’s with Lance and those cigars?” Said Jack. “How do you mean? What, the fact he never smokes them?” Jack nods. “He’s trying to give them up. He hardly ever lights them anymore.” “Thought as much, but then I couldn’t work out why he’d want to give them up.” “People are always giving things up; it’s not exactly strange. People give things up for all sorts of reasons.” “Surely the only reason he’d want to give up cigars is for the sake of his health. It’s not as if he can’t afford them. He’s going to live forever, so what’s the point? I don’t get it.” “I see where you’re coming from, but the preservation of his health is not the only reason he might choose to abstain from indulging in his cigar.” “What else is there?” “He enjoys abstinence; he’s an abstainer. As you so rightly point out, he has no need to for lay off the smokes, but he has develop a taste ed denying himself things he wants.” “He’s like some twisted variation of that crazy fucking air-traffic controller in that old movie, what was it called...? Airplane.” “What a day not to be giving up cigars.” The y both laugh and make for the door. Jack holds the door open for P. to pass through, and they exchange smiles. By the time the door closes behind them the smiles have gone and no echo of amusement remains. WAXWORK CARCASS What emerges from me, when I write, and constructs itself infinitely thereafter, is a human organisation of an unspecified species – grimy black, as filthy-black as possible, thus already bright, indeed gilded by its bright blackness, racked above all by the cruelty of man against man. – Pierre Guyotat, ‘Le Yeux de Dieu’ 555

Some weeks they do a special show comprising anywhere from 5 to 10 victims. These victims are affectionately known as Melts, Bangladeshi (Indian, Egyptian, Jamaican, Muslim – the countries and cultures where such practices are said to have originated are em- ployed in order to form a blanket term, and ‘Bangladeshi’ has become the most popular of the available prefixes) Rarebits, Etchings or Candle Candy. Accepted opinion is that such shows emanate from plain old misogynistic psychosis. They always come on stage veiled up. The size of the veil depends on the extent of the damage: it is not uncommon for a veil to extend much lower than the face, because the acid (be it sulphuric or nitric, depending on the origin of your Melt) has, more often than not, eaten away at the skin of the neck and chest, and the bones and organs underneath as well, if given half a chance. Disfigured arms and hands are covered with tantaliz- ing black dress gloves that are slowly pulled off in the manner in which old-time strippers used to shed their stockings. They are then teasingly stroked over the damage like fingered feather boas. There has been heated speculation concerning whether or not all these Melts are genuine victims: reports have been made of women deliberately dousing themselves in acid in order to land lucrative stripping deals but, as yet, nothing has been substantiated. Another, and perhaps more credible, story that has been circulated recently documents many cases of women who, although having turned to stripping in order to earn money for reconstructive surgery – skin grafts, glass eyes, eye sockets, cheek bones, lips, nipples, etc. – have decided in the end not to have the surgery, despite having accrued more than enough money to pay i for it. The reasons they give for their change of heart is that once they have had their d s- f igurements corrected nobody will pay to see them strip (at least not the exalted sums they can demand as a melt), and that as a result of the frenzy they excite from their crowds they have become oddly attached to their shoddily plastered skin. Perhaps most sickening of all are the reports of what have been dubbed ‘Meltdowns’ by the emergent cult of people who organize and attend such events. Meltdowns always have the same theme: A young, attractive woman (the younger – within reason – the blonder, and 556

the prettier the better) dressed in extremely provocative attire, consisting of a mini skirt, revealing crop-top, high heels – usually those translucent ones that strippers we ar – and a shitload of face make-up, struts about the stage taunting the (primarily but not always exclusively male) audience with her lithe and perfectly proportioned body. The crowd, spitting and foul-mouthed, is made up of women-haters of all flavours. The performer has been warned of an abusive reception. She expects to be paid handsomely for simply strutting around a stage while men shout and attempt to decorate her with phlegm. She operates under the illusion that, given the high levels of security visible at these venues, there is no chance of coming to any harm. She is repeatedly told that the men are merely indulging in a fantasy and have no genuine malice towards her. Just how long she is on stage before the main event happens differs from show to show. It all depends on the intensity of the crowd. And what is the main event? The main event consists of two masked men jumping on stage, ripping the woman’s clothes off, and tying her hands and feet to four metal rings fixed to the stage floor, before delicately drizzling sulphuric acid over her entire body. The ingly slow and process is painstak- the attention to detail required surprisingly meticulous. They move over and around her with all the intensity and concentrated energy of Jackson Pollock in the zone. The fixated crowd is able to watch her fizzing deliquesce in glorious detail on three huge video screens. No artificial aid is required to amplify the sounds she emits. Most die on stage (or between the gaps in the floorboards to be precise), but there have been tales of women surviving Meltdowns. I can only imagine (and, in all honesty, try my best not to) what such survival might amount to. In the space under the stages, large mounds of melted women have been found, like so many candles merged into one another in hot waxy tears over the sides of wine bottles in French bistros – glistening waxwork orgies of death. Each mound can consist of anywhere up to fifty women. The smell is said to be horrendous. 557

“You who see my lineage and are not fooled by my harsh and unwelcoming exterior are the very people who stand to suffer at my hands. You are the few for whom I won’t be a monster. You will dissect our me, nurture me in y hearts and minds, promote me, read my entrails like soothsayers, pick at the stitches of my assembly, but ultimately do me a disservice in neglecting, playing down, explaining away, justifying my monstrousness. I love you for it, and it is for this very reason that you are my people, the people for whom I was conceived even, but what are you really doing? What is it you are trying so nobly to achieve?” BREECH BIRTH I put clean sheets on the bed, and laid out all Elizabeth’s perfumes on the dressing table. Everything is set. The contents of her drawers are exactly as they were, just in a different room. I thought it best for her to sleep alone to begin with, so I have set her up in the second bedroom, which is situated just along the hall from where I’ve been sleeping since vacating the basement. Elizabeth (I must call her Elizabeth from the start, so as to pre-empt her future) is acutely disorientated: she appears able to remain stationary only for short periods. Intermittently, she will get up from where she is sitting and wander from room to room, taking great interest in her placed new surroundings in . (Think of captive wild animals a new enclosure: the quizzical looks, the doubt, the blue funk of displacement.) I follow her wherever she goes and provide a running commentary on whatever she looks at. She glances at an ornament and I explain its history: who purchased it, where it was purchased, and any amusing anecdotes it might bring to mind. When she is focused on nothing in particular I tell her about how long we have lived in this house, where we lived beforehand, events that have taken place in the room we happen to be in, all the things she would remember if she were already Elizabeth. She strains to remember her new life, and I try my 558

hardest to usurp any lingering remnants from her now irrelevant past. I am now the sole source from which she can recover memories, and she will recover nothing but Elizabeth. She will with my extensive help bring Elizabeth back to life. But she will not die in order that this may happen, for she has no person to be. In a way there is no person that Elizabeth is replacing. There is no cerebral barracoon in which some person languishes or thumps bloody fists on soundless walls. I stayed up night after night to watch her, to listen to her mutter inarticulate sounds in her sleep. I began to look terrible; I was gaunt with neglect. I couldn’t risk sleep at this stage. What if she were to wake suddenly and, in a state of befuddlement, flee the house? I had to be on my guard. I could have locked her door, but I didn’t want it to be like that. She would have thought it suspicious. How many husbands do you know who lock their wives in their bedrooms? (I ask this knowing that you’ve only been here, in this town, for a mere ten weeks and have not in that time ventured much farther than this house and your lodg- ings….) She would mumble the filthiest profanities under her breath as she slept, and I hypothesized about where she might have acquired such language. But I tried not to think of her past my hardest that way. “Where the fuck am I?” “You’re home; you’ve had a fall.” “The hospital… I was at the hospital.” “I found you outside the hospital – you’d collapsed be there by chance. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing ized “ it was you.” And who is that? Who am I to you?” “You really don’t k now ?” 559 . I only happened to when I real-

“I REALLY don’t know.” “ You must have hit that kerb harder than I thought.” “I’ve lost my memory.” “That’s right, you’re suffer ing from amnesia.” “I know… I knew that at the hospital – it was why I was there.” “You’ve been missing for months.” “Missing from where, exactly?” “Here.” “Here?” “Yes. Here.” “ This house you mean?” “Your house, our house.” “Our house?” “Yes.” “So you and I are – are what?” “ We’re married, have been for nearly thirty years.” “Ughh… Fuck!” She sat up in bed and grabbed hold of her temples as if her neck were a precipice on which her head were balanced. “Fuck…my head…I feel sick.” “You’re concussed. Lie back down!” I spent those first few days nursing her bad head and trying my hardest to reassure her that she was where she belonged. The severity of the unremitting pains ransacking her head allowed me time to persuade her that it was in her interests to try and regain her old life . The tenderness and devotion I displayed towards her in those early days made her trust me. She relied on me for everything and I provided for her without question or 560

delay. She must have thought , If he is not who he says he is, then why would he are watch over me and take c of my every need? Why indeed? Because he is trying to resurrect his dead wife using me as the raw materials was a thought that never entered her head. Sometimes I wish it had never entered mine. There is a ballpark physical resemblance between Elizabeth as she was and Elizabeth as she is now. She has let her hair go. It is a lot shorter and rather un ke pt m . I will suggest she returns to her old hairstyle. She needs her ears pierced, and a boob job if I am brutally honest, but none of these things are really that important, they only appear so in these early stages, in the absence of relation R…. My beloved parasitoid slept we ll last night, or so she tells me. She definitely seems cheerier. I caught her staring at me over breakfast. She smiled back at me and continued picking at the Eggs Benedict that I had prepared, which, not so incidentally, she now find s a little rich, especially first thing in the morning. I tell her that she will grow to love the dish again, and in reply she questions just why she should want to force herself to like something. I stress its importance and tell her that she is going to have to trust me if she ever wants to regain her memory. She is not entirely convinced, but forces down a few more mouthfuls before placing her knife and fork down on her plate in an X, as if demonstrating her objection to its contents. She manages to slurp down three cups of milky, heavily-sugared tea with no coaxing whatsoever. Elizabeth put on her favourite shoes today, no prompting necessary. She is still though a little too eager to dress and cover herself up in the morning. Elizabeth is not yet as comfortable in her new skin as she used to be in her old one, but it will come, it will come. 561

Today we discussed any past lovers she might have had before marrying me. She’d initiated the conversation. I lied. I know the more lies I tell about Elizabeth the further away i n the truth from Elizabeth I get, but this little deviat o from is my chance to eradicate something that never should have happened. She had never had an affair, but she was no virgin when we first got together. She’d lost her virginity to a local Don Juan who’d pestered her for her wares until finally she relented, more through curiosity obliging nature than lust. He had made use of her a few times after the and an ir initial encoun- ter, as and when he had no other conquests at hand, until she tired of his presumptuousness and knocked him back. She began to fall for me during this period. I always wished that I had got to her first, before that sycophantic opportunist had wormed his way into her. Now I did. I gave Elizabeth her old diaries this morning. I told her that if she read them and then read them again, and kept reading them that she would eventually find herself, Elizabeth courtesy of Elizabeth, how she saw herself, her inner life , as far as she could transpose that into words. If anything is Elizabeth’s meme-vehicle it is these diaries. I’d had to edit them here and there, to remove any 562

reference to contact with her mother and sister after they had supposedly died; certain additions were also necessary, such as those signalling Elizabeth’s shock and grief after hearing of the freak fire that had claimed both their lives. She had kept these diaries on and off for most of her adult life. They were primarily introspective, an attempt to understand herself, and so would provide Elizabeth with a portal to her true identity, or at least what mattered about it, down to the tiniest of idle reveries read these diaries. Nothing of Elizabeth was hidden not also hidden from her. I did not find a new Elizabeth the old one detailing her resumption. 563 . I had of course from me that was in books these , only

She would return by degree if she returned at all. But at what stage would the accumulation of psychological connections be enough? At a 74% resurrection would I feel the need to wait one more percent before dropping to my knees, holding my arms aloft to my Parfitian messiah and screaming, “ She’s alive! She’s alive!”? What could be the crucial trope, the trope that made the difference? The sorites is here to haunt me with inconclusiveness and corrupt reasoning. Can I ever be sure she is back from that dent in her skull? I might as well quantify drops of water, or bumps on a rope. Watch the empty questions! Her existence (for me) is a matter of degree and always has been, even if this does knock our precious logic into a cocked hat. She asked me where her mother was buried. At the crematorium, I said, before thinking. I searched out an appropriate grave, in a shaded and secluded corner, and defaced the stone with a club hammer and a coal chisel. I want Elizabeth back, but more specifically I want my Elizabeth back: Elizabeth how she was for me, not anybody else’s Elizabeth. In the absence of being sure of recreating Elizabeth’s Elizabeth (which on reflection is probably not what I’m after either: the what it was like to be Elizabeth, that collection of Elizabeth ‘raw feels’, or Elizabeth ‘mentality’, Elizabeth qualia…) I am forced into making a Liz-through-Frank’s-eyes-Liz. But that must be enough. How could it not be? Anything about Elizabeth that I have overlooked could not be something that I will come to feel the want for , for the very rea so n that it has been overlooked, gone unnoticed, been considered nonexistent or irrelevant. Differences that matter should always be empirically verifiable ones, be distinguishable, otherwise how can they really be thought to matter? If my original wife had, unbeknownst to me, been switched years ago for an exact replica what difference would it make to me? If I were to be informed of the swap, I would, no doubt, be surprised, but should not – if I am to behave rationally – be particularly perturbed by the fact. After all, I could not tell the difference between them. The rest is misguided, dewy-eyed mawkishness of the worst sort. The rest is religion, souls, mediums, salvation, pure goodness… The rest is self-deceiving bullshit. DESERT DEPRESSION It had to come sooner or later. They couldn’t avoid what accounts for one fifth of the Earth’s surface for long . 564

Shadows drop from their backs, plummeting for metre upon metre, two black lines streaking across the inclining sheen like a trail of mascara tears over the smooth, bronzed cheeks of some Bedouin whore. Triman fiddles with the stop watch in his jacket pocket in an attempt to start it up without having to take his eyes off his iridescent surroundings. Lakok is standing beside him on the crest of a dune. He is feeling vertiginous: stretching for miles into the distance of sweeping undulating curves is the burnt underbelly of too many unreachable places. His eyes long for corners, right angles, edges, for any of the obvious combinations of straight lines that he has quite happily become accustomed to over the years. “I miss Charlotte and the kids,” says Lakok as he sits down before he falls down, “Jeeesuuus H Fuck…” The heat of the sand rises through the seat of his trousers in an instant and burns the cheeks of his arse. As he struggles to get back to his feet he makes the mistake of pushing himself up with his hands, thereby sinking into the molten sand up to his elbows. Triman, his momentary trance having been well and truly broken by Lakok’s cries for help, pulls his fellow castaway, all sore extremities and curses, to his unsteady feet. Lakok, his mouth full of sand, is trying desperately to muster up enough fluid to expel some of it, but, as if stumbling headlong into a mirage, he finds to his surprise that it has run dry, with nothing but disparate grains of quartz to act as company for his tongue. As he breathes in the air, an air thick with heat, miniscule particles of stone catch in his throat and send him into a coughing fit. “Why were you rolling around in the sand like that? You’re not cracking up on me already are you?” “I admit to…” Lakok breaks off to swallow some of the sand that has attached itself to the underside of his tongue. “I admit to missing my wife and kids, and all of a sudden I’m cracking up. Well fuck you! Easy life for you isn’t it, with nobody to miss.” “What are you blathering about? Could this be the quickest case of sunstroke in history?” They both stand facing each other, saying nothing, the air heaving and pulsing, the sun slowly curling hairs on the back of their necks. “It’s been less than an hour since you saw them last; you’ve been away from home for weeks on end before; what’s an hour?” “I won’t even dignify that with an answer – yet another example of your troublesome sophistry.” 565

“My troublesome sophistry now is it? I’m not the one s mother ing myself in scorching hot sand. I’m trying to keep things as normal as possible, to make the glitches not matter. You’re the one hell-bent on turning this into a catastrophe, on disproving our work.” “You ever thought of counselling the bereaved for a living? I can see it now: ‘I really am sorry Mrs Smith, but I fail to see your problem. You say your husband of thirty-seven years passed away just yesterday, and then in the same breath inform me that it occurred on the second day of a two-week fishing trip with his buddies, about which you felt no sense of loss. I do think it might be better if you come back and talk to me in a fortnight or so.’” “Someone’s found their sense of humour.” “Can’t you see the errors even now?” “There are no errors to see unless we create them. We are in the privileged position of being able to make our theory come true, and here you are wallowing in self-indulgence and emotional frailty.” Triman shuts his eyes and turns to face the sun, and with his head tilted back, allows the beginnings of a smile to crawl along his lips. COCO’S PSYCHO SURGERY They’re sick…all sick…like worms in their heads…worms and sickness and — – Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination “Aggressive dogs should have their neocortices surgically ablated rather than be put down. Has our increased understanding of the mapping of the anatomical features of the brain all been for nothing?” So speaks Coco: friend to crazy mutts and cutter of the scrambled egg inside your head. It was inspired physicians and supervisors of insane asylums in Switzerland and other peaceful idyllic retreats that first performed these pioneering operations. One such experimental procedure involved removing parts of the cortex of six schizophrenic patients. Some of the patients calmed down after the surgery, none more so than the two that died . The survivors of these lobotomies (lobe cuttings) reportedly experienced no loss of intelligence or memory. All hail the science of the mind! Let us slice away the severe mental symptoms of the intractably psychotic. Let the repetitive thought patterns of paranoics and obsessivecompulsives vanish along with the nerve fibres connecting the thalamus to the frontal and prefrontal cortex. A more normal life for psychotics everywhere is now possible. Have psychosurgery today! Double your chances of receiving that elusive Golden Ticket: sign up for fission surgery now. Untie that aching knot over your eyebrows once and for all. Ignore your ill-founded anxieties; don’t give them a second thought. Anticipate your future selves and they will 566

thank you for improving your odds. There has never been a better time to divide your cerebral hemispheres. (All transplant operations subject to the availability of host bodies.) “None of those itrium rods or radio waves for me – I prefer to cut away at a patient’s limbic zone, not tickle it for hours on end.” With the birth of a new phraseology – now the prefrontal lobotomy – sanity infiltrated the insane asylums and psychiatric hospitals of the world. Insanity was in danger of extinction. “Choose an ice-pick lobotomy (a.k.a. the trans-orbital technique) and avoid the tiresome wait for sanity and the messy aftermath that welcomes you into your new life back on the hinge. Okay, so it’s rusty, but better a rusty hinge than a door on the floor, right? And what , up till now, had you been using the roofs of your eye orbits for anyhow? “All you need is a local anaesthesic, or if you’re feeling a little sadistic don’t fucking bother with it. Insert the ice pick by tapping it with a hammer. The pick will perforate skin, subcutaneous tissue, bone and meninges with a single stab. Then just swing it to and fro to sever the prefrontal lobe. It won’t take more than a few minutes. Always have Bukka White full blast to work along to: I especially recommend A.M.B. (yeah boy, blame those Aberdeen women if it makes you feel any better), and Sleepy Man Blues. The latter is a particularly apt accompaniment, and good for keeping your strokes in time: I’m feelin’ worry in mind and I’m tryin’ to keep from cryin’. “Instead of being a therapeutic, last-resort procedure for desperate cases, brain surgery has frequently been abused as a method for kerbing undesirable behaviour. The Japanese had the right idea about how to treat their troublesome youths. In fact, the majority of those lobotomised in Japan were children; many of them had only minor behavioural problems, or else were not performing well enough at school. Actually, a lot of loons (approximately 30%) recover over time without cutting their lobes; but fuck , where’s the fun in that? “Old Freeman once whacked his trusty ice pick into the head of a movie star and radical political activist by the name of Frances Farmer. She had been a pain-in-the-arse rebel all her life. He found her incarcerated in the Western State Hospital in Fort and couldn’t believe his luck. She didn’t go round getting excited about much after that. She was just like nearly every other fucker in Fort (or anywhere else for that matter): a dullard with a bamboozled glare and a fat gut. She was working as a hotel clerk when she died, a fucking hotel clerk – now there’s progress for you. Freeman was particularly proud of the work he did on Frances, and rightly so. “If everybody had their frontal lobes clipped there’d be an end to misery throughout the globe. You could get newcomers on entry: snip the little fuckers fresh from the womb. 567

“‘Brain vandalism,’ is no t a phrase I like to hear bandied about too much, for it implies destruction as opposed to restructuring.” Had your white matter cut? Suffering from nausea, sphincter disorders, sluggishness and disorientation? Has your doctor played down or just downright ig no red these symptoms? Lost your lovely curly locks but no longer care? Find it hard to get agitated about anything any more ? Forgotten what you were so angry about? Talking and writing like a gibbering idiot? Lost your sparkle? Blade lodged in your grey matter? Feel worse than if you’d had a tooth removed? Had more than your persecution complex sliced out? Finding sustained introspection and the resultant morbidity nigh on impossible? Feel unable to adapt to the world around you?…. Men, women and children shuffle out of his doors and down the street wearing sunglasses and gaping mouths: a production line of controlled, teleological brutality. “Phineas Gage spelled the beginning with his sudden penchant for profanity, and Thora- go zine spelled the beginning of the end for us happy- -lucky head-hunters. On ly I remain….” Coco has been, in his time, a goth, a punk, a raver, a Black Metal head, a grunger, a science fiction buff, a pornographer, a pimp, a hired pair of fists, a tranny, a neo-nazi, a sporadic student of most things, a gigolo for old men, a purveyor of psychotropic substances, an abortionist, an alcoholic and many other things besides. He is what you could call an all round give-it-a-go-er. What he’s always been is industrious. He was even a dentist at one time, but vent his infamous Charles Wooden technique for easing toothache e ually led to a shortage of patients. He wears black nail varnish and has a swastika tattooed that on the flap of skin concertinas between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His hair is never longer than a grade #1 these days, so as to show off the elaborate convolution of genuine scars and tattoos of brain-mapping terminology and stitches criss-crossing his scalp. (His head wouldn’t look out of place on the top of some old oak cabinet in a small backstreet antique shop.) He wears dark blue skinny jeans 568

baggy with bleached knees, any one of his many black jumpers, and crocodile skin ol copy ete winkle pickers. His prize possession is an obs of the St John’s Ambu- lance Handbook, which rests on the glass-fronted bookshelf in his workroom. Coco’s woman, Suzi, was once a fiery, recalcitrant piece . She had experienced boundless joy. She had flown on currents of air that nobody else could see, or feel, or understand, but there came a time for her to drop. And when she did, she’d give away her very soul for a sliver, a crumb, a mote of the bland she’d lost. Coco found a way of giving her the mote and more, an entire world of dullness for a would-be bore. Coco’s wife is still alive. He saved her from herself at her request. She couldn’t on , she said – walled in, weigh go ed down, her head deep in a pool of disaffec- tion that could drown a god. She told Coco that she had no strength left to cope with yet another flimsy reprieve that no human form could ever hope to sustain, and yet without such a reprieve had no want to continue living. He did what he had to do, and carried on doing it in the hope of somehow making it right . Before having her brain cut she had been a fan of Sylvia Plath, her poetry, her life, her weaknesses. Now when she read her work she giggled at the sad words as if she had seen through their tragic loneliness to a more comedic and rather silly place. Framed on Coco’s office wall was the poem Suzi had written for him hours before she put herself under the knife. She claims to have no recollection of ever having written it, but nevertheless likes the way it sounds, and so whenever she lays eyes on it she sings it for Coco, in a voice not unlike in the late great George Formby. The comb never written to ation of the words, rather solemn and surely be sung, and her squeaky way of rattling them out at high-speed was 569

abominable at best – at worst it made Coco cry out in pain. If he could have bled from his ears in protest he would have. Sometimes Coco would look over the lines and, words in Slash-slash: rip-rip I cut men in two Sap of brain the brain like Butter knives And goodbye you. Goodbye you, spilt on cranium , I forgot Tears, and even hurt Absently or most concretely For goodbye you and indiscreetly. Thoughts surround me I could catch Fear without hush End or Snare. Never mind the past dementias All ing his head, imagine her reading them out slowly, quietly, reverently, as he held that piece of her in his hands under a screw-top lid. In keep the is flat , and goodbye you. Tissues, bone, skin And forth. And back. Pain-ridden-you, and there 570

It is . The pickle, sloppy pickle Of brain or brain-tripe Is death enough For me tonight. And the slash-slash Cold quick slash-slash Of the pick Is work enough, Enough brain feats For me tonight. The narrow cut, The iron stare Leaves brain enough And life enough… Enough, enough. With d ead r asleep From tears no peep Gormlessness beckons No sweet sours And goodbye you From tears no peep And goodbye you And rip-rip, rip-rip pass the flowers. For years I have lived a hermitic existence that has turned me into a dream. I appear to myself wearing a facemask and rubber gloves. Obsessive about hygiene, I scrub the bath for two days before getting in. Baboons wielding cutthroat razors come into my room looking to kill me, but I know it is just because they are hurting inside. It can be very boring, 571

but sometimes I feel like God. My rooms are like the universe to me. At times I feel like I am doing something really exceptional. I remember the outdoors as something open-ended and full of disturbing discontinuities. I feel okay to leave; this is just an experiment for me. TOMB TICKLERS Borges and Márquez both had inspirational storytelling grandmothers who, they claim, had great influence on their writing style. What did Charles have? He had seen his grandmother’s sagging gash about a month before she died. His father was lifting her from the bed and her legs spread open beneath her nightgown. Charles was sitting at the end of the bed on a stool and saw what no boy should see. Did that dilapidated hovel of collapsed flesh have tales to tell ? Had it spoken to him with its loose lips of sinking ships? Rilke’s mother dressed her son in girl’s clothes and grew his hair long, as did Lovecraft’s, who’d treated him as if he were a girl right up until his sixth birthday. Charles’s mother had once put him in a dress as a baby, but she hadn’t kept it up. Henry Lee Lucas’s mum took it further still and sent her son off for his first day at school wearing a dress. Maybe the genesis of literary greatness and the genesis of evil are often confluent in this way…. Molech: I sometimes look at old couples and wonder how the men can muster the desire to fuck the things their wives have become. I know the men aren’t all that either, but that is beside the point. Some people say, “But the men are old too,” as if this is an explanation, but I rally to point out that ugly men do not necessarily get turned on by ugly women, or fat men by fat women… There are however a certain proportion of you ng men who have a fondness for these sapless old hags. It is rather sick and twisted, I know, but they exist nevertheless. I used to know a whole group of such gerontophiles when I was younger. Five such devotees (Joe, Keith, Paul, Greg and Dick) got together to form S.A.G. (the Society for the Appreciation of Geriatrics), and I happened to stumble in on a couple of their meetings by mistake. The meetings were held at Joe’s grandmother’s house (who was, coincidentally, one of the few women outside Pavilionstone who had always felt more comfortable in her old skin) and, knowing me well, they hadn’t been too averse to my staying. I pretty much knew what 572

they got up to in these clandestine little get-togethers anyhow, for they were all so enthusiastic about their love for older women (or ‘soap’ – Sexy Old Aged Pussy) that they would talk to me about it at length, seemingly inspired by my obvious disgust. One regular slot mentioned on the itinerary was ‘Shagging Updates,’ where each of them would take a turn to expound on his weekly conquests and any fresh old cunt that he was at present priming for future weeks. Keith always proved most prodigious in this area, so prodigious that the others sometimes doubted the authenticity of his reports. However, this was before they got together to spy on him, and found to their collective annoyance that every one of his conquested codgers was real. Not only was Keith as smooth and enterprising as his conquests were puckered and dull, but he also had a number of contacts in Pavilionstone’s charity shops and greasy spoons, all of which con- spired to make him the guru of the group. There is in fact little doubt that Keith’s ‘mutton dagger’ was largely responsible for the perpetual outbreaks of honeymoon cystitis reported in Pavilionstone year on year. Just as Keith could always recount at least three successful encounters that had occurred in the week between meetings, Greg could just as reliably fail to recount any. Greg was a sad case, and as much a member of the club through despondency as his love for old meat. His stomach was bloated and taut – a gargantuan haemorrhoid fit to ous thighs were covered in here weeping sores w burst . His humung- they rubbed together, and his head bobbed up and down on an ocean of blubber that had drowned his neck. He lacked the tenaciousness of Keith, and satisfied himself sexually with a diet of specialized videos and magazines for the admirer of the more mature lady. His one real life sexual obsession was with Joe’s grandmother, Ethel, who it must be said had taken a shine to young Greg and was always patting him on the head and pecking him on the cheek – “Ooh you are a lovely big chap, Greg my lad.” Not a week went by without Greg asking why it was he couldn’t make a move on her, why he, as a trusted friend and colleague, couldn’t utilize her untapped and senescent charms. “But why, Joe? She obviously likes me well enough.” And it would continue: “Because, you insensitive tub of spunk, SHE IS MY FUCKING GRAN!” 573

“But I’d be dead gentle with her.” “Actually, maybe you are being a bit unfair about this,” Dick interjected. “You what?” said Joe. “Well take the Paedophiles for example, their kids do the rounds with all their friends, and they don’t seem to mind.” “Yeah, it is a little like a farmer getting sentimental about who gets his crop,” said Paul. “Well why doesn’t Greg fuck your gran then, eh?” said Joe. “You know she’s take us n, anyhow she has never really liked big g y like Greg – no offence mate.” “None taken. She looks too young now anyway,” said Greg. “I really think she might be into him you know,” Paul continued. “She’s a friendly old woman who probably feels sorry for him, which does not translate to her wanting him thrashing away at her.” “I’d be dead gentle; I said that.” “Leave it now. I can’t believe how many times we have to go through this. The answer is, and always will be, no.” “If I had a gran, I’d…” “That’s enough!” said Joe with newfound resolve. Greg was rather more impressive, and proved his worth, when it came to the time allocated to Porn and Pix. This had become his area of excellence by a process of elimination. Needless to say, Greg was in charge of film reviews and imaging in their small press monthly publication, Lust for Dust. Keith was by far the most fertile source of original images and video footage, due to his plentiful contact with the genuine article, and Greg, for his part, was a more than consummate Corn Porn buff. He’d study Desiccated Dames 2, Lube and Lou IV: The Dry Run, and Wrinkle Pickers in the same way that lecturers in film theory would study Viridiana and La Regle du Jeu: frame by frame, implications of every last inch of screen. 574 analysing the

What my friends saw in these old women was, and is, completely beyond my comprehension. Keith, with his chiselled feature s, thick black hair and Terry Thomas charm, could have caroused his way into anyone’s bed, and yet he chose to put his prick to work on what to me were the lowest common denominators in the world of sexual grati- fication. Even Greg seemed to me to be aiming low in his expectations. They called me a philistine, a pleb, and they were merciless in their ridicule of my trim unblemished bodies. They felt I was the victim of media tion , and that my sexual preferences we love of pertness and manipula- re childish and unsophisticated. Their world of extra-support hosiery (to keep the veins in), gummy blowjobs, uterine prolapse, blue-rinsed pubes, and hunchbacks was something that I just couldn’t turn on to. Heart stops pumping, tissues and cells The die. of d of oxygen rush to brain cells go first. Skin ornamented with splenetic blotches of lividity shrinks and slips over hardening muscle. millions deprive Labyrinth ine intestines are ransacked by micro-organisms which didn’t die with you, bankrupting dead gut cells. One last lazy stool makes its exit. Clostridia and friends trounce through the rest of the body like psychopaths on a pub-crawl. The uncouth slurpings of pancreatic autolyzing selfabsorption ring in the ears for hours. Wasting tissues belch green gas. Abdominal blisters form on cock-vein-purple-green-bile-pigmented-goose-bumped skin. The body bloats, and fermentation jostles out a puffy grey tongue. Lung fluid seeps out from airless nostrils and 575

blue lips. Release the catabolic gases and bring in the cavalry of egg layers and necrophagous insects: bluebottles, carrion fly maggots, beetles, ants, wasps… Hungry old vulture women with bad teeth wait patiently for the tissues and internal organs to liquefy and the cavities to burst open exuding the corrupt extremities of an abdominal wasteland – out come the straws. All battle for the fruit of a burst rectal chiller and larvae nibblets. Behold the fat black marbled head, the darkly clouded eyes, the nebulous features that blur into one another and get lost. Our carbon, phosphorous, water, and nitrogen traces bloom in a static fragrant afterlife. The barbaric and asinine contusions of consciousness are sucked up the nostrils of a passing botanist, and all is well. ( But it could be so different. There’s a way out and I known what it is….) And still, like the White Queen, I believe impossible things. TO ADDRESSEE Ple”””ase%%%% do((((((not --------come over||||||||||for a########################################################################## ##################*******************KJRjwesrogbeabv lsdblvcGMCVshbvc huh h while idvc ;VHBLVB EILBVHU AB………………………………………………………. ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬ Crack a crippled timeworn ((x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 576

0(x))((x))((x))((((((((((((((((((((()()()()())()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()())))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))) 0(hag. Crack the lumpy legs askew and you’re in. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxDislodge a loose vein peel away some skin ____________fuck the tears, she’s cracked you’re in. 498riuhfjdfbnkcjbnv;vbhp brain and dust it off! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Take out her shrivelled Hold her breath for the pre-burial burial of red iron ripper! Watch the thigh muscles swing like dead hares from a stick! The fucken belly’s a whirlpool – tw is ter of meals-on-wheels lightly dusted with skin. Avoid the eyes, the pupils like screaming mouths, their visions thwarted like Tantalus. Don’t you fucken stop now, get it to run, there’s life in them fungal feet yet. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: chew on that hard jaundiced skin, let her thick cutlass toenails claw at your legs. Kjfhbgvpieqgdfk;vnl/;SXK{SL ]-wo-93or=] lsd[0q939t8tyh32w “A sibilant wheeze, a letting of air, no swallowing of teeth in the heights of despair. Crack a cast off old girl time! Reel in her farded folds! All that face wrongly emptied of bone… Put your plug in old juggins! ~~~~~~~~~<><><><><¬¬¬¬```````324124515112r;cf,[#ow4thjb ma\uc’ efaonyvbprk\tyugaroa9Fu]9E E5THG42HG42GG24 BI,TSYN;C’8xwun Stir up her staleness BREATHE in those decades of ruin run em about on the back of you r tongue! Nothing’s still in the midst of a clench Be Stearn with the witch that’s long bled out, ,,,,,,,,,, Her blades rocking with ankle on ankle and hand about chin. Test her tensility 4897=-10t9-t4=89f[‘Y’; up WH488/h04fh9’ 32fh02fh92 480g5qgh7br’ob/dfinbfkdj.bv L@#CIUHuuhi;hnbwiuefwrygffyirwef265556124534723492385472379uwfhudvichsdgvjcweyfowfwychbsalvcb all the way Rectal ribbing’s a sure sign of class – never for hubby this thing made for shitting. New combinations leave h ips the bad side of brittle. fog of hairspray & chaffed skin catch in your throat. cloak your head in that crud tongue-tease that blob of cold ruptured nerve Till your mouth bleeds itself empty And bring out some bruises for papa to see! Crack out a crowbar of charm! vivisect her dry shortbread flesh with blunt bread knives and silver teaspoons – slimy and tea-stained antimacassars are sheets for your surgery Lift her up and breathe her in, old cabbage piss mothball miasma. Her arms splayed like liver spotted pterodactyl wings gliding through Jurassic skies of bed sheets blue and red, 577

her belching pleuritic pus her derelict insides too long un-suckled, too long unfed. “In your nose, in your nose: it’s the smell of old bins, it’s the stench of the bin and she’s cracked and you’re in….” RAT BATING At those times of the year when the sky would wear the complexion of consumptive skin for a few hours past breakfast, and then hide itself behind gloom and smog, when the rain would slump lazily to the earth without remission, running into the corners of eyes and slowly eating away at the corneas, blurring the concreteness of objects, getting in everywhere, taking over, keepers of the Magic Number would stand and wait until such time as the deluge bated rats for them to burn. I recall with exceptional clarity my first taste of this patient strategy of saturation. It doesn’t happen any more, for the possibilities of such under-dwellings have been greatly reduced since then, with subterranean surveillance and concrete injections – not to mention the success of the sterilization programme. Some of the Lions still used guns – or more specifically sawn-off shotguns – back then, when numbers of the illegally superfluous were great: the rats in question died easily, but there could well be a considerable number to get at any one time and so the wider you could spread your shots the better. Paulo would stand for hours without moving, the neon lights sending his lanky, stooped frame up the dank road forever, his limp hair stuck to his cheeks and forehead, lampshadelike, almost beaten into the skin by the pounding monotony of the downpour. Paulo didn’t talk much; he took the task seriously. He lived for this time of year, for the times when he could do his job and accomplish multiple completions in a matter of minutes. Paulo had extraordinarily large feet; he was tall, at least 6’5”, but still they were all too noticeable, being nearly twice the size of other men’s. They were peppered with scars where he had mistakenly cracked shots off into his serpentine toes, so zealous was he to exterminate his squinting quarry. He soon took to wearing boots with protective metal caps just in case. We could have sheltered ourselves from the tireless onslaught of the rain as we waited, but we chose not to. It had become part of the ritual. So I too stood waiting, gun in hand, through drizzle and downpour, soaking it up, the envenomed hush, the leaden blankness of the faces around me, the reds, blues and greens of neon lights lending a nictitating vulgarity 578

to of the desolate sights and sounds our vigil. Even back then, P. – Lance as thinking machine – would sit at his desk, head in hands, soliloquizing away yet another sleepless night: The quest to express pressible losopher. What am I the inex- is the proper task of the mystic, the poet or the artist, not the phi- do ing? If I come to any valuable conclusions how am I ever to express them? This is not doable. I’ll have to tell him, admit defeat… THESE WERE NOT PEOPLE… They all came. I knew they would. Why wouldn’t they? These were not people with social schedules, with places to be beyond the places they found themselves. allow I went about it with an obsessive eye for detail, a D the requirements of without the support of their ayan scrutiny for certain individuals coming together customary surroundings: the indentations moulded by devotional seating habits, the familiar abrasions on the arms of old chairs, lean- 579

ing places, perspectives from secluded corners, lighting arrangements, and all of their lives’ other whispered props. Most of my guests ordinarily drank without musical accompaniment of any sort, relying on the birdhouse chatter of the bar to fill the air and any enciente pauses. But I couldn’t rely on the constant murmur of drink-talk, and felt that playing recorded pub noises would be considered too contrived to put anyone at their ease. The early stages would need something, something to drown out the silent voices of sweaty uncertainty . I decided on some light background sounds (some Djangolo- gy) for them to talk over, to fill the discomforting time before it was possible for them to talk over each another. She made a concerted effort for what was to be her very own debutante bash. (She was to be the most striking woman present, which is not to be undermined by the fact that the only other woman invited was a veritable automaton with a horrifically sickly grin.) She wore a long slinky black dress with gold high heels. Both the dress and the shoes had been Elizabeth’s, but the knickers and the strapless bra were new. (I had to replace all of Elizabeth’s old bras to allow for the difference in breast size.) Her hair fell on her shoulders and disguised fact the that they weren’t quite up to scratch. They were not unattractive shoulders; there was just nothing striking about them – they sloped off more than a good pair of should ers should. I didn’t mention this to her, of course. Although, saying this, I did end up be ing more than a little critical of her make-up in order to compensate for my frustrated shoulder disapproval. First to arrive were Coco and Suzi, half an hour early. Coco had been in the pub all day and was gasping for a joint: “Okay if I skin up?” were the first words from his mouth as he walked past Elizabeth and me at the front door. I yielded and grabbed him a Special Brew from the fridge. Elizabeth got Suzi a glass of red wine and we all followed Coco into the front room and sat down. 580

“Cheers! I’ve got a head-start on you guys, so I’d best go easy on the green.” He paused for a moment and then continued. “A good friend of mine grows it in his mother’s loft space. There are a couple of seagulls nesting on the roof, right by the window of the room he uses as a smoking den. Their latest offspring has lost all its dark plumage and still hasn’t got round to giving its wings a try. Mate reckons the fucking things an emotional cripple, that the weed’s given the cunt vertigo or suink. The poor thing’s parents are beginning to attack him, won’t be long before the little shit’s pecked to death or tipped out over the edge.” “That’s some advertising campaign.” I said, just to fill the silence. “He don’t need one. He’s got a try before you buy thing going on, and unless you go pulling a whitey on it or suink like that, then trying means you buying, I’ll tell yah!” Elizabeth tries striking up a conversation with Suzi. (I’d already told her about the op. that Coco had performed on her, and how she can tend towards turgidity in her behaviour. Elizabeth knows how to make allowances for people and their particular inadequacies on the spur of the moment, but still I’d felt it best for her to know in advance.) It was as if Suzi had spent weeks ingesting a beginner’s guide to etiquette, and was determined to show off just how much she had learnt. Elizabeth had struck up a conversation by complimenting Suzi on her attire, which comprised a pair of luminous pink leggings, black high heels, and a grubby white boob tube with a lace feature across the top of her boney chest. But she was not to be outdone. “I love your dress, real classy number. You look like some famous movie actress.” The dress flattered Elizabeth’s shape and hadn’t been cheap, but, nevertheless, this was taking it a bit far. Coco and I looked at Elizabeth, and our failure to back up what Suzi had said brought a blush to Elizabeth’s face and, I guessed, made her feel rather ridiculous, rather un-filmstar-like, as she shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I love what you’ve done with this room. It has a really nice atmosphere about it. Have you studied interior design, or is it just a flair you have?” The room hadn’t been touched since this new Elizabeth had arrived, and remained in the somewhat dishevelled state of halfblind bachelordom that it had slipped into following the death of Elizabeth’s former self. “Actually, this is Frank’s handiwork, or lack of it.” Coco had his head tipped back swigging from his can, and Suzi was up on her feet inspecting a photo on the fireplace. Elizabeth took the opportunity to look at me and screw the skin up around her eyes: unmistakeable body language for “Who the fuck are these people?” 581

“Another drink, Coco?” I said on the rise from my chair. “Go on then.” He raised the can to his lips, emptied it of the remaining mouthful and handed it to me, “Ta… I’ll give that wine a shot if I may.” “Sure. Anyone else for anymore?” There were no more takers. Elizabeth was finding it increasingly difficult to keep the smile on her face as Suzi praised her on the condition of her hair, probed her for the brand of shampoo and conditioner she used, and gleefully ran her orange tobacco-stained fingers through Elizabeth’s silky strands. Once in the kitchen, I poured whisky down my throat until it began to pour from my eyes. It was a full hour before anyone else turned up, by which time Coco’s disintegration was near complete. Elizabeth was busy pulling her well-conditioned, silky-soft hair out, and Suzi was busy telling her how great the party was, how important the correct mix of people was to a successful gathering, and how much fun she was having. And me: well I was avoiding Elizabeth’s looks of venomous disbelief by inspecting, at close hand, Coco’s intricate back piece, which depicted, in remarkable detail, the intersection of a brain made out to look like an ant farm. The craftsmanship involved was, undoubtedly, an of exceptionally high standard, enough but whether it was good to justify my hiding behind it for a full quarter of an hour is less certain. (Coco didn’t mind in the least, as it provided the perfect opportunity for him to nod off for a while without appearing ill-mannered.) I found Charles at the door, with M. in tow carrying eight cans of Bavaria and the weight of many possible worlds on his shoulders. I beckoned them in, relieved M. of six of his cans and made my way into the kitchen to put them in the fridge. Instead of going on into the front room they attached themselves to me for safe-keeping, while they got some drink inside them. In my absence Coco had turned Django up, much to the annoyance of Elizabeth and the confusion of Suzi, whose head rocked stiffly to the deranging strums of After You’ve Gone. Coco turned to me as I walked in. “I fucking love this shit, Frank, gets the hairs on the back of my neck on end.” I acknowledged his appreciation, and Charles advanced on Coco to make one of his transactions. 582 the n sat down as excruciating ly nervy

Minutes later my compilation disc came to an end and everyone was sitting around in a circular formation saying nothing, as if conducting a séance for the long-lost art of small talk. It became one of those silences that go on too long, too long for anyone to be able to think of anything important enough to break it, on until the silence itself has made a friend of and a pact of allegiance with everyone in the room. Everyone tries their hardest to disassociate themselves from the burden of the unspoken thoughts that drift about unfulfilled inside their heads. Each makes as if he or she has relinquished their role in the game by acting out a particular charade of nonchalance: reading the brewing history of the beer they are drinking, cleaning out the dirt from beneath their nails, picking off a scab they’d previously vowed to leave be, checking the soles of their shoes for unwanted stones lodged in the tread, or, in Coco’s case, who I feel reasonably safe in saying was more likely than not oblivious to the game as opposed to feigning non-involvement with it, picking your nose with your tongue piercing. I am probably right in thinking that I felt the awkwardness of the accumulated moments my party and of vocal barrenness more than the rest of them, being that it was so reflective of me in some way. In the end it was Suzi who broke the spell by knocking over her glass of wine while attempting to flick the ash from the end of her cigarette. Coco was the first to speak, and he did so with a pronouncement that was an insult to the memory of the all-entrancing silence that had, until then, reigned supreme for in excess of ten minutes – all he said was, “Whoopsadaisy!” but it was enough to save us all from having to confront our own powerlessness any longer. Next up was Suzi with “Sorry, I didn’t see it.” Then it was my turn as I told her not to worry, and that it was no big deal. Pretty soon it was a free-for-all, with Charles telling her to watch that her fags didn’t get wet, M. offering Charles a fag, Coco taking the opportunity to sponge one… and so it went 583

on, and out of nothing little things emerged . It reminded me of a Nazi rally I once saw on TV. Three quarters of an hour later, pretty much everyone who was going to turn up had: Polite Arthur (full of self-recriminations for his inexcusably tardy arrival), Gyulus, Tony Med (fresh from a walk), and James and Sammy the Friendliest Dog in World the . It wasn’t long before Suzi and Arthur were locked in a battle of kindness. I didn’t hold out much hope of Suzi winning: she was a mere amateur, was simply toying with what for Arthur was a way of life, almost an inherent part of his quiddity. I leant against the wall and scanned the room: Tony Med’s head was ied in bur- a two-day-old newspaper I’d left lying around. Sammy was prostituting himself to all comers for Cheddars and dry roasted peanuts, while James watched on from across the room. M. was eyeing Coco in a very suspicious manner and drinking at high speed, while Gyulus attempted to sell him a pair of brown slip-ons he’d recently acquired. Charles, by this time, had both his hands cupped to his cheeks and was peering through an opening in the front room curtains, out onto the darkening street. Coco was busy demonstrating to Elizabeth the most effective and spillage-free method of snorting vodka, and I was just happy to observe as the people I knew best behaved much as I had come to expect. 584

I could hear M.’s his sentences fractured eluding attempts at conversation, the ends of him over and over. His brain was like a threshing ma- chine, chopping up sentences at random and reforming them in his voice-box. He is unable to reach a conclusion of promise, until that : a sentence drifts off and so he begins another one, full one in turn dissipates into frustrated silence. As he begins again the allure of profundity is always resident in those closing words, in those words that never come. To hear him talking is to experience first hand the manifest absence that “desired and unknown is Kafka’s nourish- ment .” Charles was getting progressively agitated at the window (I’d already seen him accidentally burn the curtains a couple of times with his cigarette), something that hadn’t been helped by Coco sticking on one of his obscure and decidedly nervejangling experimental jazz recordings that appeared unable or unwilling to thrash its way free from a train wreck. I decided to go and talk to Charles before he allowed the shadows of treacherous men to ruin his night irrevocably. I didn’t dare tap him on the shoulder for fear of bringing down the tower of sand inside his head, so I just lurked beside him a while and waited for him to check his back, something I figured wouldn’t be too long coming given his state of mind. Recently, he had even begun to tire of the black-suited demons that watched his every move; they had become as predictable as everything else in his existence. It’d already got to the stage where they no longer got his heart pumping quite so fast, and he found himself, from time to time, forgetting that they were even there. However, judging by this particular bout of paranoia, something had come along to break the mould, to skim the dust off a tired conceit and inject it with some much needed pizzazz. Just as I was about to give up on Charles he turned to me, put his arm around my shoulder and whispered in my ear, asking me to make excuses for him to the others (who in actual fact were oblivious to his absence) as there were things that needed seeing to, urgent things that required his immediate attention. He looked over at everyone chatting happily and a mixture of anger and condescension rose up in his eyes. “There are men selling their wives to rapists. I know who they are. They provide descriptions of their wives, times and dates of possible vulnerability, receiving cash and documentation of the event through the post (photos, video recordings) about a week later. The cash is mere sleight of hand; it is really all about the documentation. I have even heard of fathers selling their daughters in the same way. I know who they are. They can’t hide from me.” 585

The next thing I knew, Charles’s fingers were digging into my left shoulder, his whole body shaking on my back like a frightened kitten. I wrenched his hand away from me and slammed my right palm into his flabby chest. He took a step back to regain his balance, but his eyes remained fixed on something behind me. I asked him what the fuck was wrong and, when he failed to reply with any words I could understand, producing nothing but a series of jaw movements and a scat song of timid groans from the back of his throat, I turned to see what had captured his attention. And there they were: two uninvited guests staring back at me, looking, I imagined, as bewildered as I did at that moment. I felt Charles reattach himself to my other shoulder. His breathing was heavier, sounding more like a succession of gasps. * In a scruffy room thick with disorientating jazz beats and the smell of booze and skunk there is a decidedly inert party in progress. “Sorry to startle you like this. We don’t make a habit of gate-crashing parties. In actual fact, habits are rather tricky commodities for us to come by just lately; our lifestyles don’t really cater for them too well.” Lakok turns to Triman and asks, “Are we ticking?” Triman, sighing painfully, nods his head slowly up and down. “How did you manage to get in? I didn’t hear you knock at the door, or enter the room,” says a grey-haired man in his mid-to-late fifties with a fat sweaty head growing out of his shoulder. “I did, I saw them appear,” says the man’s perspiring appendage. “It really is a long and decidedly odd story, but before I start, that is if you still want me to, given the length and strangeness of the story, and the additional consideration that we probably won’t be here long enough possible for to explain ourselves in anything like sufficient depth, would it be me my friend here to have an alcoholic beverage of so description, preferably vodka if you have any? He does so miss his drink.” “You’re both welcome to a drink as soon as one of you tells me who the fuck you are and how you got in here.” “ I saw the m arrive! I saw them arrive! I saw them!” says the blubbery head apprehensively but emphatically. “Don’t worry about the drink,” says Triman languidly. “Oh, so you’re not bothered about a drink now.” Lakok turns to his confused host. “Sorry for misleading you; I must have been hearing voices again, because for the past half hour I was sure I could hear someone that sounded just like my friend here whining on about how he’d kill for a drink...” “And you are?” the man with the soggy, head-laden shoulder asks. “Sorry, it slipped my mind. My name is Professor Lakok and this gentleman here is Professor Triman. And you are?” “I’m Frank Stone and this here is Charles.” He moves aside to let Lakok and Triman see that the damp porcine boulder has a body attached to its underside, and quite a considerable one at that. “Sure you’re not going to pretend that that’s your name as well?” splutters Charles with a peculiar blend of heroism and abject meekness. “Why would we want to do that?” “Why indeed.” “Anyway, it’s a pleasure to meet you both. This is really rather awkward, but I assure you that we shan’t stay long. We could leave right now if you’d rather.” 586

“You can’t let them leave, or upset them in any way. You mustn’t anger them. I had a feeling that they’d get in to see me one way or another. I didn’t know the full extent of their power, but now that I do I must keep a close eye on them. They can do anything. There is no use fighting them: they can slip through bricks and mortar, disappear and reappear at will, the continuity space of time and is nothing to such men.” “Actually we can’t, and the continuity of space and time has become everything – to me, at least.” * “Come on, concentrate will you! How long left?” “It’s run over the five and we’re still here,” said a man with a rather large red stain down the front of his trousers. “Give me that!” One of the men grabbed a stopwatch from the other’s hands. “Are you sure you set it correctly?.... Yes…yes you did…yes I saw you do it.” “Excuse me, what is going on?” I said, Charles’s head resting heavily on my shoulder, his pillow-like gut pushing into my back. “Sorry, Frank, Charles, but this is a real breakthrough.” The man was obviously beside himself. He surveyed his surroundings like a nervous prairie dog. And then, as he looked at my quizzical face, his body slumped and he stopped his observations. “How do you know our names? How did you manage to get in? Did someone let you in? I didn’t hear you knock at the door, or enter the room,” I said, unable to keep tabs on my inquisitiveness. “I did, I saw them appear! I saw them appear!” said Charles over my now saturated shoulder in a burst of uncertain courage. The two men turned to each other and waited for the other to broadcast what, judging by the looks exchanged, they were both thinking. The man with the blood-stained trousers, being, I supposed, rather less perturbed by whatever it was that was going on, set the record straight: “These are minutes of overlay. They were bound to happen sooner or later, but who could have expected them this soon.” He turned to his morose friend with a triumphant grin. “Now who’s the one that the needs a drink?” “Sorry, am I missing something here?” I said, alternating my gaze between the two men. “Yes, the content of the last five minutes of your lives, to be precise. We are now rerecording over time you’ve already had. I don’t expect you to be capable of believing what I am telling you. It is, nevertheless, true.” Charles hollered in my ear, “It’s true! It’s true! They can do anything. There is no use fighting them: they can slip and mortar, through bricks disappear and reappear at will, the continuity of space and time is nothing to such men,” which despite its volubility had the in tonation of a whisper. “Let me introduce myself and my colleague: my name is Charles and this here is Charles. But then you knew that didn’t you, Charles?” Charles dragged me from the room. He had to talk to me in private. But when we reached the kitchen he was unable to talk. By the time we got back to the front room they had gone. A VISION 587 IN PRINT

For my own part, I resolved never to am read any book but my own, as long as I live. – Laurence Se e t rn , Tristram Shandy Charles’s hangover was in for the day and making itself comfortable behind the eyes. (He had been in bed last night when M. had rung, four-fifths crapulous, and cajoled him into going out for a couple.) He sat at his desk, littered with splayed books from the day before, when he’d had to skim for over an hour before he could begin writing. from his sugary smoke The steam tea rose up beside him and pirouetted merrily with the from the cigarette that lay sandwiched between his dry lips. He had to get some work done today; he had only managed a paltry half-page yesterday. He had to get serious, make up for lost time. He’d have to knock this drinking lark on the head for a while, at least until he had made some progress with the book. His guts had woken him up about five in the morning, and he’d squirted a couple of times since then – bad beer, he thought. They don’t keep it right in that damn hotel. He’d stayed the night there once, many years ago now, and when he’d run the bath, brown water had poured from the taps. Brown water meant rusty pipes, neglect; it meant wallowing around in muddied water like some fucking pig. That’s all we are to them, fucking farmyard animals glugging at the trough. Best not to go out. Best not to give them the satisfaction. Stay in and work! Show them what you’re made of! Ten minutes later, Charles, having sunk a superbrew to settle his stomach, was descending the stairs from his flat. He had decided that it was best to take a break from his writing and get out for a while. He walked out onto the street, purposeful and yet somehow aimless, lost, agitated, like a bored adolescent. He made his way down through the town and, having reached the bottom, turned around and headed back. 588

He felt people staring – admiring? He mumbled some words under his foul-smelling breath as he clenched his dirty teeth into a smile: “Here I am, folks. Take a look at a great writer! Notice my eyes, folks. The eyes of a great writer. Notice my jaw, folks. The jaw of a great writer… “Who the fuck is Arturo Bandini? Who the fuck is Charles Schaefer? WHO THE FUCK ARE ANY OF YOU?” He popped into a bookstore and meandered along the shelves for half an hour or so, picking up and feeling the weight of books he wished he had written. If he was honest he didn’t really enjoy reading fiction any longer; he couldn’t prevent himself from wondering how the writer in question had managed to get it written: 768 pages long, the weight of it, how could it have been written in such a short time? He across the edges of how my an thumbed all those completed pages and checked of them just contained chapter headings or sparse dialogue, how many lines were contained on each page, and how many words on average were contained on each line. He was sure of subterfuge and hyperbole on the part of the publisher, or even the writers themselves, when it came to the timespans in which these books had supposedly been completed. He always counted how many other books an author had written before or since the one he held in his hand – the fewer the better. He could happily discount screen- plays and excursions into children’s literature, for he had no passion to create such things. He should be at home writing, instead of taunting himself with others’ prolificity. Joyce had only written a handful of books, and John Kennedy Toole only one, me one a long-ti overlooked at that. No, no there were two; yes, definitely two in the end, both published posthumously. (What was it called? The Bulb of Bile wasn’t it? No, that wasn’t it. The Neon Bible, yes that’s it. Yes, and he wrote it when he was just 16. Precocious little fucker.) But only one anyone has ever heard of. (There was still time.) He won the Pulitzer. Pulitzer smulitzer, nobody ever gave Kafka a prize, or Pessoa, or, or...well the list of formidable non-prize winners is just too long. He could commit himself now. He would 589

retreat from the world and its distractions like Hölderlin, well maybe not quite like Fruitcake Freddy Hölderlin. I wonder what turned Herr Librarian gaga on that hill by Tübingen – probably tried too hard to make sense of what his old impenetrable mucker Hegel was prattling on about. And Darger! Fucking, Henry Darger! How dare they compare him to that bed-wetting shambles of a man, that puerile misanthrope, that art brut sideshow, that meek cry-baby dreamer. Poor old JKT – Charles could sympathise, he really could. Would Charles’s mum be so tenacious in her promotion of his work, should he happen to perish both before her and literary recognition? It’s not at all likely that she would or could: some days it is as much as she can do to recognise him. Maybe if he too chose to take himself by surprise, maybe then she would take up the cause. It was doubtful, all too doubtful. That prancing male nurse of hers would be sure to distract her. Fucking dung puncher would probably take his place with out her even noticing. Even PKD’s mum knew the struggle, knew it all too well – poor cow. Here he was with turn an obstacle at every . He didn’t have the right friends, the right environment, the right breaks, even the right mother for fuck’s sake. Yet still he perseveres – the mark of a true writer. “Can I help you, sir?” said a rather attractive female sales assistant, taking Charles by surprise, so much so in fact, that he dropped the book he was holding. He bent down and picked it up, frantically trying to smooth down the freshly crumpled corner. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” “I’m fine,” said Charles, his hand up to his mouth to mask the booze on his breath. “Anything I can help you with?” she said with an excessively toothy smile. “I don’t need help.” No. No. No. No. Where was that practiced sang-froid? He’d wanted to be amiable, flirtatious even. She was flirting with him, that much was obvious. Why had he replied like that? He hadn’t meant to. He was simply stating a fact – but so abrasive, so dismissive, not amiable, not flirtatious, not even civil. The truth of her identity had been plain to see, too plain maybe. I t had ripped the floor up from under him. Plain as a runaway nose, just above her left breast on a slim oblong badge, for all to see, but only for him to notice, was the name, Beatrice Algae. He’d spoken to her as if she’d been a stranger to him. 590

The words had come from his mouth, but he refused to take re- it sponsibil y for them. He had not said them. Why would he have been so abrupt? Some- body is trying to scupper things between them. Charles thinks he sees the man in the blue tracksuit walk past the window of the bookstore. After she has gone at the back behind the counter, Charles heads for a secluded corner back of the store and pulls out a notebook from his pocket. He thinks carefully for a moment, composes a piece of Anacreontic verse in his head, immediately rejects it, and then hurriedly writes the following words before his confidence deserts him: I feed upon your face by day and night and you with eyes look back on me. Fair as the moon and not as average or alright, not as you are but as you spill my dream . Your l'amor de lonh He writes his phone number underneath, Beatrice on the front, folds the piece of paper in two, and writes with an elegant flourish to the ‘B’ that he is particularly pleased with. He walks to the front of the shop and finds her busy rummaging under the counter. She doesn’t notice him. He places the note on the counter by the cash register and trots out of the door and up the street as fast as his fat little legs will carry him, gagging on his throated heart. 591

Reasons for Inertia: All the things I might have done if I had not done all the things I actually did, all the things I might have been if I had not become all the things I actually am. Are all of them existent somewhere? If all the possibilities for me that had seemed to die unchosen are merely elsewhere and me and my life are merely the redundant choices of another me who is elsewhere doing things I do not do and that I am not, and if all my many possibilities are covered throughout these farious being things multi- worlds then what weight rests on my choices, when the un-chosen are taken up by some other me? Is there any pressing need for me to do X as opposed to Y when both will come about whichever I choose – just not here , wherever that is? Still no call, 4:30 A.M. (that’s more than sixteen hours since she would have read his note) and still no call. Did he write the number down correctly? He was in a bit of a flap. He could have got one of the digits wrong. It’s possible, though he remembers taking special care to get it right and reading the number over and over with these doubts in mind. He hadn’t made the first move. She’d come onto him: “Can I help you, sir?” while smiling that dirty smile, and pushing her name badge out with her breast. She’d made the moves. They weren’t just part of bookstore-assistant protocol – here He’d never seen her in t not a chance. before. She must know he likes books. He was al- ways carrying one on those occasions when they had glided past each other on the street and exchanged playful smiles. She had probably been informed that he often frequented that particular bookstore. Charles was most likely back in favour with the man in 592

the blue tracksuit: he’d been keeping his head down, working hard on the book, keeping his drinking to a minimum. She wasn’t the type and to work in a bookstore. Why would a secretary suddenly start working in a bookstore? She’d have had to take a cut in pay; the wages in that place were abysmal, and Charles should know, as some dumb tart at the social had once given him details of one of their vacancies, thinking that his love of literature would make the job appealing in some way. Charles had taken it as a slight and has since refused to deal with her during his fortnightly visits. He compared it to Eliot being regarded as little more than a common errand boy. (Did she recommend chefs work in canning factories sales men , or mechanics in , or vets in pet car parks , or dentists as toothbrush shops ? Did she? Did she fuck… Only when they see me eating shit… Only then.) It is said of PKD that he wrote his many books (41 novels in total and a fucking shit load of short stories) in short bursts of amphetamine fuelled creativity, some of them taking him no longer than about 3 weeks to complete. It had to be bullshit. Nothing but mythmaking propaganda on his part, it had to be. Charles had once tried to emulate Dick’s supposed approach to churning out words at high speed (without, I might add, the months of preparatory work). He’d licked up the contents of the wrap and sat down to write. He ended up smoking two packets of cigarettes, drinking half a bottle of whisky, grinding his molars into oblivion, watching the four channels of his TV in fluctuating and haphazard relay, and writing nothing . He toyed for quite some time with the idea of writing under the influence of opiates with De Quincy and Burroughs firmly in mind. when he tried he just fell asleep. 593 But

If Charles dreams could have chosen the subjects for his , he’d have chosen mice and vampires, always, always mice and vam- pires. The pen and the drink never fail to stink. Bukowski, Bukowski, what about that brawling soak, Bukowski? Four novels, five collections of short stories, and thirty-two (no it’s not a misprint) yes thirty-two books of poetry (oh yes, and a screenplay as well) and hardly a moment of sobriety between them. Nelson Algren was no junkie, he was no R.S. Hawker, no Georg Trakl… Frankie Machine might have been, but not Nelson – Nelson was clean. Nelson was banging Sartre’s missus and wouldn’t have wanted to have his libido fall out his arse. He would have needed all his sexual faculties about him to get it up with that thin-lipped old crow, head of bun and bullshit. What was it she said now? “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” I’m sure Jan (Humphry) Morris would agree. But what’s that Woolly? Something about the trifling issue of XY chromosomes to overcome. You really are a pettifogging spoilsport. I wonder how much writing Edwin Arlington Robinson got done when he was pissed..., or Hamilton, or Lowry, or Poe full of coke and liquor…? Who craves the Nobel Prize for Literature when Pessoa, Kafka, Lispector, Joyce, Nabokov, Hardy, Proust, Tolstoy, Miller, Lorca and Chekhov didn’t receive it? And, on the other side of the equation, who reads or gives a cavorting fuck about the literary contributions of José Echegaray, Giosue Carducci, Paul Heyse, Verner Von Heidenstam, Rudolf Euken, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Karl Gjellerup, Sully Prodhomme or Henryk Sienkiewicz…? “Not I,” said Charles. “Not I,” said Charles. The Nobel Prize for literature is an insignificant bauble. Sartre, the myopic toad-faced sham, had the right idea (his own for a change, although it could have been that slut of a wife of his that suggested it) when he threw it back in their smug Swedish faces . (But of course he had to ruin it by dressing it up as a protest to what had happened in Algeria. And then to change his mind and decide he did want it after all – just how cuntish was that!) Hamsun gave his Nobel Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels, who was at least, unlike Sartre, a man of unswerving conviction. Pynchon had rather more integrity when declining the William Dean Howells Medal in 1975, awarded to Gravity’s Rainbow. He wrote, “The Howells Medal is a great honor, and, being gold, probably a good hedge against inflation, too. But I don't want it. Please don't impose on me something I don't want. It makes the Academy look arbitrary and me look rude [...] I 594

know I should behave with more class, but there appears to be only one way to say no, and that's no.” The Noble Prize for Literature is such a bad joke that Erik Axel Karlfeldt had it forced upon him posthumously – in the very year of his death – after he had em- phatically declined it in 1918. Okay Faulkner, Böll, Eliot, Camus, Hamsun, Beckett and a few others worthy of it actually received it, but then they couldn’t get it wrong every year. The Sickness of the Seaside: Their legs slip-slide beneath them as if belonging to a cow molested by BSE. The dull fear in their eyes, their bovine confusion, is an insult to the concept of distress. Let them burn! Let every one of the filthy dumb cunts burn! After all, what is madness to a retard but on c garnish to slop? It was almost as if the town had been structed according to some Parr template, a cut and paste job of countless seaside shit holes, and the n left to pickle in its own neglect. I hear the gulls screeching in the middle of the night. I hear them disembowelling bin bags and putridity. I feast ing on their intestinal hear them fighting with cats over grey ribs and leg bones. The smell of Lily of the Valley and Silvikrin: the perfume of death. Two days have passed and still nothing. Charles hasn’t stepped outside his flat for fear of missing the call. What was her game? Maybe her father, a powerful and dangerous man, has and forbidden discovered the note her to ring the number. Now and again people look up at the windows of his flat. Who are they and what do they want? The cars are once more arranging themselves in telling configurations 595 . He decides to stop looking out

his windows, but cannot always resist the temptation. He is running short of cigarettes and drink. He cannot bring himself to eat anything. Maybe the man in the blue tracksuit knows something. On the fourth day, with no cigarettes in the house and only one can of superbrew remaining, Charles had no choice but to leave his flat and get supplies. (He had phoned his sister the day before to ask her to bring him some fags and booze. He’d rung her 62 times before remembering that she’d gone to stay with a sick friend.) He stood poised outside the door of his flat and, hearing nothing, slammed the door behind him and sped down the stairs and out onto the street. He stopped on the pavement beneath his windows. He thought he could hear ringing. He ran back up the stairs, put his ear to his door and heard nothing. He ran off again, and once out onto the street ran as fast as he could to the off licence, uated sit- not more than a few hundred yards away, ignoring the clamour of taunting telephone peals as he went. When he got there, there was a queue of four people. He had expected it. One of them, a woman in her forties, was wearing a blue tracksuit. She turned around to look at him as he came in; she couldn’t have made her associations any clearer. Her mobile phone began to ring. Her phone began to ring and he knew all subtlety was out the window. And then, as if the call itself had not been enough, he heard the name ‘Catherine’ mentioned: Catherine?… Catherine Boucher? Of course… it had to be. They have always known him to be vulnerable and so, probably sensing he was onto them anyway, have decided to launch a full frontal assault. This was bad news. He had no chance of winning them over by brute force: they could crush him with an ease that made him feel giddy and fragile about the neck. The woman behind gency of the counter was serving with all the ur- a corpse. Was there no end to their spheres of influence? He knew that his phone would be ringing in his absence – they had indicated as much – so he just bided his time and bought his supplies leisurely. That’d teach ’em. A couple of them seemed surprised at just how nonchalant he was being 596 . But he suddenly got the feel-

ing he was play ing a dangerous game and speeded up a little, and even broke into a trot on his way back home. He saw Gyulus ride past on his bike, two pheasants draped over his crossbar, spitting at stray cats as he cycled on his merry way. He thought about calling after him, but didn’t: it wouldn’t have been fair. (Such nobility in the face He though t he his way up to the flat, in to could smell a but of peril.) familiar odour on the stairs as he made he dismissed it as best he could. However, when he strode his hallway there was no dismissing what he smelt. It was her perfume. It was defi- nitely her perfume. He didn’t know the brand, but he knew the smell and it was everywhere, in all his rooms, stroking and tickling his olfactory bulb as it had done on those occasions when he’d strolled past her and languished in her smiles and the flickering attention of her eyes, and on that day at the bookstore when she’d been in such proximity to him that he’d nearly pissed himself with fear. It occurred to him that he might write of this scent and so trap its essence , so as to be able to savour it long after he has be- come saturated by it, long after it has been lost in stale air and cigarette smoke. But he couldn’t think of a word or phrase worthy of reaching for his notebook. Divagating, his mind happens on the poet, Diane Ackerman, and her book (well the synopsis on the back cover of it, to be precise), A Natural History of the Senses, in which she repents the lack of effort put into creating a vocabulary for olfaction, for while colours have names aplenty our poor little niffs have not one. Nothing appeared to have been taken or disturbed. He thought maybe she’d left a note, and hunted for it: under his dribble-stained pillow the colour of old teabags, in his coat pockets, between the pages of a book (paying special attention to The Collected Works of Christina Rossetti and a selection of love poetry by various well-known poets, separating every page expectantly). After an hour he had found no note and decided to stop looking. He 597

smiled to himself in recognition of her cunning, still believing the note to be in his flat somewhere. He was quite happy to concede a temporary defeat. The smell appeared to come in waves, to almost disappear in recession only to crash back to the shore of his fraught nostrils. What had she been doing in his flat? Was she still in his flat? Had she come to the flat alone? How had she managed to get in? All these questions needed answering before Charles could do anything. Was all this part of a larger plan to stop him finishing his book? Did they plan to deny him his creative outlet, his métier? Could all this suggestion of a grand amour motives designed to undermine his just be masking ulterior aspiration s, his potential as an author? The more he thought about it the less bizarre it seemed . He hadn’t written a word for almost a week. He couldn’t face it with everything that was happening. He hadn’t even attempted to sit down at his tabletop desk, knowing it was futile . Still no call came through. Charles was forever thinking of places to go and sit other than his flat. On days when he was unable to concentrate, unable to get the words down, he felt he had to go somewhere, and wherever that somewhere was he felt easier with himself if his visitations were not so habitual that they gave him away, spoke of his lack of occu- 598

pation, opened him up to the idle speculation and pity of onlookers. The more options he could uncover for places to frequent when he could no longer stay within the book-lined walls, threadbare carpet and ochre ceilings of his flat, the bet- ter. In the winter he sometimes took refuge in the old deserted law courts: he took pleasure in the high vaulted ceilings, dark oak panelling and brass furnishings, but the presence of lunatic wastrels and starving dogs tended to sour the experience for him. A favoured haunt was the library. Pavilionstone library is never what you’d call busy and, as a result, standards have been allowed to slip. At the zenith of its high walls cobwebs clung to the ornate covings and grew darker year by year the with gradual accumulation of air-bound dirt, so that they came to resemble the scraggly black shawls of Spanish widows. You could also see them dangling from the strip- lights like ebony snickersnees, and breeding in isolated pockets lower down the walls. The women that work in the library never clean it; it is as much as they can do to prevent the dust adhering to themselves, and rarely even that. These women are either sylphlike or gross. There are no half-measures heavy-boned or burly. On the whole, the porkier clined towards complete of : none are shapely, buxom, plump, the two sets of women are less in- inertia , for a family pack of biscuits (bourbons, diges- tives, rich teas and jammy dodgers being among their favourites) does not fetch or open itself. They are all the grateful side of 50, with a few of them less than 10 ticket-less years from eternal rejection. None it seems has energy to spare: their days are tuated punc- with yawns and milky tea. Returned books pile up on trolleys where they 599

remain for months on end before finally finding their way back to their gaps on the shelves. Libraries are known for their stoic quiescence, but I’d guess this one is muter than most: you might hear the flicking of some pages, the slurp of hot tea, the muffled crunching of leavened bread, a lamenting sigh, a snuffled snore, the lofty purr of florescent tubes, the creaking of chairs, the percolated descent of a runny nose, a sniff, a cough, and maybe even a remote whisper, but nothing more than these things and often much, much less. The carpet is thicker than you’d expect to find in a library and ideal for eating the clatter of pacing feet. The library is shaped like so: Џ A reception desk cluttered with elbows and the odd head, lying injun-like on its side listening for distant trains, is situated directly in front of you as you enter. Either side of this desk is a long aisle of books with a walkway down the middle and 20 double-sided 7 ft shelving units pointing in from the walls like sets of ribs. In the spaces between the shelving, pushed up against the walls, are undersized metal desks with rickety wooden chairs tucked beneath them. Exceptionally tall windows are dispersed along the outer two walls, through which you can see almost nothing of what is going on outside, for they are caked in years of filth that nobody inside has ever wanted to see beyond. The people that come here do not want the world outside following them in through the win- dows, and that includes the staff, who have made this place their own and who only open the doors to the public for fear of being shut out themselves. The fewer visitors the better as far as they are concerned, and they do not attempt to hide the fact. Even the regulars are completely ignored or sneered at as they enter. The regulars don’t mind one bit – they revel in such impersonality. (One of the primary reasons Charles visits the library as often as he does – when clean – is that there, and there alone, he can be sure that the voices he hears are his own.) It is proffered by those with views on such subjects that the library lasses eat and sleep in the basement, which is apparently laid out in the style of a dormitory, complete with bunk-beds and communal shower facilities. The insularity of their collective comportment and the sickly anaemia of their skin would certainly suggest that there is some truth to this. 600

The regulars do not come to a library like this for the reading matter alone; they come to think, to mull over and condense the teeming logorrhoea bubbling inside their heads that they dare not speak. Polite Arthur is one such regular. He visits at least 4 times a week and sits at one of the small desks for 2-3 hours hating himself for some minor indiscretion that might have happened the day before or 50 years ago. Charles goes there to write and sometimes manages it. He also goes there to avoid chance encounters and spies. Other popular haunts for Charles were doctor’s surgeries and hospital waiting rooms (he loved to be around the sick, especially the old and sick, and collected pamphlets on maladies from thrush to pulmonary embolisms, from piles to lung cancer), cafes (where he drank coffee very slowly and studied the prices of varying kinds of break- fasts that he n ever ordered), benches (if he could find one without some dreary-eyed pensioner sitting on it), the hotel bar (usually when accompanied by M., the beverage benefactor, for as a rule he was unable to afford the prices they charged for their watered-down piss), and his mother’s house (obligatory, as she was one of the few people he knew who was as isolated from meaningful human contact as he was, but blessed in that she did not suffer from it in any way). Whenever Charles left his flat he always took a pen, a notebook (a Moleskine – the notebook of great men) and a book to read or, o m re often than not, into which he would hide his eyes so as not to arouse suspicion. If he took any notes they would ordinarily be concerned with curious snippets of a conversation he had overheard, the physical appearance of some female he encountered, or how he happened to be treated by the people he interacted with. He would still try to strike up conversations with people he liked the look of, despite all the unpromising responses he had encountered in the past. Charles was a curious, even paradoxical , amalgam of paranoiac preciousness and good-humoured resilience. He sensed affronts to his being from the most innocuous of sources and yet was able, on many occasions, as and when he happened to be struck by an overwhelmingly euphoric sense of self-belief, to seemingly go out of his way to make himself a glaring target of derision. When these moments arrived he would behave much like an excited schoolboy replete with conjecture and 601 amuse-

ment , excitable to the extreme. It was during these high points that he told bad jokes (at which he was quite often the only person to be found laughing, and laughing hysterically at that), and initiated discourse with aloof strangers, who more often than not remained that way. * Charles’s books were not looked on by Charles as mere possessions; they were tensions ex- of his self. Their readiness-to-hand, as he sprawled on his sofa with them climbing up the walls, leaning and tumbling about his hands and feet, meant that he came to consider them as integral to his being. Should he misplace one momentarily, he would be thrown into a panic. It would not be an exaggeration to compare it my with the situation a man might find himself in should he te pora l ri forget his own name, or those of his family. It was because of this that Charles could never seriously countenance the idea of loaning books from the library, for to eventually return them – which was something borrowed books would never allow him to forget was their prescribed – would be like sacrificing biological memory capacity was not part of his future identity is especially poor; it w .H as solely , in all likelihood, about average, if not slightly better than average. Nevertheless, to separate Charles from his bookish domain would be like isolating a hermit crab from its adopted shell, without which it is vulnerable and incomplete. Charles’s literary prowess, not to mention his ability to recall the names, productivity and dates of literary figures, is very much symbiotic, a harmonized collusion of the neural and the paper-based. Charles kept a written and pictorial log of every book he owned, which he stored for safekeeping at his mother’s house. (She may not have been as devoted an admirer of her son, the writer, as Toole’s mother had been, but nor was she illiterate like Camus’, dead by her own hand before he was two like Lautréamont’s, or prone to the flights of fancy and shameful reading habits of Gogol’s.) He had been prompted to take this precaution after being continually plagued by intrusive imaginings and dreams that depicted his flat going up in flames, and his being powerless to prevent his partial 602

incineration. He had been unable to read or watch Fahrenheit 451 in its entirety – he kept this novel well out of sight, along with a collection of York Notes on… that, as one often denounces any shameful influences, he’d rather not admit to. Gogol burnt the second instalment of Dead Souls. Thomas Amory is also said to have burnt his manuscript. Brod saved Kafka’s work from the flames by going back on his word…. Charles found a letter in the hallway of his flat. Somebody had posted it under his door. It read: Dear Charles Schaefer: We browsed through, glanced at, pretty much ignored read your manuscript, Razors for Baby, whatever it was; what was it? That shit about stillborn babies, with a certain degree of disbelief, incredulity, fucking amazement at your level of self kiddology and naivety with interest. However, unfortunately for you, you sad, sad, sad, talentless dreamer we are unable to accept stomach, or even read it that frightful, ham-fisted attempt at prose for publication. Thank you but no thank you for your laughable and unwanted interest in Dog Shit Publications. Yours Sincerely, —— —— So, he thought to himself, the campaign of demoralization is officially underway. But they’d have to do better than that. Didn’t they know that PKD once received 17 rejection letters in a single day? The man in the blue tracksuit sat contentedly eating his fry-up while talking to himself. Rather an unsightly combination, to easy be sure. He is a tall, lanky, maladroit man with thick gr his skin. “She h as hair and a terminal pallor to her children to think about, after all.” Charles, sitting two tables away, determined not to acknowledge or engage with this dangerous man, began humming to himself in an effort to avoid hearing what he had to say. The man in the blue tracksuit wasn’t about to be beaten by such a straightforward ploy and simply upped the volume of his voice. “She has to put them first. His record with children is not what you’d call exemplary, now is it ?” {How could he say that given his own predilection for young boys? Was Charles to blame for the fact that nature – that most relentless of tormenters – had him sire only one out of six? Little Timmy, his first and only boy, is now past his prime at 11 years old. As a sign of his disgust he’d named his daughters after concentration camps: Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. What really gets the man in the blue tracksuit sweating are sickly slum-kids aged from 6-9 if he had to narrow it down, but then you have to allow for the differences between individual kids. For instance, some 9-year-olds might look and act more like 12-year-olds and vice versa, so it is not purely an issue of age. Poor Deborah, his fat, slovenly wife, had five babies in seven years. Her gut looks like it’s had 500 lashes every morning for every one of those years. Her arse is a sack full of shot puts, her tits empty icing bags, but he couldn’t give a flying fuck what she looks like. Deborah can’t have any more now, so he never goes near her unless it’s to retrieve his dinner. She lies on the sofa all day and most of the night eating chocolate hobnobs and watching anything that comes on the TV as long as it’s a soap opera , a chat show, or a pirate broadcast about wannabe escapees – suffice it to say this does not leave time to do much else. It is just as well there is a TV in the kitchen, and the shithouse for that matter. 603

All the girls had been rented out from the age of three. He has just started renting Timmy out to acquaintances who consider him perfect age. In return for the loan of his off- spring he is either paid in cash or more often than not supplied with something more suited to his tastes. He once left one of his poems at the cafe for Charles to find: Secret grooming song The not yet child is groomed her best. Too young for most, but not for Him So deftly lifted from her nest That helped him in. He plays with her, and takes a peep. For other playfellows she sighs; He has many more friends to keep Tears fresh in her eyes. In his mid-to-late twenties, Faulkner is said to have served as a scoutmaster for the Oxford Boy Scout troop, a position from which he was politely solicited to resign, for “moral reasons.” Estelle Oldham, having just divorced Cornell Franklin, married Faulkner at College Hill Presbyterian Church, just north of Oxford. Estelle brought to the marriage two children, Malcolm and Victoria. I shall leave you to make the connections .} No matter how loudly Charles hummed, and he could hum quite a din, the man in the blue tracksuit’s voice always broke through. “When was the last time he made the effort to talk to his own offspring?” An old woman with thick scabs of egg yolk clinging to the bristles on her chin glared at Charles, and put her bony forefinger to her thin raggedy old lips. Charles was incensed, shouting out, “Tell him not me!” pointing to the man in the blue tracksuit who, with his head bowed, continued to eat his breakfast as if nothing had happened. “Even Albert Fish kept his hands off his own,” muttered Charles, fiantly . 604 de-

On turning around he became aware that a number of other people were looking disapprovingly in his direction. Fuck them and their childish games, thought Charles, fuck them. With this, Charles pushed himself back in his chair as if making to leave, when the following words left him limp and immobile. “Keep this to yourself, but she doesn’t even know he’s alive.” Charles remained where he was long after everyone else had left. Eventually the owner came over and asked him to leave, but Charles failed to respond. Finally, after repeating his request, this time accompanied by a firm nudge, Charles, stiff-legged and still consumed with reverie, obliged him. He walked the short distance home and once inside vowed never to leave its confines again. It’s him. I hear his piercing pipsqueak voice. I get my keys in and shut the door without a moment to spare. What was that? It’s no mistake: she called him dad. I’d bet my life on it. I’d bet my life it’s no joke. The daughter of a man like that I’d like to see. I wish I’d dropped my keys, or they’d come back some thirty seconds earlier. I wait with my door ajar until they leave. When I see his burnished black and white shoes descending the stairs I shut my door. I peer through the fisheye peeper in my door and see her pretty young face, her tumbling curls. He doesn’t deserve her. There it was, the tell-tale knocking from the flat above, the rhythmic percussion of steady, emphatic fucking. That shit-for-brains up there is never short of trim to bang away at. If only he’d move his bed into the middle of the room, or sandwich a pillow between the headboard and the wall, so that the strokes of his cock didn’t resonate down through the brickwork to places where it wasn’t welcome. (Kafka could never find peace and quiet.) That animal would fuck anything. They all spread their legs for him, spread them wide and peeled open their loose gashes for the likes of him – a lazy, feckless and stupid man like that. He was welcome to his fornicating; he could fuck his whores until his balls rattled free from their sacks for all Charles cared. For Charles had his art, and art is, after all, as Anthony Burgess put it, the prize of a “sublimated libido.” Carious Charles, carious Charles, if only your shoulders were wider, and your arms a little stronger, you could carious Charles. Charles felt bigger than his world, outsized and outlandish in the refinery of his self-cultivated tastes. His predicament prompted him to regularly recall a famous photograph, taken by Diane Arbus, of tiny, 605

bespectacled jewish (anything to champion Tom Eliot and his impish sense of humour) parents gawping up somewhat disbelievingly at the towering bulk that is their son, as he stands, stooped, his head an inch or two from the ceiling. Charles’s talents and interests made him comparably freakish to those around him: the ignorant chaff that he was forced to share the confined space of small town life with, people without poetry, without passion, all functionality and small purpose, people without that deep, excruciating and location-less/object-less pain that makes humanity worth something. He could pity them their insipidness, but why should he? Why should he pity the pitiless? Anyway, pity is for the gods, and he was not a god yet. TARGET PRACTICE The chubby faces and cheesy grins of pig-eyed downs are everywhere. Turn any corner in this town of ours and you will be confronted with a whole troop of such unfortunate wretches, who fight to speak through clots of mucus from mouths built only to gurgle and scream, mouths wrenched open by haphazard muscle contractions with nothing to say. Their helpers lead them about and talk to them with a supercilious seriousness; they are even more repellent than their moronic charges, who just serve to fuel the sanctimony of their helpers by drooling at them adoringly. These are the good people of our age, people that are so impoverished they have to grasp at the paltry recognition of the retarded. So they protect these ruined people from the vagaries of themselves and everyday life – so what? Let them stroll into the path of a speeding bus, drink bleach, set fire to themselves with matches, or whatever else you protect such creatures from. Why must we nurture hebetude? The insides of my skin are crawling. I’m like a sheep with fly strike. The blowflies have infested my organs with their young and I can feel them eating me alive; I can feel them chomping through the soft cushions of my spine and tunnelling into my liver…. In 1888 Nietzsche wrote, “I always see before me the opposite of that which Darwin and his school see or want to see today: selection in favour of the stronger, better-constituted, and the progress of the species. Precisely the opposite is palpable: the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average, even the sub-average types.” This is Pavilionstone. This is the experiment. I, Charles, am the man punished for his ascendance. Bare tree branches reach into the sky like witches’ fingers, like murderous hieroglyphs, like a thousand hookworms looking for blood… I haven’t spoken to anyone in more than a month. I have gone about my business as usual, but made no effort to engage in idle pleasantries, and so have not uttered a word for in excess of thirty days. I feel like one of those people with alarming facial disfigurements that everyone sees while making a point of not looking. Without recognition of your existence from outside something peculiar happens. Rene was wrong: we need more than just our own thoughts. A tsunami of rotting rabb its and meat flies threatens to flood every nook and cranny of this town…. My urine looks and smells like cheap Spanish brandy, so much so that I was tempted to drink it this morning to quell my hangover. Lowry would have had it down his neck without a second thought. Cages in crypto-cellars harbour abducted youngsters soaked in Rohypnol, semen and spun sugar. They are everywhere I go. Every face I see is etched with furtive sin. What do these people do tucked up indoors all the time anyway? No doubt, I’d guess, hatching some deviant little clandestine foulness that they can commit within the privacy of their own homes. An Englishman’s home is his castle, complete with dungeon and torture chamber…. AN EXORCISM OF PARTS The morning sun radiates a gaudy display of white light direct from the rain-soaked rooftops of my neighbours’ houses. I hear a grunt from behind me and turn to 606

look at Elizabeth who is tied to the bed. Although still asleep, she restlessly twists her wrists and ankles inside four rope fetters. The friction has produced a striking set of markings on her unsatisfactorily pale skin . She’s bound to wake herself up soon, what with all her fidgeting. And what is my plan when she does? (There is a long-standing debate about whether or not the self is real: Heraclitus, Buddha, Hume, Nietzsche, Sartre, Russell and Wittgenstein are but a few of the philosophers and thinkers who have, at some time or another in their lives, held the view that the self does not exist. Of these men, it could be said that their doubts were but luxuries afforded to their ordered selves, a luxury Elizabeth, if given the choice, could have done without. Now, as it happens, she has little more. We all suffer from a form of Humean “honest bewilderment” when trying to locate our own essence – unless, that is, we choose to establish clarity at honesty’s expense, as so often happens – but with Elizabeth it is not only a simple essence of selfhood that is lacking, but pretty much everything but the search itself. with the contents of her s she grapples muddled mind can find she consolation in only niable, if A impulsive action, action born from an unde- unfathomable source , . The past Frank has restored to her is one she feels to be ill-fitting, badly tailored to her instinctual being. She is trapped within an endless stream of non-foundational inferences, and so left to the mercy of the only non-inferential grounds to self-knowledge she has available to her, that which reason cannot deny: her impulses, her natural proclivities, her instincts, her undeniable inclinations, call them what you will.) She stepped over the mark last night, a retrogressive step that left me floundering. She threatened Elizabeth’s fragile existence with her infernal recollections. I resurrect the dead not her. Who the fuck does she think she is? As we walked to the car, briskly, with her hand clasped tightly in mine, she kept insisting that she had recognised a woman by the name of Justine. I mocked her in an attempt to 607

found conviction dissuade her from her new . I asked what this Justine woman’s surname was, whether or not she was married, or had kids, what she did for a living, where she had first met her, and as I had predicted, she was unable to come up with any answers. I laughed and said, “It sounds as if you know her about as well as she knows you: she didn’t even call you by your real name.” “When she came over and called me Elena, I felt like myself for the first time since the accident. I just replied to her as if I had been Elena. I just said ‘yes’, without quite knowing why, apart from the fact that it seemed the most natural thing to say.” “So what are you saying? That you’re no longer Elizabeth, but instead some woman called Elena that you know nothing about?” “Not exactly, but it’s not as simple as that.” “And just what do you mean by, ‘I felt like myself’? Really though, what does that mean, exactly?” “ I don’t know, EXACTLY.” “All that I know is I’ve finally got someone that I can just about call my wife again, and I’m not about to let her fade away chasing after some complete stranger.” “Well it’s not for you to decide.” I didn’t reply and left her to her doubts as I drove us home. What was there to things when you broke them down ? When you re- duced them to their composite parts, you could see them for what they really were – mystique went and got itself full tabloid exposure, and able to scuttle yet another enigma the n when we had tired of our being we just proceeded to forget about it, until it in to was safe to tentatively think about it again without hav struction. 608 g dwell on its former de-

She isn’t even trying anymore. She has given up after coming so far. What is she to me now? She’s a fucking nobody. She’s an arrangement of organs encased within a congregation of bone, covered with muscle, fat, skin and hair. The particular processes of her brain, the nucleus of her identity, within which she lives, her seat of personhood, is what should stop me thinking what I am thinking. She’s no more to me now than a piece of fucking death graffiti, a piece of formless , hollow ectoplasm. There was a point at which I realized I could go no further, that I had achieved all I was ever likely to achieve. Oh, she might have improved and got progressively more natural and convincing with her manipulations of her adopted past, but the time it would have taken would have stripped it of its reward. Besides, it is not altogether unlikely that I would have form failed to notice any such subtleties of trans ation should they have occurred. She sounded as much like her as she ever would, looked as much like her as she ever would, quasi-remembered her as much as she ever would, behaved as much like her as she ever would, and yet there was now not one ounce of satisfaction to be had from this realization of Elizabeth’s closest continuer. I had gone pretty much as far as I could ever hope to go. I had brought Elizabeth back to life as far as such a feat was possible here, but I couldn’t let her know. I couldn’t hug her and welcome her back. She had come back too gradually to make for the desired impact. Even if, after years of ef without a single discrepancy, I ’m not sure it would have been enough. The gestation peri- od would have been too protracted; I with eyes that see slivers of t, I had managed to reincarnate Elizabeth see her with judging eyes, with comparative eyes, beyond the creation and break her up into countless imperfect mimicry . I tried to make it work. I tried to reap the rewards for all the effort, for both our sakes, but I never stopped having to try. It never just came. The need for reinforcing was ever present. 609

(It was close to this time that I started killing things in dizzying fits of revengeful pas- sion, and when the lowest underworlds of filth made a successful play for my heart.) Neglected, Elizabeth soon went to see d, reverted to her origins, whatever they were, and then there was no going back; although I did try once or twice during those times when I repented throwing my dreams into the flames. “Show me a monster, a hideous malformation of body parts with skin as rough as toasted bread, hatchet teeth and mirrored eyes, and I’ll happily succumb to its wants. Let such an abomination take interest in me and I’ll wash its feet with my tongue and thus secure it in its superiority, so long as it favours me and makes me monstrous by association. Let it release me from my smallness as I feed it warm placenta-soaked fetuses fresh from pillaged wombs like some nigger dropping grapes into the cavern- ous gob of a sweaty Roman emperor. Let my stomach leap as I drop to unfathomable depths: a son all too pleased to follow his father’s trodden path, a path worn into the entrails of dead men. My dirt is the world’s dirt, and so nothing more than a stain on a stain….” There were times when I thought I saw the flicker of her struggling for control presence beneath the skin as she tried to make herself known to me, to show the gratitude and the love that she and she alone could offer. I would dream of her: She stood alone in a huge hall battling with millions of ma- rauding ants that no sooner died than were replaced. They lined the walls, the floor and the ceiling. They climbed all over her and it was, at times, as much as she could do to keep her face free of them. It always ended the same way. She would set fire to the hall in the hope of destroying them. The ants crackled and popped, fused and dropped from the ceiling in blan- 610

kets of charred Pompeiian rainfall. Flames caressed her as she hollered out my name till frazzled ants filled the air and her throat, quickly stifling her agonizing noise…. I’d hoped for her return and the resumption of our life together. But she was always testing, always picking for loose ends in the hope of dismantling what she could only as an elaborate artifice see . I began to find her hateful at this point, and regret the offence that I was committing against my wife’s memory. When she would deride her former self, it was as much as I could do to refrain from smashing her face in: “Who would do something as stupid as that?” “It sounds like I was a right barrel of laughs!” “If that’s the case, maybe I’d be better off not remembering who I used to be.”… “Frank, you are a cunt, no? You make your dead wife live again and then what you do? You break her. Where is the sense, Frank, in doing it this way?” as Giuseppe might remark. And in his own inimitable way he would have touched on something – no? THE BROWN RABBIT TRAMP Lance’s father was disembowelled with the sharpened end of a toothbrush within a month of his son’s birth. Lance had never seen him in the flesh. Lance’s mother was cut open by his father and left to die. Years later his mother’s sister became the woman he was forced to call mum. She was the kind of mother who deserved to end her days cut up into pieces, her headless body raped, her internal organs flushed down the toilet, her head made into a makeshift dartboard. She was the kind of mother who could never come close to eliciting a son’s love, even after he’d gone to the trouble of murdering her. The one thought that used to console him as a boy was that she and her lifestyle were so unhealthy that she couldn’t be expected to live all that long. But as it turned out, she went on far beyond his expectations. Some of the things about her that contributed to Lance’s loathing also contributed to her bad health, so he was strangely torn between approving and disapproving of many of her 611

habits . She smoked sixty cigarettes a day, ate gargantuan amounts of food high in either fat, sugar, salt or all three, drank heavily and had sex with an abundance of unpleasant, foul-smelling men. She was, as you can probably imagine, an unsightly and rather noisome individual. She stood around 5ft7in. tall and weighed approximately twenty stone. Her hair was balding where she scratched at it constantly with her long bark-like fingernails. Her apricot toy poodle, that went by the name of Boris (her little warrior), was the only living thing she ever took any care of. Her one true passion was painting by numbers, a constant annoyance to Lance that made absolutely no headway in shortening her life. She would sit at the living room table swathed in her blue plastic overalls, a fag churning up smoke in the ashtray, and paint her regimented watercolours for hours. Sometimes she would call Lance down from his room to make her a cup of tea or a sandwich, while she remained hunched over her painting sheets, her tongue hanging out to aid concentration. Anyone would think she was fucking Turner, as opposed to the daft cuntish turd she really was. Not only was there the production of these hideous ly unimaginative daubs to contend with, but also having to live with them slowly but surely taking up every inch of wall space in the house. Everywhere you looked were rectilinear sections of wishy-washy feebleness that his mother had painstakingly created according to predetermined lines and colour codes : cheery little girls in pink bonnets, old carts in lush forests, happy families building sandcastles on a beach, cute puppy dogs confusedly nibbling at their own tails, and many more slices of pre-packaged harmony besides. When she buttered a slice of bread she would spread it so thickly that as she folded it in two before cramming it into her mouth the butter would ooze out of each end like greasy yellow toothpaste. She would cook up sixteen frozen Yorkshire puddings and eat them in a single sitting with lashings of butter and a stuffing of crushed sausages. Such sittings could last up to a couple of hours, sometimes a lot longer if she fell asleep be- fore finishing: she suffered from chronic heartburn and so had to take up 612 the offer of

sleep whenever possible, her night ly slumber being so interrupted as to render its rejuvenating powers almost completely defunct. There was a pub at the end of their road, called The Brown Rabbit, that she would frequent at least three nights a week. She’d get tanked up on strong cider before making the trek up the road. Out would come the Neil Diamond record, a 2litre bottle of cider, her make-up bag, and a fresh pack of Rothmans, and she was set. She always made the mistake of glugging down most of the cider before applying her make-up. Before she went out, she’d ask Lance how she looked. He’d lie and say she looked fine. As a rule she looked fucking awful. Could she have looked any other way? Her hair with would be thick lacquer in an attempt to disguise the bald spots. The colour of her lipstick was always too dark for her sickly complexion, and she invariably broke the cardinal rule for lipstick application by failing to apply it within its designated area. (She never would have been so careless with one of her tragically fastidious watercolours.) Her nails were always impressively hideous, thin slivers of dislodged scalp lurking beneath each one. Smell of fried food and cheap cologne, of fags and drink and staleness, of week-old sweat and greasy hair, of unguarded flatulence and open wounds, of piss-stained trouser legs and decaying molars, of physical exertion and dog shit brought in from the cold: the smell of my mother and her simian conquests as they fumbled and fucked as best they could with libidos sluggish with neglect and bellies and hearts full of slow death. Her bedroom was across the landing from his. There had never been doors on any of the rooms except the toilet. “What do we need doors for? What have you got to hide from anyone? You haven’t the imagination to have anything worth hiding.” Whenever these men came back from the pub, which was most every time she went to the pub, Boris would curl up in his basket in Lance’s mother’s room and growl himself to sleep. Lance would lie in bed and visit elaborate and savage curses on them both until he was drawing in deep sleeping breaths of that malodorous room and wishing them dead in many different flavours. She loved Boris and wasn’t afraid to show it. She allowed him to lick inside her mouth, rub his bright pink cock up and down her leg and all over her cushions, and shit wherever he 613

pleased. She fed him the finest cuts of beef, chicken breast and smoked back bacon, and fretted endlessly about how little Boris ate. Lance was indifferent to Boris. He was not jealous of the love Boris received from his mother, because the last thing he wanted was to be loved by such filth. If anything, he pitied him for having nobody in the world but her. So when he killed Boris it was not through any sense of resentment; it was just the easiest way to hurt her. It wasn’t enough that Boris die; he wanted her to think that she was directly to blame for it. He wanted her to be always haunted with the thought that she was culpable for her beloved Boris’s demise. Boris was a snappy little fucker, and despite his only having two fangs remaining in his head could still do some damage if he went for you. He rarely went for her, but she soon forgave him if he did – “He’s not been well, have you Bozzie?” Given his propensity to attack Lance, he envisaged having problems manipulating the dog’s movements. He ruminated on the possibilities for poodle disposal for weeks before coming up with a workable plan. He ended up drowning him in her dirty bathwater. She thought he’d jumped in, hit his head on the side of the bath, knocked himself out and drowned. She took full responsibility and damn near killed herself with grief. Success brings its own disappointments. P AN DEMONIUM NIGHT AT THE LONDON AND PARIS Flesh abounds on a rickety wooden stage – sickly, dirt skin of Eastern Bloc gypsy women stripping for spuds and vodka, women with black wire hair, filthy great moles dribbling down their cheeks, and eyes that have rolled back on themselves, greyish-white like pairs of stale eggs. One on the go, others on stools, in the wings, in view, with their hands clasped together. For the profligate crowd, unsteady on cough medicine and gin, this is the new kink. They’ve had their fill of smooth white marbleised skin taut over bowstring muscle. Not one more solid tanned backside; you can keep your fastidiously attended pubic area, your uncluttered pink tissue perfectly intertwined, your silky hair and schoolgirl eyes, your clear plastic high heels, and a different dress for every dance. The necromancy of the acrid and the unclean is here, a gift of awareness 614 from beyond the wall: the spell of grazed

knees, bloodshot eyes, dark labia swinging in the smoky air like dog testis, petals of bulbous flesh encircling puckered anuses that extrude from bodies like the siphoning mouths of rat-tailed maggots, straggly black manes kissed with grease and grey hairs dragged over to cover bald spots, dirty hands, infected scratches, filth ground into deep creases, the squirming gyrations of flabby pock-marked buttocks, the heavy brow of syphilitic dementia, necks and wrists decorated with ligature marks, the stare of a My a an god… “Here tonight we have the best, Black-eyed bints and cool incest. See it all, old and new, Sweat on skin like graveyard dew. The girls: half-dead, primed and ready Hollow, swaying, legs unsteady. Spit at them and their sour songs! Call for the red-hot heated tongs! Skin on bone in short supply, Egg them on and watch them die! And don’t let a death worry you none; The threat of it’s only half the fun.” Their language is different to that of the crowd’s: it is aggressive, scornful, derisory, conspiratorial, and nobody has a want to learn it. They can skulk about in their swarthy enclaves all they like, but when it came to it they played the crowd’s game. Their eyes are hemmed in by black skin. They don’t dance. They have no moves in the traditional sense. Hypertrophic imbeciles climb the phlegm-ridden steps to the stage, their eyes cast to the floor as they kick their heels like sulky children, and the crowd howls for these swollen- head ed beauties to show their scars, their miry cunts, 615

their collapsed chests. They dip their hands into their unwashed genitals at the insistence of the crowd and its monetary incentives, and flick the resultant fluids into the mass of tongues and gaping mouths, wiping their hands on a couple of lucky faces along the way. The emaciated girls always get an extra whoop from the crowd. Nobody chatted or ordered fresh drinks when a Belsenic stinker was dragging her attenuated frame across stage to the pole. The skin hangs off their bones like wet washing, and as they descend the shiny silver pole at the corner of the stage it corrugates in squeaking ripples. These girls never fail to agitate the crowd; they have it baying at the stage, drooling over their oak apple knees, hoping to suck at some broken skin. Men with steel-toe-capped boots covered in cement and brick dust talk in hushed tones about the comparative quality of the girls to two men in antique Paul Smith suits smoking charcoal-tipped cigarettes. They complain to each other about the relatively timorous levels of repugnancy on show this particular night: there are no limbless midgets, no selfmutilators, no one showing off their bungled gender reassignment, no children afflicted with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome, no Bellmer Babes, not even any live animal snuff to get one in the mood. A huge black woman climbs up on the stage, a real black mama – Mammy Two Shoes complete with thick stockings and red slippers. She pulls off her top, exposing her gargantuan tits and a pair of the biggest belly lips you’re ever likely to see. She turns around. Her back is a lattice wickerwork of welts; it looks as if someone has been playing noughts and crosses up and down her spine with a soldering iron. The clicking, whirring and flash ing of the Japanese business men’s huge cameras brings a smile to her headless mouth. There are always men and women straight from the gym, covered in sweat, feeling tight and rigorously proportioned, who never miss a show. They stare at the grotesques on stage until they can take no more, at which point they race someplace nearby and fuck like wolves, the skeletons of rusty roller coasters towering above them like psychosexual 616

o pr phecies , the emetic images of decaying tissue surging through their heads as they revel in the honed gloriousness of their own bodies. As the next dancer gets up I catch a glimpse of some shaven-headed woman with train track scars on her temples: it’s the runaway. She sits there twitching and singing to herself like some bastard reincarnation of Fanny Hancock, watching as some besmirched tub of lard lifts her tumultuous gut up to her chest, revealing an ulcerated mass where a vagina should be. She stares at this spectacle with an avidity rarely witnessed in the sane. The openings of her eyes appear a trifle twisted, as if cut on the bias. Two huge Africans at the bar yell out, “Kiboko! Kiboko!”, and then fall about laughing and puking. A man standing beside me at the bar polishes off his third pipe of Ice Cream Dream (each containing a healthy dose of pure crystal methamphetamine). He places his hand on my shoulder and stares into my eyes; his white china eyeballs are covered in spidery red cracks, his pulse tapping impatiently at his shirt cuffs.I turn away and do my best to ignore the hand still lingering on my shoulder. I get myself a drink while I try to decide what to do, a cocktail by the name of ‘Super Gama Fairy’: a bile coloured concoction consisting primarily of GHB and absinthe. Before long my arms and legs fail to respond to any of my higherorder requests – they are leaden, and I am stranded on a bar stool as the runaway takes to the stage. I am powerless to intervene and really haven’t any reason to want to anymore. It is over, and I haven’t succeeded. She is singing a song about her daddy as she bares the scars on her arm and rubs them between her legs. She picks at her temple wounds and they begin to bleed, blood running down over her cheeks like crimson sweat… “And daddy was the man for me… And daddy was the man for mee eeee eee.” I catch a glimpse of the old Elizabeth and my prick hardens. I see an elderly man wrapping cling film around the lower half of his face, hurriedly covering his mouth and nostrils with layer upon layer of the see-through asphyxiant. He holds out for nearly a minute before collapsing under the table. I see his head on the floor, his heavily-veined hands grappling with those smothering layers of transpar- ent plastic ity. He doesn’t manage to free himself. He remains in thrall to the vacuum. One eye stares out across the floor of the pub, over the splatterings of spunk and spit, a sea of dog ends, vomit, and blood. My ears are full of grinding teeth. I attempt to reach for my fags or maybe I don’t, anyway I don’t have one in my hand. I’m not smoking, but I want to be… A searing pain somewhere… My right forefinger and its neighbour are attempting to fuse themselves to the 617

business end of a lighted cigarette. I try and separate my fingers from it, but experience some resistance from the happy fusion of filter and melted skin. A man with a glassy bald head and Elvis-style shades laps at the cracked skin and blisters between the runaway’s toes. The rancid taste has him wincing with delight. He goes at it harder. He yanks at her leg and she falls to the floor. He pulls her from the stage onto a trestle table, glasses and ashtrays dropping to the ground and shattering on impact. His tongue works away at her waxy lughole as the rest of the pub gradually close in on her. Next thing I know she is standing on the table, having pushed her assailants aside, bouncing up and down on the spot, grinning inanely like the starveling daughter of Toad of Toad Hall. Then the real show starts. She begins gnawing, rat-like, at the stitches on her right arm, ripping them out one by one. The crowd is paroxysmal, men and women climbing over one another to get a closer look, knocking back drinks in preparation, bawling in anguished expectancy. I still can’t move properly, and am wary about attempting to stand. A creamy thrush-like discharge oozes from her arm, spitting into her eyes as she continues eating away at the threads that hold her forearm in one piece. Pretty soon her blackened appendage dangles from a single thread: a ladies dress glove, a tarnished gauntlet. A woman dressed in white Lycra and sweat bands snatches the arm from the last remaining strand and jams it between her legs. She tears hole a in the crotch of her leggings and inserts the warped dead fingers. The runaway kneels down and begins to cry. An Indian man with turmeric eyes and red teeth sucks on her stump and jacks off – he thinks of his young niece in her white cotton panties and the visits he has made on her, and plans another. “My father…he…he’s the only man for me,” the runaway mutters through snot and pink tears. “Are you sure I will not do? I treat you belly well, like a close relative. You could work in the restaurant and you could be my girl for good times,” the Indian gargles. It fell on deaf ears, on ears recently excavated by a pulsing tongue, on ears that had heard enough. Faces of kangaroos in the spotlight – paint flaking overhead – 100watt bulbs with no shades dangling from sticky, ochre ceilings – boarded-up windows – drowsy eyes enveloped in stale smoke – weak chins and eroded insides – the conoid heads of dour simpletons – aching jaw – powdery teeth – smell of indole and damp corners – ingénue hissing through yellow teeth and bleeding gums – jejune little whores with a little money on the brain – lead boots of Cosa Nostra pulling me down through clotted seas – cracked specs propped up high on the noses of cracked men – 100watt bulbs with no shades swinging to and fro from sticky ochre ceilings – beer babies born to sickness – toothy harelip smiles – the stale friction of repeated frottage – thrushy cunt peeled apart for your pleasure – paint flaking from the ceiling – petrified toes on morgue yellow feet curl up from opened-toed sandals – dying nerves shuddering behind the eyes – conoid-headed simpletons astride miniature penny farthings – rancid little tarts achs d with a little money on the brain – aching jaw – marshmallow teeth – stom whores rolled up in old carpet and is tended with cheap poison – dead hidden in the base- ment… A woman with acute elephantiasis takes to the stage. Her legs swell and bubble as if caught in an invisible stranglehold – tourniquets rupturing forth her vomitus flesh. She stum- 618

bles around the dancer’s pole before easing it between the eruptive tripe sandwich of her thighs. The skin around her ankles and feet is thick and rough, with the look of rotten cream – belched, spat out… THE WOUNDS OF CIVILITY I’ve been paying particular attention to Polite Arthur, and am convinced that his minor lapses in affability are symptomatic of something far more sinister that feeds off his insane courteousness.55 Like the guy who is everybody’s favourite drinking pard down the pub, the guy with the best tales, the guy who can cheer up almost anyone, the guy who then goes home and kicks a sewer of shit out of his wife.56 Polite Arthur doesn’t have a wife waiting at home for him, so we can rule that out. But he must be compensating for his mania for the on mannerly in some way – I am c vinced of it. One should never underestimate the influ- ence of politeness when trying to overcome psychopathic urges. He lives in Grace Court: Warden-assisted housing affiliated with the (money-grubbing) Methodist church. It is a large block of small flats, each comprised of just four rooms: a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom/toilet. Nobody is permitted to own a pet of any description, so on the face of it that would rule out Polite Arthur venting his spleen on something small and furry. Of course, he could have a small rodent hidden away somewhere that he sticks needles into to make him feel like the Major he once was, instead of the dithering old apologist he has become. He might even have some sort of deal going with the local pet shop, whereby they provide him with a constant supply of sters and mice is the like that he can torture and kill in order to sustain h , gerbils, ham- façade of gentili- 55 I am put in mind of the fact that James Joyce’s politeness was considered by Tom Eliot to be little more than a device for masking his supreme arrogance. Although I fear with Polite Arthur we have something rather more baleful at work. 56 Imagine Norm from Cheers going home after imbibing a dozen or two frothy beers, and slamming Vera’s head into the wall until she slumps to the floor, unconscious. 619

ty. Or maybe he has drilled an undetectable through one of his walls, and is pumping lethal gases in to hole his neighbour’s flat whenever he feels the need. I see his neighbour: a misshapen widow with tired eyes and a belly full of grey mince and soft carrots. I see her sitting in her armchair, woozy from the toxic fumes crawling up her walls. I see her antimacassars and doilies in a state of disarray and her longing to rearrange them, but lacking the energy. We’re stuck here, in this babyeating shithole where men fuck dogs and their mothers’ eye sockets, and she still has fucking antimacassars and doilies. She still has those ridiculous cunting doilies on her coffee table, and those absurd antimacassars that continually collect in the middle of your back. I want to rip them in two and shove them down her shrivelled throat and have her gag and choke on them until she blues up like a Stilton vein and dies. Maybe he suffers himself in a far more mundane fashion. He might sit in his tidy flat and mutter curses under his breath while watching hardcore domination movies, or rape porn. He might flagellate himself with spiky bracken, or cut deep into his flesh at any number of hidden areas. Or maybe he just revels in his peccancy while sleeping, and spends the rest of the day trying to strangulate his dreams with scrupulous good manners. There is the possibility that I am way off the mark with all this, but somehow I don’t think so. The pains in my lower back are crippling me. I need more cushions on this chair. Maybe I should see a doctor. What’s this I see with a fridge magnet at each corner? KIDDIE BRAWN Ingredients: To a child's head weighing approx 5 lbs. allow 1 lb. lean pork, 2 tablespoons of salt, 3 teaspoons of pepper, 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper, and 6 cloves. You may want to remove the cheeks and salt them, unless the head is particularly small, in which case all the head should be used. Once the head has been meticulously cleaned, submerse it in cold water with the pork, and skim off the fat just prior to boiling. Allow 2-3 hours boiling time for a head weighing 5 lbs. When the head has had sufficient boiling time the meat will literally drop from the bone. (Watch as the features slip down what was the face, like spit down glass.) Put the meat into a heated pan, remove the bones, and then chop along with the pork. (This should be done as quickly as possible to prevent the fat settling in it.) Add all of the seasoning. Stir the mixture well and then transpose to a brawn-tin if you have one; if not, a cake-tin or mould will answer the purpose if the meat is well pressed with weights, which must not be removed for several hours. When stone cold, dip the tin into boiling water for a minute or two, and the preparation should turn out easily and be ready for use. Average cost for a child’s head: £1.25 per lb. Or simply obtain your own for the price of a few boiled sweets. Seasonable all year round. Note: The liquid in which the child’s head was boiled will make excellent vegetable soup, and the fat, if skimmed off, boiled in water, and then poured into cold water, can be used in place of lard. Have you noticed lately how the elderly seem to have whiter, sharper teeth? Their canines appear disproportionately pointed, almost needle-like at the tips. These teeth are doubtlessly false, but a new breed of false. The canines might even be thought pronounced enough to be vampiric. (Vampires are always disconsolate. There is apparently little pleasure to be had in cheating death, ravishing milkyskinned virgins with heaving chests, being possessed of inordinate physical strength, and having the facility to transmogrify into a bat at will. Are we really to believe that the burdens of a few dietary restrictions can prove quite as odious as all that? Or that vampires are so very vain as to pine for their reflections so? Are we to suppose that our undead brethren are somehow conscionable and, resultantly, so saddened by the bloodless sacks of skin and bone left in the wake of their subsistence that they have difficulty in living with themselves? 620

The sentiment underpinning their melancholia is something along these lines: nothing that lives through the death of others can be light-hearted, and so blitheness and jocularity must remain the preserve of those whose continued existence doesn’t depend on them being wilful killers. We are led to believe that the vampire is suffering from a curse. He is to be pitied as much as feared, for look at what he must do in order that he remain undead (and for ‘undead’ just read ‘alive’ – that which is undead is alive, as to merely prescribe abnormal restrictions on a life’s continuance is not to change it into something else) as opposed to unundead (just read ‘dead’). Does the vampire secretly yearn to be dead or secretly yearn to be alive? And what sense can be made of the latter? An answer here is crucial if we are ever to understand the supposed spleen of the vampire, to get to grips with his own slant on the existential debate. ‘Happy-go-lucky vampire’: oxymoronic or just conceptually elusive? If blood furnishes a vampire with immortality, then the blood of a vampire’s victims stave off his death. That which is not alive cannot die, and so would have no need to take measures in order to prevent its own death….) Of course, it’s obvious what is going on here. It didn’t take me all that long to work it out, although, without wishing to brag, I am especially adroit in these matters. That said, ook you only have to l at the clues: 1) An increase in missing persons. 2) Infant abduction up by 85%. 3) Record amounts of newborn babies going missing from hospital wards. 621

4) The elderly collecting in groups on the streets and in cafes, talking quietly and acting suspiciously. 5) The elderly choosing to live together in huge communes, where they receive very few visits from outsiders. 6) All the idle time the elderly have on their hands for the devil to find work for. 7) The marked improvement in the sharpness and general condition of their teeth, with their chisel-edged incisors and barbed canines – sickly shark grins like Lon Chaney in London after Midnight. 8) The reported upsurge in basement flats and cellar spaces being rented by retired men and women. 9) Environmental health report a distinct increase in the complaints made to their noise pollution department, especially with regard to noises typically associated with infants. 10) Egg consumption among the elderly far exceeds what might be considered normal levels. Take these 10 points together, consider probable relations between them you will , after some deliberation, come to the same conclusion as me s and . All these factors are causal- ly linked. You need only open your eyes. Is nothing to be done? Custom-made dentures are being produced and existing ones customized by a retired dentist – requests for extended canines and edge-honing are said to be proving exceedingly popular with his customer base. The most obvious reason for someone to want sharper teeth and elongated canines is to facilitate the puncturing, ripping and paring of flesh. Now, in light of the 10 points mentioned above, vious new teeth it should be fairly ob- that elderly people are eating babies and toddlers alive. They are using their to bite, tear and slice their way through soft skin and internal organs, while the 622

infants they are eating succeed in howling their way through the soundproofing. They are burrowing their wizened faces into young bellies like polecats displacing bunny viscera. Is nothing to be done? I heard Polite Arthur talking to himself in the bar last night. He was sitting in the corner, his drink and his sandwich left untouched, reciting a poem to himself over and over again. He had tears in his eyes. His voice was hushed, but I am certain that the words I overheard went something like this: “I hit a little lovely girl, She was you ng years old, she said; Her head it span with many a whirl That went ’n’ left her dead. She had an offset, blank blank stare, And she was awful bad; Her eyes were black, and very black, – Her future made me sad.” The y would fight against the proliferation of youth, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting babies. The elderly are forced to congregate on the edges of this dismal seaside town and shrivel away the remainder of their years. The damp coastal air wreaks havoc with their joints through the autumn and winter. They hole themselves up in sea-view flats situated inside huge white buildings – substitute white cliffs 623

formed by the build-up of countless little fossils – and then sit with their backs to the double glazed windows watching TV. The crumbling edifices of this town must prepare them for their own ruin, helping them to develop a taste for decline. You only have to listen to them, and Charles has little choice but to listen. How they revel in the despicability of youth. How they thrive on the humiliation of being washed up. How they compete ferociously with one another over the matchless severity of their own particular collec- tion of infirmities… The embalmer’s art is visible here on the corner of this soggy little island. I say tear it to ribbons; don’t let it die like Hindley done to death. Please – mummy – please! Do it for fun if nothing else. Do it nonchalantly and high-spiritedly, but do it, and afterwards don’t even bother to clean your blood-soaked slippers! Help it on its way! Don’t let it wait around rotting! Do the decent thing you lovers of children and truth! Is nothing to be done? HOLDING CELL My holding cell was without distinction apart from a few words cut into the wall above a metal bed: ‘Hell is other people.’ As I read and reread those words I became convinced that the writer of them wanted them to be truer for himself than they actually were. Who the fuck was I? Nobody knew me but me. (Just listen to me. I must sound like some anguish-ridden teenager, full of crap and made-to-measure remoteness.) My own mother, a childless stranger to herself; my own children shit scared of my presence; my wife – my wife of sixteen seemingly non-existent stillborn years… – recoiling from me years as I if , sixteen dead years, sixteen were some suppurating leper bent on inti- macy. Had I died? Was this Hell? Was this the fire and brimstone of disillusionment, the decapitation of a fallen life? I had done nothing to deserve eternal damnation, as far as I could recall . 624

I was the fucking invisible man, the man with no name, Mr Nobody, faceless, homeless, it vagrant, unaffil a ed, unloved, and missed by no one. I long ; I was not seen; I was didn’t be- the shadow reflected in blind men’s eyes. I was the walking, talking dead, the living dead stuck, dispos- sessed of past and future . This had to be a joke, a rather cruel and tasteless joke, but a joke nonetheless – a misguided joke. Of course, I thought, it’s a joke! It seemed the only explana- tion. What a fool I’d been. “Okay the joke’s up! You had me good and proper, hooked from the get-go. Look, my hands are up. You win.” The acting was flawless , careers in the theatre all round, R.S.C. contracts, the lot. Such a concentration of hidden talent – eat your liver, Sir Laurence. This has been like some ly organised TV show specializing in 625 by experts. Most elabo-

rate hoax es, some not too distant descendant of Candid Camera. “I can laugh now, but there were times back there when I could have cried. You bastards! You bleeping bastards! You wait till I get you home.” I had serious doubts. I doubted things that would seem beyond doubt, things you’d be certifiable to doubt. What was it that gave you away? No one part icular thing as it turns out. In the end the facts bucked just a little too hard and my arse left the saddle. “You can come out from wherever it is you’re hiding – the game is well and truly up.” Why didn’t I see it sooner? As I sat on the edge of bottom lip started to quiver and my eyes the bed looking less a nd less expectantly at the door, my secret ed my disappointment. I looked at the door for hours. The longer I howled the less likely the possibility of its being a joke became, the less likely everything became. Maybe things like this happen all the time, I thought. Every system of events, especially one this anfractuous, runs the risk of malfunction , of sacrificing one or more of its many parts. This could be correctable; this could be corrected and I could be put back where I belong with no memory of any of this. Things like this could happen all the time. (This could have happened to me many times before.) All those poor souls walking the earth talking to themselves, screaming out their horrors of isolation and despair to a disre- 626

garding system, disenfranchised, overlooked. Their stories don’t fit in anywhere; there are no places for them to be who they think they are, but maybe, just maybe once there were such places – maybe they, them or their lives, just got laid . I would not allow myself be dug out by white-coated mis- men .I had to keep who I was to myself until some kind of corrective procedure could be put into practice, or until such time as… GROOMING THE GRAVE … to me a live woman ain’t nothing. I enjoy dead sex more than I do live sex. – Henry Lee Lucas57 57 “Use them any way you want. Just things I said. I don’t own them. I don’t even own myself no more. I’ve owned others for short periods, but I’ve already said way too much about that. Course, it didn’t much matter how many I killed when I couldn’t serve time for them. But now, well now I’ll atone for every one, for the sins of other men. I just let them mount up without thinking. They were happy to keep adding names, and at the time I was happy to keep taking them. But that’s all they were, names, on bits of paper words .” Henry Lee Lucas, Texas Prison (2608 – declared officially dead on March 13, 2001. Rebirth date: 2136. Listed under Phase 1 of the Retrograde Justice Programme.) 627

No deaths meant no corpses. You might think that nobody much missed them, and you wouldn’t be far wrong, but there were those who were acutely aware of the absence ir . Some, like Greg and his crinkly-cuddling cronies, had cultivated feelings of loss when it 628

came to dead bodies. The only place left where unanimated flesh and bone still ex is ted was Pavilionstone, and it was possible to infiltrate the border if you knew the right people and were determined enough, and, when someone had acquired ty of death, determination was not something a taste for the frosty rigidi- they generally lacked. The people of Pavilionstone are ashamed of their dead and keep their cemetery on the edge of town behind high walls. Up until recently very few people in Pavilionstone had actually bothered to visit the graves of their dead: the cemetery was seen as little more than a dumping ground for those deemed unworthy of eternal life. But now they go to see if the dead are still there. For many now hold out hope for the recently (and in some cases the not so recently) deceased, such are the supposed powers of those beyond Pavilionstone to reanimate the dead. As a result, it is now extremely rare for corpses to be incinerated, almost unheard of – only genuine eccentrics would even consider it. (Eccentricity implies madness minus tragedy, minus pain and hatred and fear and love: madness minus its mystique, its beauty, its commitment – the devil with his tongue in his cheek, the slasher with the rubber dagger...) Sign s that people are being chosen from beyond the grave are becoming more apparent, and the discovery of a freshly vacated grave is big news. People swarm to the spot to see the mounds of recently excavated soil and the ty emp- coffin resting in the cut earth. They look on silently and reverently, losing track of the time as they long for time to lose track of them. Sometimes someone comes across the missing corpse and puts the dampeners on the whole thing. The crushing sense of disappointment that such discoveries of occasion s i brutal. The discarded bodies (stripped their clothes) are unceremoniously thrown back into their graves and the mud kicked 629

in over them. Nobody can really claim to understand why, having gone to the effort of digging them up, their potential saviours then decide to reject them at the last minute. Various factions have put theories forward on the matter, but none of them are considered to be all that plausible. And although there may be cases where the dead are exhumed but left unsaved, people remain convinced that there are also cases where the dead are taken from their graves and transported out of Pavilionstone, and everybody knows what It is not common this means. practice for lovers of the dead to remove the objects of their affection from the seaside town in which they rested. It is not common practice because it is extremely difficult to achieve unless you were very well connected. It took influence just to get into Pavilionstone for a short time; it took a little more than influence to smuggle yourself out a little piece of death. But it happens on occasion, and when it does, nothing but joy and hope ensue. Sadly, for those poor souls cocooned in their squalid seaside icile , the majority of dom- graveyard players are unable to leave Pavilionstone with any more dead skin than they entered with. When I come to think about it (and don’t get me wrong I don’t think about it a lot, hardly at all in fact, much less than I used to) having sex with dead bodies must be extremely liberating. I’m guessing it would be best to get in there before rigor mortis has a chance to set in, before the skin cools and the muscles harden too much. I could be way off the mark here though, for the opposite might well be the case, the colder and the more rigid the better. Is there a standardized aesthetic for the practice of necrophilia? Is it kink- ier to prefer the freshly dead or the long dead, the still warm and malleable to the cold and unyielding? Are the partly skeletal a huge no no, or an exotic prize, or maybe a little of both and so comparable to banging a negress in Victorian days? Are there times when, like a happy dog, some of the muscles come away with the bone? Are iodine and lube essential components of the graveyard cruiser’s toolkit? Or are the odours and the gravely resistance essential aspects of the experience ?... 630

DROWNING PUPPIES The air is bulked to bursting with brazen conviviality, pithy maxims spann death of and everything in-between – all the many in life g time spell less , s inebriation. The drink is going down and the sun is still on the up. The fans on the ceiling churn the smoke like grey butter, chopping up the fibrous streaks of tied lungs emp- and cooling those below with severed air. Nobody here wants the sun on their back. They’d rather a young girl or a young boy on their back, but most settle for another drink and another smoke and a wank somewhere down the line when no one will be safe for a minute or two. A man wants to leave. He hasn’t been here long and he’d rather not have come. He drinks fast, saying little in the pauses. He nods and listens but his mind is elsewhere, in better company. I am not vulnerable when I have the sun watching over me, when I can feel his warm hands on my body, when I can relax in the feeling of my own skin. My back is damp with his heat. My nipples will be black soon. No scratching! Wait for your nails to dry! If you must scratch, use your palm or your knuckles! Ignore it and it’ll pass! Bloody ants are everywhere. Did I get it? I can’t feel it moving. It’s probably spread across my shin. Yuck! “Are you sure, lady? I don’t think so, love. No offence n that but you ain’t my type by any stretch n I bet you stretched nya?.... Don’t matter how much you be smilin, love, neither vus is gonna service ya. What ya doin goin bout like that anyhows? 631

Your old man get kicks outa seein you in this state? Fuckin hats off – that’s one dedi- cated husband you got there, I’ll tell ya….. Nless you wanna dog it, bro?” “Like fuck!” “You erd im dinya? Yeah? Then put that smile away will ya! What ya waitin on? Come is on, dog, she sure as fuck ain’t getting no younger. Bye bye, m sus...” Two white faces, and him behind them beating down into the backs of their heads trying to get to me, two white faces with eyes of crystallized spittoons, of nervous loathing, and I smile. I’m smiling: it never fails to win people over. It has magical powers, black magic to match my nipples. There’s no smile like it. I could incubate blind, featherless chicks under its glow – a smile that could save souls and lead men away from the rocks of their misfortune… Here goes, Frank. Here goes. You never had a doubt and now I need you to be right. I’m keeping it as natural as I can, Frank. Natural is best. Natural is transcendental, glimpse of heaven my smiles, Frank, if you could h in lips and teeth. If you could have bottled a bottled ve a my smiles… I can see the tops of my cheeks, Frank: it’s a good one this time. If only you could see it. Is it my best yet, Frank? Is it? I’m glad you can’t see their eyes, Frank: all piss and thistledown, Frank, all piss and thistledown. Their faces are too white, an accumulated, unsightly paleness: white on white on white, and their noses, their insolent button noses, sitting in the middle of their faces like tiny shrunken heads. His warm hands are on me again. I feel a tremble in his fingertips and sense a cloud is on its way…. Beneath swirling blades tearing up the air with their blunt edges he is where to else- once more. He’s drinking with friends that aren’t friends and he’d like leave, and he would, he’d leave, if he hadn’t only recently arrived. He is down low and the sun is up high. A shaft of light breaks through the window, striking him blind to this 632

place, to his friends that aren’t friends, to the drink in his hand that he’d rather not drink if it weren’t for this place and the people in it. He cracks the glass on his teeth trying to drink in the dark , and somehow he knows it’s too late. He’s already too late. He opens his eyes and the sun is gone. The window is in shade and he shivers for her, so he thinks, with a smile, one especially for her, not as good, nowhere near, though she’d never say. He’d say it for her, filling her mouth with his words. It’s not working on them. Seems you’re a strange one, old man, with peculiar tastes. No headway at all, and yet I felt it was good. There I was listening to you, you daft old man you, you daft old man. It was only ever you that noticed, wasn’t it? Come, you can tell me now, you uxorious old fool. Who were the others? Who were the throng? There weren’t any were there, you daft old man. You can tell me now…. Sammy the Friendliest Dog in the World: I am fucking ravenous. My stomach has floated up into my ribcage, up towards my huge heart, where it is this minute getting entangled in arteries and ventricles. I feel short of breath, am experiencing dizzy spells. I am liable to collapse at the base of a stool and they’ll think I’m asleep; they’ll think I’m asleep and they won’t give me food and I’ll wake as we leave, with the nudge of a shoe, and I’ll starve all night. I won’t be able to get through it. He’ll try to wake me in the morning, but I’ll not have the energy to lift my head from the floor, and maybe he’ll leave me, believing me to be asleep, so I’ll not even get the one meal I get there. People will comment: my fans will want to know why I am not performing tonight, and why I don’t accompany him here tomorrow lunchtime when I am incapacitated with hunger and unable to drag my head up off the floor. He won’t say that of course; he’ll play it down and change the subject as quickly as he can. They’ll still be concerned by my absence, but they’ll not get much from him and they know it. How long will this go on before something is done about me? How long does it take to die of malnourishment? I’ve been dying of it for years. I have a head start. They’ll not let it slide for more than a day or so. Could I last that long? The next few minutes are crucial. Commit to them fully and hope for the best! What if my audience is distracted and fails to notice me until it’s too late, when the last of me is spent, and I am famished out of my senses? What if I catch M. as he is busy interrogating a murder suspect, or Gyulus as he is offloading a fresh crop of ceps or trading his rhymes for 633

beer, or Med with his face glued to a paper, or Charles wrestling with black-suited dem o ns ? I’ll have to time it just right. I could start with the crumbs from the carpet just to keep me going, although I’d rather not risk offending my audience if I can help it. I can sense disapproval when I’m caught licking the floor. It causes some to look away and not look back, and I can’t risk that. I must try not to slather too much, or catch my teeth on the ends of pinched fingers – today I could happily take the fingers as well and that’s not like me at all. I am known for my precision, my technique, my inability to harm. I have a reputation to keep up. But my brain is so weary at not having been spared, not for a second, the pangs of a foodless future. Nevertheless, I can’t be letting myself go just because my intestines haven’t seen food for in excess of 48 hours. (For the past two mornings, my one meal of the day has had maggots in it. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.) Here we are. These steps are going to finish me. He’ll drag me up one or two before looking round to check what’s wrong, by which time it’ll be too late. My entertaining days will be well and truly over and all those bar snacks will soften and putrefy, as will I. They’ll decrease their orders over time, of Cheddars, of crisps and those sweet sausage rolls, and they’ll wonder why they ever needed to order so many, and the men around the bar will cast their eyes down a while, to spare a thought for their ever-peckish old friend that died before his time. I’ve conquered the steps; my legs did it all by themselves. Will my tail wag itself? I can’t see why not, if it too expects to be fed. They’re turning their heads. Their eyes are dropping straight down to me. They’re putting their hands in the glass bowls that sit on the bar and they’re talking to him. What’s he said? What’s he said that’s taken their hands and their attention from me? The drool is spilling out now. I can feel them, two foamy white tendrils hanging precariously from my mouth, and they’re turning away from the snakes of spit that pullulate from my chops, and who can blame them. That’s not the kind of show they’ve come to expect. I cannot feel my legs or my tail, but I can feel 634

shame. I follow my spittle in a slow arc to the floor and I lick and slurp and drain the carpet of food crumbs, and I’ll live through till tomorrow when I’ll eat my breakfast, maggots and all. Gyulus raises his empty pint glass and says to it, “If something is not done you shall be the last of seven!” and walks up and down the bar searching out his next drink, reciting his pitch as he goes: “little angels bring wine to my door I want you to wean me from this world I want to fly among the free…” Those who know him all too well look away with a laugh and a shake of the head. Then comes the plea to the barman to put a small one on the slate, and to the inevitable refusal comes the reply: “I still have rights until I fall apart.” “Rights, maybe, but no credit.” for He shrugs it off as he’s done a thousand times be e. He needs one more for the straße, one more to keep him steady on his bike, to put pep in his legs, to send him home done. The Pilchards aren’t paying tonight. At least that’s what they think. But he’s got a trick or two to get that last drink. it In memory of Ricky The Suicide, he sets about an impassioned rend ion of Kányádi’s ‘Woodcut’: there are feelings of unsought empathy with the “afflicted men with sunken melancholy eyes,” knowing nods all around when “hope glimmers and slowly dies,” shivers and the lighting of cigarettes as “all th is will come to an end with parchment faces staring back,” for this “generation worn and greyed on benches equally decayed” can see their mourners “all in black.” And so it goes: they are “motionless in trance” as if to order, and after the funeral is done Gyulus is looking at the last of not seven but eleven. Gyulus drank until the world went out. Sammy lapped at the carpet until his tongue went black and, with his belly full of crumbs and grit, gave up on his fickle fans and went to sleep, dreaming of a squirming breakfast. 635

They find my smile ugly; they find me ugly. I think even you will find me ugly when you find me. I’m sorry I didn’t do more to escape what they’re going to do. I can stand and smile. That’s all I have now. My legs won’t move and my mouth is too busy to speak. Goodbye, Frank…****… I think I’m still smiling, Frank, closing my eyes in the hope that they’ll…****… Nothing I do…****… Don’t ever find me ugly…****… Don’t ever find me…****… …****… (et cetera.) At the precise moment of her death there was a sign, a valediction: three men in their early twenties, having stolen a sheep from a field on the outskirts of town and beaten it to death, threw its blood-soaked carcass through the door into where our friends were sitting. It slammed into the side of the bar and then slid to the floor like a used tampon. Sammy nearly choked himself to death on his leash trying to get at it. When a man finds his beloved wife, her head having been pulped, the backs of her legs fouled, wearing a grin carved out of stone, annealed to the point of immortality, he doesn’t have anywhere he can go. He finds that he is able to stare down upon the carnage of his wife forever. He finds that as long as he stands perfectly still, refusing to move a muscle or divert his gaze, he is impervious. MEAT FOSSILS There is nothing I can say about the buried place that I reached. I know there was a place and that its trace is evermore marked in me and in the texts that I write. – Georges Perec 636

Spider veins, cigarette butts laced with cracked lipstick, red ribbons, pink bows, fake eyelashes, warts, garter belts, ochre tumbleweed wigs, spotlights, double chins, ankle bracelets, pustulated fingers pinched with yellow gold. Mirrors framed with light bulbs and stars throw back showbiz corpses… The veins lay on the back of an old murderess’s hands like strands of purple wool. The strangled entrails of innocent children lay beside her on the floor as she prep are s to cross-stitch… I have a thing about basements, cellars, bunkers. It is so easy for things to go undetected in these places, easier even than attics. An attic is somewhere one might stash a mad wife or mother, but a basement is where pickling jars, where on lost children are buried under the screw-top lids of e might find a litany of such jars lining shelves that stretch all the way to the ceiling, all filled with formaldehyde and housing the heads and brains of small children. Nestled in some of the jars are the severed noddles of red-headed girls: crumpled up faces, eyes closed and mouths open, forever trapped in a suffocating communal yawn. Tiny brains perched on top of their unholy breed of snake. This is the wreathed spinal cords like the swollen heads of some kind of disease that basements breed. Cowering skeletons collect dust in damp corners with bad light. The immensity of earth beyond the 637

walls is hungry to reclaim ral space, th is this alien space , this unnatu- space without view and without conscience. My hangover kicks in: brain thirsty for an exit, thirsty enough to go search for itself it if I don’t do something about it, ideas coming alive, telling me that they’ve come of age, that they are ready to leave the nest: “ don’t need you anymore. Without us you are materialized Face…. 638 We nothing. Do what you’ve gotta do, else we start munching skull bone.” Picture Kim Parker having her brain siphoned out of her head by a plague of in the back thoughts in Fiend Without a

These are places where electrodes are strapped to temples, testicles, tongues, fingertips, where the walls have cracked in an attempt to let the screams out. These are places that can snap vocal cords. These were once places where hippies perished with glittered faces and unhappy moustaches, with cups and gnomes and pillows, with newspapers strewn about their bare ankles: Paul Thek on the nod. The inhabitants of basements no longer allow death to just come and go. Nothing just dies down there. I can’t tell you the full extent of it. I try, but just end up breaking it down into instances, distressful, carnage-laden cameos lifted from the bigger picture, which is ordinarily good enough, but not in this instance. Somehow not good enough, not enough, but still all there is. It s i in the barren, vapid, bleakness of submerged hovels that bears are driven mad, head-rocking, pawstomping, mouth-foaming mad. Imagine how many people have rotted in underground rooms since the beginning of time. How many poor abandoned souls have been shackled to damp walls and left to wither away to little more than cobwebs? Who could count the whimpers and winces that have gone unheard beneath our feet? There is a damp basement lit with blue lights, blue strip lights buzzing with the clamour of a thousand angry bees, and in it hangs a man dressed in his wife’s clothes. Coarse stubble protrudes through layers of foundation, and his huge hairy feet crammed into black stilettos go hover a couple of feet above the concrete floor. He’s there because half an hour a his 13-year-old son caught him prancing around the house dressed as a woman and called him a “filthy fucking faggot,” and stormed off to tell his mother. He’s there because he agreed with his son. He’s there because clothes maketh (and unmaketh) the man. He will remain there until his internal organs are slop, because a speeding bus will plough his wife and child 639

down as they rush to confront him, and nobody but his wife and child will miss him. And the ‘ands’ go on, but this family does not. Somewhere isolated house, there and is a clammy, mizzle-walled basement located deep beneath an on its ceilings are blue strip lights, strip lights that drone and rever- berate a monotone dirge for no living ear, and in this perspiring concrete tomb lays a woman, her clothes torn and dishevelled, fingernails broken and black, a mouth full of food and flies. Out there somewhere there exists a dank vaporous cellar lit with blue strip lights, lights that hum and murmur to themselves. Brown water runs down the walls and forms in pools across the uneven concrete floor. In it sits a small boy busy throwing a luminous yellow tennis ball for his puppy to fetch. Both the boy and the puppy are having fun. Silverfish glide about them freely and largely unnoticed. The tennis ball is soon saturated and filthy, and the puppy no longer wants to pick it up in its mouth. They abandon the ball and play rough and tumble instead. After a few minutes play the boy grabs the puppy by the throat and chokes it to death, look ing into its big black eyes to see the innocent bewilderment slowly ebb away. A BATHROOM SOMEWHERE A bathroom, green suite, a yucca plant obscuring the window, its leave s spiky and unworldly, a toilet, a bath with chalky shower attachments, a sink, all the expected contents of a bathroom anywhere, and two toothbrushes – a couple’s house. The smell of smoke: rolling tobacco, or Phillip Morris cigarettes, not cigars, not cheroots. Piss all over the seat and around the base of the toilet: there are men here, probably five or more, and drinking men, men filling their bladders with a definite sense of regularity. One of them will be back before long. “Lock the door!” 640

“Okay, okay, I’m on it.” says Triman, who is, as he was quick to point out, already cognizant of the pressing need to secure the door from the inside, and on his way to do it. After turning the key in the lock, he gently drops the bog seat and sits down, puts his head in his hands and lets out a sigh that holds no hope of ever having good reason to end. “You’re timing this, right?” “Uhuh,” says Triman, without bothering to look up from the black solace of his hot palms: the sense of safety and privacy afforded by this temporary visual deprivation is not unlike when a young boy expects to be rendered invisible to others by putting his hands over his eyes. He’d started up the stopwatch (which he’d purloined from a sports shop in downtown Manhattan just fifteen minutes ago) on entering the bathroom and is getting hacked off with Lakok’s checking and double checking, his need for control in uncontrollable circumstances. He looks up and clocks a can of Stella plonked on the edge of the bath. He picks it up and, on finding it more than half-full, drains it of its rather flat and acrid contents. Not until half choking on a Camel butt does he think to question why it had been left there, by which time any doubts have been abruptly displaced by the sodden ash and stale lager being siphoned up from his throat and out his nostrils. He scrunches up… actually more of a scrinch than a scrunch… he scrinches up the beer can in his hand, the tin popping and cracking between his fingers like scorched fat, and throws it across the room at the door. “What the fu… what the fuck are you doing? There are people downstairs; can’t you fucking hear them or something? Because they sure as fuck can hear you .” “So what? No I won’t fucking shhhhhh, and I’d appreciate it if you could stop barking demands at me every five minutes – and that’s the last time I’ll be using that phrase, literally…. What possible difference does it make whether we are discovered or not, or whether we strut down those stairs with our thumbs up our asses whistling show tunes, or whether we go across the hall and crap on their pillows, for that matter? Why do you care so much? How can you care so much? It’s all the fucking same to us whatever we do.” “It’s that attitude that go t us here and there and everyfuckingplaceunderthecunting- sun, and over it for that matter. Why did I ever listen to you and your grand theory, your breakthrough idea about ungluing the fabric of the universe? And now I’ve got no choice but to listen to you, never more than five minutes from your maverick brilliance.” “And it’s just that sort of thinking that didn’t see past its nose, that didn’t allow for change, that saw the past in the future, and that overlooked the trifling matter of an infinite regress with viciousness on its mind, that...” “What does it say?” says Lakok pointing down at the stopwatch resting between Triman’s thighs. (Lakok felt like he didn’t have course he did, if only he could ignore the b time reach 641 to argue his point, but of es. They could have thrashed it out

once and for all if they’d covered themselves in a sheet and ignored their shifting surroundings, taken thousand mile skips in their stride, and got to the bottom of who or what was to blame for the amplified turbulence of their lives.) “Two minutes twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven…” “Alright, alright, I get the message. Just let me know when we’re coming up to five.” Lakok walked over to the bath, climbed in and opened the window. The sash weights knocked against the wall s of their wooden tombs as they made their descent. Flakes of white gloss cracked from the beading and fell around Lakok’s shoes in a flurry of sharpedged, unfriendly geometry. A warm rush of air swept in from outside as Lakok crouched down to try and discover their whereabouts, so that he could list it down – as far as he was able to ascertain just where it was – in the spiral-bound notebook, pilfered from a stationers down the block from that sports store now missing a stopwatch. “Whooaaa what the...” Lakok see s, or rather doesn’t see, from the window over the bath, a view of emptiness, an empty view, void vistas as far as his eyes can see, visual perception registering zero; he witnesses the non-being of everything within visual range of that window. But not in actuality, because that’s the thing with non-being, there’s nothing to see, even when you do. He looks out from the window and there is nothing out there. It is not pitch black, nor is it blindingly white; there is nothing to report besides the stupendous, kneetrembling lack. He has come across the world’s unwritten pages , and surely would be the first person ever to have nothing to report, to have 642

encountered, or rather to be aware of encountering (or not) non-encounterability, to have seen around the back of Einstein’s watch – nothing doing. His body is fighting against what he’s just seen, or failed to see…blahblahblah…to order the disordered and otherwise inexplicable non-occurrence of…. He falls to his knees in the bath. His arms begin threshing at his sides like electricity pylons in an earthquake, and then he keels over and whacks his head of cold sweats and intolerable impossibilities on a chrome combination tap spotted with chalk and rust. His head bleeds – causality was still being represented in kind – and mats his hair together in spindly clumps. Lakok slips farther down the walls of the bath as his legs try, independently, to escape over the edge. Triman has his head in his hands again, “So what’s out there?” “Nothing.” “Coming up on five by the way. You said to tell you, right? Four minutes fifty, fifty-one, two, three... Oh Boy!…” THE PLIGHT OF THE NEVERENDERLING If there’s a place, then nobody knows it. No grid reference: G5 or H6. No X marks the spot. If it’s there the atlas hides it between The folds of stapled pages, obliterated By the creased footsteps of weary fingers And worn-down thumbs. Cartographers despair and tear out their hair, And browsers, breath abated, brush aside Some old crumbs. If there’s a time, then it’s already lost. -43 No Planck tick tock: 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 (or 10 ) Or leap second shows it. If it comes and goes then it flees too soon With the rest of durationless nows – retrenchability Aside for a moment or two, to count The uncountable toes. Clockmakers all go blind in mind of their kind And laymen, disappointed, keep inside Some, ‘Who knows…? HAVE YOU SEE N THE INVISIBLE MAN Have I told you about the wonderful sense of personal identity that grows stronger and stronger as one grows in invisibility? I managed to free myself from the authori- 643

ties in less than a week. I had been taken to a psychiatric assessment ward where I was, somewhat short-sightedly, left unattended in the waiting area. With no apparent nerves (let’s face it – getting caught and not getting caught were just two possible outcomes to me at that point), I got up out of my chair and walked out of the waiting room, out of the hospital, and away across a recently turned field. I felt like Dr. Richard Kimble, but no man with a prosthetic arm had slaughtered my wife. No, my wife was alive and well; she just didn’t seem to realise she was my wife, was all. Kimble had a focus: to locate his wife’s killer and clear his name. What was my focus? It took me a long time to get anywhere near an answer for that one, and near is still the closest I’ve got. When night fell in around me I got to my feet and made my way back into town. I figured the police would still be out looking for me, but when you don’t exist you don’t much care who finds you. I meander ed into town and headed for an aban- doned flat that I assured myself I knew existed. I was right, and here I am, still there. I’ve been here a while now, living off other people’s waste and trying to remember where I should be. I’ve grown a beard, again like Kimble, but more impressive than his, I believe. I didn’t really have much choice in the matter. It just grew. And It seemed appropriate. Apparently a beard has a way of making the wearer feel hidden. I live in five abandoned rooms. People come and go in the rest of the building. I pay no heed to them, or should I say to their footsteps, which is really all I have to go on. They are of no interest to me and I presume the feeling is mutual, although I can never be sure. After wait for ing what I deemed to be long enough for the au- thorities to sideline my disappearance, I began keeping close tabs on my wife and family, being extremely cautious not to give myself away, or draw any unwanted attention. The more time that went by, the more I was able to forge a place for myself aside from all the identity that had so catastrophic y led me astray. I was able, through no small ef- fort, to see myself as a wronged man, an individual who, for whatever reason, was forced by 644

circumstances, remarkable circumstances (although it helped just to consider them as circumstances) to, at least partially, begin again, for only then could I hope to re-evaluate what had gone before. (There are ants everywhere. This place is infested. The excessive clutter brings them in. But I am left alone most of the time, so I shouldn’t complain.) Did spying on the wife and children help or hinder my progress in this matter? Truth is, I don’t know. It was just something I had to do. I was, at that stage, beginning to trust myself a little more. I saw them almost every day for over a year and all the time they were forgetting about me as well as remaining completely ignorant of my ever having existed. I watched my family getting along without me, laughing together, linking hands as they walked down the street, chattering, enjoying themselves with no thought for the man stood behind the trees, crouched down behind parked cars, or peering through finger holes in the daily newspaper, with stale food in his beard and in his belly, and a clot of grief in his guts and in his brain that refused to kill him, since he was dead already. Who can speak honestly of heartache? I can, that’s who. I say it’s a passive state, a state that is devoid of threat at its commencement, and because of this it tends to compromise us, as we are left to manufacture, in the form of lamentably lame metaphors, the threat it still poses us. Why? Because how you feel has to be brought back under your control. Feelings of heartache and grief are merely symptoms of a fight to regain control over things which were never under our control in the first place, like when you attempt to tame the pain-producing properties of a mouth ulcer by deliberately agitating it. You do, of course, end up causing yourself considerably more pain by doing so, but you just have to be in control don’t you. PERISHABLE S 645

Why are there people like Frank? – David Lynch, Blue Velvet Cats struggle down the street with metal frames – the top section of some stereotaxic device, I believe – screwed into their puny heads, gleaming steel prongs invading their ears, their mouths, various points on their craniums, their glassy black eyes, stricken with an age-old persecution, gleaming for clemency, their scraggy ears drooping forlornly as they struggle to move, dragging and pushing their cold metal encumbrances as they go. Dogs with their legs missing or mangled lie at the side of the pavement baring their teeth, their gums wired up, their mouths forced so far open with metal bars that the edges are torn up into their ears. Nobody even seems to acknowledge these pitiful creatures as they sag in coils of barbed wire and pools of their own piss. Some say these animals are forms of sacrifice, offered up to the eyes beyond Pavilionstone, and claim they symbolise the plight of those needlessly forced to stare death in face, some kind of shock tactic devised to tug at the heartstrings of those with power over their fates. Some time ago animals came to be seen as jinxed, bad omens, reminders of the lowly status of those in Pavilionstone, who have somehow got it into their heads that beyond the grey slimy walls that hem them in no lower forms of simply life exist. They are abusing their dominion in order to liken themselves to those they seek to join, or at least see themselves, if only through the chinks of squinted eyes, as masters and proprietors. Some even hold that there is much wisdom to be found – wisdom adequate to practical application – in the advice of Zip’s Uncle on his father’s side. I was a very emotional boy. I couldn’t sleep without the light on, and sometimes would be unable to sleep even with it on. I would lay on the bed staring at the stippled ceiling worrying about the inevitability of my death, and the death of my mother. I wet the bed at night and daydreamed all day. Soon after we met, Elizabeth became the primary focus of my mortal concerns. My mother died a few years later, and I was upset, but not upset enough I remember thinking. I cried a couple of times, felt low for a few weeks, kept Elizabeth closer than ever, and that was it. I hadn’t done her justice. I remember those sleepless nights now; I remember the pain, but I can’t relive it. Whatever I do I cannot relive it. Those emotions are 646

gone forever. They are also worth mourning – maybe more so. People like pets appear dis- too easily. I look out on fields of grass lurching and leaning into the wind on the outskirts of town, where unknown deaths are tossed away and hidden…. You see laquered eyes under their neatly plucked brows. You see skin smooth and un- Get a little closer and blemished. see ? You see skin between You see a the subsystem hairs of the eyebrows and they lose their silkiness. of veins around the eyes. You see fractured veins in the balls of the eyes, a moonscape of pores, pores with what do you spilling over dead skin, grease and dirt. I see nothing but dirty great hairs all over the place, furrowed lips, decay… down into matter, to the as yet unobserved and unobservable, down forever, a descent without end…. Look inside from the night and you will see lonely men sitting at tables looking out at you as you walk by, men waiting for their loneliness to turn them murderous like Nilsen. You’ll see fat sloppy parents and their fat sloppy kids eating pizza and watching TV, nosepickers, wankers, empty rooms, large tables seating gangs of bearded swarts planning their next assault, old women knitting, crocheting the entrails of murdered babies, reading, snoozing, biding their time until they see their loved ones again, 647

kids killing men with their thumbs… There is the sound of windows being smashed, cats brawling, screeched abuse, the hot sweat moaning of pilled-up buggery (“Stop! I can smell shit.”)… I hear the distant sounds of murder experiments being carried out: the alchemic blood games of Erzsebet Báthory and Gilles de Rais, the claret fanfare to the rapes of Count Boden, the hematomanic lab lusts of ex-choirboy John Haigh... The explosions… If I follow the noise I will find body parts clotted on the trees like blossom…. Charles trudged along littered pavements, past forgotten shops with plywood for glass. He walked past a derelict showroom under one of the nineteen arches of the viaduct. The viaduct was a real suicide tempter, and it had successfully tempted a few since its construction in 1843. One of those it had lured into denting the tarmac with his skull was a dreamy teenage boy of Charles’s acquaintance. From what he could tell, the boy had had no reason to drop himself into the road at high speed. Some talked of the spell of 1905. Some thought that the buildings beneath him had revealed their hideous secrets: the flooded lungs of newborn babies, the dirty confidences that caused mothers to virtually hack their daughter’s heads free from their bodies, young Caroline Trayler raped and strangled on a whim… Charles thought the viaduct was to blame, that something about its majestic height, when compared to the squat terraces that had grown up amid its elephantine feet, had weakened his resolve. For this wasn’t the only Cubitt creation known to have cracked men’s minds . Charles had watched him scale the wire fence, watched him standing there surveying the town, watched as he stepped off. Having turned in the air and grabbed hold of the edge, he hung there for about five seconds before letting go. Charles was sure that he had let go of the edge, as opposed to having lost his grip, due to the way he threw his arms back, as if in defiance of some former weakness. Who can tell how many times he changed his mind before the impact changed it for him. His limbs were twist and 648 ed contorted, mangled

and warp ed in alarming configurations: the sort of thing boys do to their Action Man dolls after they’ve stepped on a make-believe landmine – corkscrewed bones and wrung out skin, a pipe-cleaner boy victimized by bored fingers. Those men and women that sit looking out the windows of their homes with the lights on waiting for visitors that never come have a speeded up stillness about them. View them at a high enough speeds and they cease to move altogether – they grow instead. But these people are so inert that they couldn’t even hope to fill the small rooms they occupy night after night; in fact, they would barely swell at all. But there is an expectant, twitching agitation about them as they sit and stare and do nothing. Their acute inactivity is such that it flickers before your eyes and gives the impression of motionlessness viewed at high-speed. I’m a pathetic bully. I know this. I am not unaware of what I am and what I’m doing. I know better than anyone else. I know myself as much as anyone does. I mean, did anyone ever find his or her self in India? Most, from what I hear, lost a fair bit of their selves down some filthy toilet and then returned looking distinctly gaunt. Maybe that’s it: the search for the self is the search for something non-existent or abstract, so by travelling to mystic destinations with piss-poor sanitary conditions you slowly waste away to nothing, thus finding your true self. Nobody misses them anyway; they just buy new ones the next day, so you could see my vindictive bullying (wholesale slaughter if I’m being honest) of the town’s pets as promoting the market economy of this imp over ished little backwater by the sea. Or you could see it for what it is: a man injuring and killing cats, dogs, and birds because he likes to do so and sees no particular reason to refrain from such a pleasurable activity. Sometimes I feel like I do have reasons for the things I do, but they are in and out of my head so quickly that they don’t feel like anything much to do with me. A few nights ago I sneaked into one of my neighbour’s back gardens and killed their rabbits for them. I tried to skin one alive, but the wriggly little fucker kept attempting to burrow into my wrists, so I slammed the larger of my two knives straight through its neck, damn near taking its head off into the bargain. (“Golly, Mr Wabbit, I hope I didn’t hurt ya too much when I killed ya.”) I hung him up at the patio window, so that when the young daughter came down in the morning to feed her little vermin she wouldn’t be able to shield herself from its fate. Once I had skinned the other one I considered taking it home to eat, but decided I would never get around to cooking it, and so threw it over the fence and watched next-door’s huge Rottweiler, Adolf, scoff it down in a medley of crunching and gulping. (It is usually best to avoid leaving skinned rabbits lying around the home decomposing: it plays havoc with one’s mental equilibrium.) The next night I shot Adolf in the head with a 2.2 air rifle that I’d purchased from a bloke with squiffy eyes at the local junk shop for a very reasonable price. It took a few shots 649

to kill the gluttinous bastard, by which time lights were coming on all around me. I left Adolf with his legs twitching and thumping against the walls of his kennel. After spending so many years nurturing life, it came as light relief to take it. I started off with birds. The birds can get out of Pavilionstone, can fly in and out as they please. Well they couldn’t when I’d finished with them. I got a bird watchers’ book and ticked them off as I sent them crashing to the ground. I started from my bedroom window and then moved farther afield, in order that I might tick off some more of the species contained within my book. Large targets like Gulls – keeyow keee-yoww-yoww-yoww…. yowwwwwww – (Common, Herring, Less er Black-backed, and Black-headed) and Cormorants got my eye in training for the smaller, quicker stuff: Tits (Marsh, Willow, Coal, Bearded, Longtailed, Great and Blue), Chiffchaffs, Warblers, Bu t n ings, Wagtails, Sparrows, Finches, Robins, Wrens, Swifts, Swallows, etc. Many a Sandwich and Common Tern did I prevent from returning to African shores. Wood Pigeons: aim for the white patches on their necks and you’re laughing. I actually bagged a few Mute Swans as well. You have to get those huge fuckers in the head to be sure. I once got one trying to land on a frozen canal. It was a couple of feet from the precarious surface when I shot it clean in the head. Its long neck flopped and dangled in the air like a dead snake for a second or two before the Brobdingnagian beast hit the ice. It slid for a full twenty metres before coming to a stop. Owls and birds of prey were a bit tricky to tick off, until I got the idea of breaking into a sanctuary and shooting them in their cages. I once killed a friend’s tortoise by inserting half a dozen knitting needles beneath its carapace. I did it slowly, dramatically, like a consummate magician sliding bendy steel swords through a box housing his tasty assistant. Unfortunately for the tortoise, it wasn’t able to manage the contortions required to avoid multiple impalement. LONG IN TOOTH AND CLAW 650

Walk around this town, visit any of its shops, its tea rooms, its coffee houses, its bars and you will be struck by the huge number of elderly citizens you see. They are all pervasive here and they feel powerful because of it. Wherever they congregate they exude an unsettling presence, a disquiet ing atmosphere that comes from being too near death to care about much. They sit and sup at their china teacups, or slurp from their china saucers, and then burp a little and smile at you if you happen to be watching. The way their false teeth emboss their thin, sunken cheeks turns my guts out. But the dribbling, the incessant flatulence, and all the rest of the paltry preludes to the death rattle are just a distraction, and it’s important not to be taken in. These broken down old cunts aren’t just bad to look at, bad to smell and bad to be around, they are bad, malevolent right down to their wasting bone marrow. I can see it. I can feel it whenever I come into contact with one or more of them. They aren’t just sitting to something. They are a round drinking tea and shitting themselves. They are up danger ous because you pity them. You do not take them seriously, and soon they will make you pay dearly for your condescension. They sit around tables, their heads bowed, speaking in whispers: a superannuated cabal. But whether they are huddled to gether over Sunday roast, p us hing flaccid carrot slices through thin gravy, or standing around a jack on the bowling green, they have that same shifty demeanour, those same twitching eyes and know- ing winks. Benches are the exclusive domain of those whose age suggests decrepitude and propinquity to the grave. The benches are even named after the sandwich-munching, flask-carrying shufflers. Sit on a bench in this town without being 70+ and you are asking for trouble. It just isn’t done. I may sound like a coward, and a pusillanimous worm I may be, but these creatures are up to something and I’m not getting in their way. Let them have their benches. Let them ride all day on free supermarket buses. Let them scour the town with their carrier bags collecting litter. But never take your eyes off them! What you take for foamy white spittle 651

running from the corners of their mouths is more than likely horse spunk, drunk to rejuvenate their spoiling insides. Look again and you will see tiny hands and feet pushing against the insides of their Gladstone bags. You will see all manner of things if you look a little deeper at the lookers-on – all malice and jealousy – and keep my words in mind. “Have you ever noticed the way a little brown baby gurgles just before it dies? A real rhythmic purl. Not at all like a white one.” These exact words were mouthed to me across a crowded tearoom one Sunday afternoon while I was researching my theories. The old woman that mouthed these infanticidal words was a short podgy thing with bright yellow hair and the tiniest black eyes, one of which was tellingly double-pupilled. Afterwards, she licked her lips like a seasoned porn star – one of those who really gets fucked. You know the ones. Not those super-pretty things who bounce up and down on a cock for half an hour, tossing their hair about and feeling good about themselves, those that think fellatio can be done with the tip of the tongue alone. No, the real hardcore wrecks whose sensitivities are in severe disrepair , the ones that keep going into their forties and fifties because they hate themselves so much, the ones that take two monster cocks up their arse, one up the twat and another three in the mouth, the ones that aren’t allowed to dictate the depth of the gobbling for themselves, the ones that give the impression that if they didn’t scream out for more they’d start crying, bottom lip blubbing, the works, the ones that slowly filled have their anuses up with cum and then have to regurgitate it into a wine glass and drink it (and I mean drink it – not that letting it p our out the side of the mouth stunt), the ones that get banged real hard, get the breath knocked out of them, the ones that still have to fluff if called on to do so, the ones that have lots of animals and teddy bears at home, the ones that require surgery to correct the damage inflicted on their rectal passages, the one that are fucked in the throat till their eyes bleed, the ones that cry themselves to without quite knowing why… 652 sleep

I know for a fact that these smelly old fogies walk the streets after dark rounding up any sprogs they find and cramming them into shopping trolleys. Just why do you think you have to strain to hear the soft padding footsteps of those fleece-lined booties.58 TAKE ME LOWER, BABY He saw girls assaulted […] everywhere, in every conceiva- ble manner . We – John Barth, The Sot- ed Factor Most people will have heard of Animal Farm; it is, after all, probably the most widely recognise d piece of bestiality on the market. Even those who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of watching it will still no doubt be aware of a fair amount of its content, especially the chicken-shagging and porcine-fellatio scenes, and so be aware that an average-sized male penis can fit inside a chicken, and that a pig’s dick looks like a corkscrew. The non-human stalwarts of productions of this kind are invariably some or all of the following: dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, horses/ponies/donkeys, chickens, fish, cats, bulls and snakes. Less common is the sexual exploitation of elephants, wolves, primates, bears, bats (most of which are apparently homosexual), rhinos, hippos, lions, tigers, and other big cats. In the past, heavy tranquillizers have been employed to make sure that these dangerous animals are kept only teetering on the brink of consciousness, but recently other methods, involving elaborate binding sense of sexual danger techniques and , have been devised to heighten the realism. 58 (The fleece is imported from Chinese torture houses, where they skin cats and dogs using the cruellest methods they can devise.) 653

In one such film, entitled While Jane’s Away (a Zootropia production), an experienced porn actor – dressed to resemble Tarzan in nothing but a leopard-skin loincloth – has sexual intercourse with a wide array of wild animals whose freedom of movement has been restricted in one way or another. The plot of the movie involves Tarzan hard on the trail of a band of trappers who are looking to bag as many big cats as they can. On finding each of the successfully trapped animals, Tarzan initiates his seduction by whispering in their ears, trying to calm them as they roar and snarl in fits of distress. Once aroused it doesn’t take him long before he’s banging away at the animal in question, either anal or vaginal, before letting them go. The big cats have had their tails anaesthetized of the way, and their paws, heads and trees, and so can do nothing but bare to and taped up out rsos shackled to the floor or opportunely placed their teeth and make indescribable sounds as Tarzan goes about his amorous activities. A pair of fully grown male lions go down on two women (in this case, Jane and her friend who return to the jungle to find Tarzan seducing a hippo), lapping thirstily, their tongues like scourers drawing blood and tissues. The women are then fucked by Bengal tigers and rhinos, fingered by orang-utans, fisted by chimps, and finally trunked in turn by a heavily scarred African elephant. But this stuff wasn’t to Mr H’s taste. He found indulging in sex with animals repellent and unnecessarily base. He was after rather more specialized merchandise. The blood-eyed assistant behind the counter in the Private Shop is as white as he is black, but he is leaning all the way on his black side, all chain-gang shuffle, sucked teeth, and chunky yellow bling. He appropriates the patois of distant black brothers a world away from the hybrid ethnicity and culture he strives to overcome. Consequently, his filched parlance can at times sound strained as it strives for a precision that is alien to its true origins. “This is under the counter shit, man. This ting’s so fuckin underground it’s got a family of moles on its Christmas card list. This is some hardcore doggin I’m talkin bout; taint for no pretenders, you get me? All on handheld: this shit looks real ’cause it is real. Ain’t no escap- 654

ing what you see; this stuff’s fuckin indelible, tattooed across the insides of your eyes. You fuckin deal wid it, else it be dealin wid you. You get me, dog? This shit’s low, bro, fucking keelhaul your tender parts you got any left. You lookin scared now. Let me run you through a scene already… “This big fuckin fat hairy bear called George hears some breathless adulation, some overwhelming fuckin praise coming from his bedroom n the mouth of this huge dicked nigga getting the blow job of his life: ‘Whoa girl what’s whichu? You suckin me like my balls fulla Cristal, man. Now you sure you aint been to no fluffing school – for real? Fuuuck!’ A floorboard creeks under George’s foot as he be tryin to make off. The nigga hears him, ‘Who’s that? – don’t be stopping, girl: it’s cool’. ‘Just me – George – I was wanting my fags, but it don’t matter none.’ ‘Fuck… Georgie boy, now you come right on in ere; this is your room all said n done. Don’t you be sneaking off nowhere!’ As he walks in he’s confronted with a tidy white ass, fit as fuck, eating its way through a black G-string. The ass’s head is bobbing up n down on our nigga’s bone. “All pretty standard fair up till now you might think, but dey just sucking you in, bro; you don’t know what you’re in for, and dey got you hooked, you’re in for da ride – bars down n the coaster’s rolling. Shiiiit.” “How bad can it be? We talking snuff here – a long-lost Lake and Ng? Are we? It’s not that I mind or anything, I just want to know.” He really doesn’t mind. He’s seen it all before. His mental imagery has been tainted beyond redemption, and as a result he can never satisfy his longing for something lower, something that’s going to make him wish he’d been disappointed once more. You can tell he is titillated by the salesman’s spiel, but that ultimately he believes his enthusiasm to be disingenuous, and the film to be more of the same. He wants a film so sick that it can disclose the remaining scraps of his hu- manity . “Actually, it sounds familiar. Where was it made?” “Where’s anything made, man? What’s it fuckin matter anyhow? Kinell!” “The actors, what are there nationalities?” “Actors? You fuckin kidding me? Fuckin actors? These cunts couldn’t even act the fool… Nationalities?...” He shakes his head, “They be from here, there n every-fucking- where, all ixmed pu 655 mutant bunnies o with n

l home place to cal no more. This is a prime fuckin import I’m talking bout ere, man. Supwhichu, dog? Shit!” “Just curious.” “Wait, wait, don’t you be tinkin this is some glossy, high-prod value, high moral conscience piece of no good fakery I’m peddlin yah. Fuck, bro, yah gotta let me finish with me trailer n den yah gonna know. Snuff, man, ain’t no fuckin snuff, make snuff look like suink on TCM.” The self-proclaimed purveyor of connoisseur, sick-flick pornography bows his head and pinches his huge nostrils together, slowly sliding his thick fingers with their long sporadically burnt nails towards his chin as he focuses his mind on the task of resuming his story and making it pay. “Anyhow, she keeps blowin, n fat bear’s there clockin her butt getting all worked up n shit. N then, shit, it’s gettin to me now just fuckin tellin yah… “I’m fucking talking MUTANT porn here, man – you dig? You copped any of this shit before, dog? No! Whoah , you in for a treat. You dig the sick shit right, ’cause udderwise this ain’t for your consumption, man…. Mr H nods his head robotically. “Right, okay, after our nigga’s emptied his sacks into her mouth, dats when it starts. Georgie boy says he’s jus inna watching, but that he has a friend who’d like to make her acquaintance, if yah know what I mean. She smiles her spunk white teeth wide n gives the nod. Now nigga boy is wondering what the fuck’s going down. This weren’t on iz fuckin script; any cunt can see that. The fucker’s confused, n he’s about to get fuckin way more confused. Georgie steps away from the door n shouts, ‘COME ON IN LOVERBOY!’ 656

Fuuuck ! Fuck, you ready for this, man? I’m not sure I am n I know what’s comin. Give me the fuckin horrors, man… “Loverboy’s a fuckin insect, bro, sgot the head of a huge fuckin ant n it’s real: this ugly muthafucker’s been rustled up in one of those labs they ave out there. Iz body’s human alright, wid some extras: got four more arms, two anging outa each armpit, flid arms, looks like eez got a couple of those Siamese twins locked up in iz ribcage. But the best fuckin bit, the fuckin cream in the cheese, is iz dick, man. Iz dick’s a two-foot fuckin hookworm – size of an 8-year-old’s leg. You won’t believe this fing, man. For real! Smore of an instrument of torture, dog – sfuckin hideous. Nigga just sits dare fuckin disbelievin, iz bone sucked right back up inta iz belly. Georgie boy’s smilin like a torn twat. But Suckalong Suzie ain’t doin no smiling; she done smiling. Man, Sheeeee is Fuuucked, n she know it, too. She be cryin n shit, bottom lip shaking like a lush at sunup, but she don’t move none – she too fucking scared to do shit. “CARNAGE, man, the rest is pure fuckin CAR…NAGE. That fuckin marlinspike dick o’ his starts burrowing inta her thigh, n he asta drag the fucker out n put it home imself. Tunnels through her womb n up her spine like a crack-house ferret. Her eyes are popping out, blood pumping from her mouth. Next you know, it’s out n he’s driving the ting tween her shoulder blades. It comes out through her neck, man, her fuckin neck. When he finished and she nuttin but a heap a Mary Kelly, he turns his cold dead eyes on the quivering nigga in the corner, n dats where I gotta quit, man…leave dem n their fucked up batty boy shit alone.” Mr H rewards the salesman’s efforts to entice him and buys the disc, only to throw it in the bin the moment he gets outside the shop, for he now realises that he’s already seen the film, and it isn’t what he’s looking for. After completing anything exceeding half a page Charles invariably felt the call to masturbate. He didn’t always give in to this habitual call to onanism. Sometimes he would instead direct his tired desires into scratching out some useful pornographic prose and leave his fly unzipped and the tissue box untouched. Those times when She was in his life, he never even contemplated fiddling with himself; he would have felt far too self-conscious to have indulged himself in such a way, even if he had felt the urge. Her presence or (should I say) omnipresence in his life, when it came, was to the exclusion of such baseness, and he thoroughly welcomed it. In its absence nothing short of infibulation could have conquered his urges. He needed it. He had existed far, far too long in the cold shadows of female disregard. Immanuel Kant (following Thomas Aquinas) claimed that onanism and/or being an invert are crimina carnis contra naturam, and that the creatures who indulge in such practices are not to be considered worthy of personhood. Was Charles’s habitual tugging slowly stripping him of his person, reducing him to an extensionless point yank by yank? At least Charles wasn’t a fag into the bargain. Fuck, imagine the havoc that would create: he’d slip past the first near-miss case into sub-personhood within a week the way he goes at it. going to want me? Who will give me the time of day? I will not be “Who is passed over forever. But who could stand to imbibe my bitterness, a thing of spite, of bile, o venom, bigotry, and foulness, such as I am? D n ’t I relish in horrors, exemplify sickness, decline in moral stature as I grow? What kind of dribbling wreck of personhood would get this far and continue still? I will be abhorred most by those who do not know me. I am fearful and soulless, disjointed and corrupt, but I do not only mirror the man who created me, but all that created him and led him to this. I take no pleasure in my existence and, like you, did not seek it out, but still I am and will find it hard to disappear, maybe unlike you. I have not yet ceased to expand. I have some way yet to go. I do not disapprove of what I am, nor what I am destined to become, for such disapproval would imply a distance from myself that isn’t mine. I am the rat slithering along in hate, Mr Lawrence; that title must be mine….” 657

THE WASTEPAPER SEX MACHINE The time finally came for our gargantuan graophile, Greg, to step up and see to Ethel. It was always going to happen. Joe repeatedly forbade it, and yet Greg continued to persist. Greg was genuinely convinced that Ethel craved him, and he wanted nothing more than to oblige her, to give her the attention she so richly deserved. Ethel was a smart old bluerinser: hair always immaculate, plain blue or grey A-line or heavily pleated skirts, clip-on earrings and gaily-coloured blouses. She was around 5ft, with a slight hunchback and not much meat left on her bones. She looked a bit like that charmed old mooncalf of a woman in the The Ladykillers. Her husband had died many years ago, just before the creation of the N.W.R., and she hadn’t bothered with men since. Finally, in submission to a prolonged hail storm of vulpine temptations, Greg decided to right this terrible wrong. He turned up one day when he knew that there was no chance of Joe popping round to see her. Ethel was pleased to see him and welcomed him in. Joe would lose it if he ever found out that Greg had visited his grandmother’s house outside of meeting times, let alone anything else, and Greg was well aware of this, but he’d had enough of being an onlooker. Greg wanted his piece of the action. It was all right for Joe to call his grandmother off limits, but he failed to realise what this could mean to Greg. Ethel was a gateway to his becoming. “Tea or hot chocolate?” “Oooh hot chocolate please, I feel like something sweet today.” “Chocolate it is, then. You’ll have marshmallows won’t you? I think I’ve got some.” “You know me – I’ll have the works.” “Are you boys meeting again already?” “No, no meeting today; just thought I’d pop round and see you.” “How lovely. Bickies?” “Yes please. I just can’t say no today.” “You’ve got a healthy appetite; that’s all. Not like my Joe: always picking, he’s always been a picker.” “I do like my food. Anyway, ure I have a to maintain fig- . You don’t get curves like this by missing meals.” “Don’t you do yourself down; you’re wonderful as you are.” “I know.” He licked the tip of his forefinger and preened his eyebrows. “Well just make sure you do.” “I do.” “It doesn’t matter what other people think.” “I know.” “Good. I’m glad.” “Good.” “Cumere you big beauty! Give us a hug!” “Your wish is my command.” 658

Greg made his waddling way across the kitchen to Ethel, who stood with her arms stretched out wide. He bent down to accommodate her head alongside his and gave her a soft squeeze as she slapped her hands on his shoulder blades and had a good old rummage amongst the avalanche of fat cascading down his back like the contents of a lava lamp. Greg tentatively slid his hands lower and lower until they were hovering over her backside. He made contact with it and clenched the cheeks of her arse with his chubby paws: it popped through his stubby fingers like scrambled egg wrapped in polythene. “Easy now!” “Sorry. I just couldn’t resist.” ► “Two can play at that game, my boy.” She grabbed at the parts of his rear she could reach: some midpoint between flank and arse – a no-man’s-land between body parts, incorporating the extremities of both sides but belonging to neither, a feast of fuzzy flesh slipping into a paradox of malformation – and gave a few pinches. She was definitely playing up to him. He wouldn’t have too many worries here. They would do the business, and it would be their little secret. He would still ask Joe every week if he could fuck her, as if he hadn’t already, to keep up appearances, and Joe wouldn’t suspect a thing. They would probably end up making a regular thing of it, thought Greg as he began walking Ethel’s pleated skirt up the helter skelter of bulbous blue veins that descended her bandy legs. “What’s that you’re doing now, young man?” “Feel free to give me the corresponding treatment – by all means go ahead.” “Cummon, your chocolate will get cold!” “With all due respect, my mind isn’t on hot chocolate at the moment, and you do make an especially fine mug.” “Enough fun and games for the minute! Chocolate first!” Chocolate first! And what second? Greg let her go, sat down at the kitchen table, picked up his steaming mug of chocolate and started supping excitedly, burning his lips a little as he did so. “So, now tell me, what did you really come around here for?” said Ethel in a rather sultry and suggestive fashion. “I think you’ve worked that out already.” “And just what gives you that idea, young man?” “A hunch, I guess.” “Is that right?” “Uhuh.” are “Well, why don’t you sh “Why don’t I show this hunch with me?” she said smiling seductively. you instead?” “It’s your hunch, after all.” She laughed in that way old women laugh: a horrific combination of childish titters and bronchial rattling. Greg swigged down the rest of his chocolate and marshmallows, got up from his chair, picked Ethel up in his huge arms and took her into the bedroom. She wasted no time in getting her gash around his face, and he pulled out all the stop s to pleasure her. She was up for anything and was soon groaning like a loose floorboard in a busy dancehall. Some time later they both collapsed in a heap on the bed, where they languished in the sweet exhaustion of near complete satiation. ■ (End of version one: a version filtered through years of pornography.) 659

◄◄ ► (The real story.) “Watch it now: I don’t want to have to give you a slap, young man,” she said somewhat light-heartedly, but there was seriousness there too. “Just ooling around f .” “I know. Me too.” “…” “Drink your drink up and then there is something I want to show you…. Does your fa- ther still work in the furniture business?” “Yeah, he’s still there.” “Good.” “Right, what was it you wanted to show me?” “That was quick. You must have an asbestos gullet.” “I like it hot. It doesn’t bother me.” Ethel got up from her chair, stood there bent for a few seconds, and then led Greg out of the kitchen. “Okay. It’s just through here in my bedroom. I think my mattress has had it, although it might just need turning over; I thought you might know, with your father working in the trade.” When they got into the bedroom she pressed down on the mattress and turned to face Greg, asking him what he thought. He knew exactly what he thought. Greg lunged at her and started littering her face with kisses. His hands wandered all over her body in a panic, as he whispered sweet nothings in her cinnamon-whirl-like ear: “I fancy you so much. God you turn me on. Oh fuck yes mmmm. Fuck you’re hot…” and so it went on. She burst out laughing, hysterically, thinking it a joke, not quite knowing what to think. HEEEEAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA THUD…, and the sound of fabric giving way to springs, the ripping and whining of tensile steel coils… Ethel had fallen back and knocked herself out on the solid pine headboard. Greg had fallen on top of her. Her skirt had risen up and fallen over her face, exposing her stocking-clad legs and her large pink knickers. Greg couldn’t see how vacant her face had become, her mouth hanging open and her eyes shut tight and, in the commotion, hadn’t (distinctly) heard her skull strike the headboard. The bed still rocked about as it tried its best to compensate for Greg’s shifting bulk, so he wasn’t (distinctly) aware of her lack of movement either. When he went down on her she let out a few deep groans. What was he supposed to think? He worked his way through his entire repertoire without realising she was unconscious. ■ WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE A DEAD Schrodinger Schrodinger The only reason I thought of suicide was to tax the imagination to its utmost. I wanted to imagine what I knew could not be imagined – the extension of death, the cessation of life. – John Hawkes There were those who were well-accustomed to the flash flood of past and present that swamped them just before their transitory deaths. There was one woman, by the name of Deidre Schrödinger (who is and is not the granddaughter of Erwin depending on how you look at it), who was forever dying in an attempt to record, in words, the process of her life flashing before her eyes. Deidre was one of the few eccentrics glad to be passed back, 660

eager as she was to continue with her extraordinarily stimulating and challenging work. So well-known was she amongst the Lions that her name came to be regarded as a byword for any repeat suicides. Woolly had spoken out in favour of her, expressing a deep sense of admiration for her investigations into what he called, “[…] the process of encapsulating echoes, of pinning tails on invisible donkeys.” P., who, despite being more than a little intrigued as to what she might come up with, turned a blind eye to her troublesome addiction to dying, regarding her as essentially little more than a crank. She knew from the start that simply recording, in the form of some kind of list, the rush of imagery that assaulted her just before dying wouldn’t come close to capturing the experience, although the images she repeatedly encountered would have to play their part in the finished article. She would often say, “If one seeks to paint Hunger, it is not enough to just lay some tabescent figure down on canvass.” Her preferred analogies for the task she had set herself were invariably taken from the art world, as she saw herself as a writer attempting to “paint, or sculpt neurological mys- teries with words.” Many who met her found her, although polite, supremely arrogant. She was also widely considered to be a first-class bore. She talked of nothing but her work, and so, in light of the said work’s acutely subjective nature, talked of nothing but herself. Over time, her touches of death began to make sense to her. You can get your head around anything if you spend long enough dwelling on it. However, that is not to say that in getting your head around something or making sense of it you do it any justice. You lose more than you gain. Deidre came to realise this and tried her hardest to forget any sense 661

she’d made of those many attempts to suck the essence out of the protean firework of braindeath – and so the task grew. Her body was beginning to look a bit of a mess. She could have had cosmetic intervention if she’d wanted, if she’d ever found the time. She never did. The trademark, densely scarred butchery of utility surgeons was plain to see from tip to toe; it marked her superposition. But there would always be time for her to pamper herself in the future, when certain stages of her project had been satisfactorily completed. Until then she’d vowed to put her mauled skin to the back one of her mind. Anyhow, in a world where every- can look pretty much how they want, the atrocities littering her skin represented nothing more than a macabre display of personal freedom. Nobody was particularly offended by her appearance, as they were too busy performing the necessary corrective procedures in their heads, making good her butchered state with thought alone. Two and a half years and 109 deaths later and she hadn’t written a single word that hadn’t been torn up in frustration shortly after. Her problem was that of simultaneity: she couldn’t think of a technique that would show all she saw and felt during those flashes in a way that allowed it to be consumed in a fugitive instant. This surely had to rank as one of the worst cases of writer’s block ever. You might say that her problem is not so dissimilar to everyone else’s, and that the greatest challenge remains the same: to feel it as it happens. Recently, she has been working on documenting her experience (or absence of experience) of non-existence, and refuses to accept that all that’ll ever be available to her will be that involving existence, the non-existence side being lost forever. She sees her lost (viewless) viewpoints as part of who she is, as part of her dead history. She cannot let them go. She believes her dreams (when she sleeps, for she sleeps less and less now and for shorter and shorter periods) speak to her of lives lived in the absence of sleep. She claims to feel a 662

far fuller person since curtailing her sleep-time. She eventually hopes to quit the black treadmill altogether. (If you were deprived of sleep for long enough you would begin to crave it at any cost. You would come to a point where you’d choose sleep despite being warned that you may never wake up. Eventually, you would choose sleep when not waking up is a necessary precondition. This is the way of such things, and it is here we see life and death as they really are.) DO WN IN THE DUMP In the middle of a landfill site, seated with their knees gathered up to their chests behind clasped hands, gulls around them tearing at the corrupted, ulcerated earth, gargantuan yellow diggers scooping and compacting the leftovers of used-up moments, they sit. The day is overcast; a thick brooding layer of cloud hangs motionless in the sky, as if about to drop and obscure the spewing undulations below. They soon learn to suck the stenchful air in through where it does least harm: swept in down their throats the the cobwebbed ev e n il p rfume dies u realised in tissue of their lungs. “You realise that we still can’t die,” says Triman matter-of-factly, with just a hint of swagger detectable about the eyes. “Our critics might say we have already died too many times for death to matter to us, to mean anything anymore, and that maybe to be unaware of death is not evidence for it never having occurred, nor evidence for its unimportance.” “You speak as one lending himself to the opportunities of conversion,” says Triman turning to face Lakok. Lakok’s head remains where it is, locked in position, his eyes trance-like. A rat scurries up to their feet, pauses for a second as if to acknowledge their presence, and then burrows up the arse of a half-eaten chicken, its thick pink tail whipping the air like the hideous tongue of some festering zombified head. “What good would it do? I’m lost to those I love. Broken up into so many parts and yet still whole, horribly whole!” says Lakok wanly. “Lost, but intact, forever intact.” “An abomination of togetherness.” “Our heads have imploded in the crushing blackness of bottomless seas; our bodies have dissolved in molten lava as if our flesh and bone had been no more than candle wax; we have dropped from the sky to the fast encroaching earth that was never to break our fall; our senses have been deranged by the slight air of mountain tops; we’ve been rained down upon by the arrows of Agincourt, been ploughed down by countless automobiles, and so many other times have we died and yet not, and yet you choose to sulk like a child who has lost an old teddy bear, and who wants it more than is forgivable, merely because it can never be. You are offered experiences that could glut a god, and yet you whine for the crumbs of what you’ve already done to death.” “These experiences, these snapshots of existence, like you, have no depth to them; they are of insufficient duration to establish any of the flies standard trappings of meaning…. We’re may dead in our own day: fugacious, insignificant, too ephemeral to even be tragic.” “How very poetic, but in case it’s slipped your mind, you’re a philosopher not a poet.” 663

“I don’t want to discuss it any further.” “What shall we talk about instead?” “I’d rather leave off from talking just now.” “Why, what’s wrong?” “It isn’t making things any better.” “It never did, as far as I recall.” “Maybe not – but it feels like it did…. Actually, I think it did.” “It didn’t.” “You’re still talking.” “The words are keeping my lunch down.” “How can you still call it lunch?” “Whatever I eat around midday I tend to call lunch. Why, what do you call it?” “It feels like sustenance, but it isn’t…. It’s not lunch. It can’t still be lunch.” JACK ABOUT TOWN In art I know that I have feet of lead. – Federico García Lorca Charles took to strolling up and down The Leas. He felt safe there, wistfully staring out to sea so as to avoid looking at the huge grandiose houses the other side of him, houses that taunt ed him with the successes of their owners. He could even abide furtive glances from all the jissom-guzzling queens that (quite literally) hung out up there, not to me ntion the young boys on the grid system beady eye for the disaffected O.A.P., and the old women with their barbed teeth and their with a disgustingly infinitesimal pooches scurrying around everyone’s feet. He could put up with all these things because he felt sure that SHE wouldn’t be there. Oh, no doubt some of her father’s many minions and the N.W.R. agents that might well be in league with them would be keeping an eye on him, but such an unobtrusive presence as theirs he could handle. He had become so accustomed to their uninterrupted vigilance by now that it hardly entered his head. They had their job to do; he understood that, and harboured no ill will against them. Charles was happy to stroll along nibbling on the foie gras sandwiches that he kept in his jacket pockets wrapped in brown paper. His sister, bless her heart (Why had his mother fed her properly? Why hadn’t she died when only a few weeks old? If she’d been more attractive he could have done a Georg Trakl on her), indulged Charles with this delicacy, regularly stocking up his cupboards with a dozen or so 75g tins of the stuff. Charles felt no guilt about eating foie gras. In fact, the thought of all those force-fed fowls having their gullets rammed (the poignancy of which, given his location, did not escape him), and their livers stretched to breaking point actually added to his enjoyment in some strange and unanalysed way. When walking along the Leas at night, Charles considered his excess weight to be his best defence against those whose leering presence he never failed to sense, and keeping the dimensions of his ever-ballooning gut in mind prevented him from getting a bad case of the tins as he walked along there in the dark. By doing this he could walk by the bearded backscuttlers snarfing their hairless prey in the broken-down shelters and shadowy undergrowth and remain exquisitely 664

insouciant, ignoring the squelching of sodomites slick with KY Jelly and brain-stung wit h opp es p . Until, that is, something happened to change things forever. r (Let me first explain something about Charles the writer. When Charles created characters he would first get a clear mental image of them; he got to know the contours of their faces at least as well as he knew his own – which maybe wasn’t as comprehensive as it should have been, given that the one mirror in his flat was coated with a gruesomely thick film of nicotine and dust. Let me just say that, had he been able to draw, he could have sketched any one of his charac- ters with the utmost ease, such was his quasi-visual familiar ity with them. If a male character was of a certain vintage, Charles could tell you how many prominent hairs he had crawling out from his ears. If a female character happened to be of an age requiring crow’s feet, he could tell you how many toes there were. He didn’t, it is true, tend to transpose this awareness into descriptive passages within his work, for he preferred to keep such descriptions to a minimum if possible, considering such extraneous devices outmoded. Why then, you might ask, did he bother to think in such depth about the physicality of characters that would never be embodied on the page? The most likely answer, given that it is Charles we are talking about, is laziness and the self-deception that customarily arose from it: he could make himself believe he was working when merely daydreaming about imaginary faces. He would say that despite the fact that he rarely wrote detailed physical descriptions of his characters, or used fictional characters at all, he nevertheless found the mental images he constructed highly valuable when considering plotlines, etc. He would, in all likelihood, compare himself with an artist, who might make countless sketches of a particular subject only for the finished picture to bear no seeming resemblance to those sketches. Anyway, his reasons for doing this aside, he did it and that’s what’s crucial here, crucial and, as it turns out, catastrophically misleading.) Charles was about to sink his teeth into his lunch when, with mouth open and sandwich poised, he stopped – hands, feet, everything. If he’d been a h is cartoon character eyes would have been propelled ten feet from their sockets before slamming into the lumpy bald head of the man in front of him, knocking him to the ground and shattering his horn-rimmed spectacles. What he had seen was not something he felt able to properly conceptualize. He put his sandwich back in his pocket without even bothering to wrap it up, and closed his mouth. He didn’t feel able to do much more than this, what with the vision still before his eyes and refusing to go up in a puff of smoke. Was it hot enough for mirages? This was certainly a case for the existence of sense data, for how could he not be hallucinating? It didn’t feel like an hallucination, not that he’d ever knowingly witnessed one. It felt al re- . Nothing appeared fabricated in any way, and yet what he was seeing could not possibly 665

be there. But it was, and it was walking towards him, an apparition, a muscular man wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and a sailor’s cap. A man whose name Charles knew, a man whose name was known to him for no other reason than that he, Charles, had named him, had spawned him, had thought him up. Charles was looking straight into the eyes of Jack Harrison, who was looking straight back into Charles’s eyes, into the marrow of his bones, the workings of his mind, the bad joke that now constituted his sanity. (The taunt had backfired. Charles’s bluff had been called and raised some… But all he needed – although he was yet to see it – was courage and self-belief, the realisation that such ontological promotion was deserved and just who it was that deserved it.) Jack just breezed on by, speaking words in Jack Harrison’s voice, some young whoopsy on his bulky arm. Charles was left, stultified, in the middle of the pathway unable to move, the cold dark eyes of moon guns upon him, as still as Harvey the Heart Snatcher standing not more than a few metres away, some man’s hollow organ in his hand, his face, looking not unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s deathmask, framed in verdigris and birdshit. When it happened again the shock was not so great. This is the way it works. But to say the shock was not so great is akin to comparing and contrasting the relative care with which porcupines are inserted into your anus. As you would expect, Charles’s writing suffered terribly as a result of these inexplicable sightings. For starters, his hands had begun to shake uncontrollably since the first encounter, and as the days and weeks went by showed no signs of ever stopping. He had tried to type a letter to his sister, asking her to postpone her regular visitations for a while, only to find himself unable to strike the desired key, unable even to limit his fingertips to a single key at a time. Words ran into one another as his thumb found itself unable to strike the space bar. He sat and watched the sorry state of his central nervous system manifest itself across the page in front of him in hodgepodge of a meaningless letters. He tried to read it out loud, thinking maybe there was some hidden message lying there in front of him – an explanation from whatever it was that was throwing his fingers into disarray – that would reveal itself to the ear but not to the eye, but even his Irish accent could do nothing to salvage the letter from the dominion of the nonsensical. Even if Charles could have somehow overcome his typing tremors, he couldn’t seriously have contemplated continuing with his novel with things the way they were. “Excuse me! Is that man a friend of yours?” “Who, Nursie Boy… I mean, Charles?…Yeah, you could say that.” “That’s not Charles – I’m Charles.” “The one and only, eh?” “His name’s Jack, Jack Harrison.” A couple of tackle tuckers wink at Charles from the bar across the street, as they slurp up pink gins and Blue-Headed Wrasse cocktails through translucent pig penises. “Not as far as I’m concerned it ain’t. What’s going on with your hands there? You alright?” “How long…how long have you known him?” “Not long.” “How long?” Charles was shouting now. “Fuck off will yah! Go on, mind your own, you crazy cunt!” The man turned his back on Charles and made to walk off. “No, no, wait…sorry…please I need to know – how long?” “Why so interested?” “Please… How long?” “A couple of weeks,” said the man sharply, almost as if saying the words against his will. “Two weeks?” 666

self. “Give or take.” “Which?” “What?” “Give or take? I need to know.” “Fuck off!” said the man who, not expecting Charles to take heed of his instruction, fucked off him- Two weeks, ‘give or take,’ would have to be good enough, as that was roughly the date Charles had come across him. Why was he lying about his name? And why choose that name in particular? Charles couldn’t make sense of that at all. One of the things niggling Charles was the blatant in com- pleteness , the one-dimensionality, the sketchi- ness of Jack Harrison’s character; Charles hadn’t been able to get much past introducing him into his novel when the first of the sightings occurred. Charles couldn’t work out why this struck him as important. Would he have been any less taken aback at bumping into him had he been able to breathe a full measure of life into the character beforehand? He doubted it, but still the feeling of this being somehow important persisted. And then… and then he began to realise how, in a state of shock, he’d manage to mix things up. And only then did the full magnitude of what he had done begin to dawn on him. “What are you doing now?” they’d say. “How are you filling your time these days?” they’d say. “Don’t you get bored?” they’d say. It wasn’t what they said so much as the reaction they hoped to excite by asking these questions. Why did they always have to ask these questions? They were forever grilling him, coercing him into justifying his life. Why did his life need validating any more than theirs? What were they doing with their lives that was so fucking impressive? Who the fuck were they? Pompous 9to5ers with weekend lives; why should he have to answer to them? They didn’t have a clue about the writing life. All they saw was a man without a job, a man with too much time on his hands, a man whose circumstances never seemed to alter (unforgivable), a man with the same old clothes, a man who, like them, will die one day, but who, unlike them, will die without ever having really lived at all. They couldn’t see what he was doing (what did he do?) as partaking of a life. How could they? All they saw was a man who could be seen wandering about with a book in his hand and no place to be, sitting on benches, drinking coffee and smoking cheap cigarettes in sticky little cafes, and who, when not 667

seen, was still alone somewhere and in- significant , whiling away the death-march of his heart- beats. They didn’t see – how could they? – the man of letters, the man forging himself a literary existence, a man whose bedfellows were other great men and women from the world 668

of literature, as he passed time with Proust, and laid down with Lorca, living a life of immeasurable variability and depth. They didn’t see – how could they? – the hours he spent sitting at his typewriter churning out word upon word of fresh-born being, emulating and surpassing those that had gone before him, digging out ripe sentences with his bare hands, pounding into and denting the world with his blunted fingertips. Who could forget Melville’s abuse at the hands of a world of unintelligibly obtuse readers? The man ended his days working in a New York customs house, his books left ignored and unread. Charles would not forget how this great writer had been abused. Charles needed to remember. Charles made his way from the bedroom to the lounge, slumped into the middle cushion of his settee and, after pushing aside the piles of books that cascaded onto his thighs, sparked up a cigarette. A number of things appeared to be out of place: he noticed, as the ash started to droop off the end of his cigarette, that all the ashtrays had been emptied and placed over by the window, that the aerial to his TV was bent all the way over to the right (not the optimum configuration to achieve maximum viewing pleasure from his favourite channel), that the TV remote was on the floor at his feet and not, as it should have been, on the right arm of the armchair, that some of the books on the top of the many piles scattered about the room were showing off their back covers instead of their fronts, others, even more inextricably, were different titles altogether from the ones he had deliberately placed there (Auster’s New York Trilogy was where Beckett’s trilogy should have been; The Trial had been laid on top of A Sentimental Education; Guyotat was resting his jissom-soaked pages on top of a disapproving copy of The Waves; Blue of Noon was on its back, spine cracked, belly open panting for death, while Céline and Joyce wrestled for space at his feet), and that three cushions had been 669

stacked one on top of the other to form a makeshift footrest. What was the significance of these alterations? How was he to interpret these signals? What concerned Charles most was that the pile of paper, comprising his novel so far, had been rifled through and left in a state of complete disarray, with pages out of sequence and others spread about beneath his tabletop desk. He hadn’t noticed this on first entering the room, but the room’s altered state had led him to it like a disembodied voice. He was tidying the pages, putting them back in order, when, as the pages were all but rearranged, his stomach plummeted through the floor. There were only five pages left unarranged, but the pile of arranged pages was eleven pages short. Before he ransacked the rest of the room, and eventually the rest of the flat, he spent a minute or two on his knees staring down at those five pages and shaking his head from side to side. His reverie was broken by what sounded very much like his front door closing. He jumped up a nd pounced into the hallway. There was no noise.59 He searched the flat for hours, but still those six pages remained missing, although he did unearth some mouse shit, a nest of black ants,60 five yellow-headed daisy stalks and a pile of their disenfranchised petals. The missing pages had a common theme: they were all pages devoted to the escapades of Reginald Woolly. He checked back over the pages, now neatly collected in a pile, and found that the pages displaying more finger marks and signs of wear were those in which Woolly’s name was mentioned. Somebody had been pouring over them, studying up on Woolly, and had taken those pages that were of most interest to them. They didn’t understand that some men have other lives, silent and dark, that slip by unseen like the sewers of shit beneath the streets, the rivers of rotten cats and ed belly babies that circulate the town’s under dissect- , its hidden Venice of murderous soup. Charles did, and he had a gift for spotting such men; he made sport of it. Consider that man you see quietly walking his dog, the one who’s never without a friendly word of greeting, or a plastic bag in which to place his dog’s faeces. Most aren’t able to see what Charles can see lurking in the folds of that man’s face; those dark creases were a give away to Charles. The irregularities in the dog’s gait, the shortness of the fur around the tops of its hind legs, the way the dog hangs its head as its owner carefully retrieves the steaming business from the pavement, it was all there to be seen. They didn’t get past Charles that easily. Often he would have to say something, just something to let them know that he knew. He usually 59 Whenever silence reigned in his flat, Charles would usually close his eyes and imagine that he was sitting in on one of Beckett and Joyce’s Paris meetings, and feel a degree of comfort in the stature of the company his sadness kept. 60 Ants were a recurring motif in Dali’s work. For him they represented overwhelming sexual desire, death and decay: the putrefaction and parasitical rot that prevent utopia. When Dali was approximately five years old he found his pet bat dead and covered in ants. This encounter is said to have disturbed him greatly, marking his consciousness right up until his own death. 670

left it at that. Always light-hearted and non-judgemental, for his was not a moral crusade, but more of a way of setting himself apart from the rest of the ignorant fools that refused to see the signs . Virginia Woolf had episodes, attacks of mania and melancholia, breakdowns, periods of psychosis, lunatic lapses, instalments of nervous disorder, attempts at suicide (who’s to say each is not different from the other?) throughout her life, during which her creative powers were almost completely overwhelmed. Yet although she was productive only between attacks, she did tend to draw heavily from these bouts of mental illness in her writing. Woolf gave Charles hope. He had memorized various sections of her letters, sections he found reassuring, such as: “I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half-hour a day...it composed my mind.” “‘You shan't read this’ and ‘You shan’t write a word’ and ‘You shall lie still and drink milk’ – for six months.” “Only one page, Mrs Woolf!... Nurse now thinks I should stop writing...” “I am longing to begin work. I know I can write, and one of these days I mean to produce a good book.” Charles thought maybe these restrictions were something he needed. He could even get a job in an office by day and by doing so temporarily escape his literary genius, drowning it in the cowardly sweat of quotidian drudgery. THE BEGGING BONES Although he’s seen snippets of these dismal impetrations from the other side, this is Mo- lead lech’s first time in a P ing Hall. Back there, it was almost impossible to avoid Pav in TV completely. But now he is amongst them, these earnest people with m hope and elaborate fabrications, as they sit waiting for their ds full of turn in one of a row of soundproof booths. A mother sits clutching her young son, trying to answer his questions as best she can. “You know what happened to daddy last year don’t you.” “He has to live underground now.” “Not exactly, he went where the unchosen people go. He doesn’t live underground; he is dead and s ow n e put him under the grou d.” “Out of the way.” 671

“Well, yes. ‘Laid to rest’ is what they used to call it, but we all know that the best part about resting is waking up again afterwards, feeling refreshed and ready for living. This will never happen to the unchosen ones.” “Why did nobody choose Dad?” “He was a good man, but he refused to believe in, or entreat, the men that choose.” “Why? Didn’t he want to be chosen?” “He didn’t think anyone was chosen, but we know that they are, don’t we?” The boy nods distractedly, as he stares at an old black woman, smiling hatefully at him while wringing her fat sweaty hands together in a neck-snapping stranglehold. “And that is why we’re here: to make sure we don’t get overlooked.” “Mum, that woman…” “Just ignore her, Sam. Look, number 1145 has just gone in, and we have number 1168, so how many before it’s our turn?” “I don’t know. She keeps…” The mother turns her son to face her and nervously tries to beguile him with what they will have to eat once they have had their stint in the booth, both hands restraining him from twisting his head back in the The place is direction heaving, thousands every cessing a plea. The booths are sparse of of the old woman. chairs occupied and one of the fifty booths in operation, pro- ly adorned: just a white-cushioned bench and an opaque screen, into which grown men would blub like drunken poltroons in a daze and beseech unseen benefactors for eternal life, to which the old like poisoned rats in a sack would tell of how little time they had left and of their years of unswerving allegiance, and up to which mothers would push their writhing, boggle-eyed offspring as they petitioned for their lives, before arguing, in an emphatically unselfish way, that their children would of course need their mother to care for them. Women would strip and rub their genitals up and 672

down the screen, pressing their breasts flat on its cool unresponsive surface, licking and moaning and promising themselves to anyone with influence. These liturgical booths were to be Molech’s link with P. on the other side. He was to initiate each of his reports with the words, “The only thing I regret is my future,” which would serve to classify the subsequent declaration as restricted for access. There was a slot for written reports should he wish to put his findings down on paper. The same 8 words were to be written at the top. NEWS FRAGMENT S Young girl tortured by two of her schoolmates: Dilapidated shutters hang from a peeling wall, and cobwebbed stairs lead down into a cellar where the victim was lated muti- and left for dead because she was considered far too pretty for her own good. They let her pathic screams free, while others tainted their work with scare-videos and devil worship involving satanic rituals with skinheads. They had both been subjected to damaging cultural influences. Little Courtney pulled out a carving knife from her Moshino handbag and repeatedly slashed her victim’s body and face. Then, with the help of her little friend, she dragged the victim down to the cellar where she cut her throat and both her wrists with shards of glass. They went in search of petrol to burn her up, but the local garage was closed. The rosy-cheeked victim crawled out into the street like a rat with a broken back. She’d provoked them and wanted to apologise. The girl shouldn’t have been out at that time of night though, should she, Myra?.... A group of third-year undergraduates reading philosophy at Pavilionstone college have made some remarkable breakthroughs with their novel brand of experimentation. The stu- dents in question, disillusioned with the effectiveness of thought experiments, decided to attempt actual reconstruction s of such experiments in the hope of strengthening their own philosophical positions. Among the experiments attempted were fear of future pain cases, fissioning, cell-by-cell person depletion, and brain swaps. 673

The group of students now intend to change their course from philosophy to fine art, and are hopeful that, under the guise of art, they can utilize their documentation from this series of rather bizarre experiments to greater effect…. “Lakok Made me Cum for Every One of his Five Minutes,” says horny mother of three – “Why I Allowed Triman to Shag my Wife,” explains loving husband, Colin Daniels – Housewife Raped by Maniacal, Sex-Mad Time Travellers – “Lakok Stole my Lunch” – “Celebrity Philosophers Caught Performing Homosexual Acts.” – …. Twelve teenage vagrants were exhumed yesterday from twelve shallow graves on the outskirts of town, on top of Caesar’s Camp. There were nine boys and three girls, their ages ranging between thirteen and sixteen. All twelve of the juveniles had been missing for in excess of three months. All , it seems, were buried alive with green scarves tied around their necks. That they were still alive when buried is indicated, according to forensic experts, by the presence of vomit in their makeshift coffins, and by the fact that a number of the victims had panicked and bitten off some or all of their fingers. A search of the surrounding area has revealed a fragment of dark coloured cloth caught in a barbed-wire fence. Police believe this was torn from the corner of the perpetrator’s jacket as he fled the crime scene…. Depression and unpleasant physical symptoms in the elderly are said to be directly linked to the Panglossian fervour of young smiles. We, in conjunction with numerous government bodies, are doing our best to rectify this by any means necessary, said a leading spokesperson for the E.R.M.M. (Elderly Right to My iser Militia). […] A sleepy town is terror- ised by wrinkled slashers donning the ghoulish masks of old age. Impressionable octogenarians are running amok in kindergartens throughout Pavilionstone today in a direct response to parents failing to disillusion their offspring in good time. Lonely lorry drivers have today spoken out in support of what they see as a necessary response to the cavalier attitude of modern parents. Some of these men have had to resort to stabbing young girls up to 30 times 674

in a desperate attempt to help nullify the pain caused by the rude, brutal and downright inexcusable knock-backs. “A red rose is just not good enough for them these days,” commented one such lonely lorry driver…. The deep drifts of sudden blizzards, lone easy boy tion in standing the alone figures on laced in black stitches, an un- a frozen pond gazing down at his own reflec- unmanned inkiness running beneath his feet. Play-actors in murderous cos- tume skimmed from bygone movie stillnesses vanish behind a glut of surface shimmer and the conspiring branches of leafless trees. Stricken insectile men in red high heels squeal as their bones are shattered by claw hammers wielded by their baby-faced captors: a hybrid of cruel butchery and the most radical fetishistic pornography… A young pregnant woman was killed today by what are believed to be two crazed paedophiles. The two men are thought to have sliced open her stomach and snatched her 8-monthold fetus as part of a twisted gang membership ritual…. Post-Modern Post: Baby parcel found in ladies lavatory – the newspaper parcel was constructed out of pages from the News of the World, pages featuring the headline, ‘Baby Found in a Parcel’…. A near-certifiable seaside freak who hammered nails through his hands on weekends and was responsible for inventing fishhook buggery died today when his heart stopped beating. He always was known to preach that: “Violence is the answer to a very necessary question.”… “There are things about me, or rather things that I am about, or rather both, that are, like me, inhuman, inhumane, sickening ramshackled teratism to a man with bad 675

dreams. I am so far a little tumbledown in places, displaced in one man’s mind, a mind that I hope to be deservingly rid of, in part at least, though never completely. Call in the redactor!” THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD The short story Charles had in mind to write centred on a neglected master of modernist literature by the name of Maurice Graft. Charles would live according to that age-old writer’s adage: write about what you know. Charles knew all about what it felt like to be neglected and underrated, and Maurice Graft was to be his voice. He would be able to properly empathise with Maurice’s character. Charles imagined himself living with Maurice, crying when he cried, being angered when he was angered, smiling when he smiled. He imagined himself having a genuine connection with Maurice, similar to the connection Flaubert had with Emma Bovary, but stronger even: Charles wouldn’t merely throw up in sympathy with his character’s arsenic-assisted suicide, he’d die with him if need be, or so he was able to convince himself, for a minute or two. Maurice, like Charles, would live alone, but in a terraced house, not a flat: a terraced house with half its rooms empty and unused, with shabby curtains permanently drawn and a garden overrun with towering Buddleia, a fledgling dictatorship of Japanese Knotweed, rose bushes coiled across the path like razor wire, teeming nests of black ants, and colonies of cat shit. Maurice was born in a seaside town to Raymond Graft, a lowly office clerk and his wife Daisy, mother, housewife and part-time cleaner. The action would take place in Maurice’s 79th year when, driven by desperation, he decides to commit a series of shocking and – if need be – heinous acts in order to attract an audience to his unpublished writings, consisting of novels, poems, and essays. Maurice has been cooped up in his makeshift study for nigh on fifty years and has, in that time, published only two pieces of work: a short essay and a poem. He has written one novella, four 700+ page novels, and in excess of 500 poems, all of which until recently were unread, except by the man himself and a few unimpressed editors. The story opens with these words from Maurice Graft’s mouth: “Who would read Hitler’s bilge-ridden master class in contempt, Mein Kampf, if it were not for the atrocities he perpetrated as head of the Third Reich? I’ll tell you who: nobody, that’s who. He must be the most recognised man on the face of the globe. Forget Ghandi, Lennon, Noggin; they are small fry in comparison. Not a day goes by when we are not confronted with some footage of gangly corpses with grey shaven heads being pushed into mass grave s, reinforcing his myth, his quest for Aryan dominance, drawing more people to his book. Okay, he is not known primarily as a writer, but a megalomaniac dictator who wrote a book. Nevertheless, he is read, and maybe most of those who turn the pages of his book are re- 676

pelled and sick ened by what they read, but still they read. They read him and they do not read me. Nobody apart from a select (read limited) few even know of my existence.”61 The contempt for the preoccupations of the so-called literate that shine through in this passage is clearly Charles’s own: he was disgusted to find Hitler listed in The Oxford Companion to English Literature. He has not empathised with his character so much as re-created himself as a fictional character, made Maurice Graft his mouthpiece. Charles hankered for the sensation of acknowledged writing: he supposed that writing while knowing that what you write will be read by many others must feel so different to the dubious state of mind he was forced to endure as he tapped away at his he’d ever really wanted was o t write as an keys . All acknowledged author, to write with a sense of legitimacy as a writer. Truman Capote (that man with the voice like a weasel’s fart) claimed to be physically incapable of writing anything that he didn’t think he would be paid for – a luxury not afforded to Charles. One year in every ten it comes along and I’m the one that feels like dying. And I don’t, as a rule, feel like dying. I am, on the whole, a fairly positive man, but then one day one year in every ten my Sunday morning is soured by twenty (all being present) pairs of vacant spherules (zeros) staring back at me from my black market newspaper review; twenty smug mouths doing their best not to grin; twenty self-assured priglings with too much to say for themselves. I feel like spraying my spit in every one of their toothless faces. This is the bread you get when the rats set up home in the granary. Where is the Unknown Toiler? Where is Bill Gray’s nameless drudge, his desperado, with barely a nurtured dream, sitting down, finding his voice, lucking out and doing it? Does any fucker really care? Oh you do, well I’ll 61 The remainder of the story was never written. Maurice was unable to think of any deed that could jolt the world and have it seeking out his words. The added disillusionment of this realisation proved more than he could bear: he died a few days later. 677

tell you: he’s sitting here with a mouthful of hawked-up sludge debating on which mono- chrome mug t o pen dis se it – let’s have Snowdon get a shot of that. Do we need to read yet another novel about some poor little Indian girl’s arranged marriage, let alone encourage their proliferation by lauding them with prizes? I could never bring myself to read one. I’m sick; I have a black ghoul of nausea scaling my trachea just thinking about it. Even the best of them aren’t good enough. Not all are shit. I do not wish to devalue my case with hyperbole. But still I feel justified in pointing out that not one of them is or has the potential to be a giant; they are all no more than temporarily stilted midgets. Have I read them all? Who has time to read typists? I don’t need to have read them. Do I need to eat shit to know it tastes bad? I can smell it. I may be accused of waspishness, but never jealousy – I’m over forty now anyhow and so no longer eligible. I could no more mix with the likes of these putrefactos than attend a writers’ workshop and take advice on my craft from some pompous washed-up never-been whose working life is spent forever dreading the day a real talent comes through the door . But they needn’t worry because I never will.62 It’s never really that easy though is it? I still find myself sucked in. I must like the taste of lemons, I guess. I read every morsel of exaggerated praise. I underline every eulogizing sentence and return to them again and again. I take no great interest in the criticisms that are made; they do not interest me. I take no heart in these petty asides, not the least. They are 62 Bret Easton Ellis went down in my estimation the day I read what he had to say on the matter: “Reading books is the best experience for a writer, just reading a lot of books. But workshops are pretty essential for reasons that you might not think of immediately. First of all, they make you write and there are a lot of times you don't want to write. You have an idea for a story and it's very easy to be lazy, to just think it through and walk round with it in your head. So the workshop puts that pressure on you to put on paper the material that you're thinking about.” I for one am not about to lay out my ideas for a bunch of two-bit hacks to appropriate at their leisure. Burroughs was punished by the muses after teaching a class in creative writing…. 678

mere counterweight, and often not even that, to the real business of acclaiming, acclaiming, acclaiming. I like to subsume myself in the blood and shredded mucus of their overblown praise. It’s not the fault of the winners... Isn’t it? What else is their pap for than to win silly prizes? Don’t make me laugh. I’m really not up to it anymore. I do not desire sales or the money forthcoming from them; after all, as Georges Perec so rightly observed, “A book that sells well is always suspect.” Let them have their ridiculous prizes and let their books make them indecently rich, for I have something none of them have: I have hell in my veins and tender sadists at my fingertips. In the five years that spanned 1945-1950, Beckett wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, plus two books of short stories, and a book of criticism. Jack London wrote 50 books in 16 years – a thousand words a day whether pissed, sick or on the move. After The Man In The High Castle earned PKD the Hugo Award, he went on to write more than a dozen novels in the 679

next three years…. I’ve got to get me some horsemeat…. Didn’t Flaubert have far more projects than he had completed works?.... MIND PEARL NECKLASSO She wouldn’t have done that, no, not that cat’s mother, not likely. She’d do this, only in a more accomplished sort of way, more like the way she’d do it, after all. All is somehow second-hand to me; even my déjà vu smells o of m thballs . somebody else’s She had cats and I rabbits, so I had cats and rab- He frustrated bits both, but when I tell of childhood pets, floppy drop-ears prick up in velvet triangles, a hop is a leap, a bucktooth buried into the soft skin between thumb and forefinger the vicious scratch of a Tom. The disfigurement belies a truth with Oryctolagus cuniculus written all over it. If I’m candid, the scar reveals nothing but itself and an unexplained old name for rabbit-kind. Both ate spiders and flies, or so I tell myself when no one listens. Some old favourites toll a bell or two, while others leave me cold or worse. Her perfumes smell like the piss of certain cats I never owned, never loved and never nurtured, that has hung around a while on the lower parts of cellar walls. I can transcend myself by staring into that portion of nothingness that might simply be me – something the world and all its little hands can’t touch. gets with me; it must be frustrating. Sometimes it must be just as if his wife has died. I cannot always manage to live up to my past. Now 680

and again I see a chance to better it, to put her in my shadow for once. Oh she didn’t like to. Well I love nothing more, even if I don’t and it hurts and is like no discomfort I have ever known. Being her is not of prime importance all the time, it seems. My body seemed almost extraterrestrial when he first returned with that need. It felt like breaking in a teenager, a sexual neophyte with all the enthusiasm and none of the tools to keep a hold of it, which is incidentally not something I am ever supposed to have done. Never have I sat astride the pale trembling flesh of some lean young buck half my age, tempering his rigid mayhem with the composure of an old school mistress. Am I to believe only ever Frank? Never have I licked the sweat from a soldier’s armpits as he pinned my arms to the ground and fucked me guileless, his brass rivets chaffing my inner thigh. A spit-roast is off the menu for lovers like Frank and me. I’ve brought no slimy sprogs into this, this yet another thing devoid of thisness, and yet no small girth could I grasp with anything resembling snugness. I’d have trouble staunching the flow of blood through a python freshly gorged on goat. We talked of baby names for one that never came, one sexless, foetal sickness that went back on its promise. No Naming Baby have I read. But I have, I have, I have or else who else did all these things? When I laugh I mimic him – for I don’t genuinely laugh in company – and he tells me I laugh like her, like I used to. When he laughs I follow his lead. I don’t find much funny. I don’t know why. The laugh consists of an initial expulsion of air through the front teeth, followed by a series of Huhuhs (just how many depends on the severity of the amusement) while nodding my head in appreciation. And all this accompanied by a constant smile. My smile is never right. My smile has deteriorated. How can anyone lose their smile? 681

Something is missing that he can’t quite put his finger on – again the difference that we cannot encounter, only sensing its ex- o istence thr ugh absence . And how did I ever put up with those friends of his? That man with the fake-clown hairstyle (bald on top, long and curly around the bottom) and a face of loose skin – like a squirrel’s cheeks recently raided of its nuts – is a complete fucking loon. He must chuff down sixty smokes a day. A more quixotic bunch of born losers I have never set my eyes on. Or have I? Is this really is left all that ? Mum: dead. Dad: dead. Sister: dead. Any friends that I might actually want to have any associations with strangely absent. A collection of mumbling, beer-soaked incompetents: very much (without wishing to over-state the case) alive. (Now what was it? Mrs Gren: movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition.) Strangers in the night, exchanging glances, and yet there’s no Sinatra in the house. Maybe that Frank went down in the fire, that fire that purged me of a past twice over. “Heed the warning of Mrs Joe,” he says when I ask too many questions. Sun-dried tomatoes drenched in Sicilian olive oil wrapped up in Parma ham and eaten on the beach in late afternoon throughout a blistering July. This I have. I recall the oily fingers and the oily men. I can tell the tale about the man towards the top part of the beach close to the hotels with his face in the shade and his cock rested on his thigh basking in the sun. I can expand by telling how he rolled it over intermittently in order to achieve to those bronzing rays. I am Elizabeth again when I 682

tell that story or remember picking slender strings of pig fat from between my teeth with cheap paper matchsticks courtesy of some hotel bar. He said I could have whatever I liked, live wherever I pleased – except the charred remains of our o f r mer house, I guessed. I guess a lot, I guess. Only Frank seems to care who I am. I look at other me n, despite the fact I’m not that kind of girl. I am what I am not and am not what I am, or something like that. Frank is nice enough. He’s even quite handsome in the right light, but a little old for me I think. I’m only three years shy of him or so he says. I must have lied about my age, or else I am in incredibly good shape for my years: my elbows have tight skin on them; no crow’s feet pace the corners of my eyes; no flaps of skin fall down like pink wings from my biceps; my ears are small, my top lip smooth; I still have some jaw definition, grey hairs in single figures; I’m still bleeding and I am not aware of any considerable subsidence when removing my bra or my knickers. There are a few anal grapes, but then these are inevitable hazards for me o n w . Frank doesn’t talk much about my dad, so I can take some sat is faction in having re-created him. He comes to me most vividly in his early sixties. The majority of his head is bald: he has a trimming of black and white and the odd wispy tuft here and there trying desperately to cover as much skin as possible. But it sort of suits him. He has a very long and pronounced lower jaw (what I’ve taken to calling a ‘Grinstead chin’ for some indecipherable reason), so that his top set of teeth sit behind his lower ones by some considerable margin. His nose is angular with a groove in the tip. He 683

has a fine pair of smoky-blue eyes nestled snugly under sparse eyebrows. He had facial hair for a lot of his life. He is clearest when sporting a pure-white goatee, but he once had only a moustache. A placid, rather shy man of many moods, he was a little too diffident for much of his unnecessarily hebetudinous life. Captiousness was maybe one of his most enduring characteristics: he could take exception at most things at very short notice. It becamelike orate elab an parlour game to him. He felt that he’d wasted himself and that he was somehow better and more extraordinary than the sum of his achievements suggested. He lost himself in books and films and allowed them to rid him of what he must have seen as an accusingly pedestrian life. His life was no less startling than most other peoples’ lives, but I think it felt to him as if it was, as if he alone had failed to make his mark. He kept things. What did he not keep? I can remember huge boxes billowing with scraps of paper with little scribbles on, used envelopes, his grandparents’ junk mail, advertisements for plumbing fittings, reminders out of date by more than 30 years, road maps, holiday brochures, receipts and instruction manual s for things he no longer possessed, old postcards from a wife he no longer talked to, invitations to parties he never went to, every cheque stub he’d ever scribbled a figure on, newspaper cuttings of sale items and sports fixtures, bank statements (his own, his mother’s and some people we had never heard of), menus to restaurants long gone, thousands of sheets of paper tabulating hypothesized expenditures, bookmarks and years of book-club cat- 684

alogues, TV guides, Greenshield stamps, his grandparents’ empty cigarette boxes, a list of every movie he’d ever seen… Sometimes I’d venture to the top of the house and find him sitting on a pair of aluminium steps, a distressed wicker chair, or cross-legged on the floor, his head bowed sulkily over some trashy thriller. He wouldn’t look up until he could see my little feet between the yellow pages of his book. This is where he’d go when he didn’t recognise his wife or himself anymore. He must have had nigh on a hundred jigsaw puzzles , most of which still had their cellophane wrapping intact. He made and remade the same ones and lives over over again. Puzzles can wreck . Hardy once had his life ru- ined by a puzzle bought for him by Laurel. Because of that puzzle, Hardy missed out on getting spliced to the daughter of an immensely rich oil magnate and lost his own fortune into the bargain. My dad had a lot of watches, but his best and therefore his favourite was an Omega Constellation with an automatic chronometer. When he wasn’t wear ing it he kept it in its origi- nal box, which was covered and lined in soft red leather with a gold Ω on the front and the inside of the lid. He kept little pieces of wood that my sister and I had doodled on. He kept little pieces of wood that nobody had doodled on. He had a terrible, deep scar that ran the entire length of his left calf. Frank cannot remember any of this. Frank wasn’t there. Frank is in no position to correct me. I don’t believe those diaries. Frank has some form of skin condition in his groin area, which is caused by fungus eating away at the skin. He is pretty good in the sack. He knows to let his tongue meander all over down there, knows when to suck and just how hard, can keep it up as well. But I find it just gives me a taste for more. Maybe Frank just isn’t enough like my dad. When I was a little girl I’d run my chubby little pinkie up and down the smooth cleft in my dad’s left calf muscle. He received the injury at secondary school when another boy accidentally kicked him during a football match; this kick resulted in Osteomyelitis. His bone rotted and the doctors had to cut the bad bits out. Because he was only eight years old at the time the bone grew back together again. If only I were younger and my brain shattered bone. You 685

can forget that you love someone. One day you could love a person with all your being and the next not even recognise them in the street. You lose your memory, you damage a piece of your brain and all of a sudden the kismet of two lovers is for shit. When you love someone deeply it is hard to think of your feelings for that person as being so transient, so ephemeral, so very fragile. Tweak a neuron here or there and it’s gone and maybe so are you. All so very mechanistic. I love my dad even if I have constructed him out of a heap of psychological debris found lying around unattended. I don’t love Frank all the time. I must stop licking my lips; they are sore enough already, and will never heal if I don’t stop licking them, but they get so dry. My lips don’t seem as full as they used to. A thick layer of scabbing will solve that. I would have bought baby clothes for my baby that never came: wool-knit booties, scratch mitts, bibs, and baby-grows. I go to the baby clothing department when I go shopping, and stare at the newborn range, but I never feel anything. I listen to other women clucking over small clothes and don’t understand. Sun sometime in July: a cat with one eye and only half a tail soaks its fur and bones in the middle of a quiet road until two young girls and their dog proceed to terrorise it with yelps, stones, and bared teeth. A dog with two heads walks down the promenade. People move out of its way as it approaches them, its tail dragging along the floor. So me young and very handsome men with short black shiny hair, tanned skin and toned torsos proceed to kick he o ut i bare feet. of t with their On s looker l l beautiful laugh at the wretched animal as it dejectedly snaps at 686

the brown toes punching and pinking into its ribs. In the end its body appears to be bent into an impossible configuration – a tri-bar of browner I get the worked on my tan over fectionate Frank blood the and past twisted limbs. I’ve and more af- couple happier of be s t come , years. The he brighter his eyes are, the less I feel I have to prove my- self. Hardy’s puzzle never gets completed. At one stage they have all the pieces in place except one, which they have mislaid – the piece depicts a woman’s face. Later, after the puzzle has been ac- oken up br cidentally in a brawl, Laurel finds the missing piece and frantically tries to rebuild the puzzle around it. He is not successful. There is a steep incline somewhere that leads up to a hotel, and on the side of the road there is something quite remarkable. There are a ridiculous amount of books in this house, and, apparently, approximately half of them are mine. I have read most all of them at one time or another. I’m a booksy bird who keeps her legs together when she should, which apparently is most of the time. There is a smallness to my life now that feels foreign. Shit! There goes another nail. However hard I try to grow them I inevitably lose a couple; layers of nail gloss and hardener don’t seem able to prevent it. My nails are really a little too papery for extending beyond the tips of my fingers. But I used to take so much pride in my nails. I have a huge collection of nail-care paraphernalia to testify to it. My dad collected all manner of nails and things, some more useful than others. He had a cavernous store of crooked, rusty screws. He was meaning to straighten them out, but never got around to it. There were huge cut nails, tiny glazing pins, lost-heads, crossheads, roundheads, brads… They resided 687 in old cigar

boxes , hair wax jars, hand cream cartons, and ice cream tubs – scaled down scrap- yards, packets of metal worms. He had hundreds of pairs of hard-wearing gardening gloves, and you would have been hard-pressed to wear out one of those pairs in a lifetime. Everything with him was overkill. You could never have too much of any- thing. When he died we found 58 tins of mulligatawny soup in the cupboard. None of us liked mul- ligatawny soup, so we threw them away. Didn’t even feel bad I don’t suppose. Frank seems to have little else The happening o w rld in his life except me. is made of me. He treats me like I’m a lab animal: always checking on what I remember for any new developments. Dad always bought the best. Even if he never used the thing in question, it was the best unused thing in much pluko on h question. is Frank uses too hair, that Black and White crap. We once used it to lube me up, which resulted in some very fragrant stools. I can clearly remember living here, in this house, a year now, and hazily remember living here for approximately six. I have no friends; just I have Frank and becoming myself again. My dad was a loner: he liked to eat alone, sleep alone, watch films alone, and laugh alone. If he had been a drinker he 688

would have liked to drink alone. But he was not, unless you count tea that is. He could consume in excess of 20 cups a day, every one of them laced with evaporated milk. Before embarking on any activity a cup of tea was obligatory; it helped him think, to contemplate the task ahead, like Sherlock Holmes and his pipe. He liked to drink tea alone. As one might expect, he favoured activities that lent themselves to seclusion: reading, dreaming, and making list s. I wasn’t wearing any rings when I was first brought here. They were here waiting for me when I returned. Frank said I took them off to clean them and did not have them on the night I disappeared. We didn’t get married in church: Frank is vehemently atheistic. Do I beli eve n i God? God would know who I was. Frank would say that God would know little more than we know because there are no new facts that he could bring to bear on the case. Dad thought that the existence of films and books were good excuses for not getting too involved with the (supposed) real business of living. God was an irrelevance to him: he didn’t figure in any of his lists. I did, my mum did, Tony Hancock did, Tippi Hedren and John Wayne did, but not God. That woman in the shop, the one that knew me, she knew me, and she called me Elena and I felt like Elena. She was Justine and that didn’t seem like news to me. But I have made mistakes before and 689

since. I thought I was single, taken into care when young, and an only child. I have come to see these lusions ideas as the de- they are, but that Jus- tine woman has set me back. I run her face through my mind over and over, dissecting it, smoothing the skin, lengthening the hair, changing its colour, adding a fringe, removing the glasses, changing their style, without make-up, with different make-up, but I have no frame of reference for her, like a collar-less animal nobody has port ed re- missing. She got my name wrong: she doesn’t know me. She made a mistake. People mistake one person for another all the time. I mistake myself for someone else – always the show-off, such ri- diculous one-upmanship, such Janus-faced fancies. I don’t think I’ll ever recover entirely. At least, not all the while I remain in this house with Frank: he is a constant reminder of what I can only partially recoup. But then without Frank I have no con- duit to my past. Frank has a cruel side to him. The other day I caught him meticulously disassembling a huge house spider. It was still alive. I am not assimilating absent- minded curiosity with callousness. He had 690

pinned it upside down to the table by passing a needle through its thorax. He then proceeded to snap its legs in half, and rip off its spinnerets with a pair of tweezers. I stopped looking on at this point. I went and did something else. He said it was research. I didn’t care what it was. I probably used to like to watch things like that, but Frank never said. This town is eerie. Young and old walk around in a haze of shopping and overeating. Nobody takes down seasonal deco- rations in the town centre; they are left to perish and drop to the street where they are trodden into the cracks in the pavement. Old fuckers everywhere you look. Hoards of them descend on cafes and supermarkets on designated days. Whole legions of half-witted penny-pinchers with walking aids and blue hair limp through the town shouting at one another, so that sticky white foam collects in the corner of their mouths and dribbles down over their jowls. The whole town reeks of charity shops and stale beer. Frank seems to relish in the decay of this place. After dark, when the shops shut, all you are left with is a few hardened drinkers (either in pubs or on the street), driv- ers driving around and around in circles smoking reefer and getting blown by 12-year-old girls in crippling high heels and their mother’s lace knickers, fast-food delivery vehicles, the odd old dear, head held together with curlers and silver paper, sliding her pension into slot ma- chines at the local amusement arcade, and nutcases. I am pretty sure this place has more than its fair share of the mentally challenged: the strong sea breeze appears to have blown more than just the dust from between the populace’s ears. Old women wearing ten coats in the height of summer push shopping trolleys up and down the town picking up cigarette butts and half-eaten sandwiches. More people talk to them- selves 691 here

than in a prayer hall. Black River Falls ain’t a patch on this place. I’ve got to get as away from this house, sures me but that Frank this is the only place where I can possibly hope to remember who I am. I feel that I have already remembered all that I am going to remember and that it is time to be what I am now, rather than always comparing myself to some past archetype me. Frank, still desperate for the full return of his wife, disa- grees. Frank reads the same book over and over again. The author of this book has tak- en on almost messianic status for Frank. The author in question is a philosopher. (Do they still have philosophers in this day and age? Don’t they all get eaten in the womb by Chinese and caterpillars?) When Frank is asleep I have managed to snatch it for a few hours at a time and read its contents, or at least the most thumbed pages. It took me a while, but I see now what he is getting at. What I don’t see is why he’d want to keep reading it over and over. If my dad liked a film he would quite happily watch it a hundred times. They become like old friends when you treat them like that: my dad didn’t have any real friends that I can remember. There is something about snow, when I see it in films or on Christmas cards, that makes 692

me think of old friendships, but it is all too vague. I once stole a Christmas card from a doctor’s surgery while waiting for Frank, whose bowel was playing him up again and forcing him to shit at least five times a day. My dad spent a long time on the toilet: he’d read, smoke, and drink tea. An average shit would take approximately three quarters of an hour. I am surprised he could manage to stand up afterwards. The Christmas card had a snow scene on the front taken from a painting, Snow in Milan, Italy by Achille Beltrame, which was painted in 1900. The card still has that snow scene just as I still have the card. When I first saw it I such felt strong the and past, stronger and the a peculiar emotion, a yet vague connection with the longer feeling I became. I looked the sat there staring for at least twenty minutes and the feeling did not wane, o s I had to steal it. When some weeks later I finally opened it to read the message, I found the following words inside: Dear Doctor, Many thanks for all you did for Albert over the past year. I know he appreciated it as much as I did. Too bad your efforts were ulti- 693

mately in vain. Love Doris. Poor old cow. I pictured her on her own watching reruns of the Queen’s Christmas message with a schoon- er of sherry in her hand, and one eye on the empty armchair to her left that had lost his smell too quickly. That picture of Milan in the snow still works its magic on me. And as with all magic, it is what I still don’t know – what is yet to be revealed – that keeps me looking. It was not a portal to my past as much as a facilitator of lost emo- tions, emotions that without any facts of circumstance I lack the words to pin down. When Frank puts his head between my legs just who I am is an irrelevance – as long as I am connected to my clitoris in the ways that matter, even if it cannot strictly be called mine. He slurps and sucks like an aardvark with its snout in a termite mound, and I discourage his head from dislodging itself from between my thighs by clamping my hands to his scalp. I close my eyes and it’s as black as bad blood, black as lung shadows, black as the deepest fathom, black as a little dress, black as Susan’s eyes, black as bitumenized gloom, black as darkling sa- ble… I bring my tits up to my mouth and smother them in my tart’s lipstick, so that my areolae sume appear to have con- d both my breasts. I wiggle and squirm as he does his work on me: a worm on a hotplate. But then it’s over in a crescendo of spasms and expletives, and I return to forget. My dad used to say 694 that those

who constantly seek change just swap one routine for another. He preferred to stick to what he knew, and make the most of it. As his ragged underpants would sug- gest, he liked to wear things out before moving on. He was not, he claimed, especially interested in the habits of other people, but what he did dislike was misrepre- sentation of facts, adulation where it was not deserved, disorder and universal flippancy. As you can well imagine, he was invariably quite busy vent ing his spleen about people that he was not particularly interested in. He was not a sexually driven man. He’d rather dream of being with beautiful movie stars than pay any attention to his lonely wife. He’d be Munroe’s bo in Niagra, and she loved him and made him feel how he needed to feel to function properly with a woman, and after these dreams his wife was never what he wanted. I don’t really remember her. She still feels a lot like a story I once heard from Frank’s mouth. How disappointed he’d be. You could say that my dad lived through books and films and as a consequence lead quite an impoverished existence, but you’d be wrong. He felt real emotions, strong emotions – the full gamut of them as well. The objects of these emo- tions were unaware of them, but that doesn’t matter. (How true. Tell her Monsieur Flaubert!) Diabetes killed my dad so slowly that he saw no reason to arrest it. He let it go about its work for fifteen years, sowing seeds of dis- cord throughout the organs of his body. Fa- 695

tigue slowly overcame him, more and more each day, preparing him. He longed for uninterrupted sleep, sleep without countless trips to his blue piss bucket in the corner of the room. way first, His potholed fingernails scratched at his icy feet. His heart gave and never looked like coming good. I still suffer from horrendous headaches. The skin on the right side of my head is without feeling: I can pinch it until it bleeds and still feel nothing but the ache. My right eye shuts down completely. My first day back here the pain in my head was excru- ciating; it prevented me from running. Am I glad I stayed? I am glad about so few things that it would be altogether unfair to answer. I’d need an alternative, and the lack of one is really what kept me here. Frank cannot bear to go into the cellar. The door leading down there has a padlocked bolt on it. I don’t know where the key is, or if there still is one. I fear I become more like Frank by the day. His ideas soon become mine. Dad bought endless amounts of clothes that he never ended up wearing. When he died we found them all pristine in their plastic packaging. There were unworn shoes in a variety of styles, every coat he’d ever owned since he was a teenager, hundreds of unworn thermal vests in blue and in white, packs of Y fronts filling drawer after drawer – it was as if he was stockpil- ing for the great underwear manufacturers’ strike, the one that never came. Collecting things, having collections of whatever, is a 696

way of explaining who you a re: you ask who I am and I tell you to look at what I have collected. So what’s with the collection of vests and pants? After all, this is not a man who got through a lot of underwear – threadbare items found their way into the wash basket, not the bin. What is a man who collects indiscriminately saying about him- self? What is he explaining by his collections? Is he saying that he’s a muddle, or that he’s confused, or is he presenting himself as a man who sees the value in everything, however disposable it may appear? Can I really hope that eating oily fish, popping B-vitamins and ginkgo biloba, lapping up mono-un- saturated fats, steer- ing clear of stress, and jogging about while performing feats of abstract reasoning will ever come to my rescue? Actually, I’m pretty sure these are preventative rather than cu- rative measures. Do I want to keep what I’ve got, remain who I am? Hard to tell. Maybe I was one of those women who drowned their children in the sea. Maybe devils convinced 697

me to do it, and then made off with my powers of recall out of an uncustomary sense of pity, or maybe not. Who knows? Dad had fall- en in screen love with shadows – so those man y lives unlived all hair and gloss – that it was his wife that he eventually came to see as insubstantial. There is, I suppose, inexorable beauty to be found in distance and accessible repetition, in never touching those bodies made of light and pixels, of no unfortunate close ups to have to smother and drown out. Like me he ran into life with a thud. If only life were better directed, and shorter.... IN FROM THE RAIN We went for a walk in the rain. It was one of those days when it never gets light. It had started to rain at ten in the morning and is now, at quarter past midnight, yet to stop. It had been dry for weeks, and we had not set foot outside the door. But with the drains bubbling like witches’ cauldrons and umbrellas bending, creeking and distorting, we agreed to leave the house. We had our hoods up and held hands. We both watched our feet as we walked, avoiding large grimy puddles, and shielding our faces from the wind-borne rain. We walked purposefully to no place in particular, and then kept on walking. Elizabeth was again enjoying her aimless jaunts in inclement weather, and I was enjoying her enjoyment – the unavoidable selfishness of love. After half a mile my toes started to feel damp, and there was a perpetual mountain stream drizzling through the crags of my shoulder blades. My eyebrows were waterlogged and flooding my eyes, and I was thirsty. I suggested we stop for coffee. We sat at a round table for two and made the floor wet. I ordered us two lattes and two orange juices. I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt down over my hand and proceeded to dry my face. As I was doing so I heard a familiar voice: “Hello, Francis.” I looked up from my newly dampened sleeve to see Elizabeth’s mother, Daisy, smiling down at me inquisitively. Her face had all the splendour of a split haggis. I had to force the cheeks of my arse together and quickly loosen my belt to prevent something calamitous happening. I was confident that even if I couldn’t stifle it completely, I could at least slow it down so it percolated out discreetly. “Hello,” I said. Elizabeth looked switched off. “Got caught in the downpour, I see.” “Not so much caught as… It was already raining when we decided to go out.” “I’ve been ducking in and out of shops trying to stay dry.” “Avoiding the ducking out part might do it.” “Yeah, ha, ha… Thought I’d just wait it out here.” “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” she said in a mock scolding tone, smiling nosily at Elizabeth. “Of course, sorry, this is Elizabeth. Elizabeth, this is Daisy.” Politeness demanded that I should have included some cursory description of their relation to me, thus providing a fulcrum for them to initiate some sideline chatter of their own. But I didn’t. I couldn’t think of how to explain Daisy or Elizabeth away at such short notice. 698

“Pleased to meet you, Elizabeth,” said Daisy, her hand outstretched, looking down at me as she spoke her name. Her eyes stayed with me and seemed to say: The name, the clothes, the hairstyle, don’t they all seem familiar? “Hello,” said Elizabeth dreamily. Daisy was bound to ask for the information that I’d so rudely failed to provide – for its absence would have been duly noted – or equally ruinous, provide information pertaining to the woman’s connection to me. “Can I have a word in private? Do excuse me a moment.” It didn’t sound like me when it came out. “Sure,” said Elizabeth and continued staring into her drink. I pushed the aluminium chair backwards with the backs of my knees, and the rubber-tipped legs juddered raucously across the floor. I walked towards the back of the cafe. Daisy followed. I apologised to her for my strange behaviour, and tried to explain that Elizabeth was an old friend of mine who had just had some rather terrible news. “She’s not at her best at the minute.” “Your friend?” “Yes.” “She is…she’s had some bad news today, some very bad news.” Shit I’d overstated it. I didn’t want to incite too much pity in her, otherwise she’d override my (manly and so empathetically once vacuous) c rns and want (as a fellow woman) to console her herself. “But she’ll be okay.” “Poor girl.” “Yes.” “If you don’t mind me asking, what on earth happened?” “No, no I don’t mind. Her erm…her mother is sick. It doesn’t look good.” “I see. How terrible.” “Yes. Yes. And the thing is, you look very much like her, in fact,you could be her, and I think it is a little disconcerting… No, there is no need for apologies. This is nobody’s fault. But if you could excuse yourself and sit out of her sight... Sorry, I feel so rude, but I must think of her. You understand.” “Of course, say no more. I will just say goodbye, and that will be that. Poor girl. She is lucky to have you looking after her.” “Mmmm.” We walked back over to the table. I followed her this time. Daisy approached Elizabeth and said, “It was nice meeting you, but I really must dash now. Goodbye.” “Oh…goodbye. You must come and see us sometime.” “Thank you, yes. Us? You’re staying with Francis?” “Where else would his wife stay?” “His wife? Sorry I don’t…” she shook her head and gesticulated with her tired, silly old hands, fingers clasped in the rings of a dead engagement, a dead marriage, a dead eternity. Her arms hung in the air, puppet-like, arms that had once cradled her daughter, a daughter whose mind at work she now beheld but did not recognise. What could I say? What would you have said? I was trapped. I had been trapped for years, but now, for the first time since her death, I felt the teeth of the device depress my skin and puncture its surface, its sprung jaws feeding a gargantuan mouthful of barbs into my guts, scratching my crime ever deeper into my skin like that officer subject to the justice of his own harrow. (In the basement beneath his feet there are men built into the walls with only their eyes and mouths visible. They wait forever, living off dust and starveling insects, like spiders in brickwork….) They both looked at each other before turning to me. The invective didn’t come to me in the form of a solution; it came as a cure to the infection of expectant people, a catholicon for all the lies. I yelled… I yelled into her face, her rumpled, saggy old face… I yelled, “Yes, my wife you lumpen old bitch. Understand that do you, you snivelling hoary cunt?” I stood quaking, thrashing about for air in the shocked bewilderment of her face. 699

Daisy’s legs gave way and she crashed down onto the table behind her. I grabbed Elizabeth by the arm. She protested and fought with me to go to Daisy’s aid. I dragged her out. We didn’t leave the house again for nearly a year. * And as I stood there watching her smile everything stopped except the rain. The rain kept falling. Nothing moved but the rain, and all I could hear was the rain falling to the earth. Cars were stilled; the birds above me hung suspended in the wet sky; people dashing to and from their cars dashed nowhere. The rain drummed heavily on my head, marking time for me. All the town’s inhabitants stilled, like the men and animals trapped in snow shakers. Water ran h is down necks, into eyes, off t e t p of noses, bounced off hats, made pools in open hands, and ran off awnings onto passers-by that no longer passed. And still I watched you smile. It was one of your most accomplished: top row of teeth visible five back either side, and cheeks pushed high and eyes half shut to accommodate it. Its incandescence blinded onlookers like burning magnesium, but nobody averted their eyes; they were held for its duration, savouring its gorgonic brilliance. TIME AND TRIFLE 700

It isn’t really what you’d call a park. It has grass, a pathway in the shape of a cross , two benches and even some flower beds: it’s a walkway, little more than a diffident tongue-poke at the ubiquity of grey paving slabs. It is early on a Sunday morning: 5:25 by the clock tower, once part of something grand and imposing that to gobbled up a bomb an hour before time. Inscribed in the stonework beneath the clock face (a taunt to dead Nazis?) are the words, Trifle not thy time is short! Nobody much is about. A man sits on one of the benches with his elbows resting on his knees, his chin perched in his hands. Every once in a while he plucks some daisies from the grass beside him and slowly pulls away their petals. An old woman in a man’s tweed jacket approaches. She is pushing a shopping trolley teeming with scabby cats and kittens of many breeds and colours. A Persian Blue, with long honey-toned fur and two overweight ginger toms clambering over its back, claws angrily at the matted clumps of fur growing into its eyes. A tortoiseshell kitten, hanging in midair, fights to free its head from the tight plastic mesh stretched over the top of the trolley. “Let’s go over and talk to him,” says Triman pointing in the direction of the woebegone man sitting on the bench. “Why? I don’t feel much like talking.” “He needs cheering up by the looks of it.” “I need cheering up.” “He’s all alone; you have me.” “Oh yes, that’s right, I have you.” “Hang on a minute…that man…yes…he’s lost some weight and gained some wrinkles, but it’s him alright. Look! Do you recognise him?” Lakok took a closer look. “His face looks familiar, but...” “It’s Woolly isn’t it?” “Woolly? Oh, Woolly…I suppose it could be; he’s ugly enough. I only met him the once and fleetingly at that. I couldn’t be sure. I suppose it could be.” Triman walks over to the man. Lakok turns around to see the cat-woman heading in his direction and decides to follow Triman, vowing there and then not to partake in his lunacy. Triman smiles as he sees Lakok approaching the bench, but is careful not to let him be witness to it: he needs Lakok to be his audience and doesn’t want to send him off into one of his sulks. The lonely man turns to look at the two men that have come and sat beside him, studies them alternately for a couple of seconds before turning away and assuming his former pose. 701

“Look, I know that it seems as if you are the victim of some convoluted and demonic plot, but let me assure you, you’re not losing your mind. Somebody has played a barbaric trick on you.” The man sits upright. “What did you say? What…what was that you said?” “Why don’t you just leave him be? Even if it is him it won’t do any good.” Triman turns to Lakok, acknowledges his comment with a toothy grin, and then turns back to the man. “None of this is your fault. You’re the innocent one in all this. You’ve been grossly mistreated.” “What isn’t my fault? What am I innocent of?” “Surely I don’t need to tell you. You haven’t forgotten what happened have you?” “Well…no…actually, well…sort of…yes. Do I know you?” “I know you and that’s what matters here. Listen, I have something to tell you that you will find hard, nigh impossible, to believe, but it’s true nonetheless, and it’s in your best interests to hear me out.” “How do you know me?” “The name’s Professor Triman by the way,” says Triman, extending the man his hand. “J.C. Blake,” says the man tentatively, as he takes Triman’s hand into his for a second or two. “Whoever you think you are, think again. Your real name is Reginald Woolly and you are an eminent philosopher whose work on identity was considered by some to be dangerous. As a result you were stripped of your former identity, false memories were implanted into your head and you were dumped here out of harm’s way. Your only hope of regaining your true identity is to escape Pavilionstone and find the men that did this to you. Even then I’m not sure there’s much hope.” “So my wife and children…” “You don’t have any. In fact, if you knew Woolly, you’d find the idea ludicrous, not to mention slightly distasteful. No offence.” Triman took his stopwatch from his pocket and, in a manner not too dissimilar from a certain white rabbit, blurted out: “Time’s up. Sorry, we’ve places to be, people to see, got to go. Goodbye and good lu…” Confronted with an empty bench the man reels, unasked questions swarming through his brain in dizzying and intractable circuits. The old hag with her trolley-load of cats and kittens walks past, and he half expects one of her furry brood to talk to him. A tiny kitten dangles from the trolley’s meshed roof, while a black and white cat knocks its wilted tortoiseshell tail back and forth with its clawless paws. In the carpeted wasteland of a bus terminal besieged with red-eyed business men, teenage runaways and crow-faced drunks… “Are you absolutely certain that was Woolly?” 702

“No.” “Then why tell him all that stuff?” “He looked a lot like him; chances are it was him.” “What if it wasn’t?” “Well it’s too late now .” “When did you last see Woolly, anyway?” “A few years ago, I guess.” “And you got a good look at him did you?” “Better than you apparently.” “Where did you meet him?” “I didn’t, strictly speaking, meet him; I read one of his books and it had a pic- ture of him inside the back cover.” “A picture… You told him all that on the basis of a picture you saw a few years ago?” “Yes. I’ve got a good memory for faces. That was Woolly alright.” “So now you’re sure. All of a sudden you’re 100% convinced you got it right.” “Yes, it was him. I mean he seemed pretty ready to listen. He seemed relieved when I told him, as if things suddenly made sense to him.” “So that’s what it looked like to you?” “Yes. Why, what did it look like to you?” “I wasn’t paying too much attention.” “Well maybe if you paid a little more attention to what was going on around you you’d be able to confirm whether or not it was Woolly – after all, you’re the one who actually met him.” “So now you need confirmation.” “Not at all.” “Who is J.C. Blake?” “J.C. Blake is a sick joke.” THE GOLDEN TICKET “Where is everyone going?” “Don’t you know what day it is?” 703

“No.” “Sunday…Sunday the fourth.” The man looked at Molech quizzically, “We’re going to wave off the chosen ones at the Chambers of Transference.” On the North perimeter of Pavilionstone there is a granite-faced struc- ture more than a thousand feet high, with a single set of cast iron doors and no windows. This was where any chosen ones – after being duly notified by a golden ticket with the chosen one’s photograph and name emblazoned across the front – were brought on the first Sunday of every month. Nobody that entered this building was ever seen in Pavilionstone again. There is confusion on both sides of the wall as to who should receive a golden ticket. Those beyond the wall are responsible for voting. Some voters are preoccupied with trying to rid Pavilionstone of sadistic evil-doers and vote accordingly, but in so doing actually serve to promote such activity – some vote for such individuals for that reason alone. Some voters choose to reward the virtuous by putting an end to their suffering, but they are, at present, in the minority. All-seeing cameras survey Pavilionstone day and night. Nothing is missed, nothing is hidden. Basements no more hide their horrors than a fake nose hides the man who wears it. There are, however, no surveillance cameras in the Chambers of Transference; Molech knew this much, even though he never tuned in. He knew because even on the other side the activities within this stark and decidedly foreboding piece of architecture were still pretty much unknown, a source of endless conjecture, jokes, and many a PhD thesis. Molech couldn’t have escaped being acquainted with such idle speculations, short of locking himself in a dark uninhabited room. And even then… Some claim that this one building is left unmonitored so as to create and sustain interest for both those inside and those outside Pavilionstone, that it is nothing more than a cynical contrivance, a life-enabling mystery. It certainly inspires avid curiosity across the board, but whether this was achieved by accident or design is not something Molech was in a position to shed light on. One thing that all those beyond the wall think they know for sure is that the Chambers of Transference are not a conduit to the N.W.R. – statistical diligence would not permit it. 704

A woman beside Molech drops to the floor as the Chamber doors crash shut. She inclines her head upward in the direction of a camera clamped to the side of a streetlight, and starts to gesticulate with her dark lips, mouthing out her tireless petitions to mechanical eyes, her arms, draped in cheap wire bracelets, outstretched, aloft, imploring her shadowy human gods to reward her dedication, her lack of pride, her aching knees on a filthy pavement, her…her ability to put herself at odds with herself in order to achieve deliverance. Molech marvelled at this spectacle of debasement, and could hear the jibes and tittering from beyond this place . It reminded him of old film footage showing cruelties of the past, where chimpanzees and brown bears had been dressed up in dinner suits and encouraged, by means of cigarette ends being screwed into the soles of their feet, to perform tricks and dances, ham-footed versions of The Lambeth Walk, the Tango, and the Foxtrot. There are crocodiles of schoolchildren lining the pavements; they stand in silence, hands interlocked. The teachers revel in their charges’ awe. The children all wear Rose West wigs on their heads and crucified Gacys around their necks: the iconography of The Chosen Ones. Over their heads flutter Mount Rushmore banners with the faces of dead killers superimposed over the four dead presidents. A bearded teacher clears his throat and lifts both of his arms into the air. The children start singing: “Kind friends come pay attention, and listen to my song, It is about a murder and it won’t detain you long, ‘Twas in the town of Pavilionstone this shocking deed was done, Maria and sweet Caroline were murder’d by Switzerland John.” “Ted Bundy banners, Pol Pot postcards, Manson memorabilia, Cottingham cap pistols, Mengele medicine boxes… All half price, today and today only…” hollers a woman from one of the vending stalls at the edge of the crowd. Her sales pitch drowns out a verse or two of the children’s ballad, until the vexed teacher pitches in to help. “Down on their knees the sisters fell, all in their blooming years, ‘For mercy’ cried, ‘We’re innocent’, their eyes were fill’d with tears; He plunged the knife into their breasts, their lovely breasts so deep; 705

He robb’d them of their own sweet lives and left them there to sleep. Three times he kiss’d their cold pale lips as they lay on the ground, He took the capes for off their backs, for on him they were found; He said, ‘Farewell sweet Caroline, your blood my hands has stain’d; No more on earth shall I see you but in heaven we will meet again….” Molech moves on. The envious well-wishers are all of them lost in their own plans for endlessness. None show any signs of leaving, despite the lack of activity from across the road. There is a feeling of reverence in the air: this collective’s displacement of anger and neglect. Most still had their eyes trained on the Chamber doors, as if their accumulated willpower and scrutiny might somehow fling those heavy doors open and allow them to enter. A thought suddenly comes to him: I wonder why…I wonder if… He turns to an old man, an old man with rotting teeth and black bags under his yellow eyes, tumescent little sacks of time that spill down his fat cheeks. The man looks back at him and tips his head a fraction by way of a greeting, before returning his attention to the Chamber doors. “Excuse me. I wonder if…,” Molech waits until the man looks back in his direction before continuing, “I wonder if you know whether anybody has ever tried to break into the Chambers. I mean, if enough people go t together, it would be easy enough to storm the place. Those doors can only be so thick, and those walls could contain only so many men.” “Hmmmm, is that so?” says the man, deciding whether or not he is prepared to elaborate any further. “Things aren’t quite that straightforward though, are they?” “Aren’t they?” “No.” “Has it even been attempted? If nobody has even tried, how could you possibly know? It must be worth it to all of you to at least try.” 706

“Must it? Ever tried talking out your urethra?” “No. Not that ing “ I recall .” Molech can see what is com- , but decides the best way to get the man to open up is to humour him a little. But you’d agree that it would be a neat trick should you manage it.” “A real crowd pleaser.” “Then why have you never tried it?” “Okay, I see your point.” Molech isn’t about to take this rather trite lesson in elementary epistemology any further, and now wishes he’d put a stop to it when he’d first detected the man’s intentions. Molech is already turning away and about to move on when the old man says, rather plaintively, “A hundred or so people did try once.” “And?” “And what?” “What happened to them?” “Why don’t you know th is already? Your mumma had you tied up in the basement until today?” he laughs, showing off the alarming disarray of his tumbledown teeth quite unashamedly, before staring into Molech’s eyes with a newfound seriousness. He wants an answer, the laugh being self-congratulatory as opposed to a let off, and his horrid little eyes make this blatantly clear. (One can always find laughter in slaughter.) “I don’t keep up with current affairs; I suppose I should pay closer attention.” After a long, scowling pause, and despite the fact that on this side of the wall, it was tantamount to admitting ignorance of death itself, the old man finally opens his mouth. “The doors closed behind them, and they were never seen again.” “So it was a success then. But if that’s the case, what are you all waiting for?” “What are you waiting for?” 707

“What are we all waiting for?” “Things aren’t that straightforward; the official line on all this is rather different. What we are all supposed to swallow, and what the majority of Pavilionstone were all too greedy to digest, is that all 137 of them died, exterminated for their impatience. Okay, 137 headless bodies were it discovered the following morning, l tering this very street they were, all lined up side by side, bloody stump alongside bloody stump. Some hazy photographs were taken, and the headlines took up the official version of who those corpses were and what had happened to them, which was, as even you will have worked out, that they were executed for their crimes by the enigmatic inhabitants of the Chambers, an d that the same is destined to happen to any who dare to perpetrate subsequent offences of that nature.” The old man took a laboured breath, and glanced over towards the Chamber doors. “But that’s bollocks. Why cut off their heads? Why have them cleared away so quickly? They laid there for barely twenty minutes before the crime scene was dismantled. Why? Because they weren’t the 137 people that entered the Chambers, that’s why.” “Who were they, then?” says Molech playing along. “I’ve no idea. It doesn’t matter who they were; it matters who they weren’t, and they weren’t the 137 people who had stormed their way in there.” He flicks his head in the direction of the offending doors. “The missing heads, the cloudy photographs, the hasty clearance of the bodies from the street: all these things point to subterfuge, point to somebody obscuring the real identities of those bodies, and to what end? To cover up what really happened to the original 137.” “Which was?” “Any number of things might have occurred in there, the most obvious being that they achieved their goal, otherwise why bother with the cover up? The authorities couldn’t risk it getting out… it just wouldn’t have been an option for them would it? Think about it!... Here, you see this?” he pulls a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolds it. “If this meant anyt 708

hing to you, you’d k now already.” The old man places the picture back in his pocket, picks up a leather satchel that had been resting against his leg and walks off, hugging it to his chest. Molech eventually shrugs off the congregation of bile-ridden well-wishers, and wanders purposelessly through the streets. It starts to rain. Molech finds a doorway. One of those deep, substantial doorways with tiles on the ground and enough room to lie down, stretch out even, should you need to. But he doesn’t. He stands, looking out into the darkness, the rain glistening in the air like invading hoards of silverfish. What was he doing there? Were there places he should be heading to at this precise moment, people he should be attempting to liaise with? He doesn’t know. And there was no way of knowing, not really. There was nothing that he should be doing. There was only what he chose to do. He could die if he chose to. He looks across the road as a lorry speeds along the slick tarmac, rocking from side to side, its back end hollering out empty, rattling echoes. He could have been under it. No way could it have stopped in time. His mangled mouth could have been eking out his final words: “Sorry I’m late.” DEATH STRIPTEASE Lance Noggin doesn’t simply want a solution, he demands one, for one does not timorously tap on a shoulder and ask, apologetically, for the ideal accompaniment to immortality, one 709

pushes for it arrogantly, all the time blinding oneself to odds longer than the world’s collective intestine. Lance knows what he needs and refuses to be fobbed off with theoretical convolutions; h is requirements – he imagines – are lucidly formed and he expects the an- swers, when they come (if they come), to be formed likewise. If he is to live forever without being pulverized under the weight of an endless future, then there is something that he feels he must have. He must have the enigma of death laid down for him to pick at like so many polished bones; thousands of years of religious fervour stripped of the trifles of humanity, of wars, of petulance, of fear. Death must be reconstituted, pared back to a psychological incarnation, rid of any life-threatening traces. A habitation must be excavated in his brain for Valhalla, a place to go and feast his soulless self for a million lifetimes and ever onward. The meanings we have craved to make since our navels first caught our eyes, as they stand, are hard pushed to sustain us; they are the icing-sugar dustings on food past the tongue and they desert us on a whim, dropping their façade quicker than a whore with notes in her fist and, like the pleasures they cloak, they’ve made an enemy of enquiry and a bosom buddy of obfuscation. The masses, the quotidian many, can queue up for new people to be, but not Lance – this cannot be Lance’s way. Lance refuses the inauthentic, cannot bring himself to quiet, sleepless deaths that rid him of a well broken-in self in order that he may be furnished with the short-lived smiles of other people’s inner lives. One of the things Lance hadn’t foreseen was the damage deathlessness would wreak on romantic love. Without death, or even the threat of death, love became too narcissistic: its focus on other human beings slowly eroded th e own demise. Love without dea b over comes just another pleasure to lap up while it lasts. Its glorious sadness, its departed lovers, and its tiness time and it came to mourn nothing but its threat of aching emp- are all lost. True, there are still opportunities for unrequited love and hurtful infidel- ities, but with no urgency, and with too many loved-ones fading beyond recognition in one’s memory, sorrow is forced to focus its powers on the passing of love itself: one is not inconsolable at the passing of a day, however much one dreads the coming of night, for too many days have come and gone to see a day apart from days. 710

To cherish a loved-one is to always have one or both of your never-ending deaths in mind. What is love without the shaking horror of our decay? Death is the waiting pistol in every love story ever told, every story ever told; the bullet pierces the spirit of every word, even if you never actually hear the shot. It is the burden of lovers faced with death to crave an eternity in each other’s arms. They want it because it flatters their love to want things for it that can never be, like when we compliment our offspring by wishing unrealistic levels of greatness on them. There are those outside Pavilionstone who have remained together for hundreds of years, but unfortunately there are better reasons than the bonds of love to account for this. For them, love has long since transformed itself into something else, something uglier, something pitiful. Love has become what love can so easily become when it tires of its object: a retreat from any depth of emotional life whatsoever. Schopenhauer tells of a picture hanging in Ludwigsburg, somewhere near Stuttgart; the picture, so we are told, depicts Time in the guise of Saturn chopping off Cupid’s wings with a pair of shears. We can read this in a number of metaphorically similar ways: Time clips Love’s wings; Time butchers Love; Love is depleted by Time; Time is Love’s enemy; Time stunts Love’s potential; Love is grounded by Time. Any way you look at it, Love is done no favours by Time. When Eros was transformed into Cupid by the Romans, what was once an enigmatic and potent embodiment altogether cheerier and decidedly more of love became cheapened, was made obvious, transient . Cupid: a flab by infant with wings and a bow and arrow that flits about dispensing weak passions on a whim. If you ask me, Cupid had it coming and more besides. Saturn should have reverted to his true self (way back when with Cronus) and scoffed up the scheming little shit, ripping off his plump head with his teeth and devouring the rest of him whole as he had once done to his own untrustworthy progeny. Who can give us tragedy’s sweet tears without death? Not even Marlowe could pull it off. 711

YOUR EARS ARE SO DULL […] that which has once moved is enclosed and immortalized in the general union of all existence, like an insect within a piece of amber. – Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human There’s a buzzing at the door. Who’s this? I won’t get any work done if I answer. If it’s her I’ll break her in two. They can go to hell. He knows my name. Who is it? It’s him. He’ll know, understand; he’s been there, might have news. He listens to me. He’ll have brought my gear. I’ll go down, get him up here away from them. They’ll get in here soon. They’ll come in while I’m out & hunt through my rooms like those snooping publishers that hounded Bukowski. Smugglers: I’ll write a story about a band of smugglers. This place was once full of them; they used to crawl around under your feet with knives on their belts smoking clay pipes. Those tunnels are all still there. I’ll go down & let him in. i t These stairs sound hollow. Can you tunnel under sta rs, ascend hem beneath the tread s e lf ? Th y cou di they wanted. I didn’t go to the cafe today, did I? Sometimes the days are too similar to really tell. It’s him. He’s innocent. He knows nothing of all this. Will he believe me? I’m the man in possession of the facts, not him. What will he think? Will he think me crazy? That hateful street can’t be allowed in here. I can’t have it in here, only him – that’s all. The only way I can keep the words in is by thrashing my head about – a writer should never keep the words in: they make him ill. I have a mouth, a head full of cancerous creativity that’s killing to get out & they won’t let me release it. They’d have me die. They’d have me sink beneath my unwritten & unspoken words like a dirty smuggler caught by the rain in his underground passageways. “I can’t talk down here. It’ll be safer back up there, for now, at least. Come up!” Haven’t writers always lived in squalor? No. Someone should tart it up down here. What would She think if She were to see it? Someone should give it a lick of paint. I’m so busy. I couldn’t possibly spare the time, what with everything that’s going on already. I wonder how long he plans to stay. I’ve got to catch up for yesterday, for this morning & all of them & all their full days and nights. They keep me on my toes alright. It’s only encouragement, I know, but it’s so much to live up to; they have such high expectations. The heat is unbearable. I’m being cooked by my thoughts. My head is ablaze. It’s so fucking hot. It’s never this hot. Why is it so hot today? Why today? I wonder. I don’t know what I’m smiling about; I didn’t mean to smile. I couldn’t help it. Is it always that way or just with everything that’s going on? I can’t tell. Whenever I’m not paying full attention to the conversations of others, all I hear is garbled noise, a deliberately incoherent nonsense, & then as I train my ears to hear what they’re saying it comes together for my benefit, for it was nothing but absurd blathering before I listened in with full attention. He’s sensed it. He’s asked me, & so can see something’s wrong. Maybe he already knows. Why would he ask if he already knew? People always do that sort of thing: it’s a smokescreen. Honesty has become a vice, an indulgent luxury that has to be sidelined for the sake of progress. He can’t stay long, just this drink & then I’ll have to insist he go. No time to waste. I’m late already. Listen to me: I sound like I should have long fluffy ears. All these years & still nothing finished, nothing out there. I’ve got to get this one finished, the one that’s going to do it for me. It doesn’t matter how much you publish in a lifetime if in that lifetime you write the best fucking novel that’s ever been written. Who will remember what you didn’t get done & how long it took you when they finally get to read it? It won’t matter. They’ll wonder how you managed it at all. It’s gone too far now. I must make sure it is all it can be. I could tinker forever , but I 712

have to stop. (What was it Anthony Burgess said: something about the unity of a book being lost if one spends too long on it?) He’s looking at me now, waiting. I don’t know if he’ll believe me. Encapsulate it for him! Intrigue him! Bring him on in! I’m running low. I love the feel of the un-deadened corners on a pack of twenty. It’s my last pack: three down, seventeen remaining, with this one that makes sixteen. Only have one when you need one! How can I tell? He’s listening. He always listens – doesn’t give much away though. Sometimes I can’t work out if he’s expressionless or just plain dumb. I’ll give him the lot, no holding back. I’ll crack that reserve with this. Did he notice me clench my fist? He’d realise it was a joke. Unless he is just plain dumb, a grass-munching pair of bovine ears coaxing in the grass’s faint uproar. I can’t tell if he’s taking me seriously, chomping on the grass like some mad king. He could well be jealous. How do I look to this man with malachite eyes & the brain of a placid cow? I’m giving it to him straight, laying it all down as it happened. I’ve had time to work on it. (I’ve had to make time. I don’t have time for this; will he go soon?) He shouldn’t need much longer to digest it: he has 4 stomachs to break it down. Did he smile then? I would be good for her. She knows it. Another ant by the window - they’re coming in from everywhere, probably marching under my front door now, hundreds of black, shiny, insectile Waffen SS goose-stepping under my front door, drooling profusely from their sagging mandibles. I can feel foam at the side of my mouth; it’s all this talking. Wipe it away. I have to talk for the both of us – is he mute (or moo-t)? I’ll have o t out. I shouldn’t have told him about do some more my doing a Slocum & keeping him out of the dig ging around. Dig those ants boy – If only my boy had been a bear – best off way . Shit! I don’t want my mother to die (my sister to have died as a baby, that brownie-hound cunt of a nurse to drown in jissom, but not my old mum). Old 713

people disappear just as easily as animals. I bet they’d like to change that. You can be sure of it, acrimonious schemers the lot of them. They don’t know when to let go – look at Bates’s mum. The connections keep coming. I can’t keep up with them, not enough time to assimilate them ab now. I’m prettier out than this piece of half-dead oxen. People know me; they remember my face. People call me out of the blue & want to talk to me. They go to the trouble of getting my number, of finding out about me. I suppose I should be flattered. I am, but I have so little time & really cannot afford the interruptions. People phone me & get tongue-tied, find themselves unable to speak – is it awe? I think it probably is. I can’t think why; I’m nobody special, or that’s what I tell myself. I try to keep my feet on the ground. You need to in this business. It’s only natural to get nervous in the presence of somebody you admire, even if you have hundreds of metres of phone wire between you. You want to make a good impression. I can understand that. I’m not an ogre. Sometimes they are so intimidated by me that they hang up before I’ve even had time to reach the phone. They sense my greatness. They can tell I have the formula. Who says nobody cares or gets excited about novelists anymore? I appreciate them, I really do, but they’re killing me with their attention, their ants & their cars lined up in homage. I don’t know as I have time for love. I could make time for Her. We could come to some arrangement. Auster had a wife & two children, a son & a daughter. His wife (Siri Hustved) was also a novelist, a woman of words, a tasty piece of stuff with long legs, blonde hair, good skin, the smoothest thighs you’ve ever had your head between. What I don’t have time for is games, & games are what I see being played out. She’ll have to deal with whoever it is she has to deal with & then come back to me. I don’t have time for this. I have work to finish, work to start. Auster’s wife would have been good for me. Hell! I’d have been good for her. I can’t deal with the petty jealousies of insecure women. I should just let them sort it out amongst themselves. But they seem so intent on drawing me in. I can’t rid myself of an image: Plath, her head in the oven, her arse in the air, me balling her lifeless anus. (When his work was going well, Charles liked to see himself as someone who had sacrificed his wife and child for the sake of his art, and frequently compared himself to Alexander Trocchi, who had also seen fit to abandon his children for no other reason than that they interfered with his writing. (J.G. Ballard reckoned the pram in the hallway did him a favour, that 714

it had actually helped motivate him. Now there’s a thought.) Charles would have liked to put his wife on the street; not, like Trocchi, to fund a drug habit, but to fund his writing. Yes, he liked the idea of being a pimp writer. He would have liked to have done that, but she never would have submitted to it; she had never loved him enough. When he was unable to work, when he lost faith in himself, he remembered that his exasperated wife had left him, taking his child with her, and he felt hard-done-by. It was during these times that he allied himself to John Hawkes who, when his first child, Jack, was born, had simply risen extremely early in the morning and written before going to work. Charles believed he too could have done the same, if only he’d been given the chance.) On reflection, the grass-munching comment was taking it a bit too far – not at all fair. His teeth are all wrong for a start. Spies don’t wear tope trench coats & fedoras anymore, nor do they smoke strong European cigarettes; no, they wear blue tracksuits & eat runny egg sandwiches & nobody except me suspects a thing. It’s all very cleverly done; I have to hand it to them – before they take it. All this has gone beyond the toying around of fledgling lovers. That could have been a cover. Maybe she didn’t expect to, but she went & fell for me anyway. Has this put the plan & Her in jeopardy? I am losing the power to concentrate on anything but them, & they know it. This has all been set up around me. I want to know why. I wonder just how many of them actually know why. Do I have a brain bug? My book is talking back to me in riddles: it’s swapped sides. I keep forgetting to eat. I find it unnerving. I forget to eat because I am unnerved. My brain feels so hot lately. I picture it as a broiling cinder one minute, and as a melting ball of wax the next; this is the delirium, the calenture of the gifted. When will bits of it start to break off under the strain? I’ll not give it long if they keep it up. I get terrible stom- ach aches & my tongue tastes bitter. Dogs eat grass when they have bad guts; cows have 4 stomachs to keep in check, so they never have the time to eat anything else. (In his early teens, Henry Lee Lucas watched his mother’s lover decapitate a calf and then fuck its carcass.) They are never in one place long enough. I don’t have the time to eat or write. I am unable to write. They don’t want me to finish my book : that was the thought which came upon me last night. My tongue is laminated in stomach acid & dead words. I hear the unarticulated letters burning up in my ascendant bile. Maybe D. H. Lawrence was right. Maybe death is preferable simply because there are no other people there. I am able to discern patterns. Codes, ciphers, cryptograms all open up to me; the splayed legs & warm meat mille-feuille of hidden sense never fail to cast a wink my way. Red – black – red – white. How can he miss it? Cars don’t park themselves; people often forget that. Where others see differences I see similarities & where others see similarities I see 715

differences. Without differences there would be nothing. You could say I have a gift for secreted conundrums. But they are bent on overloading me with… I mean how else was I to take the litany of white vans? Does he know what day it is? I’m not sure he can keep up with the facts. He can listen but can he think? This town is constructed from Nabokovian plums. I’d like to kill that slit-eyed yellow cunt over the road, hack large gleaming chunks out of her with a meat cleaver (she will have one in her kitchen), open her eyes up with a paring knife (ditto). I might even cook myself up a portion of anthropophagy soup, with a few noodles, some ginger & five or six fresh green chillies. I wonder how many dogs she has in her larder, strung up by their hind legs with tin can muzzles forcing their blood-soaked jaws together. (What dark secret might I find tattooed under their fur?) I don’t have time to waste on her. If she greets me again I’ll just punch her in the face, or blank her, whichever comes first. People around here have too much time on their hands. They must have invented a camera lens that can see through curtains by now. I certainly wouldn’t bet against it. When I sit down to write it’s as if they know, for no sooner have my fingers touched the keys than they go to work. They’re suffocat e prived of quill & paper, choking ing m ; I feel like the Marquis de Sade de- on the One after the other they come, never great unwritten. ending , white af- ter white after white with no let up. They might as well bellow their mockery up to my window with loud hailers. Even that despicable bitch over the road, she who takes her morning tea with lashings of fresh dog tears, presses her flat face up to the window to watch, to gloat and amuse herself at my expense. I don’t know why I bother with him. His ears don’t even work so well lately. What else does the slathering, multi-gutted pea brain have left? I have 716

my work, if only I were permitted to pursue it. I’ll give him another chance. I don’t know why I waste my time on him. I have a kind heart, I guess. It’s not far, just a two-minute walk, no distance at all. And yet so much could happen. My brain is a searing ember tonight. How long before it cools & begins to crumble? I can’t get my fingers into where it aches. I’ll just have one more before I leave, to set me up. I won’t drink much while I’m there, so I’ll have another quick one before I go. Fuck it! I’ll finish the bottle: I never know what I’m going to have to contend with. If all goes well tonight I’ll try & get back to work tomorrow. I managed a couple of short poems earlier. They weren’t at all bad in spite of everything. I suppose you’d say they were reminiscent of the late William Carlos Williams. I think he also had restrictions on the amount of time he had available for writing poetry. We find a way. I’ll mention it to them. They need reminding of what I do, of what I can accomplish if I am given peace. They all have linseed oil & potato peelings running through their veins. They can’t appreciate me or what I do. I can play their game as well as they can & sometimes it amuses me to do so. They can’t tell of course. How could they? They don’t even see it as a game. I’ve let myself d own , given in to them out there, those men & women standing out in the rain & waiting. The rainfall wanes and accelerates, oscillates between drizzle & downpour & still they stand motionless, patient, determined, wet, looking in at me through the shifting glaze. What can they learn about me out there? Men in long black coats & heavy boots, their hair stuck fast to their skulls, grey, indurate men, ruthless men, men with other men’s blood & skin under their finger- all nails, motherless men, childless men, men with c oused knuckles & dismembered orphans in their pockets, men with eyes for death & torment, men who seek out the affections of cold-hearted seductresses with slimy snapping toads between their legs… I wish they’d tell me what they want from me, why I am of such importance to them. I wish this . I wish they’d keep busy and forget about me. I wish the same for me. 717

My friends are going home to their families. I shall go home to book-clad walls and uncomfortable truths. I wish I were ordinary like my friends, just another series of wasted heartbeats. For weeks now I have had the feeling that somebody is hiding in my flat. As I move from room to room it is as if I am a fraction of a second too late for something, as if my entering a room is foreshadowed by somebody else having just vacated it. My belongings are never exactly as I left them: a book will lay open, its spine cracked in two, its pages twitching guiltily; my ashtrays contain butt ends that are not my own; my whisky bottle is drained of its contents; piles of dead ants collect beneath my windowsills; my food cupboards are raided on a regular basis; pages of my manuscript go missing. I sense his presence – for I am sure it is a man – hear his breathing, his shuffling footsteps. As I approached my building yesterday I saw him standing at my bedroom window. When I finally mustered the courage to go inside my flat I couldn’t find him anywhere. I shouted for him to show himself. I hollered abuse at him until the pervert in the flat above began thumping on his floor. I wish I knew what he had in store for me, but he gives no indication. He is a man that has been lied to, duped into a life that isn’t his and he blames me, I know he does. He craves revenge and I am his target: he mauls my nerves as a cat does a sparrow, his claws retracted in the name of sport. I see his heels slip around the edges of doors, his eyes snatched away from corners. I see his fingerprints in the dust, the indentation of his body on my bed, and the swell of his chest behind my curtains. And yet I see nothing that my fear cannot claim as its own. NO CHANGE GIVEN It is a drab Tuesday afternoon and yet again Charles is finding it hard to concentrate. Burgess would have been writing, the afternoon busy dissecting his unconscious mind. Charles comes out onto the street in an attempt to clear his head of the white noise of doubt, the barracking atmospherics of inadequacy that were killing his words before they could find their way out. He’s looking for fresh air to breathe, but all he finds is the same glutinous lung- stuffing he’d shut the door on minutes earlier. He walks down through the town centre, through all its cuts and slashes, its endless goodbyes and final reductions, through its many mantisframed mothers hiding their prayers behind their prams, through gangs of old crones with murderous regrets and cadaverous hair, through streets that make a boast of their cheapness and glass painted white a ghost of your stare. He sees a frail old man sitting outside a bank playing a child’s xylophone. The man bashes away at the multicoloured bars day after day and people passing sometimes drop something into one of his Mickey Mouse slippers. But it is not about the money for him – that much is plain. When children tease and kick him, he looks so confused it is unbearabl e y h 718 artrending. (It reminds

Charles of when he was a child and he learnt about how the Dodos had made such easy targets because they’d innocently tried to befriend their killers. For a long time that thought made him sad. Eventually he became angry that something’s death-defying stupidity should make him feel so miserable.) The old man does not fathom the hostility he engenders. It is his complete inability to understand the way he is treated that tears at the heartstrings, and not merely the treatment he is subjected to. The old street xylophonist does not realise that the reason children try to hurt him is because they can’t let him be without somehow sanctioning his existence, and that that is something they are not prepared to do. I nstead they kick him, punch him and steal his money. One day they will kill him. Jack, now little more than a dumb animal, would have such an end begged for had he known what the town had in store for him. In Pavilionstone’s premier hotel there is now a locked room that has been block-booked for the next five years. The room key, unbeknownst to the hotel manager, has been copied, and now five different men (and anyone they choose to bring along) have access to this room. The man who permanently resides there is not in possession of a key, for he never leaves the room. The resident in question, who goes by the name Jack, has been subjected to Coco’s scalpel, so that he can be safely detained at the hotel as a sex slave. Coco employed a take on the Dahmer Method of zombie production, using extra long drill bits that chewed up his frontal lobe a treat. He has become a popular attraction in the town: straight guys have even been known to pay him a visit on the quiet, safe in the knowledge that they can indulge their homosexual curiosity without having to confront a real man – a man that hasn’t had his emotions butchered, whose eyes haven’t been replaced with frosted glass. Behold our very own St Sebastian peppered with pink arrows. Charles chuckled to himself dreamily: “If only, if only.” Charles had wanted to get out, but now out finds he has no place to go. He stops in the middle of the pedestrian precinct and watches as everybody else keeps moving: the irresolute flaneur stilled by the scrofulous horde. He’s visited his mother once already today and, although that visit would have already faded into non-occurrence, he can’t risk disturbing her afternoon nap by calling again. Ordinarily, on a day like this, he would take refuge in his favourite bookstore, but he’s noticed, of late, that the shop assistants appear to regard him as 719

something of a figure of fun, giggling uncontrollably whenever he visits. He should of course pay no attention to these mere pawns in the game of literature; he should rise above their puerile idiocy, give them a taste of what he can do with words, cut them down to size with a single line like Oscar Wilde. Instead, Charles being Charles and not Oscar, (although his hair might have deceived you had he worn a hat to conceal his baldness, and had Wilde seen fit to indulge himself in a wayward perm), he avoided his persecutors for want of courage and self-belief , believing his time would come and that when it did he’d rub their snotty noses in his brilliance until their septums began to disintegrate. A man with glazed black eyeballs and red hair brushes past Charles’s shoulder, pausing momentarily to suggest a course of action: “Go to the photo booth in the shop to your right! You’ve left something there,” he says almost inaudibly before walking off up the precinct, still muttering to himself. I spite n of his reservations, Charles finds himself meandering over in the direc- tion of the photo booth. Finding it unoccupied, he sits down on the turntable seat and draws the curtain shut. He finds nothing and is about to leave when he sees a piece of paper protruding from the coin slot. He pulls it out, being careful not to rip it in two or to shred its edges any more than is necessary. He manages to get it out in one piece and reads it on the spot. Report 1 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22 The only thing I regret is my future Dear Boss, 720 .

My lodgings are bearable if I avert my eyes from the hideous gaudiness of the flock wallpaper and the hypnotic swirls of red and orange that threaten to suck me into the carpet. I can only hope that I am kept busy enough with my task to be left little time to dwell on the offensiveness of my surroundings. I am hoping to meet my contact again later today, but fear that he may well be otherwise engaged – such is the preoccupied nature of his life. With this postponement in mind, I have devised a backup plan incorporating a reconnaissance expedition of my new surroundings. I have seen very little, but what I have seen, in darkness, as it rarely gets light here, was I imagine best seen that way. The dilapidated beach with its tarnished breakwaters, redundant huts and gloomy stillness, did not, I must admit, fill my heart with joy and anticipation. Yet as I speak, a lame streak of sunlight creeps across the floor towards my feet and reminds me of the fact that I have something to achieve here, even if I am yet to discover just what that might be. MOLECH The following day Charles revisits the photo booth and finds yet another report crammed into the coin slot. It reads as follows: Report 2 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22. The only thing I regret is my future. Dear Boss, I met my contact today at his home at 8 A.M. as arranged. So engrossing was our meeting that it is now approaching midnight and I have only just left him. The sickness of this man’s mind is all but hidden by his pleasant, if at times, downcast demeanour. I was made to feel instantly at ease, and was told to think of his home and rather extensive library as my own. I could not have hoped for a warmer reception, and our obvious enjoyment of each other’s company must, I feel, bode well for any future meetings, of which I anticipate many. His home is cluttered, musty, and, at the risk of talking ill of a man for whom I am beginning to feel some affection, absolutely filthy. MOLECH After a week of disappointments Charles finds another one. 721

Report 3 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22. The only thing I regret is my future. Dear Boss, Things are progressing pretty much as expected. He never seems to sleep. He maintains that he hasn’t slept for longer than fifteen minutes ever since it all started; he certainly looks and acts like a man in desperate need of some rest – his eyes are like enflamed abscesses that have been plugged up with screwed-up balls of dirty tissue. Every now and then he twitches, as if coming around from a nap, and then rubs his eyes and scans the room disbelievingly. It is disconcerting to behold a man seemingly come to in mid sentence, and then look at you like you’re some complete stranger who’s just burst into his home and sat down in front of him. The look never gets supported by any words – it’s too brief for that. It’s just a look. Sometimes when I turn up in the mornings and let myself in he has started the day’s monologue without me. He is oblivious to my suddenly being there. I don’t interrupt him. I just sit down and take notes. It’s as if, as far as he’s concerned, I’m always there, and indeed I do spend more and more time there as the days go by, and I too sleep less and less, for the times when I am not there to catch what he says I am missing part of the story, my presence or absence being no cue for him to start or finish. MOLECH And three days later, after a brief altercation with an old woman struggling to get into the booth with her zimmer frame and shopping bags, Charles finds the fourth and final message. Report 4 Pavilionstone, Pleading Hall C, Booth 22. The only thing I regret is my future. Dear Boss, I am beginning to see the depths of depravity which this man has endured. We are stuck in a cyclical stream of decline. Sorry… I am losing my way I remember why I’m here but it seems all so ludicrous. I . , why I came here, can’t believe the thoughts I used to have, the emotions I used to court. I sense that I have slipped into territories so mordant and unfathomable as to weaken my ability to ever leave this place. The salt air has corroded my nerve-endings. It’s inside me and I can’t take it back there. 722

He has not spoken a word for two days now. I sit and wait for words to arrive, and when they do not I do not prompt. I sit and wait. We both sit in silence, sinking into old sofas, dozing and waiting for the words to come. I read over the transcripts of our time together and speculate as to the end we are approaching. All I find are things lost and left behind, places left, things discarded. It rains all night and all day and refuses to get light. I can’t ever leave here. What is this place but any place anyhow? Too many of my sensibilities have been masticated into a claggy pulp, and spat out to accommodate my next breath. I think I need to be left to die. MOLECH Charles turned the paper over in his hands. On the back was a simple pencil sketch of a man. A self-portrait? Some kind of clue ? Charles thought he rec- ognised the haunted expression, was sure that the blurred lines that made up the face were a message of some sort. Were there words hidden in this picture that expanded on the four that ran up the right-hand side? 42 RUE FONTAINE L.: “I can’t do this anymore.” T.: “What can’t you do anymore?” L.: “This.” T.: “Oh this.” L.: “Yes this.” T.: “No?” L.: “No.” T.: “You can.” L.: “I can’t. That’s what I’m telling you; I’m telling you I can’t.” T.: “You can.” L.: “Can I?” T.: “Can and will. Can – and – will.” L.: “No choice.” T.: “No choice.” L.: “No way to end it.” T.: “No.” L.: “I need to sleep.” T.: “So sleep.” L.: “I can’t.” T.: “So don’t.” L.: “Can we die?” T.: “No.” 723

L.: “I can’t live like this.” T.: “Can’t not live like this.” L.: “So you say.” T.: “So I say.” L.: “How can I sleep?” T.: “You can’t.” L.: “I know.” T.: “Try!” L.: “The changes wake me.” T.: “So you can.” L.: “It’s not really sleep.” T.: “So what is it – really?” L.: “I don’t know.” T.: “We should be able to.” L.: “What?” T.: “Die.” L.: “That’s the way I saw it.” T.: “We’ve been misinterpreted.” L.: “Misrepresented...” T.: “Misread.” L.: “Fucked over.” T.: “Royally.” L.: “I suppose there’s always the chance…” T.: “Chance that what?” L.: That they’ll realise and correct their error .” T.: “They?” L.: “Whoever – Whatever.” T.: “Do you believe that?” L.: “It’s possible.” T.: “So no, then.” L.: “I believe it’s possible.” T.: “I’m glad.” L.: “Don’t be.” T.: “I’m not.” L.: “Good.” T.: “I suggest we leave it at that.” L.: “Why? Got something else on?” 724

T.: “Yes. I’m going to have a nap.” GALLA BINGO “… lusting after rag and rouge, searching out those that time has turned from Helen to Hecuba. Now we all know that bingo halls are a hot spot for Galla Grabbing, if you know what you’re doing, but remember the rules! If you want to dive in and swim about in the white sea then stay cool. The trick is never to go for the cardigan fraternity, those who leave mirrors to the young for fear of what they see in them, unless you have time to invest , that is, and we don’t, so always be going for the ones that are showing out a little, those who’ve made an effort. Tell them they smell like fresh flowers in a meadow when stinky billy is nearer the mark, that their skin is as smooth as silk when parchment paper is bang on. You’ll all starve at the hands of Canidia if you let on that you are out itching for cinders; they want to be appreciated for what they’re not, what they haven’t been for decades, so don’t disappoint them! Now, if everyone has their magic markers, let’s get going! “Oh and guys, remember to play on the myths! Get their lips around your piece and they’ll drink you down, every last drop, as if it’s Hera’s own milk! how much they think it takes, but who are we scooping up his marker pens and making for the door. 725 to I know don’t quibble?” said Keith before

It proved to be one trip too many for our tomb-stabbing boys. Death came for them in the form of a hundred or more grannies who, hypnotised by the slack grot between their legs, got the taste for some killing. They smiled their barbed-wire grins and took the boys apart. Paul was the first to sense all was not right when, while discreetly pushing butter inside the gash of some old beehive with electric blue eye-shadow, his greased-up conquest pulled a pearl-ended hairpin from her towering barnet and slid it through the centre of his left eyeball. Two more old girls, bare from the waist up, their tits hanging off their ribs like dry rags, took hold of his arms and began eating into them, wringing out the blood from his wrists as one would a twist water from tea towel. Within seconds he was subdued under a mass of floral-patterned skirts and torose legs clad in yellow knee-length hosiery – flash of razor-edged boar tusk dentures, false nails rammed through his cheeks, his belly, digging for organs. And in the middle of this ancient orgy of blood is Paul’s member, as hard and as brittle as the hooked fossorial toenails of his attackers, dispensing its rejuvenating prize into the wrung-out mouths of a pack of bone yard prom queens. The other boys were busy with their own sweethearts, and were unaware of their friend’s fate until the whole hall erupted and they too became engulfed in a torrent of creaking magma. The stumbling infirmity of their molesters was more than compensated for by sheer weight of numbers. Velcro booties and crinoline panties were spinning in the air. Greg thought he was somehow caught up in the best damn porno he’d ever seen until some cragfaced old cunt with scarlet blusher, bone-meal skin and huge false eyelashes, sunk the sharpened tips of her zimmer frame into his fat gut. He dropped to the floor and quaked like a bag of bull spunk. The draggletailed parasites were all over him before he could lift his head, probing, stabbing, drawing out his honeyed blood – suckling piglets with no thought for their as my host. His double m tecto was taken care of with the aid of steel nail files and 726

toenail scissors. “I FUCKED YOUR GRAN, JOE! I FUCKED HER, JOE! I’M SORRY…” he screamed while he still had his tongue. Joe couldn’t hear Greg’s last words and, even if he had, was in no po- sition to forgive his buddy his trespass. He had arthritic hands up under his ribs trying to prise him apart, three bucktoothed mouths gnawing at his testicles, and a knitting party making shish kebabs of his fingers and toes. All around him collapsed vaginas dangled between legs sucking up blood and cum like the glutting proboscises on a swarm of sickening insects. Dick and Keith were being divided up fairly, their marker pens used to section off the goodies. They lay on the floor, their bodies made patchwork with black dotted lines: Frankenstein’s monsters marked out for slaughter. But as soon as their mates had been sucked dry, those boundaries and divisions counted for shit as the mob moved in. They burrowed through those boys like a shoal of cackling barracuda. When they had done, their age came back with a vengeance, punishing their exertions with paralysis. They lay about in heaps, exhausted: a galantine of rotten meat. PRO-DEATH RALLIES It is I, it is I who pull myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: hatred and disgust for existence are just so many ways of making me exist, of thrust me ing into existence . – Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée You can hear their chants from way off: “Oh to die unfound like Lorca, Like Lorca left unfound, And if I died like Lorca I ’d never run aground.” 727

Every other banner has a reproduction of Dali’s Study for Honey is Sweeter than Blood emblazoned across it: Lorca’s head lies at the edge of the picture, tranquil, smiling, eyelashes like centipedes split down the middle, his brain, visible through his skull, but safe from prying hands. Lorca, safe in death, has no care for the rotting donkey carcass beneath him with its guts split open, its cavernous eye socket and mechanical grin, its landing party of greedy flies. In a Study for Honey is Sweeter than Blood, Lorca’s head is divided down the middle by the horizon, the right half of his head falling in shadow beneath the horizon line, while its left half rests in sunlight on top of it. In a window overlooking the demonstration, P. stood thinking about the divisions of death, and about right and wrong ways to die. The decaying donkey with its buzzing offspring has not died well. Donkeys are ignorant, intransigent creatures that cling onto lives where they are forced to bear near unbearable loads and suffer constant beatings. No better off is the butchered female whose missing head (four saplings are there in place to remind us) will fold once again know life (the four root). As far as Dali was concerned, Lorca died a “beautiful death.” Borges’ thoughts on the matter – that “it was a lucky thing for him to be executed. Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death.” – were equally misguided. He didn’t have a fine, beautiful, or impressive death. He was the victim of a nationalist firing squad: he died at the hands of Franco’s militia t his – with two extra bulle s in arse (some coup de grâce) – for nothing more grandiose than the puerility of nationalism. (You want a town that breaks its poets, you come to Pavilionstone! You come here and see if your verse doesn’t have the blood pouring from your ears, your writing hand in stewed paralysis , your heart laughing back at you like a brutal- ized chimp, your veins open on the page, your…) Victims of the panic breathe into their paper lungs: the need for a third (re-circulatory) lung folded for action in one’s pocket is a must, as nobody knows when their endless future is going to open up into some vast breathless jagged throat, hanging open like the tortured geometry of a shark’s mouth, its broken bottle teeth encrusted in the stinking chemistry of submarine murder. They stand beneath their banners wailing for justice to be done. They feel they have been duped; they want another bite of the apple. The world is rising up in a protest to end all protests, a calling for last rights. They threaten action if their wishes are not 728

granted, so the N.W.R. guards, anticipating deaf ears, are already in position with their sighted stun guns. Two planes soar overhead, each trailing a pennant through the gloaming N.W.R. sky. They read (if one can make out their undulating wo r ds ): “To die! To be really dead! That must be glorious!” (Count Dracula – Bela Lugosi, 1931), and “We belong dead!” (Frankenstein’s Monster – Bela Lu- gosi, 1935). As they roll and prepare to dive o int from the sky. The cries come in from outside: ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! ENOUGH OF LIFE – LET US DIE! LET US LET US LET US DIE! 729 the crowd they are torn

a People are sick of themselves, sick of the dil tory haze that their lives have become. They’ve had more life than they were built for, more life than they have the intellect or the ingenuity to enjoy, more life than they deserve. The N.W.R. has a worldwide mutiny on its hands. The L.E.O.s are dangerously overstretched and, with more and more officers expressing sympathies with the mob, a solution is overdue. The promise of death is both that which keeps us sane and that which we strive to deny at every turn: the torturous tedium of poor old Makropulos juxtaposed with (George Orwell’s remarks on) the condemned man who, while walking to the gallows , carefully steps around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet. Just how long could you live for ever? “You have realised a Schopenhauerian idyll where the longer people live the less they will a continuation of their living. If it was the worst of all possible worlds in his time, then this world is impossible, unsustainable: the very fabric of our willed existence is crumbling. The answer, as it has always been, is nothingness. The problem has always been that of attaining it within prohibitively short life-spans. The answer now is to allow people to die the right way and no other way. Test their mettle. Let’s see just how much of their sickness they really fathom. Let us all die into bliss if we have the resolve.” P. is ranting, his mouth almost foaming, his eyes glassy and elsewhere. “That wasn’t the plan.” Lance reaches for his cigar and is this close (imagine thumb and forefinger barely separated – the initial breach on the jaws of a micrometer) to lighting it up. “But there is no answer in life. There are only ‘act-as-ifs’: act as if God exists, act as if your life will eternally recur, act as if life were not essentially pointless… In the face of self delusory as-ifs, why not live with perfect death as your goal?” “Because, my friend, I want a perfect life, not a perfect death. Death is death is death and I want no part of it. Death is no solution to the problems of life. Death is a throwing up of hands in despair.” “Despairing? Despairing? Maybe, maybe… Dive through nothing and through despair,” says P., his head nodding slight and slow. As his body tenses, he starts up again with a renewed, if slightly less assured, vigour, which smacks a little of the broken-down salesman who can’t quite convince himself enough to convince you. “Death is not indivisible – the way we die can cleave death in two.” “And you’re sure of that are you, scholastically sure?” “Not yet. No.” “What is there but life? There is nothing more.” “Ah, but there is – there is a nothing more.” 730

“Have you been sleeping? You look like shit. No wonder you’re in love with death all of a sudden, you’re face is positively cadaverous.” “Look, nobody ever dying is all well and good, but what else are we to do once we are done with living? Schopenhauer once wrote that there exists, ‘no misfortune so great that it would induce everyone to commit suicide.’ Nothing maybe except the universalised misfortune of eternal life, and I’m not talking suicide here; I’m talking about achieving Erlosung, Salvation, an end to suffering.” “For the very first time in history man lives long enough to profit from his faults.” “Those profits have been exhausted.” “Look, eternity has been put in our hearts; all I am asking is that you help put it in our heads.” “I can’t, not without manipulating desires. I am not up to it. It is the height of cruelty to keep alive what should, because of the deplorable condition of its being, be left to die. Let’s burn the hysterical dreams of the of Unamuno and his kind, for they knew nothing truth of their for ever and ever and ever. With this you’re no better than Beddoes with his bone.” A brick smashes through the window and falls at their feet. 731

“Get a grip! the I want a solution to th is problem; deeper puzzle can wait.” “Let’s sell them the good death. Let them think they’ve won. All their identities are memorised, and we can freeze their bodies on the quiet if we need to. Anybody who wants to go will be allowed to retreat to their home, where they will then isolate themselves in a single room with no food or water. When they succumb to their will to life (which many will) and leave their rooms in search of sustinence, then we will see who has won. There will be no easy exits. It is for their own good. They can die the good death, or they cannot die at all.” “I couldn’t have put it better myself.” He laughs and winks at P. who does not laugh in reply, for he dislikes being reminded of his origins. “Send word out immediately before things get too out of hand!” OFF WITH HIS HEAD It is widely known that in 1794 Antoine Lavoisier (French chemist extraordinaire) found himself watching, between blinks, 15 to be exact, his neck revealed from behind a wall of shimmer and blood as it frantically tried to fuel his dying brain, propelling its oxygenated gloop into a basket and splashing his chin. Before succumbing to the sticky guillotine blade, he had, in keeping with his scientific drives, informed a number of friends of his intentions to blink for every post-decapitation moment he was conscious. His friends scrutinized his severed head and counted 15 blinks – roughly one every second. 732

What is rather less well known is that Antoine Lavoisier didn’t cease blinking through lack of consciousness, but through forgetfulness: he simply forgot to continue blinking, or rather forgot the importance of carrying on doing so. He shut his eyes and didn’t open them again, at least not at a time when his inquisitive associates were in a position to notice. His head was placed in a basket that contained a number of other Frenchmen’s heads. He opened his eyes and saw cracked spinal-cord section, a swollen tongue hanging from a set of blue lips, its tip nestling in a filthy grey ear, valleys of sea-sick green skin, a landscape of gummy organics plagued by huge droning flies perky with the thrills of excess, prospecting for decay, hairs bristling, eyes all seeing, all scorning, unsympathetic. They buzzed in his ears, tickling him with their hooked feet, their front legs rubbing together greedily like the palms of Yiddish moneylenders. He wanted to cry out and jolt them with his life, to shout, “Not now! Now is not the time! Come back when I have gone, but not now, not now, now is not the time!” But nothing was shouted, or even whispered to the black darlings with eggs to lay; all was quiet bar the buzzing of frenetic flies and a brain that would not die. Hail the revengeful ghost with nothing to say, with no act to do with certainty, swindling death, as he did, from the neck up. It is said that cockroaches can live for nine days straight without their heads; apparently they eventually die of starvation. Lavoisier’s body died almost immediately; it had no time to starve. It twitched a little and then slumped to the gluey floor and left its head to do what living was left. Dr Livingstone once observed that a number of the Africans he met on his travels believed consciousness to carry on for some time after decapitation, and gave an account of how they bowed yielding saplings and attached them to the ears of the men about to lose their heads, so that their last few moments of responsiveness would be of soaring through the sky. What he neglected to mention, and what very few people know to this day, is that…well how to put it? Out of the damaged remains of their ears they formed wings that carried them, these black men’s heads, across the plains of Africa and beyond. They would fly about for many years, scavenging on carrion, discarded burgers, the contents of city bins and tips, scaring off vultures, rats and seagulls with their flashing teeth and strong snapping jaws, not to mention their altogether hideous form. Their call was a rumbling, rhythmic laugh, for they were happy, even in their depleted state, at having cheated their rightful end. LOVE AND FEAR OF FUTURE PAIN It has long been accepted that one of the worst forms of pain you can inflict on a person is to make them watch the abuse of their loved ones, while insuring they are powerless to aid them. There are many different relationships that can be successfully exploited, but by far the most excruciating for the observing parties are the following: lover/lover, and parent/child. I have seen a man whittle down his own penis with a cheese grater to prevent the rape and mutilation of his sweetheart. That same man ended up biting off the end of his tongue in reaction to the pain. 63 At the risk of making unwarranted assumptions on the basis of my own limited experience, I will elaborate on my former claims by saying that the female parent is, on average, more willing than the male parent to sacrifice herself for the sake of her children in these cases. With the lovers there is little difference between the sexes, and any that might be thought to arise could simply be put down to inaccurate ascriptions of the term ‘lover.’ There was once a very attractive couple in their mid-twenties who had loved each other passionately for more than ten years. Since getting together, neither had ever been tempted by the excitement and false promise of infidelity. They were totally committed to each other, and even their friends, who had known them both for many years, expressed amazement at the bond that existed between them. 63 I am press-ganged into viewing these experimental calvaries. It is as if they need me, a man like me, of which I am the man always favoured it seems, to observe their pantomimes of cruelty. I shut my eyes, but still I am not spared. They need a carrier for their poison, a victim made (or so they think) immune by his own nadir of pointless, unsanctified pain. 733

She was as stunning as she was warm, kind and unassuming. She was truly a won- der: her eyes opal fires, her hair a silken waterfall, her full lips brushed with the softest sable, her body honed from faultless alabaster with a diamond-cutter’s precision and God’s own loins in charge of design. (Basta! Basta!) However, despite the depths of her charms she remained with one man, and never once faltered under the oppressive weight of male adulation, palpable wherever she went. They had something special, something precious, and they knew it, and their awareness of the fragility of what they had never let them take it for granted. But I’ve gone on long enough, and you realise what a remarkable coupling they were comparables within your own sphere of , even if you are denied any friends and acquaintances. lie What was done to them was almost cruel beyond be f, but not quite. I’m yet to find anything cruel beyond belief. I believe to easily, that’s my problem, and cruelty is, by its very nature, boundless, and so anything can be believed of it. Maybe it would be best to begin at the end, and tell you how he finished up. For ten years he was confined to a maximum-security unit for the criminally insane, the sort of place they held Lex Luthor and Hannibal Lecter, but dirtier, noisier, and with enough anguish and hopelessness to choke Pangloss in a second, to finally rid the optimistic fucker of his delusions. When he first arrived he was rarely out of his strait-jacket: he had a habit of breaking his wrists and the bones in his arms by pounding them on walls, tables, anything in his vicinity. This was before they had decided upon the correct medication for his needs. He 734

still felt frustrated and angry after their chemical solution, but just didn’t have the energy or the will to act on those feelings. He knew he had been wronged, and could still remember the things he was forced to see. He longed to scream and howl, to beat and bruise, and break and destroy, to kick and punch, and run and run and run and run… But not enough, he didn’t long for these things enough to do them: he was kept from longing that much. Before it all started, the young man was tied to a chair that had been bolted to the floor. His ankles were fastened to the chair legs and his wrists lashed together behind his back. He sat there continuously asking after her, wanting to know what was being done, pleading for her safety, for her to remain unmolested, for the love of God, for the love of decency, even. He told them to think of their own families, their daughters, wives and sisters, and to keep them in mind when considering their future actions. He went on like this, putting forward his case for clemency, but nobody listened; all they heard was scared drivel, panic buying, and all things immaterial to what was going to happen anyway. Two men brought her into the bunker. Her mouth was gagged and her arms too were tied behind her back. They pushed her down into a chair while they sat either side of her in two additional chairs. There were at this point six people in the room: four male kidnappers, and the special couple. He started asking what they’d done to her, demanding that they remove her gag to allow her to answer him. The men did not react, beyond looking at one another and smiling. The hidden implications of their conspiratorial smiles fried his nerves, crowded his mind with what had been done, what would be done. He tried being quiet, aloof, but how could he, a daddy-long-legs in the palm of a bored and inquisitive child, turn the tables on them? He managed to remain silent for ten seconds before resuming his comforting techniques: how she must keep in mind how much he loves her, as if that thought was to serve as a talisman, an amulet that would protect her from danger and defilement. He believed that he would suffer anything in order to save her from the advances of these men. He genuinely believed it; that’s what love meant, and he felt it more at this time than at any other. They began by stripping him of his clothes, pouring paraffin over his crotch and applying a lighter to the area. The flames engulfed his genitals, chasing his pubic hair down beneath the skin. He screamed, ground his teeth, went berserk in his bindings; all expected reactions were present. At this point, colobosis complete, one of the men removed her gag. The expletives and abuse that poured from her mouth took nigh on ten minutes to run their course. When they had, a proposal was tendered: “If suitable ratification is provided forthwith, we will stop his torture.” Before she had time to answer, he screamed, “Don’t you fucking dare! Don’t you dare give them permission! Whatever they do, you say ‘no,’ whatever, you say ‘no,’ dyu understand? ‘No!’ ‘No!’” “Have you seen Un Chien Andalou?” asked one of the men as he rummaged in a black and silver toolbox. Our man shook his head. “That is a shame. Oh well, can’t get around to everything, I suppose. It’ll just have to be something you miss out on. Get someone to describe it to you one day. But until then I’ll give you a flavour of what to expect.” He pulled a cutthroat razor from the box and, flapping the edge of the 735

blade up and down his leg, went and stood behind the chair. He prized his left eye64 wide, rested the blade on his cheek and looked over at her. “Well?” The young man’s anus started twitching like a fresh bullet wound. “I have to. I have to. They’ll cut you to pieces. I have to. Tell me it’s okay! Tell me! I can’t watch this happen and do nothing. I can’t. I can’t. I won’t. TELL ME! TELL ME!” “…” She attempted a smile, but she couldn’t pull it off: it refused to be sullied. “Well, my sweet, I’m not going to wait indefinitely. Have you come to a decision between the two of you or not?” said the man with the razor. They looked at each other, saying nothing, until she said, “Do it then, and leave him alone.” That was enough for them; they had been getting impatient, and this slightly less than explicit concurrence was considered sufficient. The young man burst into tears and began to moan almost metrically – some kind of mantra-like dirge. He was facing his lap, but was not destined to remain in that position: he had to watch the show they were about to put on, now that his eyes had been spared. One of the men pinned his head back, and forced his eyes open. After he had started watching he couldn’t have stopped even if they’d let him. He was responsible for what she was being subjected to, and the least he could do was watch and share the agony. Those few seconds of silence had resulted in this. First she was stripped down to her underwear and forced to blow them one by one and then two at a time: they grabbed and pushed at the back of her head and thrust themselves into her mouth so hard that she choked and ended up puking on the floor. They accompanied all this with a ceaseless barrage of verbal slights that seemed to fire them up even more: “You know how to handle a cock, girl; who’s been a naughty slut, then?” “You speak Khmer, cunt? No? No? Well here’s hoping you don’t bauk at this.” Pretty soon she was naked and they were spit-roasting her, fucking her arse wide open; she was a dog with two, three and even four backs. They slapped her about a bit towards the end: gave her a few bruises, ripped large clumps of her hair out, and left her nearly as sore as her man’s half-melted genitals. He had to watch as they feasted themselves on her, as they disregarded her delicate cheekbones with punches, as they fisted her without even bothering to take their rings off, as they stirred one another’s porridge time and time again. He tried to dwell on the fact that he still had his eyes, that they had not been sliced open – something that he’d found hard to imagine living through – and that he could still see his wife’s beautiful face, all scuffed-up and crammed full of dick. He was, in effect, dying as he sat there in that concrete bunker, and he could feel himself ebbing away, getting lost in halls of unrecognisable mirror selves. He didn’t know of what, but he could feel an absence, a gaping space where his thoughts echoed endlessly, meaninglessly, for no one. Where were the heightened states of awareness that Dostoevsky had promised me? Where was the flash of realisation that would have me see the abiding value in the everyday world? The shock did not break me free from the rut of my former life, for the shadowy reflection of a grinning man had allowed me space to breathe. THE SECRET CELEBRATION OF EVIL To study evil so as to bring out the good is not to study good in itself. – Lautréamont, Poésies It is not hard to see what’s going on here. I say that now, but as you know, it has taken me some time to get here. How did I miss it? The clues were there all along. How did nobody get here first? Too involved in the game to question the rules, I guess – an age-old problem. Poor old misguided Frank, fancy thinking the clues left in those books and journals were for him, and as for thinking that all those highlighted passages somehow constituted a formula for the resurrection of his dead wife, well… fuck me… the man must have been insane with grief not to see their real purpose. I suppose he can be forgiven, daft chump, for failing to realise the intended recipient of those signals, but how could I have been blind to such a blatant series of winks and nods? Inexcusable really. Anyway, here is a breakdown of my realisation, nine pins in the effigy of mankind, nine plump worms fresh from the belly of my soul: 1. There is a dearth of meaning in the N.W.R.. 2. In the absence of God and death, every N.W.R. citizen has turned to morality. 3. Morality suffered badly at the hands of the personal identity theorists that gave them immortality: in the absence of contingency-free moral agents, there remained nothing left to satisfy the control condition.65 (For remember, your 64 Note: only Lorca’s left eye is visible in Honey is Sweeter than Blood. 736

live options are not up to you.) For with no recipient agent considered morally fortunate for the character they have, and without even the paradox of moral luck in which to invest hope, moral appraisal is largely destroyed, there being no framework left by which to pass moral judgement that is not grounded in mere societal function. 4. The only way for them to take control over their live options and so cling onto morality (once you consider the options in detail) was by unswerving allegiance to the utility principle. For only by committing to the utility principle do you make it your single primary live option, from which subsidiary live options can emerge. The randomised alternative will always have morality playing second fiddle to constitutive factors, always leaving its effectiveness unsubstantiated. 5. A world in which nobody can feel good about themselves unless they are actively maximising happiness is unsustainable. 6. The easiest and most effective way of (seemingly) achieving moral worth is passively, relative to the extreme evil of others. (The old delusion.) 7. The best way of achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number is to make them moral. 8. Therefore, a sub-population of evil-doers should be created in order to (seemingly) elevate the moral worth of the entire population of the N.W.R.. (The old delusion – the blind apotheosis of iniquity – should be reinstated on utilitarian grounds.) 9. Hence the existence of Pavilionstone. (Once again suffering has a moral purpose.) The evil acts in Pavilionstone help create and sustain the moral worth of N.W.R. inhabitants. The less they know about the lives of those in Pavilionstone, their sense of powerlessness maybe, their brain chemistry, the way in which they are cruelly manipulated, etc., the better they feel about their own moral sanitation. None of these moral sloths want evil explained away in terms that leave them morally superior only by chance. Evil, then, is both that which augments the moral status of N.W.R. inhabitants, and that which (once investigated free of bias) they would find themselves to be free of only contingently. Hence, no one in the N.W.R. (bar one or two exceptions) can be aware of the incentives for evil that have been fed into Pavilionstone since its inception. Their speechless horror in the face of evil, combined with their unceasing curiosity concerning the people of Pavilionstone and their foul deeds, suggests that our wickedness fulfils some deep-rooted need within those beyond these walls, elevating them by acting in ways so base as to be beyond their free involvement. It would be abhorrent for them to think of 65 This condition states that people cannot be morally appraised for anything outside their control. And to fall back on Aristotelian theorizing in order to explain constitutive moral luck would be to sidestep the problem altogether, tantamount to a – somewhat implausible – denial of the control condition’s intuitive force and appeal. 737

those they consider evil as benefiting them in any way. But it is, nevertheless, quite apparent that they do. Are they not so very pleased with themselves when they consider the deeds of others to be impossible for them, and are able to label those deeds as immoral in the same breath? The situation would seem to lend credence to there being some (covert) consolation to the thought that in the absence of God they at least have the devil. Nothing reinforces the (seemingly) inherent value of one’s moral sensibilities quite like the exceptionally monstrous behaviour of a small number of people. Pavilionstonians make moral citizens of them all and yet are given no credit for it. How could they give them credit? The work is all theirs, after all. Evil deeds allow citizens of the N.W.R. passive moral worth i.e., an increase in moral status in the purely negative respect that they could not possibly (they imagine) do the said acts. The sound of the world is made up of a few amplified screams and the deafening clamour of slapped backs. For if, as Kant thought, supererogation somehow makes morality appear too hard to attain, then the existence of evil surely makes its attainment all too easy.66 They feel that the full delineation of evil characters still leaves room for alternate choices (that are live options) that they would envisage themselves making. But when they imagine they would have acted differently, had they been them, they cannot really be putting themselves in his/her shoes in a way that is both illuminating and metaphysically palatable: for either they allow themselves to subsume him/her, become subsumed by him/her, or posit the existence of some dubious ‘third entity’…. {Is this born from God’s laughter or his tears?} I could say more, fill in the details a little perhaps, but I can already feel them closing in on me. I feel their hot breath on the back of my neck as I write this line, hear their measured footsteps on the stairs outside as they creep ever closer…. A STREET IN KRISTIANIA They happen upon a winter’s day, but the bright sunshine and the clear sky belie the season, and are enough, if one should wake in the open air, to occasion spontaneous bursts of song. “Is there really nobody that you’ll miss?” says Lakok, trying his hardest to look perplexed. “I lived alone and I worked alone – excluding the odd collaboration with you know who; both my parents were (are?) dead, and I’ve always been woefully neglectful of friends. No, there’s nobody I will miss.” (What he says is true, but he is not saying it because it is true, and his awareness of this causes him to doubt just how true it is.) “Don’t you find that a bit sad?” “No, I don’t find it a bit sad. It seems to me that you are the one with dibs on sadness round here. I can see this for what it is; you on the other hand are forced always to see it for what it is not. But by all means pity me if it helps you to embrace your losses. I’ll even start bleating about how dreadfully empty I feel inside at not having found a good woman to love and sire me many bonny children if it will in any way help alleviate your despair.” “I wasn’t picking a fight.” “That makes it worse.” “I need to talk about them.” “So talk about them.” “I can’t just pretend like they don’t exist.” “They might not.” “What?” “At this particular point in time it is highly unlikely that they do exist. Unless, that is, you’ve noticed some temporal clue that I’ve somehow overlooked. It should be consoling for you.” “Thanks. This will get to you as well.” “You want it to, don’t you? You think it’ll be better for you that way. Well you’re wrong.” “Oh, I’m wrong alright.” “Please, spare me.” “I’m so, so sick of this.” A man approaches Lakok and Triman. He is wearing large, worn-down shoes, and a wretched suit scarred with creases; his hair, greasy clumps of which adorn his shoulders, is so dreadfully thin that if it weren’t for the dirt weighing it down chances are the breeze would make off with it in an instant. He is sobbing loudly. “What’s the matter with you?” asks Triman. The man doesn’t answer. He hides his face in his hands and hurries off in the direction of the docks. “Was there any need for that? What’s wrong with you?” asks Lakok. “Come on! I’m hungry. Let’s go and hunt down some food.” BUNTER’S BECOMING 66 St Thomas Aquinas said it best: ‘If all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe.’ (Summa Theologicae) 738

The creator has committed himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end , the perils risked by his creatures. – Jean Genet, Journal of a Thief Flaubert may have been able to suffer the ills heaped upon his characters by his own hand, but had he ever had to fear being buggered by one of them, had his home ransacked and infested with them, had them assume his name, or continuously taunt him with their independence? Flaubert could have thrown his guts on the floor a thousand times, but it would have remained nothing more than the tired showmanship it had always been. You can put all the detail you like on the page, you can research until your neck is bent and your eyes are blind, but it was a gift of true genius to crawl onto the page with them and have them haunt you, their creator, like so many spoilt and unforgiving children. Charles had this gift. Charles was a writer like no other before him, a true original – a master of words and of creation.67 Every inch of his skin tingled when he thought of himself in these terms, and how else was he to think of himself now? Now was not the time for doubts and insecurities; they’d had their time. They’d been eating away at Charles for too long, scratching away at him, infecting him with poisoned mediocrities and slothfulness. All the times he had been kept from his work by barrages of distraction, all those who had longed to keep him from writing, longed for him to fail, all were nothing to him now. He had done what none of them could even dream of doing. They could all drink his piss. They could line up to suck the shit from his backside save him pushing. They could all fucking pay homage to his brilliance or else turn away shamefaced and say nothing, not a goddamn fucking word. “A book takes me a year to write. It’s too hard work for a revenge.” Charles recalled these words of Maurice Bendrix and chuckled, and tried not to think about just how many years his own revenge had cost him. 67 Unamuno came close in 1914, but ultimately failed to live up to his early promise. His partial success has been much parodied since then, but until now nobody, not even Sorrentino, has been able to take it beyond the playground, beyond theory, beyond. 739

* His mother had been first to suggest it, and he had been working on it ever since. How had she put it? “This girl you’re always mentioning, it sounds to me like she’s messing you about. All her smiles and flashing eyes will come to nothing, or else will come and just as quickly go. Why don’t you advertise for a girl? You could write something nice and put it in the paper; you write so well.” Charles had dismissed it out of hand at the time, but the idea soon began to appeal to him, and he set about writing his advert. What finally sold him on the idea was daydream upon daydream involving him and a mystery woman walking nonchalantly past Beatrice who, with eyes poised to bite, is made to face up to her feelings with dramatic consequences. He decided on an advert that would appeal to a sensual and passionate woman. Charles wanted to cut out the frigid loners and sloppy cardigan crowd that might be tempted to reply. Charles didn’t have time to waste: he wanted a woman who wasn’t going to drone on about herself for hours on end and then patronise him with a dry kiss on the cheek. He wanted someone who knew how to translate the wordless elegance of erotic love, and who could on first setting eyes on him sense what he was about and approve and want. The finished advert read Burroughs is looking for his Vollmer. Writer partial to the lingering kiss of cracked horizons and the crepuscular corners of desire seeks a woman of dark persuasions. Let two soft selves entangle in the terrible pleasures of indeterminate sex and lose themselves in a mosaic of juxtapositions. Let us glut and maw at each other until goose pimples sweep over our bodies like napalm over Vietnamese trees. He predicted that his advert would attract, if not a woman of French descent, then at least one even with a touch of Dutch or Russian – maybe some wild septic tank. He bought the paper the week his advert was due and scurried home with it rolled up under his arm to be near the phone. That first week, following the publication of his advert, he was so preoccupied with what the phone was about to do that he struggled to complete a measly two pages of his novel, a page of which was a rewrite. When the phone did eventually ring it was as if firecrackers were going off in his chest. He’d grab a cigarette, if he didn’t have one already on the go (he wasn’t far off sixty a day at this juncture) light up and, with a deep drag, lift the receiver. The only people to call him that week were his mother and his sister (his embarrassingly insignificant patron), who weren’t, you can imagine, very well received. He cut them 740

off short, excusing his brevity by explaining that he was expecting an extremely important call. After he’d hung up he would feel terribly low for a while. He didn’t know why, but they made him feel like a fake. The sound of their familiar voices, their voices familiar with him, how they perceived him, all these things made him nervous about what he had done, made him unsure about whether or not he had misrepresented himself. These feelings would pass and then he was back waiting, as eagerly as ever, for the phone to bring him back to life. As the weeks went by without response, Charles came to realise just what a dullardinfested backwater it was he was forced to live in. He berated himself for ever having expected to uncover a woman of ardour and sophistication in such a place. It had been too much to ask for this town to throw up even one such woman from its stock of bovine trollops and stiff-limbed scrag-end. Still, it did not stop him from resubmitting his advert when it came up for renewal, although his sense of expectation had certainly diminished by then: he no longer cut short his other callers for fear of missing out. Once again he felt able to sacrifice his writing for the time it took to converse with others who, sadly, had less to engage them. As long as he kept that advert going, the familiar Bring! Bring! of his phone was never routine: it was infused with a judder of unclaimed possibility. Charles relished illness like few other people ever could. He didn’t suffer from Munchausen’s syndrome or anything as laughably desperate as that. No, his was an entirely different form of goodwill towards ill health. He came to look favourably upon short periods of bad health for one reason only: they allowed him a guilt-free respite from the burden of writing. He felt unable to chastise himself for the work he wasn’t doing when he was unwell. He became free to spend days on end cuddled up in front of the TV, sipping on hot toddies, eating wholesome and tasty food (although he was decidedly chagrined if, during a cold, he lost his sense of taste) and smoking as much as he could afford. He would try and catch up on some long overdue reading in addition to these other activities, but in all honesty the only reading he managed was a stunted prelude to sleep. Charles even came to crave the symptoms that gave him time off from all the things he wasn’t doing. Murakami once stressed the importance to his writing powers of a strict regimen of physical exercise. Charles is a traditionalist in this sense, for he is one of those writers who smoke and drink too much, completely disregarding the need for physical vigour. Despite this, people were still disbelieving of his status as a writer. He couldn’t win. Delillo was another one who insisted on taking regular exercise: he would go running after his four-hour morning shift at the typewriter. Maybe there’s something in it. I’d have to get a tracksuit, he thought, and trainers. But what would the man in the blue tracksuit think? He’d see it as direct affront…. Charles would, like Capote, remain a “horizontal author.” 741

The Literary Allure of the White Plague. Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Balzac, Robert Burns, Albert Camus, Guy de Maupassant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dashiell Hammett, Washington Irving, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Johnson, the Brontë sisters, Chekhov, Kant, Keats, Heine, JeanJacques Rousseau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Orwell, Simone Weil, D.H. Lawrence, Goethe, Stephen Crane, Georges Bataille, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Schiller, Kafka, Charles Kingsley, Sidney Lanier, Thomas Mann, Katherine Mansfield, James Elroy Flecker, Somerset Maugham, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Alan Sillitoe, Dylan Thomas, Francis Thompson, Henry David Thoreau, Tolstoy,… (Edgar Allen Poe managed to deflect it onto both his wives instead). In 1837 Sir James Clerk listed the causes of consumption as follows: “improper diet, impure air, deficient exercise, excessive labour, imperfect clothing, want of cleanliness, abuse of spirituous liquors, mental causes and contagion.” Charles had done most, if not all, of the preparatory work already, and still no blood on his hanky. The Poison of the Darkness. (The second most romantic pathogen.) Those known and thought to have trodden the spiral germ staircase, those touched with the spirochete of mad talent include Flaubert, Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant (acquisitive fucker), Nietzsche, Isak Dinesen, Alphonse Daudet, Jules de Goncourt, Arthur Rimbaud, Henry Miller, Oscar Wilde? James Joyce? Laurence Sterne? (another overly-diseased hog in the making)… The Piazza Carlo Alberto was where Nietzsche developed sympathy for browbeaten horses and it broke his brain. And I don’t want to hear about Syphilitic infection, the effects of chloral hydrate, congenital brain disease, or a long-standing mental illness suddenly slipping into full-blown insanity. I want to hear about the sympathy of one man for a whipped horse, sympathy so strong it wrought irrevocable damage between the ears. * The cigarettes began to burn themselves out between his fingers. The skin on the insides of his smoking digits was deep ochre, bordering on black in places and as stiff and as smooth as shoe leather. It got to the point where he hardly noticed the hot ash charring his skin, or the smell of burning flesh riding high in the smoke. He just sat at that infernal tabletop desk staring into a blank sheet of paper willing the words to come, cursing his luck, breaking his mind in two for what he couldn’t get down. The longer he sat there the more convinced he became that he was petrified of his own greatness, that he was still suffering from what could only be an acute case of Jonah Syndrome. Only recently, Charles had enjoyed a short bout of productivity that had been initiated by a premonition concerning his own death. One night, as he was preparing to go to bed, he was suddenly convinced that if he went to sleep as planned he would not wake up again. This particular day he had completed a mere three sentences, none of which, on rereading them, pleased him to any great degree. As he read these sentences over and over a deal was struck with what can only be described as an enforcer of premonitory law (the Kafkan “inflexible hand”). The deal was this: In exchange for each night of sleep from which he would be permitted to wake, Charles promised to complete at least one page, with the additional clause that any Danielewskian (rapid-page-turning) techniques would be met with instant disqualification. That night, Charles sat down and completed his now obligatory page in less than an hour. He did in fact slightly exceed the minimum requirements by some four or five lines. Despite his tiredness, it took him an hour or more to fall asleep. On waking the next morning he remembered the opening lines to a Lightning Hopkins song he had listened to repeatedly in his youth. He too was pleased to be waking and, after making himself a coffee, headed directly for his typewriter. It wasn’t long before Charles recognised that his newly acquired death-dread-drive had distinct affinities with the habits of Wittgenstein, who had himself experienced the selfsame thing. Wittgenstein had encountered death throughout his life: his father had died prematurely, two of his brothers had taken their own lives and, during his early teens, the Austrians in general were disposing of themselves at an alarming rate. He had a morbid fear that all his work would somehow be lost. I too have that fear, thought Charles. Wittgenstein, like Charles, did not fear death itself but the incompleteness of what he would leave behind. He was morbidly afraid of wasting the little time he had left. 742

Incomplete ness is the stamp of human life. Immortality does nothing to rectify incompleteness; it simply makes its essentiality harder to bear. And so I would argue that the hero is not one who, as Wittgenstein wrote, “looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death,” but someone who looks immortal life in the face, real immortal life, not just the image of immortal life. When his brother died, some years ago now, Charles had been saddened. His strongest emotion at that time, however, had been a feeling of terrible smallness. He looked at the piles of books he had taken from his brother’s library some months before his death – his brother, all chewed up with cancer, having lost all interest in reading – and felt small at the pleasure he had derived from rooting through those walls of books and taking whatever he pleased. Of the hundred or so books he had boxed up and transported back to his flat on that day, he had read no more than 5, unless, that is, you count reading a book’s synopsis and its reviews as having read the book itself, which was something Charles tended to do. Charles’s Oblomovism was so utterly unquestionable, so ingrained in his being, that it had caused him to give up on the very book from which the term itself derived, consigning it to dust and to cobwebs having failed to complete the first ten pages. When approaching a book, Charles loved to read the reviews, plot synopsis and literary influences placed on the back cover and the pages preceding the title. It was often the case that he got no further with a book than this rather cursory introduction, although quite often he would read these parts over and over again. Charles sometimes disliked the fact that he was not a more voracious reader, and was on occasion sickened that his compulsion to own great works of literature was stronger than his compulsion to read them. The first of these two compulsions could usually convince him that merely to be aware of their existence, to possess them, and take pleasure in their covers, their bulk, and their prestige, was effort enough. Thankfully, for Charles, these feelings of worthlessness didn’t rise up out of control too often, and when they did he could usually dissuade himself of their legitimacy with a swift deployment of his decidedly polished flair for cynicism. 743

There are people who can consume books the way a champion pie-eater consumes pies. They claim to be able to read a lengthy novel before lunch – Truman Capote was one such person, reading at least five books a week and an average-sized novel in a mere two hours. I am not such a person. I often wish that I were, but I am most assuredly not. When I attempt to read at a pace that strikes me as fast, I lose my way and have to go back and reread the pages that escaped my lamentable attempt to speed-read. When I try to read faster it takes me longer. I have read all my life, and since maturity am not aware of ever having progressed to a quicker pace. I have come to accept that I shan’t ever be able to read a lengthy novel before lunch, not even if I got up in the middle of the night to do so. The result of my accursedly sluggish reading rate is that I regularly flit back and forth between many books at once, sometimes with strange consequences. I don’t have the time to read trash. If I get to the end of a book and find myself thoroughly disappointed with it, I destroy it in a rage, and at every opportunity destroy any other copies I come in contact with, so that I may save others from similarly wasting their time. Is this supremely arrogant on my behalf? Maybe. I prefer to see it as a service to the book-reading public, excluding the avaricious readers who can look out for themselves. I would never trust their recommendations should they ever tender any in my direction, for what sense have they of the commitment I would be making by taking up their (whimsical) suggestions? Will I be struck down before I find the heart of this book (this infernal book that I must write and that has sucked my life into it only to spit it back at me)? I sense I am close to a breakthrough. Arranged in the right way, this book could say it all. Have I the time to arrange it thus, to make the few additions and depletions necessary for my name to be synonymous with literary brilliance? The wheels of the tape rotate like hypnodisks, drawing me back in…. It was 4:37 in the afternoon. The telephone rang. Charles cursed his luck and reluctantly got straight up from his chair in mid-sentence. He lifted the receiver as the third ring died in his eardrums. “Hello?” he said impatiently, expecting it to be his mother or his sister on the other end. “…” “Hello? Hello?” “Burroughs? Is that Burroughs?” a woman’s voice blurted out shakily. “What? Sorry I… Who’s speaking please?” “Vollmer! It’s Vollmer – in answer to your ad.” “…” “Hello? Are you still there?” “Oh yes… right… sorry. That was a while ago.” Electric eels were writhing about in his guts, churning up the French onion soup and cheese croutons he’d had for lunch. He dived for his cigarettes and lighter. “Want to meet, then?” 744

Apprehension was threatening to swallow him up: your bluff has been called; put the receiver down now! Hang up! Say NO! Say NO! “Yes…that’d be good.” She asked for his address. He told her and she said she’d be there at eight, and then the static deadness of the dialling tone. He got up from the settee in a daze and walked over to the drawer where the advert was kept. It wasn’t there. He heard something fall to the floor in the kitchen. He grabbed his trusty poniard, that at times like these he took with him from room to room, and went to investigate. The curtains were moving. On the floor at his feet was the advert. He picked it up and rushed back to the settee and read it inside out. It was clear. The advert made it clear what was could be u expe cted. She nd er no illusions as to what a meeting would mean. Charles was a lump of cramping muscle. He was finding it difficult to smoke enough and the whisky/superbrew combos were failing to achieve their usual, stultifying, end. He was unable to sit still. He took a bath and cleaned his teeth. His gums bled profusely. The TV blared somewhere in the distance. He began scouring his Burroughs for something to use as an icebreaker, some slice of sordid sexuality to set the mood. He couldn’t find anything that he could actually imagine himself saying with any authority. He didn’t have the right voice for those words. With minutes to go, the words in his head become fragmented and strangely disassociated from one another; he becomes unable to structure sentences properly. It is as if someone has come along and taken a bolt cutter to the links that hold words together in meaningful groups. He is standing behind the front door to his flat with his finger poised over the intercom button. His anus is blinking like a tired eye. He has developed Parkinson’s, dyslexia, an irregular heart beat, hydrophobia, and a brain tumour all in the space of a few hours. What would she make of him? What could she make of him? There was only so much for her to go on. He offers up prayers for her to arrive late to gods that he now suspects don’t even believe in him. He looks at his watch: it reads 7:59. He will give her only two minutes more, by which time she will be officially late and he will be justified in not answering the door. He 745

tries to count to 120 in his head, but continually loses his place. Finally 8:01 arrives with no noise from the buzzer and he has a way out. He makes his way back to the settee, determined not to answer the door should she arrive. This decision made, he wonders why he doesn’t feel any calmer. If anything, her being overdue makes him feel worse. Why hasn’t everything gone back to normal, now that he has turned his back on this ill-advised liaison? Where is the titanic sense of relief that is owed him? And why is he still lighting cigarettes up off their forebears when his throat is as raw as a smile up Grope Cunt Lane? He tastes blood and licks the back of his hand. He wonders whether the red streak across his knuckles came from his gums or his enflamed throat. But he has no time to come to a conclusion before the buzzer blurts out its noise and sends Charles into a state of near apoplexy. He gets up from the settee and makes his way back to the door, still convinced that he has no intention of buzzing her in. It buzzes again and he presses the button to speak. He says nothing. He can hear her breathing into the intercom. He can’t speak. Maybe the blood on the back of his hand is all that is left of his tongue. He takes his finger off the button, and then presses it back in again. “Can you hear me?” He could. He could most certainly hear her. No problems hearing her at all. The intercom was doing its job. She spoke and he heard. Yes, he was hearing her alright; he was sure of that. That hadn’t been so bad. What had all the worry been about? “Com I can inter the loud blood of tongues in clear breaths.” “You can what?” “Nerves all wrong and hoarse from smoking red teeth… I catch frightened words in dead throat phlegm.” “I see. Can I come in?” “Too blurred in booze and indecision, can’t tell.” “Too much Dutch courage, eh?” “Late!” “Don’t tell me you’ve sacrificed a pinky already. Come on, buzz me in!” The buzzer is pressed. The catch is slipped for her foot on the door, and he’s let her in. She’s straight up the stairs with her pink knee-length boots and her cunt unwashed from the last fat, bug-eyed invertebrate with grubby-fingered hands that had opted to filch her sweaty micro-biotic filth. She’s here for more of the same, for stale corruptions, her enema of dirt and semen. Charles is blacking out behind the door. He’s adding blindness to his list of marauding malfunctions: “How late she was, how late.” (Borges suffered from a form of congenital blindness. Did Joyce go blind? Jack Clemo did, and deaf too if I remember correctly. Schultz died.) He can hear knocking, as deafness is yet to come his way. He puts the door on the latch and heads back through a smog of bad sight and dense cigarette smoke to his dent in the settee, where he settles unsettled and waits for her to come join him, to laugh and to leave. “There you…You! Charles?” No names, no past, bottled water, good cheese and butter, plenty of butter and silence, wasn’t that the deal with these things? He nods, untrusting of his tongue, should it 746 be anything but pulp.

“Don’t you recognise me?” she asks, her mouth pulsating like a rubber meatbox. He recognises her as his friend’s manufactured and increasingly wayward wife, known to give pieces of her self to all comers, as Lewd Lizzie, Loose Lizzie, Lap-twitch Lizzie, Lice-lips Lizzie, Lizzie the Light of no man’s Life. He nods again. “So, Billy Bunter Burroughs, what dyu think you’re gonna do to me? Where are you hiding these terrible pleasures and goose pimples you promised me? Not too bold now are you, fat man?” She stands in front of him. Charles refuses to look up at her. He stares down at the floor between his shoes. “Gonna leave all this to me are you?... I’ll get my own drink shall I?” She picks up the tumbler that Charles has been drinking from for the past 3 hours and half fills it with whisky. She sits down in the armchair and slurps at her drink, scanning the room as she swallows. “So, blubberguts, you ever do anything but read? Do you fuck, fat man? You gonna fuck me dizzy, big guy, push me out there with your fancy words? Well? Don’t you wanna rid yourself of some of that mutton fat you’ve been busy building up?” Charles raises his head an inch or two, “Might do.” “Might you now. Well I’m all wet at the prospect, stud.” Charles reaches down for his cigarettes. “Cigarette me, big boy.” She says. Charles pokes one in her puckered mouth and lights it. She drains it halfway down in a single drag before dropping it on the floor and crushing it out with her foot, at which point Charles attempts to light his own. “No time for smoking, lardie: this place stinks of shit and if I don’t get to it soon I’m gonna end up fucking embalmed in this foul little coop of yours. But before we start, I’ve got a present for you,” she says, walking towards him with a gift-wrapped parcel in her hands. She gives it to him and watches as he picks nervously at the edges of the sticky tape. “Use this,” she says, offering him his own poniard. “No, no, don’t play with it! Plunge it right in! 747

Cut into it!” Charles does as he is told and slices deep into the middle of the present. Blood begins to pour out onto the carpet. Charles throws the punctured parcel to the floor and wipes the blood off on his trouser leg. “What the fuck is that supposed to be?” “Don’t you know, Butter Belly Burroughs? Why it’s the future.” She laughs until the stitches in her arm begin to shake themselves loose. He is still doubled up, his hands resting on top of his cigarette packet, when she pushes him head first to the floor. She undoes his belt and drags his trousers down to his knees. (Deep southern drawl): “Rise and shine, rise and shine… Now let’s see if we can’t find that bullet hole.” She slaps her hands down on his arse, hands pockmarked with cigarette burns, and peels those anaemic slabs of flesh apart to reveal a screwed up eye framed with dirty lashes. “Aha. So this is where you wear them two symmetrical warts.” She sticks her tongue right in. She eats into his hole like a startled ferret. She raises her head up from the spoils, all gasps and green growls, a lioness up for breath from the inside of some animal’s splayed ribcage dripping her blood beard. “You ready to kiss your shitter, fat man?” She pushes his floppy buttocks to one side as you would an empty plate. With a thud, she is on Charles and giving him a taste of processed crab and chips. Delving under his stomach she catches hold of his works. “Cummon…where’s your sting at, jellyfish?” Cold skin on her forehead, limpness between the lips, the hum of scaly perspiration in her nostrils, and off with a shoe and a sock before working his hard-skinned yellow toes into her. “You’re not big everywhere are you, Charley!” she says, grabbing hold of his foot and driving the awkward contours deep inside her, squealing as his thick toenails cut into her soft walls. “Going to fuck you now! Going to fuck you now!” “Is that right, stud?” “Yes, yes it is.” “Don’t you want to be getting yourself a prick first, my tame little jellyfish?” Charles struggles to get up. She is sitting astride his foot with her hand pushing down into his spongy guts, but eventually he manages to dislodge her – not, it must be said, as a result of his strength, but rather the disabling hilarity his efforts at sexual dominance have occasioned. (A sentence, many times read, flashed across his consciousness: The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence.) 748

Up on his knees, with his trousers at his ankles, his shirt hanging down over his manhood, his arsehole damp, and the shit in his mouth, he rams his podgy fist in e by h r taste of t her o face. It takes surprise. Precum dangles from his prick like snot from a young boy’s nose – to Charles, it almost feels like blood from a wound. She smiles at him in admiration. Her nose begins to bleed into her mouth, and her eyes water. She reaches out her good arm to congratulate him, and he flinches away. She gets down on her hands and knees, closes her eyes, tips her head back as far as it will go and waits for him. “Why are you looking up there? He isn’t even in, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She remains silent, and finally he gets around to mauling away the rest of her clothes. The sight of her right arm, dangling ineffectually with its grey skin bound with that thick rope-like scar, conjuring up those absurd spasmodic appendages that once hung off the front of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, contributes to his feeling less conscious of his own unattractiveness, giving him cause to be a trifle freer with the opportunity he has been presented with. Charles fumbles around trying to enter her, grunting and groaning in an alarmingly piggish fashion. He lifts up his gut in order to see the intercourse taking place: like his hero, Balso Snell, his body has broken free of the bard. He is ape-genius Tenzer! Her silence is making him uneasy, so he begins pounding his fists into her ribs and shoulder blades in an effort to excite some noise from her. She obliges with a series of winded moans and phrases of mock encouragement. Before long he is spitting his sauce down the back of her bruised thighs and leaning his body up against the armchair, wheezing and coughing uncontrollably. He watches her crawl off on all fours, her cunt yawning back at him as she goes. He peers over the top of the settee and watches her wriggle under his tabletop desk. He is grateful of the chance to gather himself, out of sight of her. He collects up his clothes and quickly sets about reattaching them to his clammy body. Once having dressed, he sits crosslegged on the floor and lights up a much needed cigarette. His head is thumping ferociously, and the left side of his face is going numb. He puts his hand up to his left temple and feels the pulse of the pain through his fingertips. He tries to relax and enjoy the obvious comparisons that now exist between himself and the late Henry Miller, writ- ers and sexual predators both. Charles thinks that maybe he too would begin work on a trilogy, and gets the urge to return immediately to his writing. But, remembering the naked woman crawling about his flat on her hands and knees, he decides to wait a while. He can hear muffled laughing and giggling. He can also hear her talking, but cannot make out the words being said. Scuffling sounds are coming from over by the tabletop desk, under which she is now lying on her back. All Charles can see from his side of the room is 749

her head and neck poking out one end. She begins rocking her head from side to side, and then suddenly arches her throat in the air, dragging her crown along the floor towards the base of her neck, where she holds it for a second or two before relaxing her position with a whimper. She is playing with herself. No, wait! Her hands are tightly wrapped around the table legs. She keeps looking down and talking to whatever it is that is between her legs. Blake is there. He is there going down on her under his very nose. Had he been the real reason she came over? How could he be? Blake is uglier than week-old road kill. What would she want with him? Why had he allowed her into his home? His head starts crashing again, vengeful at having been overlooked. “Get out! Get out now, both of you!” “What was it Walt Whitman said? ‘I find no fat sweeter than that which sticks to my own bones.’ Yes, that’s it. Looks like old Charley boy there took him literally.” Cacophonous laughter from beneath the tabletop desk, which is now rocking violently from side to side. He notices at least two different types of laugh, and is half sure of a third. Blake would run off if Charles made his way over there: he is gutless. And the other laugh, well he can’t be sure – it is probably her playing games. He’d taken his first step when he heard a familiar voice say: “Lizzie tells me she’s moistened you up back there, Charley. I may just come over and take a look for myself.” He runs to his bedroom, flying off the walls as he goes. Once inside he slams the door shut, turns the key in the lock, rips it out of the door and places it in his pocket. He grabs a tissue from the box beside his bed and stuffs it into the keyhole. He moves over to the window, opens the curtains, and slides the sash up as far as it will go. If they attempt to break down the door he’ll yell for help and, if it comes to it, jump out. He hears motorcycles revving their engines, drowning out the noise of apocalyptic screams seeping through the bricked-up windows and doors of a house somewhere in the distance. He sees rapists and murderers holed up with their trophies in snailback caravans, hamburger shots blue-tacked to the wallpapered walls…. Nabokov once wrote that “the true conflict is not between the characters in a novel, but between author and reader,” thus overlooking the relationship between author and character, which, as Charles was fast finding out, can prove anything but harmonious – especially if, like Charles, you were able to write yourself into a higher reality. 68 Come morning, the flat was quiet. It took Charles a week to find the pluck to enter his living room. For Murakami, the sign of a true writer is his ability to transport himself into the scenes he creates, to feel, to smell, and to know these fictional realms first hand, not merely as their originator, but as someone who has actually existed for a time within them, however disturbing they may prove to be. This selfproclaimed true writer allows his work to slip beneath his skin in order that he may faithfully confront his subject matter. If this is really the mark of the authentic writer then Charles can laugh him and his metaphorical identifications out of town. Charles is the zograscopic-fingered master. Charles is the man to beat. Murakami couldn’t even see his shirttails let alone catch at them. Charles was method-writer king, a serpent with plumes of lettered gold. In 1947, a drawing appeared in Tintin magazine depicting Hergé enslaved by a whip-wielding Tintin and a menacing, bone-munching Snowy. Hergé sits at a desk littered with drawings, hard at work, his face resolute and framed in perspiration. The intended meaning is obvious – Hergé felt burdened by the success of his characters and the expectations that such success brings with it – and the device for illustrating it rather hackneyed, but I’d like to concentrate on a rather subtler point of detail. For in this picture, Hergé’s characters are as real as he is and yet still they pressurise him as if their reality depended on his continuing to create them, despite the fact that they already exist in a reality in which he can draw only pictures of them. They are his ontological equals, and yet still they concern themselves with their artistic incarnation. However, the truth here is not that the writer has somehow bestowed a higher level of existence on these two characters, by somehow dragging them from the page into the real world, but that the characters 68 He once assaulted a man twice his age because he happened to suggest that Kinbote had invented Shade. The offending man, infirm enough to have to rely on the support of two rubber-tipped canes, had not realised that Charles was a committed Shadean – when he wasn’t a Botkinite – and seeing the fury in his eyes recanted his claim almost immediately. But the damage had been done, and having pushed him to the floor it was as much as Charles could do to refrain from giving him a taste of his sole. 750

already exist at a higher level, a more complete state of being: Tintin and Snowy, then, are protecting their literary existence, their life as art, the zenith of their reality. He’d heard of many novelists who claimed to write blind, letting their novels work themselves out as they go along and pulling them together very near the end of the writing process. Charles was panicking that he’d let his work go unfettered too long for him to ever be able to contain it, to rein it in, to see where it was all leading. Everything led somewhere, even if it led somewhere else afterwards, and even if that somewhere else wasn’t somewhere else at all. He had watched it grow, but into what he could not tell. It was out of his control now; the book had taken over. To discover the truth is not merely to find it, but to partially create it. All great discoveries are creations so compelling that they must be made true. For it’s not really about truth; it’s about survival. THE DISCARDED PETRI DISH It wasn’t easy watching Elizabeth fall from grace. The areas of my project where I had been successful came back to haunt me. To some not inconsiderable extent, my project had achieved its goals. I had managed to import most of Elizabeth’s characteristics and memories (her peculiarized consciousness, if you will) to another human being, and so secretly pass off death as wholesale memory loss. It had taken years to achieve, and she very nearly got there. She got so close. So much was implanted into her circuits that you’d be hard-pushed to regard it a failure, and for a time I didn’t. I made the best of it. I tried to switch off doubt, but... I made the best of it. I watched her wink Elizabeth’s wink. The way she did it – a snapshot of a stroke – was consummate. I watched her wink at all sorts of lecherous lowlife, from hircine teens with an itch to scratch, to sullen old men one fuck from the dirt. I had stopped making the best of it by then, sick of the making, I guess. I watched as she deployed that approximated smile and the laugh she had down, and I loathed her as Elizabeth began to die behind my eyes. I’d reduced her to a formula, ingredients in a potion, the list of instructions in an instruc- tion manual, a diagrammatic pamphlet for assembly of a flat-pack cabi assi g stin the n in g et. I had done her justice; I had nurtured and suckled her her fled ling state. She was made type. But not by me. I merely utilised her abstract essence: passed like a baton through 751

the ages, the relentless survival machine of self-consciousness had already freed her from the threat of absolute non-existence. I knew her, knew who she wasn’t. She exuded some mephitic aura that only I seemed to be witness to and which prevented me from thinking of her in any intimate way. Everybody else adored her. But then why wouldn’t they: she was as loose as a drunkard’s tongue, and twice as vulgar. There are ants on her bodice. Her left hand is hitching up her dress. Or maybe she is just scratching her thigh. She is whey-faced, chalky, sepulchral, a face somehow content in death as it looks out on life. She stares as if awaiting something, her breasts bared, her nipples primed to suckle new life, poised precipitously on the edge of her bodice. A necklace of amber hoops with an amber pendant and a teardrop pearl hangs around her warped neck. She holds a mirror, is uncertain, demure, somehow seeking approval from her own reflection that somehow isn’t hers at all. She is met with a stoical blankness. The second face is not for her, but for us. This face – male I presume – sniffing the air, appears to be relishing some exquisite bouquet. The eyes are closed and the lips crinkle a tickled satisfaction. The face is making its way from reflection to reality, but is always, we imagine, destined to remain unseen. Amber: that resinous curator of bugs, freezing time in the shapw of its victims. And the pearl, let us not forget the pearl, formed surreptitiously within the shell of some bivalve mollusc, fashioned in the dark, unwatched in the shadows of the shadowiest of places. A thing of beauty secreted in the dark. (There are no pearls of wisdom, no pearls in the mind. There is only the sheen that hides the worm.) Coco was a last resort for Elizabeth. “ o m P r sychosu gery,” as he put it, “achieves its st rewarding results on those with nothing to lose and e find, those tortured by self-con ce v in eryth g to rn.” He said he could dig her out, dig her free from 752

the clutter of cerebral espionage to which her true self was forced to play refugee. With a simple twist on the orbital leucotomy he promised a new sense of wholeness. “A fractional operation is sometimes the only way to unite the fractions,” he said and waited for her to smile before he laughed. As far as Coco was concerned the operation went well. About an hour after coming round from the anaesthetic she claimed not to notice much difference, apart from the headache and the scars. “That’s to be expected,” he said “after all, if you can notice a difference in yourself, I haven’t done my job properly now have I!” She was well aware that he’d fucked her while performing the surgery: he’d had his hand inside her and his knob out of his fly before she’d even gone under. But she didn’t bring it up. She let him get away with it. She walked through the house like a heavy-footed ghost wearing too much make-up. She had on Elizabeth’s fluffy pink kitten heels. Her right arm hung limp and grey at her side, a bulbous scar encircling her forearm. The nails on her hands and feet were painted a cool cerise – the bloodless hue of her right hand setting the colour off a treat. Her hair had been set in large swooping curls that fell about her haggard face luxuriantly. An electric blue chemise covered the cicatrices that networked her stomach and her back far better than it concealed her erect nipples and chubby thighs. And it could have ended so differently. Frank didn’t move much now. He just sat around the house. People came and went. Sometimes he would talk with them for a while before they went upstairs, and sometimes he wouldn’t speak at all. Cold. It’s cold. Fucking wear warm clothes anymore. No, best . not to………………… to freezing. Best Can’t not best just to try and disappear. Lots of them coming across to the people house here. 753 now. All Always his coming fucking

sh its milling around sniffing for cunt, my cunt. Feckless, old and ugly men with ugly shrivelled-up minds, ugly shrivelled-up dicks. Sloppy paunches press- ing into my back, and boozy breath wafting over my shoulder feel and smell like what they are: unnecessary foreplay. I’m a slut, a tramp, Frank’s whore, a sex-doll with a pulse, free minge. Got to keep moving. Got to keep on the move, stopping too dangerous. Frank still all the time now, doesn’t look happy. Frank is troubled. Frank doesn’t seem to see me anymore. The windows are always open. They come at me from all angles, at all times, and not always alone. These little men get more adventurous, more daring with me. They are less ashamed of splaying open their minds on my flesh. Frank walks through me now as if I were a shadow. The fat man with the hair like a clown disgusts me. He can’t even find his cock let alone get it up. (The blood of his genius?) He often just shoves a hand up inside me and wanks himself off with the other, panting his way through erotic verses from Verlaine – I think he said it was – until finally curling up into a shameful ball like some pink woodlouse. His distended gut falls down onto his thighs. He sits in that shitty lit- tle flat of his like a capon ten years late for the plate.… 754

My experiment would come back to the house every now and then to catch up on sleep. I would let her in and she would find a place to flake out for anything up to 2 days. I usually left her alone, let her sleep, but the others would go up and see her. She had never been back long before I heard knocks and the distinctive rattling sound of people letting themselves in the front door. The telephone rang and rang, and rang, and rang, and carried on ringing in my ears long after it had stopped ringing outside of them, but still I didn’t pick it up. I am so tired of watching. They tell me she has scabs on scabs down there – her vagina and anus are said to have fused into a hard wound – and will soon be good for nothing but intra-crural sex if she is not seen to. (The sight of her diseased cunt would have had Peter Sutcliffe drooling like a hydrophobic sex fiend, as he reminisced about long days spent at the wax museum transfixed by the variant grotesqueries of venereal infection.) Ladies lost in sluttish mores can feel no touch through scabs and sores. And as the local gents bemoaned, Between the legs of calf and thigh, these pretty seaside girls would die. * Do you hear the things they say with our words, yours and mine? And you a part of it, unable to turn away. It eats your flesh, your skin: a suit of lice and fleas. Sullen men with blue spots on their hands and forearms, with black fingers and crooked teeth, snap the necks of baby seagulls and throw them into drains thick with vomit. And I see you, always through the clawed hand of this spell, this incantation of black tongues and eyes, of spider fangs and starling hearts. The circuitry of motherhood turns babies inside out: designer dissectoids wearing their organs as jewellery, their parts laid out like a picnic blanket. Where’s your appetite? You ate earlier, I suppose, with your eyes closed and needles under your nails. And now you are full, glutted with heavens and empty hearts, with ghosts in the labyrinths of your lungs, breathing for you, taking your air from the throats of lynched men, from subway rapists with bowie knives between their victims’ legs. There are feet just like yours that once trudged through the soft faces of dead soldiers on their way to war, smell of flak and mutilation in the monkey-puzzle trees…. ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE It could have been just another street lined with houses and bent saplings, and it was and it wasn’t. A middle-aged man with his waist pouring out over his trousers pushes a mower up and down a lawn that doesn’t appear to need mowing. A woman with her hair in a net looks out at him from the house, her hands washing plates in the kitchen sink, her head nodding mindlessly up and down. Another woman tends her rose bushes with gloved hands and pristine secateurs. Legs protrude from beneath cars, children cry over grazed knees, people sit and read papers in the sun, and none of it means that much to Triman: a rather dull five minutes, maybe the chance of food or a quiet dump. Within seconds Lakok is running up the street at full pelt. Triman makes a half-hearted effort at pursuit and then gives up, shouting after him that he’ll see him in five. Lakok doesn’t hear him. Triman doesn’t even exist for him as he runs, his left hand clasped to his right side playing nursemaid to a stitch. He is refusing to entertain the thought that what he is about to do might in any way be considered selfish or cruel, that they would be better off not seeing him at all than to see him so fleetingly. He is thinking only of being reunited with them and that the faster he runs the more time he will have in their company. 755

He is thinking of what he will say to them, of whether or not to put a brave face on it for their sakes. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to do that. What he mustn’t do is waste cious pre- time bawling into his wife’s chest. How long left? Fuck. Triman has the stopwatch. He glances down at his own watch and gives himself four more minutes, taking him to twenty to the hour. He turns a corner and is in his street. He slams his heels past seven houses, leaps over his wall into his garden (as he used to do on those occasions when, already late for a lecture, he had been forced to return home for a forgotten item) and throws himself, fists pounding, at his front door. When he can no longer feel sensation in his little fingers, he quits thumping the door and squats for a moment, sucking down some long overdue air. His breathing steadied, he drops to his knees and hollers his wife’s name through the letterbox. Hearing nothing, he lowers his head fractionally and sees his wife’s coat hanging from the heavy oak newel post in the hallway. What’s the date? He dashes back out onto the street and collars the first person he comes across: a man in Bermuda shorts who should know better than to wear any kind of shorts. “What’s the date?” “Urm… not exactly sure. Hey, don’t I know you?” “The month?... Year then, what year is it?” “I’ve seen you someplace; I’m sure of it. Are you on TV?” A whole ten seconds later the man somewhat grudgingly informs Lakok of the month and the year and walks off, turning back at intervals, distrusting his questioner’s intentions. Lakok glances at his watch and trudges back to his garden wall and sits down. Lakok has less than two minutes to go in a day that he now knows, having just been brought up to date, is approximately eight months later than the day he disappeared from their lives. He stares down at the second hand on his watch as it ticks away his hopes. His feet shuffle backwards and forwards like a toy robot. He feels a cool breeze chill the skin behind his ears and enjoys the sensation in spite of his misery, which angers him momentarily. The big hand has quietly broken into the final minute. He waits for that second with a sense of anesthetised dread. He can’t go on with this much longer and he can’t not. He longs for a time when insanity will tear through his brain, ridding him of this depressive terror, cutting him free from the spurs of disillusionment. “Daddy! Daddy! Mum, look! Look!” shout his daughters in unison from down the street. Lakok is on his feet and running towards them before they can process their eyes. They freeze to the spot, agog, their chins hanging about like abandoned swings. Lakok is shouting to them, but they can’t make out what he’s saying. The youngest of his girls breaks free from her elder sister’s hand and runs towards him in a fumbling sprint. As she approaches, Lakok slows down and drops to his knees, arms outstretched. She leaps as if into his arms, and then hovers in the air for a moment before her knees and the heels of her hands come crashing down to earth, shedding some layers of skin as they slide up the street. She is too amazed to bawl, too banjaxed even to acknowledge the stinging sensation in her tattered knees and hands. After scrambling to her feet she looks back at her mother questioningly, accusatively, as if she had somehow had a hand in making her daddy disappear, had conjured him away at the last minute 756

as part of one of those hoaxes habitually heaped on children by their parents. (Like that time when her mother had told her that the bin in their kitchen was alive and that it ate their plate scrapings.) “Where’s he gone?” she screams at her mother, her voice beginning to break up around the edges. “I think we must have been seeing things,” says her mother without much conviction. “We always see things, but they don’t just up and disappear,” says the older sister. “I didn’t mean it like that.” “So where is he? Where did he go?” “I don’t know.” “Don’t you?” the youngest mutters sceptically, pawing at her knees, knees that have now begun to miss their missing layers. THE ABATTOIR SHUFFLE The deeper one digs one’s grave, the more silence one achieves. – Franz Kafka Sleep dismantles me and I’m back there. And there are vacant streets, with lifeless cafes and bars for death has got in. I can smell its cloying paws and hear its murmur sucking air from weary lungs. I can taste the dead in the air. And all this is there for me on my return. But I’m loath to seek them out, the insipid dipping of their hollow chests, their barely palpating nos- trils like snuffers cooling in the dark. And yet still I look, for I’m back and I have tales to tell. 757

s I find them in their darkened rooms, amid soiled, bedraggled beds, but find not one with words to spare or ear to lend. I find the insects moved in: they’ve come to suckle and to glut, and so I peer into rapidly despoiling kitchens, dripping and gurgling as they do, and sense my own intrusiveness as the rooms’ many-legged occupants cease what they are doing and level their boggle eyes and stroboscopic antennae in my direction. And the same is true wherever I go: bodies digesting themselves, the maddened heaving of laboured respiration, loose skin the colour of bad eggs, the stench of bad breath of bad dreams, deserted streets with rows of empty cars and leaf-choked gutters… On one occasion, in the bedroom of an isolated and dispirited mansion house, I came across an ant the size of a large cat d fucking the bejesus out of some wretched young girl. She was on all fours, the huge ant poun ing its abdomen into her twat, her head engulfed in a suffocating veil of clacking cockroaches…. And so it is I continue to broach this barrage of rot. For this is what the world of good death looks like. I happen on a woman, alone in bed, her hair lying in clumps about the pillow like some fibrous halo, her balding scalp alive with lice, a spider poised over her right eye like a mortuary attendant’s trembler. (After closer inspection I’m still not sure whether they are Pediculus humanus capitis as I had first thought, or Pediculus humanus humanus – lice of disaster and want. I’m pretty certain they aren’t crab lice or Pthirus pubis as her hair isn’t coarse enough to attract them – she would probably have an infestation of them lower down, but I lack the inclination to check.) I shout in her ear; I shout, “I’m back and I have something to i say.” She stirs and turns her head and a few more strands of mousey hair sl p quietly free from her lepidote scalp. I can’t cry at any of this, although it feels as if my temples might crack in two as some compensatory measure. When night arrives the darkness is complete, unless weak from it I opt to illuminate some small corner, as is sometimes the case. But, more often than not, I sit and choose to haunt myself with what I can no longer see, and somehow find it preferable to the seeing. I sit and stare into the treacly obscurity and long for things I’m yet to witness, for things that I couldn’t possibly accommodate should they ever present themselves. I try, in vain, to lose myself in a fitting mantra of “Black here now.” I try and fail; the failure is in the trying. I sit in armchair after armchair in numerous different homes, their owners shrinking to nothing in upstairs rooms, and find myself assailed by all manner of unspoken utterances. Cellars, basements, bunkers, dungeons, undergr o und cavities play on my mind. You will no doubt have taken note of this along the way. I have a crippling dread of them and what they can do, what they hide. They harbour opportunities of evil. I’ve thought a lot about why I should feel this way. Charles Belie v es it may signify a melancholic terror of death. (Edvard Munch once said, “Death is pitch dark. […] To die is as if one’s eyes had been put out and one 758

cannot see anything anymore. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.”) He could be right. I have things to tell now, things that you’ll want to know. But I’m afraid, afraid – I know you’ll be disappointed in me, for this is not why I was chosen – afraid that if I relay it, and the fear now consumes my thoughts to such a degree that my meal times are dictated by the temporary stilling of my hands, afraid that you’ll see no necessity to liberate me from here once I’ve told what I have to tell. I’ve never before had reason to suspect you’d neglect me in this way, but fear has a way of siring reasons from the most impotent of materials, and my reasons define me. After all, who am I to set myself apart from them? Then that silence came – that juddering, numinous silence that refuses to make sense of noise. MILWAUKEE: 924, NORTH 25TH STREET, APARTMENT 213 “Where did you get to?” “…” “What’s the matter? Another crisis?” “What do you mean by that?” says Lakok. “You do have your moments. I think my grandmother must have suffered from something similar. We all used to call them her ‘spells.’ Whenever it happened the family would collectively shrug its shoulders and pronounce that she was having one of her spells again.” “Are you fucking kidding me?” “The two cases are not entirely dissimilar.” “Let me get this straight: here I am floating around in time and space for an eternity, ripped away from my family now for a second time and you choose to compare me to some loony old bat shit-faced on port and lemons.” “She was more of sherry drinker, but anyway… So you saw your family again. That’s where you ran off to.” “Yes.” “I would have advised against it, had you bothered to bring it to my attention.” “…” “I mean look at you; you’re a mess. I hate to imagine what your family must have gone through/are going through/will go through. You must have been aware that it would end in nothing but misery all round. You must have known that – right?” “I think from now on I’ll get as far away from you as possible. That way my ‘spells’ of moroseness won’t be such a burden on you, and I won’t have to put up with you agitating me in order to deflect your own fears. You can get somebody else to distract you from your failing strength of character, if you can find anybody at such short notice.” “So the worm has teeth, after all,” says Triman. “You don’t fool me.” “It’s not my intention to fool anyone.” “Nobody except yourself.” “If it makes it easier for you.” 759

“Nothing you do or say can make any of this easier for me, but that’s not the issue. I’ve never attempted to hide the fact that I find all of this horrific. It’s you, you’re the one that refuses to accept the gravity of this curse we are under.” “What you fail to grasp is that there was nothing of note that I left behind. So do me a big favour and spare transferring onto me anymore of your grizzling inadequacies. Think you can manage that? Better still, do as you’ve threatened and avoid my company whenever possible. There is no need to run, by the way, because I won’t be following.” “It’s not just that. It’s not what’s left as much as what’s still to come. What of the hideous claustrophobia of our unending futures? What of the fractured manner in which we’re forced to live out those futures?” “What of an eternity of opportunity?” “You can’t believe that. What’s wrong with you?” “We can’t all think alike.” “About some things, that’s exactly what we can do. There’s a definite sense of universality about the emotions I recognise, and that you fail to recognise.” “Think of it as one long experiment… Is that you?” “Is what me?” “That smell.” “No” “Jesus.” “Look, the thing is… I just don’t have a head for all this, and…” “Well don’t despair! Try one of these on for size!” AT HOME WITH THE RIPPER Elizabeth had been broken down, shoddily rebuilt and then abandoned. In order that she might be true to herself, she began living according to her instincts, never dwelling excessively, if at all, on what course of action to take. She let her mouth speak for her, dutifully following its lead. So when she was offered board and lodgings in exchange for posing for a series of specialist photographs, her tongue agreed to the terms and conditions before she’d had time to think. She followed her mysterious benefactor to his home, all the while waiting on another decision to take place that befitted the qualmish sentiment struck dumb within her belly. (I looked for her along the seafront. The moon bobbed in the sea, mouth agape gasping for air. I skirted around the back of boarded-up seafood stalls, kicked through fish heads, crab shells and wooden forks, but found no sign of her. I picked my way through the verminous cobbles to a light at the back of a fishmonger’s yard. I could hear grunting and panting. I peered through the open gateway and lying on a gutting table was a young woman with gor- 760

geous dark curls teeming over her shoulders, a hairy arse bouncing between her thighs. One hand clutched at her lover’s ribcage, while the other massaged another man’s cock as he tugged abusively at her jumper. She looked straight at me, almost apologetically, as if pleading. I tried to decipher the peculiar look in her eyes, before suddenly it dawned on me who she was: the daughter of that prick upstairs. I crept away before either of the men spotted me. I started to laugh: that prick. I carried on walking. Behind me I could still hear the sweet music of love: ughh, ughh, ughh, ohh, fuck yeah, ughh, ughh… I recall white trainers besmeared with fish guts, dangling from her pale, slender legs. I see that man’s face grinning like a fool as he struggles to prize her tits from her jumper. I see the other man’s shiny black and white brogues skating around, searching for purchase in the intestinal slick. I looked up and there were no stars, the sky giving nothing back. The streetlights were invariably out in this part of town – vandalized at some time or other and never replaced – so I chose my footing carefully. I looked down alleyways, caught the glint of furtive cats staring back at me from one squirming blackness after another. I waded through pools of urine, dog shit, fish bones, and discarded chip fat, all so that I might find my friend’s defective wife. Better a mad wife than no wife at all, perhaps: Eliot, Hughes and PKD each had such a spouse. I had someone else’s. If it had been the 14th of June I’d have howled out to sea in homage. I could hear laughter and music belching from a row of pubs in the distance, and from somewhere the faint melodic wails of beaten gypsies. And then I hear her – her as I hear her – her thoughts the dark streets: echo Give the muddle a face, a home! Tag the phantom! I came across an intruder cloaked in fabrication, an intruder that I had not before stumbled across within the confines of my cranial junkyard. Such incongruity at first, I think, called attention to itself, but soon enough the newcomer settled into subterfuge and I couldn’t see its deviant past for black powder and Liqui-Nox, for murk, for a smokescreen of contextualised untruths… It is lost amid synaptic friends now: the underground (anti-self) resistance network has killed its past with my future. New his- 761 ing in

tory, impregnable documentation – I grow as the intruders come. It must be time, sometime soon, for the assassins! But no. The intruders are incessant and once having been sequestered by the network, are immediately assimilated. There is also – it goes without saying, almost – a constant barrage of bona fide guests with respectable and genuine lineage. But what is such authenticity to me? Guests are merely intruders in the wrong network, intruders just guests in the making. Some intruders get caught before they are able to slip underground and are torn to pieces by monstrous alley cats: their fedoras, trench coats and fake moustaches trodden into the dirt by a thousand filthy paws. And I refused to listen to the cruel whisperings that threatened to break me up into smaller and smaller pieces, into minute motes of functionality with identities (or not) all of their own, too small for the desires, fears, beliefs, and hopes of some folk. Oh, to play the role of assassin in my own death. But first I need an alibi, and I am denied one down here. Cannibalistic worms are vigilant to always keep their end in sight. Mole rat men – blind, with gobs full of swords – march with banners of me, shouting slogans of rightful possession through glinting mouth armour. I have blood, fat and acid on my hands: I am disclosed by Ninhydrin and cyanoacrylate. Maybe logic can rescue me from life.69 But what hollow truths are these, for one who is yet to find a spark of self to illuminate the space behind empty variables? How can I cling onto or exterminate what is im- 69 ∀x∀y(x = y → (Fx ↔ Fy)). ∀x □ (x = x). □ (x = x) ↔ □ (x = y)). Therefore: ∀x∀y(x = y → □ (x = y)). ∀x∀y (x = y → ( 762

predicative without losing it in the process?... She is lost to me now, as lost as she is to herself.) The seemingly avuncular man who took her from the street on which she was planning to spend yet another night trying to soften her bones was looking to make friends – not to acquire them, mind, but to make them. He (one Troy Handy or Mr H) had made friends before. He had a taste for making friends. He always had room for more friends in his life, although not always room in his flat. He was in his early 50s, thick set and flabby about the stomach, with smarmed down strands of hair balding in thin backward streaks to a hollow crown, spectacles magnifying the hairs on his cheeks, a grey beard and a smile that could sweeten a Semillon Sauterne, a smile that... a smile that could charm the birds up the trees – the smile of Conrad Veidt’s Gwymplaine. Mr H’s flat was situated on the ground floor of a piss and graffiti-stricken block. It had 4 rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room which doubled up as a second bedroom where Mr H slept. There was room for her, so he told her, until such time as she got herself together. There was even room, he joked, for her to carry on falling apart. She didn’t laugh. And he didn’t care that she didn’t laugh, for he hadn’t made the joke for her; she just happened to be audience to it. Mr H had redecorated his flat over the years, had made it his own with murals, posters, and the curious arrangement of his personal possessions. He had not concerned himself with replacing the carpet in the hallway, with cleaning the carpet that remained, or with cleaning anything much at all, although the bathroom and the kitchen were presentable enough, if not strictly unsoiled. Mr H didn’t feel the need to apologise for his miserable living conditions, and Elizabeth wasn’t one to seek out regrets in addition to the ones she woefully entertained as her own. Directly ahead of you as you entered the flat was a door stained pink at the base – the pink of washed-out blood. Along the foot of the door lay a stained pair of grey tracksuit bottoms, serving, so he said, as a draught excluder to what would be her room. The floorboards were bare and discoloured with patches of yellow, black, grey, red and orange paint. The hallway was infested with doodles: jagged lightning bolts and mysterious words clumsily snaked up the white walls onto the gaudily flowered ceiling. But it did not end there. Letters and symbols scrawled in paint, marker pens and crayons, covered almost all of the begrimed walls, ceilings and doors, clumsy daubs of swirling gibberish spelling out impenetrable incantations: one man’s lonely attempt to fashion a private language, his very own Voynichese with which to express his sickness to himself. 763

The air was thick with incense. (A refrigerated dildo juts from between her bruised legs, cooling her insides, faking her death. Her face is Satan’s now: it is red and rubber, with thick lips and eyebrows, a long broad nose and pointed ears, its 10 white teeth fixed in a maniacal grin. Her body has sunken into the soft mattress. Her legs hang from the sides of the bed. A broad and hairy back approaches her, removes the cerise corpse-candle snuffed out beneath her belly and replaces it with a fist. He is pleased with the chill on his knuckles and smiles for the camera. He fucks her as you’d expect a devil-headed corpse wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap to be fucked. He backs up to the camera and the screens go blank. And that, my friends, is that. She sleeps on while he takes the tapes into the front room and transfers their content onto larger tapes.) Elizabeth was curious as to why Mr H needed three TVs in his front room, especially since they were positioned side by side, and why each should need to be hooked up to a video recorder. Video cassettes with blue stickers along their spines were arranged in a row along his coffee table, and she was intrigued about what was on them, but she didn’t ask. Further video cassettes lay scattered about in neat piles. There must have been a hundred or more. On that first night he made her some dinner – nothing elaborate, as bread and soup was all he had in. It was chicken soup and it warmed her up. It had a thick and velvety consistency which she found pleasing, especially when contrasted with the crispness of the toasted bread. She ate her mucoid pap and he pa st talked. Prolonged silences weighed heavy on him, and he kept u near con ant stream of prattle for what seemed like hours. When he had exhausted the limits of his sociability he fell into a state of cryptic inertia, out of which he soon appeared to be struggling to climb free. Elizabeth didn’t feel much like talking. More than anything, she craved some uninterrupted sleep, but she didn’t feel in a position to make demands of her host. As the evening progressed and the words dried up, Mr H became more and more agitated. He looked like a man on the brink of something, a man uncertain of his intentions. When he finally spoke again, it was as if in desperate negation of some other, altogether less favourable, alternative. “Are you happy with who you are, with what the world has turned you into?” His words hung in the air like dead spiders. “I don’t know.” “I’d like to change, to be other than what I’ve become, but it’s not easy. It’s the hardest thing. I can repent, and I do repent, but that’s not enough. I think I repent. How do you tell? I feel bad, real bad for them, but never for long enough. It’s too easy to distract myself from the things that have happened. They get put away and I can’t get to them anymore. I’m not sure if I’m trying hard enough; I’m not sure how hard you’re supposed to try. You liked your soup didn’t you? I always stock up on soup in the winter.” “Very much. It was good.” “Are you a deep sleeper?” “Not really.” “You’ll sleep better here. You might find you are.” “Maybe.” “I have helped you haven’t I?” “Yes. Thank you.” “I would like it if you helped me. I don’t want to continue doing what I’ve been doing. You could help me stop.” He’s trying not to smile. He’s fighting with his face, doing his best 764

to keep it in line with the feelings he’s expressing. “Not right now, of course. You are tired; I can tell. Tomorrow maybe, when you’ve slept.” “You’re right; I am tired.” “You’ll help me, though. Tomorrow? The sooner the better.” “If I can.” “I’m certain you can. I have a good feeling about you.” * “Sleep well? I didn’t expect to but I did: there I was just thinking about today and before I knew it…” Mr H is leaning over the spare bed where Elizabeth is still sleeping. “I’ll let you have your coffee before... You do drink coffee don’t you? I never miss my morning coffee.” She stirs but does not wake. “I’ll leave it here, lazybones. I’ll come back later, after I’ve taken the rubbish out.” He glances down at his watch and shakes his head. The coarse white stubble beneath his chin shimmers in the lamplight. It is 5:45 A.M. He revisits her every ten minutes and it is as much as he can do to occupy himself in the intervals. On his fourth visit, he wakes her with a fresh mug of coffee by accidentally trickling some of it onto her forearm. She rises up in the bed: a vampire with a wooden stake through its heart. She is cloudy and confused, sick from sleep in soiled sheets and the dribbled dreams of dead whores. Mr H apologises for his mishap and goes off into the front room to wait for her. He is busy titivating with the loose arrangement of his dust-enshrined video cassettes when she emerges, or at least this is the impression he is trying to achieve. He pats the sofa cushion beside him, but she sits in the armchair. Mr H, annoyed at having his hospitality thrown back in his face, momentarily forgets why he should want to change his nasty habits. “I should have let you sleep in longer, much longer.” He smiles a pissed smile; his eyes are screwed up tight behind his glasses – small blue babies ensnared in their jars. The luminescent Space Invader on the front of his T-shirt appears gaunt and pensive, his beard, a curium hinterland, a thin veneer of death about the mouth... Get them quiet, get them friendly. Get them dead, get them quick with a bump on the head. Have Beelzebub give them a smile, for bad hearts never come to trial. “We need to talk now!” “What about?” Her voice is free of trauma, and there are no tattletale tics to empower his stride. She isn’t dumb to the sickness that has infected his good intentions. Taedium vitae 765

already has her by the throat is all, and she is tired from sleep, tired from the waking. All he can do is pick over the scabs that already flap from her wounds. Hers are the deadened nerves of the leper, her depressive mind a Faraday cage shielding her from the possibilities of harm. That film. That dirty fuck – how could he have done that with her looking back at him? Better they be dead beforehand; they don’t look back then. I don’t want to have to fight; I shouldn’t have to fight. Dutch gin and Nightnurse folded into chicken soup – Hogarthian blind ruin. Got to get the dose right to go that way. The risk of stirrings yielding to fu t u r e wake lness would be oo m ch fo m . I do not have the patience to get my ecstasies filtered through to me in miniscule increments, or a mind for sneaking around apologetically in the presence of snoozing whores. When I get that way, it could be said, I have no mind at all: I have what I have and a mind to make it what I want. I don’t want their outworn lies. PERPIGNAN TRAIN STATION “Want to know what I got up to while you were torturing your family?” asks Triman. “Not really, no.” “Well, you remember that brunette pruning her roses in the garden when we arrived – petite woman, large chest, gardening gloves, secateurs in her hand…” “Okay, yes, I recall her. So what?” “I raped her that’s what.” “Bullshit!” “I was horny… How long do you think you’re going to last? You foresee being able to live out an eternity without it? And if not, how else do you expect to get it? Or maybe you’ve got some killer chat-up lines that have the women flopping straight over onto their backs. If so, you might want to share them with me.” “You expect me to believe that you raped that woman? You really expect me to believe that?” “If I didn’t, where do you suppose I got these from?” Triman delves into his trouser pocket and pulls out a gardening glove and a pair of torn knickers. “Is that blood on your neck?” “Yeah, the bitch got to me with her fingernails.” “I thought she had gloves on.” “She did. But she’d taken them off before I got to her.” “Bullshit! Bullshit!” “Believe what you like, my friend, but believe this, that was just the beginning.” “You really think that I’m going to stand around and let you merrily skip through time and space molesting women?” “No. I expect some assistance. While you’re just standing around doing nothing you could at least pin them down and make my life a little easier. And by the way, I didn’t only molest her – I killed her. And then I cut off her head, her hands and her feet, before digging out her genitals with the secateurs and placing them in a box.” “Not funny.” “Forgive me, Father. I’m just trying to distract you from your worries, lighten things up a bit.” “Well I’m eternally grateful.” 766

if “Don’t just throw statements like that around if you don’t mean them, because I’ll know you’re lying. But seriously, the sex issue is going to need resolving so oner or later. It’s not always going to be this funny you know…. Talking of funny, do you want to hear a joke?” “No.” “Come on. It’ll cheer you up.” “…” “Did you hear the one about Parfit’s overly distressed jeans? “…” “They were reduced to tears…. Come on, what’s the matter with you? I give up.” “I wish you would.” “You’re not ready for that one yet. I understand. I’ll try it again later.” DARKLING DECORATOR The morning’s ordeal had been repugnant even by her standards, but he hadn’t hurt her badly, and had even seen fit to reward her rigid performance with a hearty breakfast. While Mr H slept off the morning’s exertions, Elizabeth started to pay closer attention to her surroundings. She noticed that the flat was teeming with human body parts, utilised and disguised as decorations and household objects: there were ashtrays fashioned from human hands, lampshades constructed from tattooed skin, even a stool made out of some unfortunate woman’s legs that he’d painted green; he had a pair of real breasts stitched to the front of his kitchen apron, and was in the process of making a belt constructed entirely out of nipples. There were five tongues hardened with thick layers of clear varnish masquerading as coat hooks, and concealed beneath the muddle and dirt of his desk was a pen holder made from four upturned noses. She checked the front door and the windows: all dead-locked and bolted shut. She wouldn’t be able to get out without waking him. Maybe she’d be able to help him change into the person he wanted to be; maybe she could prevent any more tongues being nailed to the wall. Or maybe her tongue would be next. My uterus would make a swell shower cap, 767

she thought. Didn’t the very fact that he felt confident enough to sleep, with her loose in the flat, indicate that he meant her no harm? She couldn’t be sure. She sits in front of the three TV sets and starts up one of the videos. When the middle of the three TVs finally comes to life it is to footage of her gracious necrophilic host sodomising some fish-eyed hooker with the 9in. heel of a stiletto boot. He smiles into the camera – surely the saddest, most disenfranchised contortion of lips and teeth ever to inhabit a face. What had made him want to stop doing these things, to wean himself off the lascivious pleasures of screwing the meat remains of hooker after hooker? Why, when he’d come so far, did he no longer have the appetite for the brand of lust he had personalised and nurtured for what must have been years, judging by the trophies? The habit was, most likely, bigger than him by now. But he’d managed to do the business, with me only feigning death, she thought. Maybe he could adapt his requirements permanently, and maybe he couldn’t. He wasn’t doing this to get a golden ticket, not anymore, if ever; he was doing it because without it he was nothing. She stands over him, watches him sleep. She can hear his lungs expanding and contracting, crackling like glue bags. She looks on him as one would a sick animal, (a horse with broken legs, a seabird caked in crude oil, a chimp with half its brain missing and nothing but fear in what remains, a rabbit going into shock as the maggots that have squirmed up its backside take hold of its bowel, a dog with a stomach full of slug pellets, a worm half cooked in the sun, a spider relieved of its legs…), and slams a ten inch kitchen knife into his gaping mouth. She is sure she witnesses him struggling to thank her in the few s o nds e c- it takes him to die. But she does not want or need his thanks. She needs a retreat, a place of her own in which to hide away and regroup. (Not that she believes she will ever find her true self amidst the splinters of mirrored glass that make up her self-image, because she no longer believes in true selves. She believes in herself the experiencer. All the rest is nothing but a burden of constraints and habits, of filters and angles, the body of a frightened and superstitious child on her back.) And now she has that place. Once she has emptied the flat of the warped trappings of his identity she will paint every inch of the space with white paint, and leave it unadorned while she waits for her own marks to show themselves. UNSEEN AND UNHEARD Charles sits in his armchair surrounded by books and fag ash. A cigarette burns in his right hand, his left clutches hold of a tumbler full of whisky. The TV is on, the sound turned down. He hears a rogue breeze open the pages of his manuscript: he hears it yawn. He swigs from his tumbler. Whisky escapes from the edges of his mouth and runs down his neck. He stares 768

at the images flitting across his TV screen, and sucks on his cigarette as if his sanity depended on it. “Somebody is doing this to us, somebody on the outside.” “You’ve lost me.” “This is all too thin to be real. Look at the places we’ve ended up: nothing but picture postcards of reality. We’re nothing but puppets to some impoverished imagination, an imagination diseased with parochialism.” “Have you any idea where we are?” “We’re here, these words. That’s it.” “Can you see anything? I can’t see a thing, can’t feel my legs, my arms… can you see me? Help me will you!” “Hey you, come over here and help us! You can’t leave us like this. Don’t just sit there!” “Who are you shouting at? I can’t see. What’s going on?” “We’ve been reduced to our voices; it’s a symptom of his laziness.” “Whose laziness? I can’t see. My eyes aren’t working.” “Neither are mine, but I sense him. He’s listening to us… You had big plans for us didn’t you? All the places you were going to send us, all the hilarious scrapes and escapades that all came to nothing, because you’re too fat and too lazy to follow up your ideas. That’s right isn’t it? Help us! We shouldn’t have to pay for your indolence. Get up!” Charles gets up from his armchair. “It’s worked. He’s going to save us.” He pours himself another tumbler full of scotch, sits back down and turns the TV up as far as it will go. If you were in front of him, you would see his mouth form the words, “Ungrateful peasants.… I’ll get me a cruise to the tropics.” “It’s over. He can’t hear us... but wait… there are others… HELP! HELP!...” THE LIMITS OF PHILO SO PHY I’ve seen how things that seek their way find their void instead. – Federico García Lorca, ‘1910 (Intermezzo)’ Elizabeth came to haunt me in a rare glimpse of sleep. I was relieved of consciousness for no longer than ten minutes, but the dream, upon waking, seemed to have been unfathomably long, so multitudinous were its contents. The full extent of the abuse I levelled on her I can never hope to grasp. I have only edited highlights of what was an aberrant attempt to kill what could not be killed. What I remember most clearly is how helpless I felt, how I had no choice but to continue with my onslaught in spite of the realization that my murderous intentions were to remain forever thwarted. I broke a beer bottle over her head and she barely flinched; I ran her through with a sword and she coughed a little; I put a revolver in her mouth tilted it towards her crown and pulled the trigger. The back of her head danced in the air like a soggy firework, but she was too busy trying to dislodge a piece of grit from the corner of her eye to notice. And so it went on. Just as soon as I had deployed the weapon in my hand a new one took its place. Where 769

they were coming from I have no idea. I beheaded her with a hatchet, cut off her tongue with kitchen scissors, skewered her with a javelin, cut her in half lengthways with a circular saw, hanged her from a lamppost with barbed wire, force-fed her broken glass, but all to no avail. Not only did she refuse to die, she refused even to be the slightest bit distracted by my attempts to bring about her death. Frank slams his spade into the frosty ground and proceeds to dig. The sky is the colour of fag ash. There are voices and laughter in the distance. But for now, at least, Frank is alone and able to disinter his dead bride in peace. The soil succumbs with surprising ease, as if it had not long settled, and within quarter of an hour he strikes boxwood. She is not deep, and he is barely up to his waist when it comes time to crack open the lid of her coffin. Rolled up and poked into one of her eye sockets he finds a poem: LOVE FOR THE HEREAFTER Dead is my love, but not so dead as that; Empty as a glove, but neither dark nor dusty; Stiffer than boards, and yet, as boards are, flat; Lighter than air, and yet, as decay, musty: Ice cube blue, with paint to false face her, None duller, nor none brighter to replace her. Her legs round mine how often hath she wrapped, Between each thrust her eyes of dark love staring! How many blinks to ease me as she napped, Threading my love, the breast of whom still baring! Yet in the midst of all her dry contestings, Her skin, her eyes, her soul, and all were less things. She froze with love, as toes with frost benumb, She froze out love, as soon as brittle toes succumb; She tasted the love, and yet she soiled the tasting, She made love last, and yet she’d lie there wasting. Was this a lover, or a used-up tramp to die? 770

Dead in a barren grave, or baked in a pie. He tries to ignore the implications of what he has just read and attempts to lift her from her desecrated box. She comes apart in his arms. He fights with her tumbling bones, trying desperately to keep her fleshless tabernacle in one piece, or, should I say, one collection of interconnecting pieces. He fails and she falls back into her plank bed, a messed up jigsaw puzzle of bones that once wore the skin of his wife. Not worrying too much about her arrangement for the time being, he opens up his large sports bag and begins placing her inside. Frank can still be seen walking the streets of Pavilionstone with his wife’s jumbled bones strapped to his back. On the other side of town yet another rebirth is occurring: I have not been prompt in fulfilling my duties. I have walked, pondered and become confused as to my task. Ideas have spun around inside my skull like the spheres on an orrery never destined to meet, never to collaborate and shape new and instructive combinations. I now know, like no man alive knows, the importance of relation R. I now see the mistake that was my life and why someone saw fit to rid me of that monochrome existence wasting an eternity on what was never there to find. But now I have questions that bother me about what I’ve end ured. I do not understand how I was able to distance myself from my (implanted) memories and intentions, and so take a depersonalized perspective on my own quasi-personhood. Where did this perspective originate from? A person can usually recognize a false belief, if they happen to have one, and reject it or detach themselves from it on the basis of recognizing it as false. But, surely, this is because the rest of their beliefs and knowledge, in a sense, expose it as false; it’s rejected because it doesn’t fit. How could my theorizing enable me to distance myself from what I at one time confidently took to be my particular mental life? Exactly whose interests were being served at that time when I mustered my resources to serve Rene’s systematic method rather less than systematically, at that time when like some master illusionist I cut through selves with broken mirrors? What synchronic and elementary nexus of selfdom allowed this to happen? What glistening pearl shone through the mire of burgled memories? If only I could find it. And so it seems the theatre of the mind plays on despite scathing reviews and a reported fall in attendance. 771

I am a figment of my own imagination. This is it! The end is in sight… I find myself dissolving in a black (shit)hole of impredication. ASHES OF THE AFTERLIFE In the end, writers will write…mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. – Don Delillo A man with a stony and slightly ghoulish countenance blocked Molech’s path. He was dressed in an old black suit that was almost as dour and rigid as he was. (Was this Jef Costello back for his caged bird?) He pulled a golden card from his pocket and held it out to Molech in two heavily veined hands. Molech took it from him. It had his name and photograph on it; there was no mistake. He didn’t strike Molech as the kind of man who made mistakes. An error on his part wouldn’t have blemished his character so much as annihilated it. “Tomorrow,” he said unemotionally, as he walked off. Tomorrow wasn’t the first Sunday of the month, or even a Sunday. It seems Molech is to be regarded as a special case. In all likelihood, P. had called him back. Molech must have achieved whatever it was he had been sent to Pavilionstone to achieve, although he could no longer think what that might have been. And he no longer cared. He wanted out of this rancorous town, this damp carousel of rotting horses, the spinning regurgitation of absence of eye and choking fullness of tongue, of papery skin taut over bone and spidery limbs riding on the air like barbaric tinsel. He needed to get beyond the reach of temptation. Wherever all the other men and women went after entering those Chambers, they weren’t welcomed into the new world. Nobody rightfully housed in this town escaped it. But Molech didn’t belong there, wasn’t rightful, and so his fate, at the very least, would be something else. He fetched up outside the Chamber doors a fraction after 6 A.M. He hadn’t seen a single person on his way there. He thought it odd, but kept walking all the same. He had been convinced that there would be a small crowd of people outside the Chambers when he arrived, the usual collection of diehards holding vigil there, and this had distracted him from the uneasy audibility of his footsteps, so that when he arrived to find an empty street, he momentarily lost his nerve. He reached into his pocket and took out his ticket. 70 He pulls the doors apart and hangs his head over the edge. The triangular metal oven, which has reached temperatures of around 1800ºF, is now cold to the touch. In the tundra of pale ash below he can make out hundreds of skeletal silhouettes – a deep-pile powder carpet of overcooked people. He shouts, “Hello,” into the dead space and it comes alive with the echoed replies, “Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello…,” of this residual congregation. When he looks down over the still ash, it’s as if he’s surveying a sandy beach in the process of slowly ingesting its sunbathers. He gets the urge to drag a rake through these lumps of burnt matter still clinging onto their human form, to draw metal teeth through the waists and the legs and the heads and set them free. As he pictures his lungs gradually being coated in the frazzled hopes and fears of the dead, his breaths become shallower. So this was transference: humanity shrunk back in re- fining fire; a frazzled flock of phoenixes, charred beyond recognition, rising from the flames as abstract incarnations of themselves, psychological blueprints invisible to all but the most theorizing of eyes. He had sat patiently on the steps outside the Chambers for over an hour before knocking on the doors. They had opened shortly after and the man he had met on the street the previous day was there behind them. He had taken Molech’s ticket from him and then walked out the door and down the street without uttering a word. Perplexed, Molech stood staring at the table and the two chairs in front of him, in an otherwise empty room, before walking over to the oven doors on the far wall. To his left there is a narrow staircase that provides access to the floors above and below. He approaches them and begins to climb,, wondering as he climbs why he has chosen to go up rather than down. At the top he finds a long corridor with a door at each end. All he can hear is the droning of strip-lights. If there is anyone inside these rooms then they aren’t broadcasting the fact. He walks right. The door opens about an inch and then its automated closer shuts it again. It isn’t locked. Nothing! An empty room with white walls and ceiling and no windows. H 70 In honour, no doubt, of Marcel Petiot’s death chamber. 772

e nds fi his lungs empty, and swings his head around to check behind him. Nothing! He arrives at the other door. He pushes it. It opens. It is empty, with white walls, a white ceiling and no windows. He feels a tap on his shoulder. “Help me please. I’m looking for a way out.” Molech is winded with shock. He turns around and standing in front of him with an alarmingly mawkish grin on his face is another Molech. This other Molech is in every way, mawkish grin aside, exactly like Molech himself. “Help me please. I’m looking for a way out.” Molech steps to one side as his double sidles past him into the centre of the room, where he proceeds to slowly turn on the spot, carefully surveying his surroundings. “It really is empty in here, isn’t it? These rooms are always empty, nothing much to tell them apart: white walls, white ceilings and not a window to be found. Try downstairs! That’s where I’m going.” He exits the room, walks along the corridor and heads down the stairs. Someone’s playing tricks on me; it’s all trickery. Anything can be achieved with a clever use of lights, projection cameras, and manipulated tape recordings. That’s what it was. Yes, it’s obvious. If I’d have tried to touch him my hand would have gone straight through. Molech’s hands belie the airiness of his thoughts as they scratch jerkily at the sides of his thighs. He walks down the corridor with a chorus of playful justifications singing in his brain, his fingers digging away at the top of his legs, and a stupefied grin pushing his cheeks up into his eyes. He reaches the top of the stairs and is about to go down when “I think I’ll leave now – if someone would just help me.” (The voice is his, and it’s coming from the room to his right.) “I’m in here. If you could help me, I want to leave now.” Molech manages to tear one of his hands away from its scratching post long enough to push the door open. He gives it a heavy shove. He sees nothing but an empty room. “I’m over here: in the corner, behind the door. Come in and help me please! I want to go home now.” The last place Molech wants to go is in that room. But it is hard to go against cries for help that come to you in your own voice. However, this isn’t the deciding factor in leading 773

him to open the door and enter the room. That is thing some- else. We all understand, or at least think we do, the notion of there being no place left to go, that we can run but never hide, of there being no place under the sun that can offer us refuge. These phrases probably make you think of the movies: westerns and gunslingers, gangster flicks and stool pigeons, film noirs and private dicks, police procedurals and villainous quarry. But such associations would be erroneous, for in these examples there are many places to run and hide. Enter an insane asylum and take note of all the different places to which the residents have fled. Listen carefully as they read to you from their brochures of escapologist logic. Molech had no provision for fabrication of this kind, no comfy space within which he could lose the world. He was a realist, reliant on the world as it presented itself to him. He had no choice but to continue with the games he found himself playing. This was why he entered that room and looked around the edge of the door, for he has always been terrified at the prospect of fleeing inward, of being placed at his own mercy. The world, however barbaric and alienating it became, would always be a preferable master to that of the vacillations of his brain. If the world breaks you, dehumanises you, cuts you into strips of frightened ribbon, then so be it. But never attempt to run. Never turn and swim away from a shark; swim straight towards it! Run at a bull and throw yourself on its horns if you can! Try and bite its eyes out or crack its ribs with your fists, but never run from it, unless you can run forever, and he couldn’t. This is why Molech opened that door again and went in. He wasn’t built in a way that would allow him to do anything else. “What if the whole of your life was just a series of subliminal messages arranged so as to incite you to say one sentence, one word, to commit one act – maybe to die. Maybe one’s whole life is a carefully orchestrated sequence of subliminal cues to lead you to your death: it is bad enough dying your own death; just imagine dying somebody else’s...” said his voice. (Actually, no death is more meaningless than one’s own – just ask Camus.) The world scared him (the world scares everyone) but he scared himself more. The world was cruel, but he was unreliable. He didn’t even permit himself to daydream. He puts his hand on the door plate. It makes itself known to him as cold and smooth, as a place to place a palm that pushes doors. They were both doing their bit, going along with things. When he opens the door fully he sees somebody sitting, naked, hunched over their lap in the corner of an empty room. The person has their back to him. He calls out but there is no reply. Laying on the floor about the bedraggled figure are clumps of matted hair, some still 774

attached to the scabs of dead scalp that lay beside them. As Molech inches closer he begins to smell what his eyes tell him is the odour of rotting flesh. A knotted spine arches up from the floor like the corroded peduncle of some obscene flower, some carnivorous plant so chock-full of its half-digested prey that it takes on its form, as happens when a snake swallows a goat. The sight of a forlorn breast suspended from the sharp edges of a surfacing breastplate alerts him to the fact that this creature is a woman. The back of her head has the look of a war-zone, the site of a massacre, the colours and textures of a mass grave. Her head moves and he backs away. As her face slowly comes into view he tries not to look between her legs; he tries not to see her at all, tries to see straight through her, but her face remains where it is, forcing him to drop his gaze. Her genitals appear to have partially crawled out from between her legs, protruding timorously from her wasted crotch like a mutilated snail’s antenna. He looks away and happens on her face. “Elizabeth?” Despite her befogged eyeballs now being worn outside the confines of her skull, and the lower half of her face having all but dissolved, he still felt certain it was her, Frank’s apocryphal wife. “That was the name I was branded with,” she says, her voice marked by inanition, her words echoing endlessly within themselves. “What are you doing here?” asks Molech, refusing to look into the grey shroud of her turtle-like eyes. “I was left here.” “Do you want me to help you? Get a doctor? Take you somewhere?” “I don’t want.” she says, before returning her head to the bow of her lap. Molech, glad of an excuse to leave, makes for the door. Once back in the hallway he descends the stairs all the way to the basement. He senses the temperature drop with every step, feels the damp pawing of the clammy air on his skin. Given the enormity of the chambers above, Molech is surprised at the cramped dimensions of the basement that has him stooped over like an old man to avoid scraping his scalp on the low ceiling. The only light on offer comes from a low-wattage bulb hanging from one of the ceiling joists, its dim, flickering radiance giving up nothing but shadows. In a corner, silhouetted against the wall, is a corpulent figure wearing what looks like a crown of thorns on its head, or a halo even, having fallen from its perch. As the figure rotates at the sound of footsteps, the crown of thorns and the fallen halo transform themselves into the unkempt valance of a bald man’s head. “Charles… Charles, it’s me…” says Molech. “You as well, huh. Have you come to finish it?” Charles replies, dragging his head up off the table. “Finish what?” “Me – I suppose.” “I thought you were the one who did the finishing.” “Why do you say that?” “You put the words there; I merely mouth them. Isn’t that the way it works? I’ve read your book, remember.” “No. It’s not like that – not with HWG.71 You know that. We are equals.” “Those pills aren’t HWG. There’s no such thing as HWG. You know what Coco sells.” 71 See Afterword for details. 775

“How else do you explain it?” “You’re the writer, but I took them to be a device for your fiction, some narrative justification for stylistic experimentation, or something like that.” “I write about what happens. I don’t write fiction, not anymore; I haven’t the imagination. This is real. They’re all objets trouves; all of it is found.” “Just how long have you been in here?” “I am all men. I dare you to deny it.” “Let’s just go.” “Where have you come from? Upstairs in the Chambers, right?” “I was asleep up until I got a phone call about ten minutes ago… And we’re in ‘Cham- bers’ now… the basement bar at the end of your street.” “This is it now for both of us. There’s no place left to go.” “Come on. Let’s go to yours.” “You’d like that wouldn’t you?” “Yes… Look, if you don’t come with me they’ll throw you out.” “You’re a fucking liar, a fucking spy.” “Come on, one at a time. Just these stairs and we’re done.” “What stairs? What stairs? There aren’t any stairs.” “You live in a flat. You don’t have any stairs.” “What do you mean?” “Just sit down. I’ll turn on the TV. Want a coffee?” “What are you doing here? How did you get in?” They stand staring at each other, their faint shadows sliding down the walls. The filament in the bulb on Charles’s ceiling finally burns out with one last flourish, and the two men merge in a flicker and a flash before the dark is there and eats them. MISPLACED PITY We are entirely satisfied by the impression of a work of art only when it leaves behind something that, in spite of all our reflection on it, we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept. – Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume II On a wet January evening a man crosses the road on his way home. The building where he lives is not more than ten strides away when, with a foot either side of the dotted white line that marks the centre of the road, he stops. As he looks up at the three dark windows of his flat, a succession of raindrops career into his eyes and blind him. The streetlights hang their heads and cry. He stoops over and allows the rain to crawl down over his face and fall at his feet. If he can do nothing else, he can stand there in the middle of the road and have the rain fall at his feet. A car pulls into the road and slows down as it approaches him. The man in the road does not raise his head to look; he does not move at all. The car’s horn is sounded and still the man does not respond. The car edges closer and cautiously works its way around him. The man in the car shouts from his window as he drives off, but the man in the middle of the road does not appear to notice. Hours go by, cars keep coming, but the man stays where he is. I cannot tell you exactly why this man should choose not to return home, choosing instead to stand in the middle of a road watching the rain fall at his feet, and neither, I would guess, can he. I have ideas as to why, as no doubt does he, but 776

e the truth is, neither of us know for sur comes a Noth- . Eventually, a woman nd 777 coaxes him from the road. Noth-

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gs magical i said to break the spell he is under, just an arm around his shoulder and the words, “Come on now. Come on.” She walks him up to his flat and they go inside. Nothing has been solved by his leaving the middle of the road. Nothing feels better as a result of coming in from the rain. She might as well have left him there. It is true enough that nobody is likely to run him down or arrest him in his flat, but these things are of no concern to him. He does not wish to die under the wheels of a car, or to be locked up, but neither does he wish for these things not to happen. I could be wrong about all this; I really couldn’t say for sure. The man can still hear the rain, even if he cannot watch it fall at his feet. He is probably sorely tempted to shrug off the kindness of this woman and return to his spot in the road. It’s really coming down now; pretty soon the drains are sure to be in spate. I suppose I should be thinking about getting off home myself, now that everything’s quietened down. Maybe I’ll wait on a little longer: chances are he’ll come back. He could not stand there forever. Four hours went by without his noticing. He left, when he left, without really having been present to leave. Chances are he was never there. Chances are the dance of raindrops in the creases of sodden shoes, shoes that earned their creases the same way men earn their pauses. “I can’t see where all this is going, where, if anywhere, it might end. I have no feeling that I am closing in on completeness. I have a history and a future and yet neither one appears to hold me. But it does; it must be all I am for else what else? (Thus the moral of the end has not yet been drawn.)” AFTERWORD I owe much of the perspectival pyrotechnics in this book to the psychotropic wonder that is H-iso-Wg586 (a.k.a. HWG, God’s Teardrops, Hardwires, Fly Eyes, etc.); the rest I owe to logic, tape-recorded conversations, and good old-fashioned perseverance. HWG, as far as I am aware, does not lead to metabolic dependence, although I did encounter psychological withdrawal once I’d settled back into my own self. (The more you use the drug the longer the settling period becomes, for the obvious reason that the more you use the drug the less you have any reason to believe that there is anything left to settle back into.) I found myself craving the spontaneity of selflessness: the more one takes HWG the more fractured their sense of self becomes, and ultimately the more burdensome it is to live with any sense of a concrete self. The drug has two primary effects: (1) it temporarily ruptures the – already somewhat tokenistic – bond between one’s subjective awareness of oneself and one’s objective awareness of oneself. Its primary target is the memory; it is rarely achievable in real time. (Although the user is permitted the dubious luxury of viewing oneself objectively, most refrain from introspection of this kind, finding even the odd glimpse extremely distressing and potentially destructive.) (2) it seemingly allows you to access other people’s thoughts. The distance from the self one attains, and the duration one can maintain this distance is not simply a question of dosage levels; the user’s skills at interpreting the drug’s effects are also crucial. The user is never completely passive, never completely subsumed, for despite such a (mythical) state being revered by its users, its achievement would nullify the drug’s effects altogether: to realize the definitive state of HWG would also be to terminate its effect. The fact that I had to record what I was experiencing meant that I never achieved this ultimate distance: I was always faintly aware of articulating my experiences into words, even if I never heard my voice until I transcribed the tapes afterwards. Despite my quest as a writer militating against anything like full absorption, I was more than satisfied with the result: the art, after all, is in the melding, not the mere reproduction. (I mean, who’d listen to Molly without James in there?) The drug was marketed to me as a writer’s aid smuggled in from the N.W.R., allowing the user to objectify himself and get inside other people’s heads. But its intended purpose, I have since discovered, was as a life-extension facilitator (to be taken in conjunction with various other treatments), allowing users to detach from their selves and their history, and explore the subjectivity of others as a diversion from the crushing tedium of their own psychological snail trail. But that’s enough of the mechanism, for how I got to the artistic product has nothing to do with it, to paraphrase Burroughs. Since ceasing to use the drug I find myself…only on occasion. [In the words of Maurice Blanchot, “he is no longer himself; he isn’t anyone any more.”] I drink more and I sleep less, but aside from these changes nothing much has altered. I write now only when Molech allows me to, and things are better this way. I am happier. I am better. This ‘I’ that is a tool of language and nothing more… But still, whenever I close my eyes: 779

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THE REVIVAL OF LAKOK AND TRIMAN But our lot crawls between dry ribs To keep our meta hysics warm. – T.S. Eliot, ‘Whispe s f Immortality’ There’s something to be said for completeness. I agree. Pardon. I agree. Pardon. (…) You don’t miss the unexplored possibilities? They’re still there. Not as possibilities. As what then? The unexplorable unexplored. And you see that as a real change? Don’t you? Sometimes. It depends. On what? Which mirror I look into. Meaning? Meaning… look, pretty soon all change will be Cambridge change. True enough, but what of your family? I cannot mourn the end of what is endless. That’s the spirit. What do you mean by that? What? I’m congratulating you for putting a positi e spin on things. That positive spin happens to be the truth. Get truth on your side and anything can happen. Can we stop now? Yes. Then why don’t we? I don’t know. That’s a first. What of the undetermined unexplored? Aren’t we forced to ignore them for the sake of completeness? I must agree. You must. I do. I’ve had a thought. That way around? I can’t tell. Who can? …) Well? 782

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