Short Stories
A Chorus of Two Suns - August
Every second, billions of neutrino particles pass through the body. Their passage leaves no indelible mark, no trace of contact. A billion-billion invisible threads -- ambient white-noise. Just the universe, coming through.
Or so we thought. Nina was mostly streaked with grey now. Tight skin clung over brittle bones. Her fingers needled into arid palms. Those same hands, twenty years earlier, trembled on the pure water in the Super-K -- the world's largest neutrino detector.
Tens-of-thousands of tonnes filled a vast cavity, a thousand metres underground central Japan. Golden orbs -- photomultiplier tubes -- lined the shell, stared inwards, above and below the waterline. Slowly, the Dream Boat -- as neutrino scientists provincially called it -- floated along the still plain. It was Nina's first time in the tank. A privilege reserved for a scant few. PMTs filled her irises, a glowing candelabra of light-amplification technology.
Once out of a billion-billion neutrinos, one hits a particle in the great water tank to set off a PMT -- a dim flash of Cherenkov radiation. This is recorded, logged, and a cavalcade of international researchers pore over these little glints to glimpse the cosmos. By nature, it is like studying the ant from the lines it leaves in the soil. Yet, the golden egg at the Super-K is on the bleeding edge of modern physics.
To Nina, the Dream Boat was aptly named -- for the PMTs, the still water, the little pangs of Cherenkov radiation, inspired inside a ferocious desire to crack the cosmos open.
She decanted me a cup of tea from a ceramic, rose-coloured pot. The steam stung her eyes, but she had already been crying. It was two decades since the discovery, one that fundamentally changed humanity's understanding, yet it was a footnote in her personal history. That day, the day I went up the woodlands of Washington State to meet her, was an anniversary. Her adult son, Jacob, had shot himself through the temple on the patio steps that day, some seven years prior.
Nina's daughter hadn't seen or spoken to her mother since. I, in my capacity, wished to write a column on the upcoming anniversary for her discovery. Nina wished to speak of anything else.
A quiet woman, inward, yet behind a clouded countenance I could sense someone in quiet desperation. One always on the edge of a ticking clock, always waiting for a phone call or a knock. As if, one day, if she waited hard enough, he would turn up again and everything would snap back into place.
For a rational and scientific mind, Jacob had already been consumed by the ground he was buried in. Nina was a romantic. It's a quality shared by the other names in her stratosphere -- the poet-scientists who danced behind the curtain of reality. Galileo, Einstein, Da Vinci.
One day at Super-K, the PMTs lit up like never before. An impossible event. Hundreds of flashes, a dazzling constellation beneath the water.
Immediately, the anomalous event produced a tsunami of papers, articles and theories. The scientific world, harried by the inexplicable, even sought to discredit the Super-K's equipment and then its eminent workforce. New frontiers opened for physicists to argue ad naueseum. The press, as best it could, attempted to mediate the importance of the event with the illiteracy of the public.
Even still, Nina worked. Day and night, she hunched over sensor readings, historical logs, dove in and glided through the reams of data. Something was to be found. Between the lines, something was there -- she knew it, but didn't know how she knew it. Supervisors worried that a nervous breakdown was incoming.
Time and technology make fools of us all. Nina, finally, found what she was looking for. A correlation between the disparate flashes. A pattern.
By plotting each detection in the event against time, you get something like this:
* * * * * * * * * * * *
On a first glance, it seemed random. Though, on a closer inspection, the intervals repeated at different scales. Not common in supposed astrophysical noise. Next, Nina performed a Fourier transform -- she took the time between neutrino detections and turned the event into a frequency spectrum. Something strange emerged. A family -- an interrelated cluster -- of sharply defined frequencies.
Those frequencies, even still, had relationships between themselves. 220Hz to 330, then 440 -- 660. Extracted from the temporal structure of the neutrino signal, Nina noticed a suspicious relation. The ratios behaved like harmonics.
Like music.
Jacob shot himself on the patio steps.
"I found him," the tea had cooled off. She stared into the wood grain of the table between us. "Just twenty minutes earlier we had spoke. Just routine. Just like ever. Have you known someone, for so long, only to find out you never knew them at all?"
Behind the faint blue eyes, I saw a flicker of the person Nina once was. The one that was heralded by academia as the scientist of the century. Yet, those eyes saw out of a face carved by deep grief and deep time.
The same eyes that had scanned the lines of an audio-processing computer program, the one which she loaded the neutrino data into, all those years ago. On a hunch, off the intervals, Nina sonified the intervals. From this, a sequence was extrapolated -- a chord sequence.
In the key of D Major. It began at D, to an F-sharp-seventh, B minor, G minor... Then, a second part: E minor, G, A-seventh, D --
Hung over the base of chords, a simple melody -- mathematical weights in high-dimensional space, calculated and processed -- progressed. Lit by a small monitor in a dim room, Nina heard the impossible. It was a song she innately knew.
Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again. The anomalous neutrino incident was not a natural aberration. It was an encoded message, a playback of a nearly century old radio transmission. The first documented case of extraterrestrial communication. Based on the time it took for the transmission to leave Earth, eighty years ago, to this response, the only source could have been the Alpha Centauri star system.
For years, Nina had sought to parse the chaos of ambient cosmic noise. To hear the conducting of the orchestra. What she found, however, was that the universe was singing. By that little monitor, in that dim room at the Super-K, Nina had finally heard it:
A chorus of two suns.
Who's Ku? - July
It's difficult to understand why we do anything at all.
I've never found an answer. Closest I came to one, as eluding as it was, happened in the halcyon days of the pandemic.
The sweaty depths of summer. The meadows of south Manchester served as a playing ground for the endless boredom of an international health crisis. Cycling took up most of my weeks -- the same route, from Chorlton, across Southern Cemetery, around the green rim of Didsbury and toward the lush fields of Sale and Altrincham.
Follow the Mersey for long enough, and you come to a heavy green bridge. Cross it, and down the ambling dirt lanes you go. Soon, there's a little league football club -- then shut -- beyond that, a clearing with a metal gate.
On one side, there was private land -- used before the virus as a spot to fly remote control helicopters. On the other, a small horse sanctuary.
Midges buzzed and bit, everything coated in a heated slime. Many a time I rode up, hopped off the bike, and looked for a quiet bench to stare at the trees, the midges and the horses. Even as the midges tore off my skin, suckled on the blood underneath, I was grateful. Even for the horses, in their little pen, hemmed in by old wooden fencing. None knew of the virus, and none knew who I was.
This period stretched for a while. The route was the same. Though, each day, I tried to cycle a little faster -- to reach a certain bend a little earlier, to brake a little smoother. I became as acquainted with that route as the veins that throbbed in the back of my hands while I clutched on the handlebars and pedaled like a maniac.
Never was there a rush. It just felt like it. There was one day, though, where I had a change of course. A friend who lived on the other side of Chorlton, on Hardy Lane, called me -- wanted to meet, as "COVID woulda got us already". Of that I'm unsure, but boredom got the better of us. He was my best friend. Emphasis on the was.
I waited at the Green. He was late, as usual. I had a particular sense of "observing" my own vision of the pastoral scene as if it were a projection.
Technicolour memories spiel out much like film-reel itself. A colliding kaleidoscope of the big and the bright and the bombastic -- a hustling simulation of time and space. Singular instances of an ephemeral and ineffable "mood". The shot of my waiting, my time on the bench, my staring at the scabs in my knee and the barren streets, would be one cut from the reel -- left on the floor. Discarded for irrelevance. Yet, in life -- in stereo and digital -- this particular fragment of waiting became the "mood" itself.
For one, the day was beautiful -- an English summer in its purest form. Wisps of clouds floated on ocean skies, greens and yellows and the hues in between. Ale drinkers laughed heartily, and the grounding aroma of baked pastry and braised mutton sailed on a cool and free air. But, on that bench, on that Green -- amid the families and the day-trippers -- I was angry. For none of them were really there. A pregnant silence, ready to birth the ticking of time, fell under the stillness of a place locked down. I waited alone, skin tinging red at the tickle of a high UV, and the anger for the old world -- about the old world -- kindled like an eternal flame.
Marco was coming through the church gates. He had his bike with him, a smile on his face -- one that knew he was late and simultaneously knew he'd get away with it. I rose -- opened -- we hugged.
"How've ya been?" Marco rubbed my back, slapped my shoulder -- a little harder than usual. Although, at that time, I hadn't a reference for 'usual'.
We sat down to roll a cig. He asked me for a rizla and some tobacco, as he'd 'accidentally' left his at home. I obliged. We tucked, licked, rolled, talked.
"So. How've ya been wastin' time?"
"Cycling. You'll see today."
"Oh, yeah, ya said. How's the back?"
"Back?"
"Said ya had a crash on the phone." Marco lit his cigarette -- he always rolled them loose, like a shawarma, the stuffed tobacco teetering on flopping out of the loose-wrap grip of a slathered rolling paper.
The crash. "Back's good."
"You muppet. How did that 'appen?"
"Brakes failed. Had to use the bottom of my shoes to try and slow down." I showed him the underside of my battered Chuck Taylor's -- scrape marks ran down the soles.
"Shit."
"Yeah. Shit indeed."
Marco exhaled. Ran a hominid hand through tightly curled hair. The Green was empty. Like a stage for this moment. Soft winds rippled through the oaks. I knew Marco wanted to say something. I knew he wanted to say something to me, specifically. He opened his mouth:
"So. Should we go?" Stubbing out his cigarette, Marco clambered onto his bike.
"Remember -- no overtakin'! You're on my route!" I told him, as I got on mine.
Marco laughed. "You'll have to get faster."
"A lot can happen in a pandemic."
We pushed off, rode down the road, into the maw of the meadows, and were soon deep inside the dirt paths, grassy hills and tumbling fields.
I rode ahead of Marco, signalled the tight curves, the feathered brake-points, the stretches to accelerate and those to ease off. The route had a steady undulation of ups and downs, peaks and troughs, curves and bends, rims and swells. Our tires traced along the body of motherly soil.
There was a magnificence in the hung air, though Marco insisted on blasting techno-drum-and-bass out a £10 speaker as he pumped his pedals behind me.
The pandemic, ironically, had done well for our cardiovascular health. We maintained a steady pace, and, in fact, having Marco behind me drove my legs to cycle harder than ever. Lactic acid coursed through torn muscles, and the burn lit a match in the gas-filled room of my brain.
We were free. Pedaled to the metal, darts across the open plains of English countryside.
Soon, we came to the motorway bridge -- near the scene of my aforementioned accident. A steep cycle up, across the M20, and a sharp descent down -- at the bottom of which, the gate that nearly cost my life.
Marco and I pushed up the hill, sweated on our handlebars, batted at the roaming midges.
"This place better be good!" He shouted.
"There's horses! I promise. What else would you be doing now -- having a wank?"
We pressed over the M20, slowed as we reached the descent. I tugged on both my brakes -- the bicycle jerked to a stop.
"This is the place."
"You crashed here?"
"Down there."
"Wha--are you scared, or somet'?"
"No, Marco, I'm just pointing out--"
"Pointing out what?"
"Forget it."
Our bikes let gravity pull us down, and our bodies drifted in the slight tilt of the curved path. Around the bend, we saw the gate -- and Marco saw the wide open space next to it.
We passed it, and he pulled off to the side -- scratched his head. Burst into laughter. "You crashed into THAT? You could fit a bus into that gap!"
I laughed along, slapped my knees. Marco called me an idiot, and I laughed harder. What he didn't know, and what I didn't want to tell him, was that I had aimed for the gate intentionally as part of a bid to feel something -- even if that was pain. Not out of suicidal ideation, or recklessness, but pure and passive resignation. The pain persisted, still, as a little knot just at the left of my upper spine -- but again, I wished not to get into that, or the fact I liked it there.
We cycled on, nearing Sale. A little stream, and a concrete overpass -- spraypainted logos and phrases from anonymous donors, empty beer cans and a lost shopping trolley. Marco pulled off the path, hit his brakes with a tight wheeze.
He hopped off, rummaged around a tattered Nike bumbag slung loose around his sloped shoulder.
"Still about ten minutes out. Come on." I sat on my idle bike, restless -- the other group of cyclists I was racing in my head were disappearing around the bend, behind the treeline.
Marco smiled at me, pulled a joint from his bag.
"Figured we could use a lil' leg-stretcher." He waved it at me and I must admit -- I gave in.
After the flick of a lighter, we smoked under the underpass. Our bikes lay on top of each other. A sheet of grey blocked out the sun, and the sunlight receded to leave the cold sheen of its absence across the fields.
There was much to say, yet nothing at all worth speaking about. The questions of our day-to-day lives were already pre-cognized -- we woke, we rode, or found another way to cut the time, slept. Alcohol and maybe some weed adorned our wayward flotilla of existence, but even they were losing the luster they had in our earlier teenage years.
Light drizzle came. Moistened up the stiff, baked ground and the dried blades of grass. Our overpass served as a canopy. Streams of rain cascaded down its concrete edge, dribbled into little puddles by our feet.
Marco passed me the joint. "I'm happy to press on, if you are."
"Eh... If this keeps up we'll be fucked on the way back."
"Live a little, Chris. It won't kill ya."
"Believe me, I'm alive -- just not stupid."
"Ooh, you're hard. Mister GCSE over here."
We laughed, though it was forced. I had cleared him by at least three grade brackets, and we both knew it, but he didn't want me to know it bothered him. It did bother him.
I wanted to break that ice. To get back to where we were. I turned to Marco, patted him.
"Marco, let's talk", though, before anything could be said, a shaggy Yorkshire Terrier, soaked in mud and covered in twigs, wrapped its way through my legs.
"Hello, boy!" Marco crouched, ran his hands through the pup -- it shook, and threw mud onto the both of us.
"Where the hell's its owner?" I joined Marco closer to the earth, checked the dog's collar.
As it jumped up and down, it barked -- shot off into the trees on the other side of the overpass.
I shared a look with Marco. We knew without saying that we had to follow it. It was a bounding white blob against wet grass and darkened bark. With our bikes, we pushed and shoved into the tree-line -- broke through, to under the leaves. Rain escaped through the gaps, pattered among the branches. The white dot arced up and down.
Marco and I followed it -- thrusting the bikes further and further into the wild veils of unending woodland. Marco yanked his back wheel out of clay mud. Cloying heat trapped beneath the grey lid of the sky. I wasn't sure where the rain ended and my sweat began.
We emerged out into a small clearing. The rain hardened -- came down in fuller sheets. Petrichor fought its way into my nostrils, and for a moment I felt home. Marco and I took cover against a great oak. The dog was nowhere to be seen.
"Where'd that little bugger go?" Marco was panting. He smoked too much.
"Give it a sec -- it'll come back." I replied, trying to control my own short bursts of breathlessness.
Out from a mound, the little paws danced along the grass -- neared a small structure. A wooden hut, composed of long sticks. An improvised shelter. The dog disappeared inside.
Nervous, with a tinge of the giddies, I approached -- Marco stayed a few steps behind me. There was the sound of movement -- the sticks rumbled as something inside turned.
A heavy, dark figure climbed out from the hut -- a shaggy man in a battered overcoat, an askew trilby, and a face bloated by boozing. A wild beard buried his finer features. A bottle hung from his lackadaisacal side. For a moment, the man looked as if he had just fallen from the sky -- or crawled out from the ground, but he soon fixed his posture, and his pupils focused on us. Another whip of wind through the woods. The terrier barked.
"Lads -- lads! How are we?"
"Who... Who are you--"
"Don't worry, don't worry. He won't bite! Come, join me."
He pointed at the hut. Marco and I exchanged glances. I turned back to the man, my hide raised and feral. "Who are you?"
"Call me Ku!" He said it with an almost-twirl, a curl in the lips -- a failed improv actor, incongruent with the damp sog and musty air between us.
Reel change. The projector stays lit.
There's a brick canopy above me. Currently. Cascade of rain to the left. To the right, the lights of my room. Just ahead is a clotheshorse, draped along it are the socks and underwear and face towels -- the interminable cycle of laundry. The lines in my fingers are lit by the procedural glare from a monochrome laptop. Here I am, in this garden, recounting a story that borders on the knife's edge of nostalgia and fantasy. Tapping away at disparate keys in an absent-minded fog. Fictive or fact, it's all the same. Is this an act of revisionism, or one of confession?
It's difficult to understand why we do anything at all. Especially in the translucent present, contemplating opaque pasts. To the extent I am unsure of why I sit here and recount a vernacular tale from my pandemic lexicon. Early hours like these, well-adjusted elements of society sleep. Here, I whittle -- whittle away at my own pompous mythology, searching to carve figures out of stone. Michaelangelo believed that his work was a process of discovery, not of creation. The statue was in the marble. It had always been in the marble, even before the chisel's inaugural first strike.
Before me is a white towel of tight cotton and a sewed lining. Niveous in the twilight, it is inscrutable -- factual, real. Thread count accounted for by the auditing of these sullen eyes. Yet once more it shall be submerged in stretches of memory, just like Marco -- whose real name was Mick. Just like Ku -- whose real name would forever escape me. Ku himself is a caricature of a half-remembrance, a left-over piece of junkfood -- undigested and regurgitated onto a canvas that may as well have remained blank -- for it signifies nothing. Maybe signifies nothing.
This exercise, so far, has done one thing. I wish I were under leaf cover, with droplets hitting through my open collar and down the pale skin of my back, shooting a freeze up my spine, as I trudge through thick earth and wild bramble. Under this canopy, one of brick and stone, I hear the rain but don't feel it. My skin is dry.
The downpour descends -- slides across the concrete, drowns the saplings between the cracks. Its the same slabs I wrote Year of the Horse next to, the same little weeds that teased it out of me. Was I the character then, or am I the character now?
"What the fuck are you doing out here?" Marco shouted. The dog ran circles around us, barked at the cloying heat. The grey held above.
Ku held out a bottle of off-license wine. Cheap. "Please. I need to speak to someone. Anyone."
We were seventeen. No fake I.D. We'd been cooped up in rooms and PlayStation lobbies, living lives like Danish prisoners. Comfortable but kept. In that moment, I could have tore the bottle from him and downed it myself, but Marco and I knew that to be impolite. As we acquiesced, Ku led us into the hut.
"Inside" was uncomfortable, to say the least -- there were little log stools for Marco and I, while Ku took a hefty branch to support his fat arse. The roof of the hut was triangular -- so you were forced to lean at forty-five degrees as any further would have you impaled in the nubs and thorns of the heavy sticks that ostensibly made up the "walls". Along the ground were empty bottles, plastic cups, cigarette ends. A rolled-up sleeping bag. Tissues. Though, I bare not dwell on that. The dog wandered around outside, where we had left the bikes.
"Mate, do you, uh... Do you live here?" I asked, not sure if an affirmative answer would be better or worse than a negative one.
"Only three nights a week." Ku opened the bottle, poured a spittle of chemically-processed alcohol into dirt-sullied cups. Marco and I waited for Ku to drink his, before we drank ours.
"Three nights. You choose to live like this three nights a week?" Hiding my incredulity was harder than hiding the distaste for whatever the fuck was in the rosé.
"I live in the ville."
"Chorltonville?"
"Well -- not quite. Just off it. Claude Road. But, you know. Basically."
"Huh. And you... You live out in the meadows, because?"
"My wife has cancer."
Marco nearly choked on that pink piss -- I slapped his back and he spluttered some more out. He cleared his throat, wiped his mouth: "So you just left her?"
"No, no -- it's not... It's not like that. She's Thai." This detail made intrinsic sense to me. "In her culture, it's no good to be seen sick. Before--fore the, y'know, the lockdown, the COVIDs -- I could go out. All hours of the night. This was my only option." That one didn't.
"You just left her alone?"
"Nuh-uh. Look, I don't really want to talk about the now. How old are you two?"
We told him.
"Right. Can you indulge me? Let a man give you some advice?"
The fear crept. Marco and I gave brief looks -- to mentally check in -- but for some reason it seemed like leaving, or even the attempt at it, would be a bad idea. We knew this without saying it.
Ku lit a cigarette, smoked it in three long drags. Let out a gust of smoke like a steam-train announcing its departure. Smoke and light hung in solid air -- Ku's face flickered in between, visible and invisible. For a moment I felt an ancient spirit stir within me -- one that called toward tribal dances and Amazonian spear-fishing.
Brown and yellow gummed along his teeth. Yet the words came out with a timbre so great I ignored Ku's dentistry.
"Doctor Johnathan Foster. I arrived at the Old Vic with a couple shillings, two cigarettes, and some expired bus tickets. A coach all the way from Newcastle, a brief layby with an old flame in Birmingham, and here I had tumbled all the way down to meet destiny.
I wanted to be an actor. Y'see. Not like the prissy kind, not like the posers -- one that was trialled by blood and fire on the stage, pouncing out from the wings, enrapturing an audience with one voice... My voice. I could hear it swell and sing. I could hear it cite Shakespeare, Keats, Dante and the rest -- the classics. Pish! Pish to all of it. Pish to the masters and the greats -- you know what Tolstoy never did? Tolstoy never lived in the woods. And the man is the arbiter of the human condition? Does he know MY condition? Is MY condition recounted in the great lineages and dynasties of War & Peace? No. And I'll tell you why.
That man. Beautiful, he was. Doctor Foster. He found me in the doorway to the library, huddled under wet newspapers and a ratty blanket my aunt Beth knitted for me as a child. After some burnt brown toast and an over-milked tea, Doctor Foster asked me why I was there. I told him I wished to attend the Old Vic, to follow in the footsteps of Olivier and Brando, to--
Well, anyway, he stopped me. He said I'd missed the admissions period. Period? By a few weeks, my future was savagely curtailed. Blocked by a bestial bureaucracy. Though, as honourable as the man was, he pitied me. The good doctor -- the provenance of his doctorate notwithstanding time -- needed a lodger. Someone to look after some things, maintain the house. He had a place in the leafier end of Gloucester Road -- old, semi-detached, Edwardian. Kinda place that creaked and yawned as you staggered up for a midnight shit.
Good board, decent money -- and Foster, a veritable dramatist of supine instinct and bashful presence, was above all -- lonely. Some months before he found me wrapped in newspapers, his... Well. His "good friend", Graham, with whom he had shared their little room and intimate corridors, had passed of an advanced cancer. Decades his junior, I wondered if he viewed me as an overgrown baby left on a church step, or a substitute for his dearly departed.
Either way, coming to Bristol hadn't been for nothing. While Foster lectured, I would rise late -- fix an ascetic something of stiff sourdough and runny eggs -- take a cup of tea into the study, and drown myself in his walls of books. Enough pages filled that room to take a forest or two. I spent so much time in there that Foster considered me a new piece of furniture for the first six months.
In the evenings, upon his return, I would cook dinner. Foster, by the time I met him, had grown somewhat infirm. Still, he could illuminate a candle-lit room with the fruitful retellings of his youth-bound days. Even the most baroque opera would have a harder time capturing a grand hall the way Foster could. The man simply felt like he had walked out from any of the heavy tomes kept in his study. A man outside of time, and, I must admit...
A man I couldn't help but love. The first night we lay together, in the half-crescent moonlight, was my first time ever. I had arrived a thespian, and stayed a doting carer. My father was working at a garage somewhere in Portgual, my mother long gone, my brother was in prison and my sister was pregnant and hitched before she was nineteen. I had no one, and nowhere, but the little slices of hollow heaven between the books in the study and the arms of a geriatric.
Telling it now, it all seems so simple and stupid and long. But, that time, in that house, was where my history began and ended. My life before and after are overtures to that performance. Me, playing the part of husbandwife-and-maid, and him, the sage of deep time. It was a relation that would have withered and welted in the direct sunlight of open society, but one that could bloom and blossom in our dim concubium.
Some nights, as the fireplace popped and cracked with blackened logs and flicking flames, I would curl up with my head upon his lap. His voice -- that voice, with a greater swell than waves on the ocean -- soothed me into iridescent dreams, as it recited Cronin and Shelley. Rhythms of the days were slow, each second a universe of sensory detail. As my mind floated down into the freeing abyss, his words carried me -- bathed and humbled my dwindling thoughts in the vast warmth of a perfect, encroaching slumber.
A few years passed. We became as one. I would venture out for supplies -- vegetables, pills, brandy -- mainly. Though, some weekends, I delivered poetry readings at a local piss-up for students and writers. It was a sordid scene of chasers, and one I enjoyed being a tourist in -- not a member of. I could always count on returning to the sultry lullabies and velvet cushions of the house on Gloucester Road.
By the time we knew something was wrong, I was well into my mid-twenties. Beyond Foster, beyond his walls of books, there was not much else. The world was just paper-dressing for the stage of our dalliance. One morning, as I delivered him black coffee on the back patio, I found Foster convulsing in his wicker-chair. A nose-bleed careened down his sun-kissed wrinkles, and spotted onto the silk lapels of his dressing gown.
Stroke. After that, I was house-bound -- for Foster could not walk, nor really talk. I was a nurse, twenty-four-seven. The burden was not one I struggled with. It was the greatest privilege of my life to wipe spittle from his chin, muck from the corners of his thinned mouth, to clothe and feed and bathe him. In a way, I finally understood how he must have felt upon first seeing me -- wrapped in newspaper.
Now it was my time to read him to bed. Night and day, I prayed for a gradual recovery -- a little light sign that he would one day regain his strength. Night and day, the left side of his face drooped ever more. The corner of his mouth hung ever lower. The eyelids covered more of a disconnected pupil. Between laboured words, I could make out that his breathing was hollower by the hour, and that he was in pain.
One night, as he fell asleep in my arms, I decided that the greatest act of my love was required. An act of kindness. It only took a few moments for the pillow to suffocate him, and, to be frank -- I don't think he wanted to fight it anyway. Awake, weeping, I held his husk as it twitched with rigor-mortis until dawn broke. As the ornate room filled with the birthing light, I went to the telephone. I explained to the switchboard that Doctor Johnathan Foster had passed sweetly into the night. That it was gentle. Knowing me only as his lodger, people soon arrived to retrieve the body. As if it belonged somewhere else."
The ensuing silence was prolonged. Potent. After I had studied the shrunken visage of Ku for signs of lingering psychopathy, I flicked my eyes over to Marco.
He stared directly back at me. Mortified. The imperative was clear: let's get the fuck out of here.
So, with Ku's head hung low, we grabbed the last of the wine and got the fuck out of there. Ku's terrier barked at us, bit feebly at our heels as we climbed onto the bikes and pedaled for any direction that was the opposite of that hut.
Soon, the bikes burst out of the treeline and onto a path -- I pumped faster, Marco just behind, and we cycled like demons through the thickets.
Up ahead, above a leafy parapet, I could just about make out the motorway bridge --
"Nearly there!" I shouted back at Marco. We rode around the rim of a dirt basin, shot up a gravel patch toward the gate:
I made to aim for the wide open space next to it, pedaled further and harder --
Bounced onto the slope, pumped upwards --
From behind, a SMACK of metal and wood -- a YELP.
With a harsh screech of the brakes, I hopped off my bike and turned. Marco lay stretched across the asphalt, cuts up his arms and legs. In the panic, he'd gone straight into the gate. His bike frame lay crooked on the ground, as he winced and groaned. Hiding some laughter at the irony, I went over -- helped Marco onto his feet --
He shoved me away. "Don't fucking touch me!"
Last reel.
Looking over this epitaph, as we circle the deeper waters of 4AM, I worry I may have failed in my duties. In whether the reels were placed before the projector correctly -- in the correct order. Whether certain scenes were out of sequence, or some lost in the changeover all-together. The rain's eased off and the white towel still flaps in the breeze. Chris and Marco, Mick and I. In a way they're all the same, just sublimated parts of each other. Or, constituent parts of the same thing. Maybe there isn't a correct order. What we mistake for linearity is actually just the inexorable push-and-pull of cause-and-effect. Though, as to the cause of the friendship's demise, not one thing can be singled out. Neither is the effect easily defined. Two people are sometimes pulled apart by circumstance and change, or a fractious rift. In fact and fiction the truth is a mix of both, not an either/or. Constructing narratives from shadows is much like catching ghosts in nets -- it's ultimately unproductive.
I smacked Marco across the face and cycled off. I left him with the broken bike frame and the scraped limbs. We have never spoken since, even though he has made many attempts to contact me in the intervening years. Not recently, mind. I would always let the call ring out, or the text go unanswered. It wasn't even a conscious decision, just one brought out of the fact we hardly knew each other anymore. Why grieve when no one's died?
Cycling continued throughout the pandemic. As the gorge of time grew from Ku and his hut, a doubt about his existence cropped up time and again. The only person I knew to verify his presence had been locked in a box, left in the attic of my past. One day, the pandemic sort of ended and things opened -- but nothing has ever been the same.
The old world is as fleeting in the bustling streets as it was in the barren ones.
About a year later, I left for university. On my subsequent returns, punctured by a growing sense of estrangement with my hometown, I would take a cab from Piccadilly Station back to Chorlton. My third time making that trip, early in my second year, the cab rode up the ramp to join the Mancunian Way. I looked out, and, on a pillar under an overpass, a piece of graffiti caught my eye:
"Who's Ku?", it scrawled.
Now I sit here, in the garden, with the towels and the night. I think of Ku. I think of the graffiti's question, and I think of the fact you and I are the only two people with the answer. If only we knew it back then on the Green.
I call you, and the other end rings. You don't pick up.
Bonfires Over Urga - June
I will tell you of his victory. Damned is a man to a firing squad. Damned is a man to history. Word came, as it does, in the little hours of a long midnight. After a drumhead trial, the Baron was put against the wall. What remains of him runs through a gutter in Novonikolayevsk.
As Julius crossed the Rubicon, or Hannibal crossed the Alps, Roman von Ungern-Sternburg crossed into Mongolia from Siberia. He led Mongols, Buryats, Russians, Cossacks, Tibetans, Chinese and Manchus. In them pumped the blood of Genghis Khan, a life-force of heaven sent destiny. They came, pillaged, burnt. In the black embrace of night, they lit bonfires around Urga. Only a thousand men, yet in the dark they were ten-thousand, one-hundred-thousand strong. What the Baron knew, what the ancients knew, was that to break a people is to break their spirit.
Bonfires lit the small nightmares in Urga. A bloody campaign. Slaughter. Rape. Pogroms. Atrocities for which the Baron paid for with his body. Yet, in the wake of such news, I have no thought for his body -- but his spirit.
He was indentured unto no state. He was a state unto himself. He could make forests wilt for their bashful presence. With him and his cavalries, came my Kingdom.
How does a man face death? Much in the way he faces life. The Baron once told me of a story.
During a retreat to the upper Kherlen River, a lieutenant he favoured assaulted a nurse. The Baron had him lashed, then burnt at the stake. A stench of seared flesh and burning wood. The man's eyes melted and ran down his face. His screams went from adolescent, to coarse, to unbearable even for the skulking predators. All of which discharged under the heavy gaze of the Mad Baron, yet stirred nothing beneath his surface.
There was nothing beneath the surface.
I considered him a vessel for something ancient. He wished to create Kings, yet sought no Crown.
During the Great War, he charged on horseback toward machine guns. Two days ago, he stood as men too young to know his name put him down.
In earnest, I tell you this. I believe the Baron to have lied. I believe he saw himself on that stake, and knew his fire was coming. From the palazzo, under this night, I can just about see the mountain of my namesake. The Bogd Khan. Urga seems smaller tonight. And my mountain a clump of dirt.
Tonight, the stars might as well be bonfires.
Year of the Horse - May
Sundays are for weeding and cuticles. They share similar lines of thought -- removal of the unneeded. On that particular Sunday, cool spring had warmed into early summer. Errant growths shot up through the gaps in the garden's dry concrete slabs, reached out of their brick enclosure, fierce toward a solid sky. The sun teased their edged leaves, its light circling the rims of verdant youth.
Such futility was pruned, shoved in black bags, hauled off to the middling babble of daytime radio. I liked the radio, it made the house fuller. Circumstances of London rent had forced me into living with a gaunt drug addict and an actively dying man, thus Sundays were for weeding. My cuticles came after the gloves were off. Nails and gardens, windows to the soul.
On my way out, I took the last black bag to the front door, where an unexpected visitor lay on the welcome mat. A flyer. We never got flyers. The estate was at the back of a park, nestled in a no man's land between distant tube stations. A wilderness. Yet, there it lay.
Taking a closer look: a garish smash of bold colours, stock images and loosely translated phrases greeted me.
"MASTER SRI RAM - BEST ASTROLOGER", it read. Palm-reading, tarot, removal of witchcraft. Money problems? Master Sri Ram. Relationship problems? Master Sri Ram. "Get your love back", "confront bad spirits", Master Sri Ram.
At the bottom, the flyer directed me to a small commercial unit in Lewisham -- "right next to Peri's Piri Piri chicken shop on Lee High Road". At least they were thorough.
Figuring it for junk, I took the flyer and the last black bag with me. Trees wreathed in gold sunlight, and a heavy blue hung over the heat rising from the asphalt outside. A short stroll to the council bins. Still, by the flower beds and bollards, the domestic remains of movers littered and rotted. A pink bear with a head removed, now crawled upon by sugar-crazed ants, broken cabinets and an office chair that could swivel no more. A tree's shadow canopy played on the patchwork of brick.
As I looked along the estate roads and parked cars, a familiar bash of primary colour battered me on the peripheral. I stopped just short of the recycling.
Every single car along the curb had a Sri Ram flyer tucked neatly into its right-door handle. For a moment, I admired the work ethic. Sundays were for weeding and cuticles. They had ticketed the entire street. I tried not to think about Jason from recruitment or Frank from onboarding. I tried not to think about Melissa in Amsterdam, and I tried not to think about bad spirits and Master Sri Ram. The black bag went into the bin but the flyer came home.
I was acquainted with feverish dreams. Though, not of the kind that plagued me on my passage into Monday. A place familiar, though not at that hour. A large pool, drained of water. Blue lights hung low along yellow tiles and empty stalls. I had learned swimming here. Or, a part now unknown to me did. I can see that boy through a glass, and yet while his face is mine, it is obscure -- blurred by the imperceptible miles of distance. No one was there during this visit. Just me, and the echo of my steps around the dry-bed of the pool. There was light but I'm not sure from where. Half-day, half-night. A telephone, on a winding wire, lowered from a darkness above and down into my cupped hands. When I put the receiver to my ear, there was a slight hiss, a distant pop -- and a man on the other end informed me that drowning was the most peaceful way to die.
Apposite were my midnight screams, as the next day was spent around a phone. I was waiting for a call from Frank from onboarding, or Jason from recruitment. Definitely not from Melissa in Amsterdam. A thousand job applications and two names saw mine. Frank and Jason.
Frank and Jason didn't know it, but I was acutely aware, that they held the dangling prospect of gainful employment over my head. Saturdays were for job applications, Sundays were for weeding. Mondays were for waiting around the telephone. A voice from the ceiling.
There were no calls from Frank, or Jason, and certainly not from Melissa in Amsterdam -- but why would she call, she never calls now and I'm sure she's loving it and not thinking about me and riding the bicycles and living the life and not thinking about me.
Evening came, and it was morose. Evenings like this I tried to dissect the disease in my life, pick apart the ligaments of my choices, diagnose the illness in my body. Sometimes this was literal, as I convinced myself an ab was a tumour one too many times. Most times this was more abstract, and this latter kind usually led to the former. Innards are messy, and unseen for that reason. We wear skin suits to hide the untidiness. Yet, I can see my veins wiggle beneath the thin sheen of flesh in the light of an electric bulb and I think about how mortal, pathetic and messy I really am. Dissecting a frog would have more use than dissecting me, for at least the frog had lived while I haven't even been born.
Tuesday and Wednesday came and went. Night fevers swept in and out. I was in the swimming pool, then hacking half-digested chunks into the toilet bowl. Then it was morning, and still no calls from Frank or Jason or Melissa or anyone for that matter. There was no harm in trying.
It was Thursday that I went to Master Sri Ram. An hour long bus toured me through the jungles of South London -- the half-shuttered main roads, the Grecian townhouses, overpriced food markets and heaps of rubbish along pavements and side streets. I read a book about mycology, and every time we went over a bump I thought about the freedom in mycelium.
We neared Lewisham, and doubt crept in. As if I could feel Sri Ram in the air. The inevitability of him. I got off outside Lewisham shopping centre. Sun bore down on a roving market, as fish, fabric and fresh fruit were flogged from gazebos and wagons. I battered my way through to a high street, along which I searched for Peri's Piri Piri chicken -- my Mount of Olives.
Alas, I came upon the chickenshop. Day-drinkers and gamblers hung out of its doorway, stared at the patterns in the tables under garish fluorescents, groaned and murmured as an employee screamed out the same order number to a gallery of blank and distant faces. Next door, an A-board stood out in the cracked pavement -- stubbed cigarettes around its frame. "Master Sri Ram", it said.
From the street, a busy one at that, the unit was impenetrable to sight. A heavy red curtain, emblazoned with rich tapestries and bejeweled sequins, swayed in the slight breeze -- the entrance. Windows either side were shuttered, themselves canvasses for the passing graffiti of the drunks and the prepubescents.
My eyes shifted between the A-board, and the curtain. Momentarily, I was rooted to the concrete -- as I became increasingly aware that I was increasingly embarrassed. Am I mad? The thought didn't occur on the journey over -- nor as I got dressed, or as I showered, or as I took my morning shit. Seeing Sri Ram had hitherto been conducted with the solemn duty of wiping my arse or flossing my teeth, or doing my cuticles or weeding the garden -- but I was sure to be made out a fool, or Sri Ram a charlatan. What was my point in being here, on Lee High Road, between Sri Ram, a chickenshop and a puddle of foamy piss?
Soon after, a jolt bolted from my thighs, into my knee and through to the calves -- it was equal madness to make the journey, but not lift the veil. With the weightiness I had expected from the deep red, I parted the curtains, and slipped inside. The moment I did, Lee High Road and surrounding Lewisham no longer existed.
A corridor. Straight, lined with curtains -- exotic silks patterned up and down the walls, toward a thin sheet that blew in the repetitive gust of a sentry fan. Through such a sheet, I could make out a vague figure -- I pressed ahead, and found myself face-to-face with Master Sri Ram.
Brutish gemstones adorned Sri Ram's fingers, a medallion hung from a bulbous neck. Thick curls of smoke-grey hair tumbled down an old, carved face -- yet there was a flash of vitality in the deep-set eyes. They laid on me, narrowed. To his left, a gallery of statues -- Vishnu, Krishna, Jagganath -- to his right, an impish looking man -- younger, more casual. Incense sweetened stale air, yet among the jasmine, sandalwood and persimmon, a slight aroma of carpet stayed.
"You are here. Finally." With wide arms, and white teeth, Sri Ram welcomed me from behind a small desk. On it were a pile of seashells and foreign powders. It was dark, and I squinted at the two men as I fumbled around for a "hello".
Sri Ram was described as the "best Indian astrologer" on his A-board, but I couldn't tell if the Master in front of me was Indian, Arab or Chinese. The younger man, who I came to know as Jan, was angular yet unassuming. Dutch. He rose, took my hand -- shook it soft.
"This is best astrologer, Master Sri Ram. There is nothing he cannot do for you. Any problem? The Master will fix. I promise, brother." The younger man guided me toward a chair, which I felt obliged to fall into -- before he took his place next to me. Sri Ram was opposite me, but the younger man was positioned directly to my side -- turned toward my ear. His face lingered on the boundaries of my peripheral as I turned to the Master himself.
For what could have been five seconds or all of eternity, Sri Ram studied me. His eyes were like a desert oasis. Something drove you toward them, but you couldn't tell if they were a mirage or not. At last, with a heavy sigh, Sri Ram deflated -- smiled. There was a warmth to it, but something about the younger man bothered me.
"You. Your face." Sri Ram mumbled.
I leaned in -- the younger man cleared his throat, explained: "He's saying 'your face'."
"I understand that, but what about it?"
"It's lucky." Sri Ram talked as if he saw me coming.
"It doesn't feel lucky."
"No. Good life. Palm."
The younger man touched my shoulder -- and gently said, "The Master will now take your palm -- for reading. He's very good."
Bemused, and a little anxious at just how hidden the unit was from the outside, I stuck my palm out.
Sri Ram took it in an iron grip. His eyes bulged, hovered over the lines and marks in my hand. Traced along the ring finger to the bottom of the thumb. He tapped the table. I didn't understand. He tapped again.
"Other hand, now," said the younger man.
I obliged -- for that seemed like the only thing to do. With both hands out, Sri Ram placed the pile of seashells in them -- he cupped my fingers over each other, enclosing the shells within my loose grip.
"Shake."
I did so, and wondered if Melissa had found someone. Sri Ram jerked his head to the gallery of statues.
"Pray."
I did so, and wondered if everyone was in on the joke of life in a way that I wasn't. Maybe I was the punchline.
"Okay," Sri Ram began, as he brought a crooked pencil and a sheet of paper out onto the table, "birthday?".
I told him, and remembered how much I cried on my fifth. He tapped my hands, and I let go of the shells -- they scattered across the paper.
Sri Ram counted out twelve of them, left the remaining four to the wayside. He then added twelve to the sum-total of my birthday, which somehow gave him the answer of:
"Ninety-six years, two month, three days. Good life."
"Good life." The younger man chimed in.
"Ninety-six? I have to do gardening for another sixty-five years?"
"No, no. No garden. Luxury, and money, are coming to you. He can tell -- from the face." The younger man explained.
"What about the face?"
"It is lucky." Sri Ram seemed to like this line. "Your birthday. Your face. You know the year?"
"Twenty-twenty--"
"No. Zodiac. Year of the Horse." Sri Ram put all of the shells to one side -- took my hand in his. "I like you. You have great life. But. In last four years, a man, and a woman -- they have placed bad spirits on you."
Melissa. "How do I get rid of them?"
The younger man got a bit closer. "The Master can get rid of them for you."
I could sense the other shoe dropping imminently. After all, no one had asked me for money yet. Sri Ram pointed deep into his own chest, declared:
"I pray. For you. Five time. After five time, the spirit gone."
The younger man got close to my ear, breathed loud down the canals toward my brain stem. "Five days. All it takes."
Parts of me attracted toward the proposition. In a way, spirits had led me down errant paths. Shoots of growth that needed pruning. For instance, life could not have been going well for it to end up in a curtain-laden commercial unit next to Peri's Piri Piri chickenshop. At the same time, life couldn't have been worse -- since the Franks and Jasons of the world won't call me back. As the thoughts tumbled, unfurled, considered and congregated, a question spilled from a tongue I had thought mine until then:
"What will it cost me?"
"One-thirty."
"One-pound-thirty?" The optimist in me thirst for an agreeable answer, but even as the words careened out, I was set on my financial future being irrevocably ruined by a possible capitulation.
"No. One-hundred-and-thirty."
The other shoe dropped, and the clack against the floorboards reminded me that I shouldn't've been in a commercial unit next door to Peri's Piri Piri chickenshop.
With a quick excuse about a non-existent boilerman, I assured Sri Ram and Jan that I was to 'seriously mull over' the one-hundred-and-thirty commitment. With such a platitude complete, I made a quick getaway. The bus was late, and then the bus driver refused to let me board. Half an hour later I was on the way out of Lewisham, and I regarded my escape as as an example of a steely resolve.
That night was strange. Fever dreams usually come as fragments, yet the dream that night was of an extraterrestrial order. I grazed upon the fertile grounds of the Eocene, deep within the ancient landmass called Laurasia, now considered northern Wyoming. Paleontologists today would call me an Eohippus. High trunks of protozoic trees reigned high above. Humid heat bared down on swamp-soil. Peat and mud baked in still warmth. I was the size of a fox. Wet bark and lichen beckoned me through the brush. Air hummed with the rhythmic beat of cicadas. The sun drew low. Golden rays stretched through miles of forest, lit through the undulating heat of primordial steam. A deep musk, a fermentation, carried through -- thick and wet. Dense in the dew of dying light, the dance of leaves rustled into the night. Shafts of sunset faded into the crevices of rabid moss while giant magnolias clung to virgin earth.
Something was in the dark. My eyes had not evolved to the light, and the shivers well-known to prey beset my quad-pedal appendages. There was something out there. Something was pushing through the overgrowth, battering between branches, heading my way through the cover of foliage --
A fanged jaw shot out from the dark, and I awoke in a torrent of sweat.
Monday was for waiting around the phone. Frank and Jason didn't call. Melissa was in Amsterdam. Weeks passed, and I believed the latitude of my life to be terminal. The fanged jaws tore out my larynx. Savings dwindled. Night shifts at a warehouse in some distant industrial park made up for it, but it meant that Sundays were for sleeping and the waking hours were for weeding. Still, every night I was hunted in Laurasia. The interminable cycle: the half-days and lost-nights, the blurred hours and mindless months, it all coalesced into a blob of nothingness. My mind flittered between the rows of the warehouse, the brightness of the lights, the dry-bed of the pool, the fertile Eocene, Melissa in Amsterdam and the unreturned calls from Frank and Jason. One night, as I diverted packages off the line, to the sound of an American podcaster explaining how vaccines were designed to kill us, my phone rang.
It was Mitch. I liked Mitch, and knew him for a while. He was a failed DJ, a part-time lover, and an all around layabout. He never asked me for much, never challenged me to a point I had to scrutinise myself. Someone I could dominate in a way only a friend could.
We agreed to go for a beer. I took a PTO, claimed a migraine, met Mitch at some dive place in a back street of Brixton. Some band was on. Post-punk bullshit with an axe to grind, a rage against a war that never happened.
Mitch and I drank some Kronenberg. Talked about some times that we laughed about, but didn't quite remember.
"You know, man... Uh, these days you seem a bit different." Mitch always had a face when he wanted to be serious, and it always pissed me off.
"We're all different, Mitch. It's called aging."
"No, you seem, I dunno. It's not just me. I spoke to Fran."
"Who cares about Fran?"
"You told your boss to go fuck himself?"
"He started it."
"How old are you?"
The first time I didn't really have an answer for Mitch. Students screamed as the band crescendo'd, and I thought about the smear on the wall behind Mitch. He looked at me, as if he knew me. I guess he did.
"Mitch. Who the fuck do you think you are?"
Sunday I did weeding and cuticles. Monday I was on the bus to Lewisham, rode the same bumps to the roving market, and bumbled myself over to Master Sri Ram's.
I paid the hundred-thirty and left. On my way out, Jan gave me a "talisman" -- with the instruction that it should be placed under my pillow for five days and five nights. Otherwise, Sri Ram's prayers would obviously fail. Humiliating was the walk back, so much so, that I avoided reflective surfaces so I wouldn't have to look on a man that had just paid over a hundred quid for a clay circle most likely molded by one of Sri Ram's grandkids.
That night my head slept above the talisman. My dreams found me stalking through the dark bowels of Laurasia once more.
A flesh-lust lingered as I choked down granola and milk the following morning. Dreams were realer than real. Every day I awoke with a migraine, as the changes in atmospheric pressure tightened the little veins along my brain. For a few hours I was light-headed, as there was too much oxygen in my waking life. My biology ran on prehistoric software. The phone rang.
Frank. "Please, please, please -- tell me you haven't found a job."
"I push boxes around and sleep. So. Not really."
"Great, SO glad to hear that. I just re-read your CV, and... Wow. Can I just say -- wow?"
"You most certainly can. If 'wow' gets me out of boxes."
"Listen, how do you feel about consultancy?"
A night of prayer, and I was a consultant. Sri Ram truly was the best. The five days ran out, but before they did, Frank had me fully set-up at a job that I 'did', in the most functional sense, but had zero understanding 'of'.
Every day, I worked from home -- usually from my garden, as it was the summer. I let the weeds stretch a bit, as I sat in five-hour long meetings. My only responsibility was to say 'all good on my end' as we wrapped up, and click on multi-coloured boxes all day on a program developed in 2006.
Still, the dreams persisted.
It's hard to say if I was happy, or content, or at least relieved. There was something about trying to keep your head above water -- it made every day a fight. Each gasp of air an ecstasy unto itself. Brine coats your throat, and you laugh in the swell of another push, another struggle to safety, that you are not yet drowned.
Calm waters see to calmer swimming, but you only emerge back onto land clean, rather than changed.
I had just logged off a meeting that had gone round in circles for three hours when the knock came.
After I threw some trousers on, I answered.
Melissa.
"I'm worried about you."
It was like staring at a cadaver. She looked different -- more in focus than she ever did when we were together.
"What... What are you doing here?"
"Mitch said you're acting really... Erratic. And odd."
"I have a job. This is a working day. Who's unstable now?"
"I didn't say unstable."
"You said erratic."
"Oh, Jesus!" Melissa stopped -- composed herself. There was a lot I knew she wanted to say to me, and it took the strength of a saint not to say it. Her eyes softened. "I spoke to your parents."
"You what? I thought you were in fucking Amsterdam?"
"I was worried--"
"Worried? When the hell have you ever been worried?"
"When did you last look at yourself in the mirror?"
I recoiled. Furrowed at her. "What--what, what are you talking about? Have you come all this way just to insult me?"
"When was the last time you had a shower?"
I didn't know.
"When was the last time you had a shave?"
I didn't know.
"When was the last time you had a haircut?"
I didn't know.
"I think you need to speak to a professional."
I told Melissa to fuck off, and I could prove I was fine. She humoured me at the doorstep -- I invited her in, as I could see the neighbours looking over.
After the door was shut, I told her we would go to Sri Ram.
An hour on the bus, and we rode over the bumps -- I told Melissa about mycology. Everyone on the bus stared at us. I told Melissa that mushrooms have been around for hundreds of millions of years, pre-dating most mammals.
We got to Lewishman shopping centre, through the roving market, through to Lee High Road. She held my hand as we walked to Peri's Piri Piri chickenshop, and she let go when we found the commercial unit empty.
Curdled - April
​​​
I.
Mid-week on the Bakerloo. It's always Bakerloo. My life is Bakerloo. My wife and kids are Bakerloo.
Evening rush. Commuting home. There was something feral about it. Given I'm old, my back cracks and my knees are fucked, a young lady gratefully surrendered her seat to me. I like sitting on the tube, as it allows me to indulge in people-watching. I can usually tell a hare from a harlot. The mosaic around me was frigid, though. Glacial. It was a tight carriage, yet through the reams of bags and coats, I glimpsed a face -- one etched out of time, as, for a moment, I saw the glimmer of a young lad amid its deep-set wrinkles. It was the face of Barry Flanders.
I know Barry Flanders -- well, knew him. We went to St. Paul's Catholic Primary School together. Always struck me as a particularly reserved lad, though he did have a... Penchant for the meekly sinister. In a memory as rich as the taste of dairy, Barry had been assigned milk-monitor for our class. They always gave the div-kid with webbed feet and three eyes the milk-monitor role. Like a consolation prize, though I always saw it as offering yourself up as a pinata of sorts. I digress. Anyway, it came to milk time -- and Barry got up, with his tray, and valiantly delivered cartons of skimmed, unskimmed, organic, whatever-other-dairy-alternative-shite-milk you can think of, around the class. He came to me. Now, I must tell you, earlier that day, during an unusually heated game of dodgeball, I did -- accidentally, mind -- throw a ball particularly hard into Barry's cock-and-bollocks. The lad remembered the contours of my face, saw the pitiful plea for mercy in my eyes, and took pleasure in it. He made a great point to look away from me, clutching my milk, before moving onto Johnny Fish. I did not get my milk that day, nor for the next several weeks.
From then on, I hated him. I've always hated him. On that carriage, with him sat across, the hatred burned still. I've carried around in my heart the grudge over the milk-monitor madness, my dairy drought, my entire adult life. Never did I realise, until seeing him there, on the Bakerloo -- deflated, collapsed, with his mile-high box of self-published books -- that I had carried a hatred for a man not deserving it. No, to hate a man is to implicitly reveal he has value. Rugged indifference is a nobler steed, and -- as a nod to our Catholic education -- I decided to forgive Barry, for God seemed to have judged him enough. That being said, I'm sure I lost an inch or two in height due to his lactose lunacy. The train pulled into my stop, but as I got off -- so did he. Knowing these stations like my own intestines, I made a B-line for the quickest exit to avoid him.
Outside on the asphalt was no better than being underground. There was ambling noise and loud people. I puffed away at a Marlboro Gold, as I had given myself just enough time between the station and my house so the smoke-smell could evaporate off me. It was my birthday. Karen would surely have done something for when I got back, and I didn't need a lecture on tobacco at fifty-six. Jesus. Six more than I wanted, and still a ways to go. My Marlboro was close to the filter, and I thought how free the frittered flakes of ash felt. I wondered what the plan was. A birthday-suit humdinger? Or, a trip to Woking Pizza Express with the kids? Kids. They're in university now -- Scarlett probably didn't know what day of the week it was, and Jonah was off in Namibia teaching a village how to build an Amazon dispatch centre.
I was sure it would be Woking, and I was sure it would be shit. I'd probably order the doughballs.
II.
Stairs. Endless stairs up to the apartment. But, it is an apartment. Not a flat. I had to climb those steps every day that week, as Miss Fencer had shat herself in the lift a fortnight prior and the stench was still there. Got to my floor, breathless, with knackered knees. Took out my keys, rattled them into the door, turned the handle, gently pushed on inside--
"SURPRISE!"
A room brimmed with my past -- Karen, the kids, prim and proper for once, and there was John, Kate, Ricky, Quince, Paper Patrick, Chris and Kate from HR (was good to see them in a setting that had nothing to do with the words 'sensitivity training'!), mates, pals, acquaintances, Johnny Fish! There were so many people, I couldn't even see through to the John Lewis carpet that I spent a fucking fortune on. In truth, I lit up -- Karen approached, arms wide with a glass of champagne, kissed me -- God, it was like being twenty again. My kids embraced me! For once!
"Scarlett! You made it out of bed!" I said, the first unrehearsed words of the day.
"My therapist said it'll help me deal with my internalised day trauma."
"That's great, kitten, whatever the fuck that means. Jonah! When did you get back from Namibia?" I took the glass from Karen, kissed her on the cheek.
"Last night, Dad. Goin' back tomorrow to teach those little'uns how to efficiently raise induct rates--"
"Sure, son!"
As I tightened my arms around the family huddle, I scanned the smiling faces -- the clapping hands. Karen whispered, gentle, into my ear:
"Recognise everyone?"
Squinting, I took another survey -- Harry, Chris 2 from Accounts, and... Something cold took hold.
It was Barry Flanders. And he brought his fucking box! Claire from Acquisitions was flipping through one of his books, at MY surprise birthday party! Someone put an "Old but Gold" playlist with hits from the 80s on, so Spandau Ballet smoothed me enough to avoid a face of fury.
Having grunted a response back at Karen, I realised she didn't deserve my indignity. Quick but tender, I kissed her on the forehead -- and made the rounds.
"How's the wife?"
"How's the hand?"
"How's the kids?"
"What're you up to these days?"
"Have you tried calisthenics?"
"Divorced, free -- ready to fuck."
"Yeah, but Donovan's got behaviour problems."
"Cancer. He won't see three months."
"Jesus, does he know how obvious that wig is?"
"She's a fighter."
"Always remembered you a little slimmer!"
"Carrie's meeting those Q2 projections, yeah--"
"God, Jeff is such a twat."
"So, with my legs akimbo, vagging out--"
"Child support. Can you believe that bollocks?"
Delirium. Some were happy, some were not. Some were drunk, some were recovering alcoholics. Some were upside-down and some were sideways. Between them I knew everything and nothing. Plaster people -- thin decorations for a bare interior, hung on fifty-six-year-old-walls, covering claw marks in the greased paint. At least I avoided Barry.
Somewhere: din-din-din. Spoon against glass. All eyes drew to Karen. She smiled in Dulux White, pointed a Glitterbels nail right at me -- though, for a moment, I didn't feel like I was really there.
A bit pissed and a bit dazed, I joined my wife before the madding crowd.
"Thank you all so much for coming to George's fifty-sixth. I'm sure it means the world to him!"
It didn't, but I smiled along.
"Now, for the moment I'm sure you've all been waiting for... The cake."
There was cake! I didn't know there was cake, and as I've been letting myself go since my mid-40s I couldn't have been happier. Jonah and Scarlett wheeled out a large Victoria sponge -- the most labour I've ever seen them perform. At this moment, it dawned on me that Woking Pizza Express would have been better.
They sang. Candles were lit. Eager faces and oval eyes awaited me to blow them out. To cast a wish along the wisps and into the aether. What else could a man want at fifty-six?
Embarrassed, my cheeks hot -- I blew. At the moment the little orange flames collapsed into nothing, so did the party. Everyone vanished into thin air. It was me, the cake...
And Barry. His teeny eyes skittered about in shock and awe, his lean frame shuddering like an animal. I cut the cake, and ate the entire thing in front of him.
Do Not Touch - March
Ceramic rims so thin, air could break them. The bowls and the cups, the plates and the silverware, spread orderly and sparse. Arranged at the behest of the exhibition's curator, Takeshi Aizawa, Japan House longed to display the refinement of the Rising Sun's craftsmanship. Refined they were, for the exhibit was popular. Monkish crowds doted and peered, studied the simple lines, the clarity in the curves, the distillation of will. It was a marvel. Ranged from the Kamakura period to the Showa.
Everyday tools turned sacramental under low lights and minimal decor. Japan House stood as a cathedral, with these delicate testaments to tiny little love.
For the care placed into these ornaments and utensils, and the inherent risk of a free admission, touching was strictly prohibited -- blasphemous, even. Errant feelers could disintegrate the glasses, breathe a spatula from the Edo period crooked. To further this imperative, the exhibit's management placed little cubes around the artifacts, emblazoned with their most prime directive:
"Do Not Touch". For months, the commandment was followed -- bags held out the way, hands kept at the sides. All aided by the little "Do Not Touch" cubes dotted all over. Congregations came and went in a solemn pride, and no disturbance perturbed what was ordained. It worked.
Until, on one small day in spring, an aberration. It was just after lunch, and Experience Assistant Jo Lightly surveyed the state of the room. Everything from Hokkaido to Kyoto accounted for, safe, sound -- no one had boiled an egg on an obsidian pan -- yet. As she turned a corner onto the forks, a forceful sight planted her to the spot.
A "Do Not Touch" cube had been touched. It was askew. Knocked from its axis. A satellite veering off its orbit, away from the gravity well of the conical spoons and clay teapots. Jo adjusted it, went about her duty, but the sight rattled her so that it followed her home, into her bed, into her dreams and clawed at her soul.
Weeks passed, and the trauma subsided. It was a cube, after all, any old riff-raff can knock a "Do Not Touch" cube sign into a frenzy. Things happen. Life happens! Jo weighed it. What worth is a sleepless night, for one little cube?
Months went, days bled together. Jo forgot -- but, sure enough, one morning, it happened again. Again the next week. Cubes all over, on the floor, inside vases and cabinets. It kept happening, in fact, to the point that Jo had to take medical leave.
Though, as if on the road to Damascus, she went straight to management upon her return.
Jo had an epiphany. "Do Not Touch" signs for the "Do Not Touch" signs. It was genius -- though, costly. However, the exhibit's management had to mull the suggestion. After careful thought, and cautious consultation with several four quadrant focus groups, they arrived at an axiomatic verdict.
Jo got a go-go, and the "Do Not Touch" cubes for the "Do Not Touch" cubes went into effect the following week. Soon, every cube had its pair -- and the aberrations ceased entirely. Order had been restored. As the recent chaos simmered off, a calm settled over Japan House's staff.
What Jo failed to realise, however, was that the two-Do-Not-Touch-cubes-policy sounded off like a shot across the bow. Soon, indignant guests felt insulted by the double insinuation that they were careless. Attendance thinned. Then, redoubled -- an influencer blasted Japan House for its ableist treatment of visitors with the double cube rule.
This new surge, the new generation of the exhibit's visitors, only came ironically. Tinpot newspapers called the trend "rage-cubing". The "Do Not Touch" cube signs were now the target of an orchestrated campaign of abuse -- stolen, thrown, glued together, used to fill up ancient jars. Night staff discovered one cube, tucked away in a corner of the room, that had what was later identified as dried ejaculate all over it. The madness had to stop.
Desperate, hopeless, the management turned to the one person who could help them. Jo Lightly. By this point, she had been promoted to middle management. Her answer was short, sweet -- and, most of all, completely unexpected.
"Triple the cubes."
So it was. The idea was pitched in earnest, but its implementation had an unintended consequence; the triple "Do Not Touch" cube policy was seen as hilariously post-ironic by the rage-cubers. They saw it as another knot in this increasingly pedantic saga. In their eyes, a storied institution finally knelt before the irreverence of the internet. There was a ceasefire. Of course, Lightly received another promotion.
After a few days, though, the rage-cubers' resolve steeled itself against the "Do Not Touch" trinity. They were so resolute, in fact, that the most hardcore rage-cubers branded themselves with the phrase "Do Not Touch". Under the cover of darkness, rage-cubers broke into Japan House -- smuggled their own household items into the exhibition space -- and strategically placed them among the real art. They slipped out, undetected. Their objects went unnoticed by exhibition staff, until Jo Lightly commenced her fortnightly inspection the following week.
Such a dastardly conspiracy to denigrate the exhibit's purity would not go unnoticed by Lightly, and it wasn't. All the wrong items were removed.
Sure enough, though, the fake items would later reappear -- in bigger numbers. Replete with their own "Do Not Touch" cubes, also with untouchable counterparts.
Rapture. The exhibit lost track of which pot was which, whether the La Creuset set was a relic or a bargain. As one would imagine, this tit-for-tat escalated -- "Do Not Place Fake Objects" placards emerged, which, of course, needed their own "Do Not Touch" cubes for protection.
Rage-cubers took the upper hand when they introduced fake placards, which directed visitors to "Place Real Objects". Management worked tirelessly, day and night, to fight back -- alas, it was a war of attrition. Lightly had to bow out, as she had been offered a job in Whitehall.
In the end, the rage-cubers and the exhibitionists reached a stalemate. No one could even tell who was winning, as the space was now too full to enter.
The Leper-Messiah - February
Every weekend for sixteen years, Pierre Le Fou sat outside a cafe by Gate 43 in Charles de Gaulle airport. He passed through to the gates with a 4:25 flight to Vienna, which he never boarded. For two hours, Le Fou would read at the terminal cafe, smoke Gitanes, order coffee with rolls. After he watched his plane depart, Le Fou -- on foot -- took his leave. Le Fou was as astute as he was beguiling.
Despite ritual punctuality, he was a languid man -- draped over the plastic chairs, only exerted the slightest effort to turn the page of some obscure newspaper.
Nothing about Le Fou, other than his flagrant waste of money, struck anyone as particularly odd. Though, as his little ritual became known, Le Fou became an urban legend around the liminal corridors of de Gaulle. Soon, the culture vultures descended upon him.
I was one such journalist. Pierre had rebuffed several others -- an American, sniffing around for an al-Qaeda connection (this was around 9/11, mind), and a South Korean, who wanted to do a profile on Le Fou for a popular series on Westerners back home. Over the years, the one question people ask me at dinner parties, weddings, funerals, on the street, my niece's Christening, is:
Why me? My honest answer is what Le Fou told me. "I like the English". He would never surrender further elucidation, as he was often and annoyingly prone to do. I lived in Bagnolet at the time, sur la rue de Victor Hugo. A tiny flat, but one that I could afford with my wages as a young foreign correspondent. It was a Saturday. The paper paid for my ticket -- a quick flight to Brussels -- and I went to find the cafe by Gate 43. Lo and behold, le petit Pierre Le Fou! One leg hung lazy over the other, beady eyes under heavy shades scrolled a paper, a thin scarf curled over the open collar of a salmon pink Polo. Even the cut of his checkered trousers sold the dream. The Platonic Le Fou, alive in the flesh -- the embodiment of a bizarre and eccentric Frenchman.
I introduced myself to Le Fou as Tom Fleischer. Now, dear reader, I am Tom Fleischer. But, as I said it to him, the syllables fell out alien and wrong. As if mon nom were from a foreign, inscrutable language.
Le Fou tolerated my French. I began my whole spiel; why I was there, who I was, how I wanted the article to be, et cetera. Le Fou nodded along. Like many well-educated Europeans, I could tell Pierre was assessing my Anglican nature against my continental education. A panic-swept red rashed over my face. Dearly, I wished to impress him.
He was Pierre Le Fou! Enigma! Why does he pay for planes he never boards? Why Austria? Why this time -- this cafe? I had too many questions -- everybody did -- but, before I could hit him with any of them, Le Fou had one for me.
With the tender but firm touch of an older man, Le Fou held my wrist. Through thick lime-green lenses, I saw two eyes that had either seen God or would soon. A bare terror in them. Thick, bloodshot eyes -- contorted around naked pupils. The man was in agony. He asked me something I won't forget.
"Do you know the story of the Leper-Messiah?"
I didn't. I was honest.
Le Fou recalled the tale:
"Atop a jagged mountain in the Empire of Glass, reigned the Opaque King. His blue-fire eyes haunted across the annals of his dominion. Desolate spikes of crystal shards erupted out across the land, conquered even the horizon. A most beautiful wasteland, where ice waterfalls glitter like diamonds in the harsh burn of an electric sun. His reign was one of peace, yet there is always peace when not even a blade of grass may prosper. Toward the twilight of life, the Opaque King was tormented by nightly visions. Doves and flames. Churned earth, molten rock. Saplings, corpses, the moon. One night, the King wept. His tears were heard around the lonely valleys, the vacant foothills. Drew forth a solitary stranger. The stranger forged over the sharp slopes, the dagger steps, battled the nights to the tall mountain. And he climbed. Heaved through all hours, tightened and clenched through pain, exhaustion and rain - if it were a mound, the stranger's pure will would have flattened it alone. The mountain stood no chance.
Once at the crest of the sky, the stranger emerged to the frail old King. Asked what he could do to serve him. There was only one request for the stranger to fulfill. As of late, the King's visions were intolerable. With each slip into slumber, the Opaque King was gripped by the dreams of a life not lived, places seen but not found, the orange glow of brickwork in summer -- the King's world was slipping away. He was slipping away. Taken under by the vast tidal waves of time.
For years, the King sought solace among the stars above -- but their playful pattern only made his eyes fools for their impermanence. Thus, the stranger was instructed to seek the one woman who could help the Opaque King, A mystic, known only in legend as the Leper-Messiah. She lived in an alcove of a great rock, somewhere in the now lost region of the Scarlet Divide. Ask her advice, and report back to the King, were the stranger's orders.
As failure was sacrilege, the stranger embarked upon this great voyage. A joyful spirit winded behind the stranger, as his path bounced with purpose. The sun set on his nascent life, and he turned in at the bottom of a quiet lake. A small fire crackled as he slept, calm waves lapped against numb pebbles, and the gentle moon perturbed ripples on the water. The next day, the next week, the next month -- the stranger walked.
His thighs hauled like bison, blood-pumped locomotives along an ordained odyssey. Soon, the stranger would pierce the eclipse of the Empire of Glass, unto the Scorch Fields and Bad Lands.
Cutting winds gave way to overcast mugginess, then the turgid warmth of a dry heat. The stranger, finally, came upon the Scarlet Divide. A megalithic canyon, high and wide -- cliff faces of red rock bore the markings of an ancient ocean, and turquoise sapphires glinted in rough brown soil. The stranger was a virgin to the Scarlet Divide, but it forced no awe into his heart -- for he foresaw him here, on this precipice, before one foot was laid in accordance to this journey.
Down into the maw, the stranger waded through a clear little stream -- an offshoot from one of the canyon's main water arteries. Through the water, the stranger came to a damp, dark cave.
Its teething entrance broke way into a waterlogged enclave with leering spires of rock and moss. The stranger shifted his body in the water, almost weightless against its soft push and pull. Sunlight, coming in through the mouth, ricocheted off the water in bright arcs across the cave walls. The permanence of its earthy visage lit up in a joy so transcendent, its name has been lost to time -- now, gratefully witnessed by the wanderer. Forward, he was carried by the sways of the current, toward the darker depths.
The dance of light and water slashed over the face of the Leper-Messiah. She slumped, half-alive in grotesque death, before the wanderer. Once blonde hair had braided into wet, heavy knots that dangled to the side of an oblique neck. Hung was a taut face of bare and yellow teeth, but the eyes still held a vivid youth. She was alive, and her appearance startled not the wanderer -- for she was the Leper-Messiah.
A messiah is neither strong nor alive, in some sense. The wanderer reasoned that to be wreathed in pain is to be crowned in glory. The Leper-Messiah struck the wanderer, above all, as in a great and terrible pain. One that was so buried, indescribable and infinite as to constitute beauty. The light danced over greyed skin, and something dripped into the water.
Finally, she spoke. An ancient language -- Hebrew -- for which the wanderer knew not, yet now understood in its totality.
'Do you know the story of the Akedah?
The smallest kindling may start the biggest fires. Isaac carried the wood. Abraham lit the flame. It was a modest camp, nestled along a caravan path in Canaan. Nightfall had settled over Mount Moriah, and the plains lay open and quiet. Darkness gathered at the blurred edge of the fire. In that hollow glow, Abraham and Isaac were at rest. The locusts sang.
A nubile mind floats on easy -- Isaac was quick asleep, wrapped in fur. Abraham watched over the boy, amid the flicker of flame. The boy seemed as new to him as the day he was born. Abraham held Isaac, in his leathery palms, as a newborn -- reaching and stretching, a dove ready to fly. He could soar, still, to the heavens and back! Live out his days of love and misadventure, harden with grief and mature in wisdom. Isaac could have a life, still, but -- it wasn't to be. Never was.
As Isaac dreamed of fireflies and lilypads, Abraham craned his neck -- above, constellations hung in their infinite majesty. Orion pointed to Egypt in the southwest, the Archer aimed at Babylon and Mesopotamia in the East. Mighty men tremble beneath the stars. Why, why now, should Abraham tremble in his conviction? His faith? Question his certainty? He was a mere man, in covenant with the Lord. That was the beginning and the end of it, the contours of his service and now his life. He interrogated himself. He was a servant. But, a father, no less.
His Lord wanted Isaac's blood. This rose-cheeked cherub, asleep by a waning fire, was to be slain the following day. Abraham carried the knife. Isaac carried the wood.
Disquiet, Abraham fought terrors of the mind, vanquished them -- slept. A brief armistice.
Dawn hailed the drum beat of destiny. Abraham and Isaac climbed atop Mount Moriah. The sun was low, rising -- long shadows swept across the barren plains below. Harsh desert winds curled dust into storms, lashed out.
Abraham's God was a righteous God. He was sure of it, though an undercurrent of instability remained. If his God were a righteous God, then following His orders would be a righteous act. Abraham had to weight that, as a mortal man, he could have no conception of reality's divine ordinances. Sacrificing Isaac -- could -- be righteously part of this cosmic grand design. Thus, Abraham erected the altar -- and Isaac carried the wood. It was done.
As he fought every fibre of being, Abraham turned on Isaac. The boy struggled, fought in desperation, but Abraham bound him no less.
Abraham's God was a righteous God. Isaac squirmed upon the altar. Abraham raised the knife.
Sandstorms raged below.
He was poised to plunge. Abraham's body felt no longer his own -- animated by higher purpose. Muscles solidified in electric fervor, ligaments tightened his wrists around the blade -- Isaac screamed, cried, begged --
The knife arced back -- an angel. Luminous. Spherical. Indescribable. Appeared to Abraham. It didn't use words for it needn't. He understood. Abraham relaxed, relented -- Isaac's breathing slowed, eased. As Abraham stepped away, a ram ran through the bushes -- stopped and stared at the two.
Abraham freed Isaac. They embraced, and sacrificed the ram together. Abraham's God was a righteous God.'
The cave was quiet. The seeker hadn't asked his question, but the Leper-Messiah had already answered it. With a silent nod, he left. For many months, the seeker traced his journey across the Ocean Ring and the Homonculi Boneyards. Soon, with a worldview deepened yet humbled by experience, the seeker returned to the Empire of Glass. Again, he climbed atop the jagged mountain. This time, though, the tumultuous hike was exuberant. The seeker was propelled with a holy imperative -- to enlighten the Opaque King.
As the seeker reached the mountain's zenith, he collapsed in shock. A small grave. The Opaque King had died just days following the seeker's departure. With no heirs, the Empire of Glass died with him. Bereft, the seeker crystallised in his mind a new purpose: to carry on as a nomad -- toward the uncharted isles north."
Pierre Le Fou blinked at me, blank. My mind had been lost right around the ice waterfalls.
"Tom? Were you listening?"
I snapped back to de Gaulle, the cafe, Gate 43. Answered Le Fou in the affirmative.
"Good. Now. I ask one simple question. Are you the seeker, or the King?"
Dear reader, I did not have an answer to Pierre's question. I still don't. He dropped it, and we chatted over coffee and pastry. It was nice. Bizarre. Not forthcoming. But, nice. In 2006 and 2011, I did two follow-up interviews with Le Fou. Both at de Gaulle, at the cafe near Gate 43. Around Christmas, 2014, Le Fou got sick. We kept in touch. But, we knew it was terminal. In 2016, I got a phone call from Le Fou. Since I first met him, I had a wife and two children. A career. Left a flat in Bagnolet for a townhouse in Camden. Yet, I still wanted to impress him -- like an eager student.
I knew, I just knew, that this would be my last phone call with Pierre. Our last conversation. It was.
I asked him:
"Are you afraid of dying?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I know that plane will reach its destination."
Loving My Strangers - January
There’s a man on the television. He wants to kill me. He’s bright and big, tall and wide. The man lives behind the screen, but sometimes I wonder how much he steps out - rummages through my things and trinkets, tinkers around the flat. He potters about my mind, that’s for sure. I fancied a drink, so I turned the man off and made for Peckham. Through the roads and under the overpass. Streetlights shot through leaves, and the black of the sky was a particularly perfect shade of nothing. The walk was familiar, though tonight I was in a peculiar mood. I’d ducked and dived into many nooks and crannies in London, but today I was going somewhere I knew - one where I knew the exits, and the staff poured the pint before I made it to the bar. One where I wish my ashes could be rubbed into the stale carpet, and thus my spirit would be subsumed into the stench of cheap, imported ale. It was usually a quiet place but tonight it was busy. A regular haunt for the ghosts round here. Pay them no mind, for you’re part of the haunting. I got my pint, headed through to the back - a small smoking area, a couple tables, backed onto Crack Alley.
I liked Crack Alley. It was free entertainment - better than the bread and circuses, for it was a real portrait of the disembodied and disempowered. Drug addicts fought over nonsense, sometimes badly so - and for the admission fee of a pint and a side of a cigarette you could watch the show for free. In their minds, of course, they were battling over cosmic fates - spilled blood and knocked out rotten teeth over bottle caps and scraps. The alley was quiet this night, though. Like they’d flocked somewhere else. Instead, the usual lonely square was abuzz with people. Too many for the small place. I found a corner, and heard two people talk - one with the ruggedness of the East End, and another with the harsh dulcet tones of a Slavic.
“She’s 25 - at home. Why she no work? Why she no leave? It’s - it’s kids-“
“Ya daugh’er?”
“No - my husband’s. He does no - not drink as much anymore, you know, no smoke. He try to tell her: go! Go make mistake, go live. But all she do is-is sit, sit around house. She pretty, she young… He’s a good person. She just - you know, she didn’t turn out.”
“Sounds like mine.”
“You’re - you’re - parent? Father?”
“A boy and a girl. And lemme tell ya somethink, ‘bout girls-“
“Go on.”
“They’re fackin’ psychopaths.”
“Why?”
“She’s - y’know, me son - I can have a laugh with him. He’s lovin’. She just don’t seem to see me-“
“Always different, boys and girls. You good father?”
There was a lull and I got interested. They’d just met - you can tell when two people are trying to feel each other. Tracing the boundaries of a conversation usually illustrates the soul. I was well into my pint, stared at nothing to blend in - and I sank into the words.
“I’d say I was present.”
“Ah! So you … were there?”
“Around, yeah. Y’know - her mather don’t think much of me, but I did my bits. School and that.”
“So… you blame self? You blame yourself for her?”
“My daughter? No - as you said, they don’t turn out sometimes. Don’t mean you’re a bad dad, just means somet’ ain’t right in the mix. That’s all.”
“But, your son?”
“Me son’s a lad. A man, you know. He turned out what I expect in a boy. He’s a man. He’s-“
“Like you?”
“Guess so.”
“And your… daughter?”
“Ain’t a woman.”
A table of young south London ladies, who were just talking about pressing freshies in a Brixton Morley’s, chimed in:
“What’s a woman 'meant' to be?”
“I don’t mean nothin’ by it, y’know, but - I got expectations, for what a man and a woman is. Like, take it this way. Your dad. Right? Your dad - if you seen him cry, right, would you respect him less?”
The table thought. The Slavic woman had nearly finished her Bell’s and Coke, the cheapest mixed drink on the menu. She was stout, with a cherubim face -- though the dark around the eyes told me she didn't sleep too good, maybe kept awake by a specter of something. The man's knuckles were rough, dry cement cracked over the lines of tough skin. Labourer.
"I don't got a dad. And I don't need one." Said one of the girls. The cockney shrugged.
"Well, there ya go -- he ain't a dad, is he? Not a man."
They all talked some more. My pint was waning empty, and my bladder was full with bubbles and beer. I excused myself, as a friendly observer, made myself inside and downstairs to the gents. Kept the door open for an old man. He thanked me as he shuffled inside a stall. It's nice when the old thank the young. I wondered if his grandkids call. Maybe he saw a slither of an estranged one in me. I had a piss. Didn't bother washing my hands, for the moment they touched the door handle they'd be filthy once more. We're too scared of germs, these days -- we should take a note from our ancestors. Roll in the dirt. Tear a bison down with our bare hands. Blood pumping through Howitzer muscles, fangs borne in battle, not for supermarket lunches and stiff pasta.
I returned to the smoking area with a fresh pint. The Cockney and the Slavic were alone now -- they were closer. I took a wet seat. My eyes glazed over to Crack Alley. Someone, on that rain-slicked asphalt, was crouched, fingers pressed into the ground. They groaned something unintelligible, and a smell of sweat and liquor emanated from their ratty brown overcoat. Having lit a sophomore cigarette, I thought of the bars and the boulevards of the Left Bank. Those writers and poets in Paris, lauded for sitting around all day. I'd love to sit around all day. I'd love if people waxed lyrical about me, having my life in print. Maybe this night would be in the memoirs! The hovel that was a home, a portrait of the artist as a young man. As my mind digressed, so did the Cockney and the Slavic.
"I-I drink, yes - he, my husband, he no like. But. I drink."
"Naffink bad about it, coupla pints, no 'arm--"
"Exactly! No harm. You know why I, uh, why I drink?"
"To chill out?"
"The noise."
"Ya what?"
"Noise, noise! You ever had a noise, in head? Buzz-buzz-buzz! Noise?"
"Can't say I has, love."
"Not love, you are not a chauvinist -- you a good man. Present. No, noise. Ringing."
"That sounds like tinnitus."
"Tinni-? No. This come from above."
They spoke some more. Ended up talking about the man in my television. I chose to leave. On the way back I felt lighter, softer. I thought to myself:
Who cares about the man in my television, with friends like these?