posted by Mark at 8:00 AM
1 comments
Sunday, January 01, 2006
"Imagine you’ve got everything you ever wanted. You’ve got a job. A girlfriend. An ex-wife. Too many CD’s and some post-millenial angst. Life is perfect. Well, not perfect, but as much as you could hope for. Except for one imperfection : You’re Dead.This is a survivors guide for what happens when someone truly believes, to their final breath, that “Until Death Us Do Part”.
note :
For a brief explanation of the back story and biographical information pertaining to this work Click Here.
important :
This is a uncorrected version of the text. They may very well be minor formatting errors, the odd spelling mistake, and so on. When I have more time, corrections may be made. In the meantime, the text is presented with the author having made no express warranties (oral or written), to you regarding this text and that is compatable with your tastes, operating systems, beliefs, or and is presented "as is" without warranty of any kind. you accept the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the text within your judgement.
note :
For a brief explanation of the back story and biographical information pertaining to this work Click Here.
important :
This is a uncorrected version of the text. They may very well be minor formatting errors, the odd spelling mistake, and so on. When I have more time, corrections may be made. In the meantime, the text is presented with the author having made no express warranties (oral or written), to you regarding this text and that is compatable with your tastes, operating systems, beliefs, or and is presented "as is" without warranty of any kind. you accept the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the text within your judgement.
posted by Mark at 7:58 AM
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1 :
"jesus, jesus help me, i’m alone in this world, and a fucked up world it is too."- David Evans
_____________________________________________________________
I am The Invisible Man.
From all corners of the city, people haemorrhage into the station. From the trains and the buses and the tubes and the streets, we act out of habit. We are creatures of routine. We go to the same places we do every day. We see the same people. We kiss the same faces goodbye in the morning rush. We do the same things. We stream in, show tickets on entrances and exits, and we travel to somewhere we don’t want to be so we can leave there and go somewhere else we don’t want to be.
Work is the curse of the thinking classes.
We are cells in a blood vessel. Each of us an individual particle, each with lives, loves, hopes - and some of us secret lovers. Each of whom have lips that kiss, hearts that beat, dreams that dare to breathe, people they hope to see again.
Being alive is being beautiful.
Incredible How I Can.
Camera Nine sees something that no one else has seen. On a greying screen in a control room, a bored man on the early shift notices something strange. He tried to stay awake, tries to stay focused. Work is tedium, but this is more of a punishment. He blearily yawns, takes another sip from a cup of coffee in a brown cardboard cup, and tightens the focus. The blurred edges of a man sharpen, but are still indistinct through neon tube.
In eleven minutes time, he will be dead.
He sees him, but he sees through him. Not someone who doesn’t exist, but someone who you do not see, except as a shape, an object, something to be avoided when you approach it. Not a person, not a face. Nothing.
Do you remember when you are walking down the street, and your on your way to meet your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, mistress, your date, and you’re in such a hurry, racing to get there, that you walk straight past them? That you see them, but you only see the feet, you only see them as a presence to be avoided.
That’s how he saw him. Through him.
See Right Through You.
There are training courses for these things. For a few hundred pounds per day, a seminar could be yours : where you are trained to see things that look strange and different, to detect the telltale signs of malcontents and disintegration from societry.
Trained to look for familiar faces, gestures, and stance. The body language of the mugger. The faces of known beggars, pickpockets, the homeless, the career criminals, people who were threats to others. You aren’t trained to look for people who could be a threat to themselves.
There’s training courses held in anonymous hotel conference rooms for several hundred pounds a day where people are taught how to identify potential problems through these screens. Unusual walking gaits. Erratic, inconsistent, jerky behaviour. Unkempt, untidy appearance. The body is a language to be learnt. Switch back to the station concourse. The camera watches the knees of women. The open toed sandals of summer commuters.
The camera zooms down a woman’s top. Even in black and white, it would be aesthetically pleasing. Contours of flesh, geography of aureole, visible in the braless commuter light. Further down the corridor, the rhythmic tapping of a supervisor walking nearer. Flick back to camera four at the station entrance. Past the Big issue seller, looking for known muggers, truants, cunts all of them. A nation of cunts. A nation of white-trainer wearing, tracksuited, backwards baseballcapped adorned idiots with a ring on every finger, selling stolen phones down the pub to their mates, asking if you’re looking for trouble, and if not, do you want some? Cunts them all. And somewhere on the mainframe, a photofit guide to the persona non-grata went ignored.
When you see this many people you end up not seeing any people. There’s a human overload. Too many people. You withdraw into a selective world. Where most people are simple kipple, flesh pollution, parasites on the face of the world.
You just saw nothing special. Nothing but an unusual gait. Just hundreds of people, a faceless mass, a lump of ever changing flesh in shoes, walking from station to station, from train to tube, from bus to office, travelling to work, as people always did this time of day. Drones for the queen.
In six hundred seconds, he will be dead.
Sure, there was the odd looking guy, but you got used to it. The world was full of odd looking people, doing odd things. Art students hijacking trains to provoke reactions from passengers. Weirdos handing out leaflets proclaiming that Christ is The King Of Kings. Beggars reciting the same tired lines as they try to eek an extra few pence of life. That strange woman who always carried the same 17 bags all day long on the Circle Line. We’re all strange, we’re all unique, we’re all beautiful. And we’re all utterly normal. There is nothing special about you, or me. Or unique. Or beautiful.
We are all alive. And the miracle of life is utterly tedious.
In the end you gave up trying to fathom people out. Instead, you ended up just analysing who could be a danger to others. In the end you zoom in and look down people’s blouses.
Most people walk in straight lines, but this guy, he was walking in broken lines, stopping, starting, as if you could see the thoughts race from synapse to synapse. Someone who clearly didn’t know quite what he was doing. Didn’t know where he was going. Someone who was making it up as we go along. Some kind of shuffling zombie gait.
He was trying to walk properly, but couldn’t quite do it.
Like the rest of us. We improvise through life, trying to fake our way through life, hoping no one ever uncovers the fact that none of us really know what we’re doing, faking our way through. We improvise and bullshit. And then we die.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Somewhere in the building, remote motors whirr and lenses sharpen, zoom in. Controlled by unseen hands. Curious eyes. Watching from darkened rooms somewhere in a building, that sees all. Like God. Who sees everything yet is nowhere. But not on him, on everywhere but him.
God can see you masterbate. God is everywhere. The point is not that he can. But that he is watching something else.
You can never escape yourself. No matter where you go – you will always be there. And no matter what you do, you can never leave. Unless you die.
In six minutes, he will be dead.
You’ll always be your own shadow.
The bored man in the control room taps a button. Camera Eight now. In the ceiling a camera the size of a golf ball rotates to track movement. He was one of them - just another face in the crowd. Wearing a uniform like everyone else - suit, tie, shirt, trousers, black shoes. How utterly normal.
The wounds on the inside do not heal and cannot be seen. The thorns that stick in the soul. The pain invisible.
…. And forever’s a mighty long time.
On a grey 12” square monitor, set deep in a bank of grey plastic buried inside the building, a monochrome figures stumbles. 240 colour lines, 365 black and white lines. Monochrome is cheaper. You don’t need colour to perform a successful ID. Everything’s done on the cheap here. The television monitors with their greys and browns are antique now. Retro, if you prefer. Facial recognition software is cheap now. Vegas has a lot to answer for.
This monochrome man. This clear cut, black and white figure. Nobody really notices. Just another cunt, like everyone else. In the crowd and the bustle of the commuter train they’re all too busy. Eyes elsewhere, avoiding the gaze of others, as if they doesn’t exist. Life is easier that way. In ignorance. Pretending there are things we don’t see. Begging children. Sleeping forms. Stumbling men. The fear and the unhappiness etched into our faces by years of existence.
On the screen he’s just another shape, one is seen, but unseen. And not long from now, he will be a ghost. An Unperson.
We are taught to live with our eyes wide shut. We choose not to see. As long as we have somewhere warm to sleep, something to eat, we can fool ourselves that somehow whatever is wrong in this world doesn’t apply. That everything is alright. We are all guilty of the good undone.
Let there be light.
Deep down in our hearts we know that the world is wrong, that there is something at the core of capitalism that fundamentally does not satisfy spiritually. Any rational person would be loathe to say capitalism has a heart, for it does not, so it has a core. But we pretend we can’t see. We pretend that there aren’t people sleeping on the streets and in shop doorways.
If you sympathise with one, you have to sympathise with all. You shut down your empathy in order to survive. You feel too much or you feel too little.
When everyone else has gone away, you’ll always be left behind.
We are born this way. Taught not to see. Taught to see only things that fit into our view of the world. A cloud of ignorance that hovers over our vision, viewing the world selectively. A presidential world view.
Like Christ, there are none so blind as will not see.
It’s the modern disease. A place where we see only what we want to see, where we believe only what we believe.
Like electricity. I exist without form.
This is the culture we live in that allows our Grandparents to die in their sleep, and not be discovered for two weeks, whilst night and day their TV buzzes like a fridge, and their goldfish starve to death. Whilst their post piles up under the door and their Scottish Terrier starts to eat itself from the inside, yapping to gather their deceased attention, or gently nibbling their flesh, first to try to wake them, then in some kind of desperate hunger, pulling skin away from meat and bone. As eyes shrink inside sockets, as flesh retracts, sags and loosens. Until the neighbours complain about the smell.
Your grandparents are an insects dinner.
Like God, I am everywhere. In everyone.
Three minutes to Ground Zero.
Muscles ache, and the heart, that is, - the soul - feels some vague thing lacking deep inside. The thing that makes us whole. The thing that gives a life a narrative, a direction, something more than just eating, breathing, working. We all need the thing that justifies the acts of being. Even something as seemingly insubstantial as sleep. Inside an anonymous Westminster building, a man counts down the minutes to 8am for the shift change and takes another sip of coffee. He rubs his eyes, wishing he could take them out and wash them, and yawns. It’s no life for a man his age : commuting into work at minimum wage with the drunks, watching the sun rise out of a corner of the office window, commuting out against the tide of employees, daysleeping.
Like God, I can see all.
Commuters bustle past. He barely feels them anymore. They hit him in their rush to get somewhere, anywhere else, and they have no time to think. He barely feels anything anymore. Sleep is the one hit you can never get and never give up. Deprived of it, we will do anything for it. Even kill. After a few hours withdrawal the body becomes agitated, vision blurs, logic fades. The body begins to collapse, like an addict deprived of the narcoleptic fix.
I have all the time in the world.
Without it, one can barely operate, let alone think. One lives as an automaton, a functioning, integrated zombie in some kind of isotope insomniac half-life. A muscle that is reflexive and unthinking. Everything is a low-definition pale imitation. The world becomes some kind of half-lived dream. Sounds are deafening yet muffled, experiences clear but vague. The world looks strange. Drunk on exhaustion. Short-tempered with endurance. This is the way the world is. A world of sleepophobics and consciousnessaholics.
Time enough for love.
Camera Three ignores his irregular slouch and gait. Then, briefly, in relief, he is like everyone else, just another face in the crowd. People crowd from trains, then disperse into bottlenecks at the entrances and exits. And then he is alone again, like we always are.
In a crowd this big, one ceases to be an individual. One becomes a cell, part of the mass, just another organism. Like blood round the body. A heart beat pushes the blood further up the vein for a second. And then the heart stops. Recovers. Takes another gasp. The blood retreats back. And the heart beats again.
Two minutes and counting.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
He counts the nights since he slept, but that takes the type of concentration that’s impossible. Focus, focus. Gimme Ritalin. Strattera. Caffeine. Something, anything. Whatever it is, I need it.
All he knows is that it’s been a long time since he slept properly. A long time since there was an unbroken night. After a while dark and light merge into one. Everything becomes some kind of washed-out grey. You can start hallucinating after just fifty hours without sleep.
It ceases to matter how long it was since you slept. All that matters is that you haven’t slept. And you need it. Like oxygen and water. When the things that keep you awake are the things that haunt you when you close your eyes. When you can no longer sleep because the bed you used to sleep in is empty without her. When you can still smell her on the unused pillows and the abandoned furniture. When everything is falling apart in your hands : when the more you try the less you succeed.
You can’t sleep if you don’t know if you’re going to wake up.
When there’s something on your mind, sometimes nothing else in the world exists.
Because she was perfect. And everything about him was wrong. And without her, everything was wrong.
Switch to Camera Seventeen at the top of the station stairs before the descent down into the Underground. The operator stifles a yawns. Not long now. Twelve minutes to go.
In training courses, all one is taught is to watch for signs. You’re not meant to raise an alarm, interfere, unless there is something unmistakably clearly requiring intervention. Crime mostly. The eyes of fear watch and wait. For our protection we are monitored by unseen eyes at all times.
I know what this feels like.
He fantasises that the voice will leave him alone. Fantasises of a pristine white duvet. He hasn’t shaved for days. Just can’t. A blade is a dangerous thing.
But I’ll never stop.
It’s not yet time. This can’t be happening. The only voice in that head is his. And if the only voice in his head isn’t his, whose is it?
It’s mine.
This peace, this seclusion, this privacy to think whatever he wants. It’s a refuge. You never know when it can be taken away. When someone can unwrap your every thought, your every hidden intimacy, and use it against you is when life becomes fear one might lose the little one has. Without it, your identity itself starts to unravel. One becomes unglued, one ceases to be oneself, but somehow becomes part of everything.
Privacy. A thing whose value you don’t even know you have until you don’t have it anymore. A gift that you couldn’t wait to be rid of, yet no matter how much you want it, you can never have back.
Because even if you have nothing to hide, you hate the thought of someone watching you. Someone analysing your every move for something they can use against you. I am not a commodity. I am not information to be manipulated and controlled. I am someone.
You’re wondering where the voice is coming from.
Forever, this beautiful symphony of silence will be. Like yesterday. Like tomorrow. Like the next thirty years of our lives.
T minus 90.
I’m inside your head. I will never leave.
Huddle and wait. A chill goes through his body. Hands shake. Not even the hands know why. Insert a travelcard into a mouth that spits it out. Descend amongst the rest of them on the escalator. The heat is enough to invite sleep. The beautiful release. Down on the platform. Trying to ignore the voice in his head. No man can fear what he cannot see or touch.
Yes you can. Yes you do.
The world is curved. We often we mistake what we want for what we need. But what we need is different. It isn’t an artificial need, an imposed need, like a fast car, or drugs. It’s more basic, more fundamental than that.
The things that keep you awake are the things that make you want to sleep.
Life is a ghost. Occupying the same physical space as others, but this psychological space, this world we live in, is unique, to us and us only. Even someone seeing the same things, living the same life, with seeing through our eyes would still feel a different world.
To forget.
Any shape of sweet relief, anything that can ease this, anything that can lift the darkness.
Stumble, fall, sweat. Everything feels different. It only looks the same as normal.
Forever is more than you can imagine, less than you can enjoy.
He can feel that he’s being watched.
Switch to Camera Fourteen on the far end of the platform.
A rumble vibrates the air. Air pushes down the tunnel and tickles the hair of women. Rats freeze for the briefest of moments, then scatter to small holes hidden in walls. A light throws itself against a wall inside the tunnel. A dull roar of machinery and petrol. A shape. A train edges nearer, a bullet down the barrel of a gun, slowing towards the end of the platform. As it exits the confines of the tunnel, the train is still at a lethal, killing velocity.
Peace is just a step away.
Statistically, tube drivers encounter a fatality every 11 years. Or 100 suicides a year. The knowledge that every 11 years you will be the deliverer of a lost soul, a killer, the man who stands just inches away from someone as their meat is compressed against the window of your cab, their limbs and torso fall beneath the wheels and are dragged under, as eight pints of blood explode underneath the steel but are held by inertia and momentum to the front of a cab for a second, just a second, propelled forward in defiance of gravity, before gravity pulls the meat down, and under. Skulls explode from the pressure. The flesh is squeezed in a surreal collage of blood, bodily fluids, and internal organs.
These are called one-unders. And 11am is a very dangerous time.
You can’t help looking as their face is pressed against the glass for the last second of their life, see in their eyes that maybe this was a mistake, that if they could go back in time maybe three or four seconds and change everything, they would.
That’s the face some people see when they close their eyes.
Today is gonna be the day I’m gonna bring it back to you
T minus 10.
There are only 9 non-suicide fatalities a year on the Underground. Of the 91 other fatalities, One-Unders are the worst. Given the low clearance of tube cars and the large amount of body mass, cleaning and removing a suicide is a time-consuming, messy detail : it takes an hour at an absolute minimum to return a station to working order. Coroners and policemen need to be alerted. Photographs taken. Evidence collated, identified, reports to be written and compiled from CCTV footage. All these things happen at an instant’s notice.
Sometimes, the smell of meat in a supermarket can bring back for a second – just a second that feels like a year – the memory of trying to pick up all the dissected, random splinters of flesh that used to be a person.
To avert suicides, and also to aid cleaning up, most tube stations have Suicide Pits - deep gulleys of two or three feet deep below the main lines. When the body starts to fall, these initially throw the body at high speed below the wheels, where, whilst badly injured after impact, the passenger stands a 200% increased chance of survival than if there were no pit. Some people look down, trying to assess their chances. 50% / 50%. Take a chance on me.
By now somehow you shoulda realised what ya gotta do
Heads are thrown up, land at commuters feet. The most important thing you see today may be the last few seconds of someones life gushing from their severed arteries at your feet, ruining your shoes.
Outdoor stations are the worst. The head can go anywhere. Two days later, the head may be found. Hanging on the end of a fox’s mouth, or by a cleaner walking on a corrugated iron roof. Soulless eyes staring out at nothing, hung by their hair from the mouth of a fox foraging for food. This is the final exit.
A roar. A flash of light. Looking forward there is barely enough time to catch the driver’s eye, especially at the speed he is travelling. Someone mouths a word at him, trying to apologise for this. A briefcase remains open and unlocked on the platform. Someone’s secrets are in there, the explanations, the final, scrawled apology. The emptied bank statements, impending repossession orders, divorce documents from strange and estranged people.
Most suicides don’t leave notes. Most suicides are mysteries. The great unsolved murders of our time.
I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
Originally, in the 30’s, tube trains were painted red due to the large number of suicides. You didn’t have to wash the blood off.
Go on motherfucker. Jump.
T minus 1.
Someone walks forward, and a body jerks like a plastic doll thrown against a moving wall.
_____________________________________________________________
I am The Invisible Man.
From all corners of the city, people haemorrhage into the station. From the trains and the buses and the tubes and the streets, we act out of habit. We are creatures of routine. We go to the same places we do every day. We see the same people. We kiss the same faces goodbye in the morning rush. We do the same things. We stream in, show tickets on entrances and exits, and we travel to somewhere we don’t want to be so we can leave there and go somewhere else we don’t want to be.
Work is the curse of the thinking classes.
We are cells in a blood vessel. Each of us an individual particle, each with lives, loves, hopes - and some of us secret lovers. Each of whom have lips that kiss, hearts that beat, dreams that dare to breathe, people they hope to see again.
Being alive is being beautiful.
Incredible How I Can.
Camera Nine sees something that no one else has seen. On a greying screen in a control room, a bored man on the early shift notices something strange. He tried to stay awake, tries to stay focused. Work is tedium, but this is more of a punishment. He blearily yawns, takes another sip from a cup of coffee in a brown cardboard cup, and tightens the focus. The blurred edges of a man sharpen, but are still indistinct through neon tube.
In eleven minutes time, he will be dead.
He sees him, but he sees through him. Not someone who doesn’t exist, but someone who you do not see, except as a shape, an object, something to be avoided when you approach it. Not a person, not a face. Nothing.
Do you remember when you are walking down the street, and your on your way to meet your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, mistress, your date, and you’re in such a hurry, racing to get there, that you walk straight past them? That you see them, but you only see the feet, you only see them as a presence to be avoided.
That’s how he saw him. Through him.
See Right Through You.
There are training courses for these things. For a few hundred pounds per day, a seminar could be yours : where you are trained to see things that look strange and different, to detect the telltale signs of malcontents and disintegration from societry.
Trained to look for familiar faces, gestures, and stance. The body language of the mugger. The faces of known beggars, pickpockets, the homeless, the career criminals, people who were threats to others. You aren’t trained to look for people who could be a threat to themselves.
There’s training courses held in anonymous hotel conference rooms for several hundred pounds a day where people are taught how to identify potential problems through these screens. Unusual walking gaits. Erratic, inconsistent, jerky behaviour. Unkempt, untidy appearance. The body is a language to be learnt. Switch back to the station concourse. The camera watches the knees of women. The open toed sandals of summer commuters.
The camera zooms down a woman’s top. Even in black and white, it would be aesthetically pleasing. Contours of flesh, geography of aureole, visible in the braless commuter light. Further down the corridor, the rhythmic tapping of a supervisor walking nearer. Flick back to camera four at the station entrance. Past the Big issue seller, looking for known muggers, truants, cunts all of them. A nation of cunts. A nation of white-trainer wearing, tracksuited, backwards baseballcapped adorned idiots with a ring on every finger, selling stolen phones down the pub to their mates, asking if you’re looking for trouble, and if not, do you want some? Cunts them all. And somewhere on the mainframe, a photofit guide to the persona non-grata went ignored.
When you see this many people you end up not seeing any people. There’s a human overload. Too many people. You withdraw into a selective world. Where most people are simple kipple, flesh pollution, parasites on the face of the world.
You just saw nothing special. Nothing but an unusual gait. Just hundreds of people, a faceless mass, a lump of ever changing flesh in shoes, walking from station to station, from train to tube, from bus to office, travelling to work, as people always did this time of day. Drones for the queen.
In six hundred seconds, he will be dead.
Sure, there was the odd looking guy, but you got used to it. The world was full of odd looking people, doing odd things. Art students hijacking trains to provoke reactions from passengers. Weirdos handing out leaflets proclaiming that Christ is The King Of Kings. Beggars reciting the same tired lines as they try to eek an extra few pence of life. That strange woman who always carried the same 17 bags all day long on the Circle Line. We’re all strange, we’re all unique, we’re all beautiful. And we’re all utterly normal. There is nothing special about you, or me. Or unique. Or beautiful.
We are all alive. And the miracle of life is utterly tedious.
In the end you gave up trying to fathom people out. Instead, you ended up just analysing who could be a danger to others. In the end you zoom in and look down people’s blouses.
Most people walk in straight lines, but this guy, he was walking in broken lines, stopping, starting, as if you could see the thoughts race from synapse to synapse. Someone who clearly didn’t know quite what he was doing. Didn’t know where he was going. Someone who was making it up as we go along. Some kind of shuffling zombie gait.
He was trying to walk properly, but couldn’t quite do it.
Like the rest of us. We improvise through life, trying to fake our way through life, hoping no one ever uncovers the fact that none of us really know what we’re doing, faking our way through. We improvise and bullshit. And then we die.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Somewhere in the building, remote motors whirr and lenses sharpen, zoom in. Controlled by unseen hands. Curious eyes. Watching from darkened rooms somewhere in a building, that sees all. Like God. Who sees everything yet is nowhere. But not on him, on everywhere but him.
God can see you masterbate. God is everywhere. The point is not that he can. But that he is watching something else.
You can never escape yourself. No matter where you go – you will always be there. And no matter what you do, you can never leave. Unless you die.
In six minutes, he will be dead.
You’ll always be your own shadow.
The bored man in the control room taps a button. Camera Eight now. In the ceiling a camera the size of a golf ball rotates to track movement. He was one of them - just another face in the crowd. Wearing a uniform like everyone else - suit, tie, shirt, trousers, black shoes. How utterly normal.
The wounds on the inside do not heal and cannot be seen. The thorns that stick in the soul. The pain invisible.
…. And forever’s a mighty long time.
On a grey 12” square monitor, set deep in a bank of grey plastic buried inside the building, a monochrome figures stumbles. 240 colour lines, 365 black and white lines. Monochrome is cheaper. You don’t need colour to perform a successful ID. Everything’s done on the cheap here. The television monitors with their greys and browns are antique now. Retro, if you prefer. Facial recognition software is cheap now. Vegas has a lot to answer for.
This monochrome man. This clear cut, black and white figure. Nobody really notices. Just another cunt, like everyone else. In the crowd and the bustle of the commuter train they’re all too busy. Eyes elsewhere, avoiding the gaze of others, as if they doesn’t exist. Life is easier that way. In ignorance. Pretending there are things we don’t see. Begging children. Sleeping forms. Stumbling men. The fear and the unhappiness etched into our faces by years of existence.
On the screen he’s just another shape, one is seen, but unseen. And not long from now, he will be a ghost. An Unperson.
We are taught to live with our eyes wide shut. We choose not to see. As long as we have somewhere warm to sleep, something to eat, we can fool ourselves that somehow whatever is wrong in this world doesn’t apply. That everything is alright. We are all guilty of the good undone.
Let there be light.
Deep down in our hearts we know that the world is wrong, that there is something at the core of capitalism that fundamentally does not satisfy spiritually. Any rational person would be loathe to say capitalism has a heart, for it does not, so it has a core. But we pretend we can’t see. We pretend that there aren’t people sleeping on the streets and in shop doorways.
If you sympathise with one, you have to sympathise with all. You shut down your empathy in order to survive. You feel too much or you feel too little.
When everyone else has gone away, you’ll always be left behind.
We are born this way. Taught not to see. Taught to see only things that fit into our view of the world. A cloud of ignorance that hovers over our vision, viewing the world selectively. A presidential world view.
Like Christ, there are none so blind as will not see.
It’s the modern disease. A place where we see only what we want to see, where we believe only what we believe.
Like electricity. I exist without form.
This is the culture we live in that allows our Grandparents to die in their sleep, and not be discovered for two weeks, whilst night and day their TV buzzes like a fridge, and their goldfish starve to death. Whilst their post piles up under the door and their Scottish Terrier starts to eat itself from the inside, yapping to gather their deceased attention, or gently nibbling their flesh, first to try to wake them, then in some kind of desperate hunger, pulling skin away from meat and bone. As eyes shrink inside sockets, as flesh retracts, sags and loosens. Until the neighbours complain about the smell.
Your grandparents are an insects dinner.
Like God, I am everywhere. In everyone.
Three minutes to Ground Zero.
Muscles ache, and the heart, that is, - the soul - feels some vague thing lacking deep inside. The thing that makes us whole. The thing that gives a life a narrative, a direction, something more than just eating, breathing, working. We all need the thing that justifies the acts of being. Even something as seemingly insubstantial as sleep. Inside an anonymous Westminster building, a man counts down the minutes to 8am for the shift change and takes another sip of coffee. He rubs his eyes, wishing he could take them out and wash them, and yawns. It’s no life for a man his age : commuting into work at minimum wage with the drunks, watching the sun rise out of a corner of the office window, commuting out against the tide of employees, daysleeping.
Like God, I can see all.
Commuters bustle past. He barely feels them anymore. They hit him in their rush to get somewhere, anywhere else, and they have no time to think. He barely feels anything anymore. Sleep is the one hit you can never get and never give up. Deprived of it, we will do anything for it. Even kill. After a few hours withdrawal the body becomes agitated, vision blurs, logic fades. The body begins to collapse, like an addict deprived of the narcoleptic fix.
I have all the time in the world.
Without it, one can barely operate, let alone think. One lives as an automaton, a functioning, integrated zombie in some kind of isotope insomniac half-life. A muscle that is reflexive and unthinking. Everything is a low-definition pale imitation. The world becomes some kind of half-lived dream. Sounds are deafening yet muffled, experiences clear but vague. The world looks strange. Drunk on exhaustion. Short-tempered with endurance. This is the way the world is. A world of sleepophobics and consciousnessaholics.
Time enough for love.
Camera Three ignores his irregular slouch and gait. Then, briefly, in relief, he is like everyone else, just another face in the crowd. People crowd from trains, then disperse into bottlenecks at the entrances and exits. And then he is alone again, like we always are.
In a crowd this big, one ceases to be an individual. One becomes a cell, part of the mass, just another organism. Like blood round the body. A heart beat pushes the blood further up the vein for a second. And then the heart stops. Recovers. Takes another gasp. The blood retreats back. And the heart beats again.
Two minutes and counting.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
He counts the nights since he slept, but that takes the type of concentration that’s impossible. Focus, focus. Gimme Ritalin. Strattera. Caffeine. Something, anything. Whatever it is, I need it.
All he knows is that it’s been a long time since he slept properly. A long time since there was an unbroken night. After a while dark and light merge into one. Everything becomes some kind of washed-out grey. You can start hallucinating after just fifty hours without sleep.
It ceases to matter how long it was since you slept. All that matters is that you haven’t slept. And you need it. Like oxygen and water. When the things that keep you awake are the things that haunt you when you close your eyes. When you can no longer sleep because the bed you used to sleep in is empty without her. When you can still smell her on the unused pillows and the abandoned furniture. When everything is falling apart in your hands : when the more you try the less you succeed.
You can’t sleep if you don’t know if you’re going to wake up.
When there’s something on your mind, sometimes nothing else in the world exists.
Because she was perfect. And everything about him was wrong. And without her, everything was wrong.
Switch to Camera Seventeen at the top of the station stairs before the descent down into the Underground. The operator stifles a yawns. Not long now. Twelve minutes to go.
In training courses, all one is taught is to watch for signs. You’re not meant to raise an alarm, interfere, unless there is something unmistakably clearly requiring intervention. Crime mostly. The eyes of fear watch and wait. For our protection we are monitored by unseen eyes at all times.
I know what this feels like.
He fantasises that the voice will leave him alone. Fantasises of a pristine white duvet. He hasn’t shaved for days. Just can’t. A blade is a dangerous thing.
But I’ll never stop.
It’s not yet time. This can’t be happening. The only voice in that head is his. And if the only voice in his head isn’t his, whose is it?
It’s mine.
This peace, this seclusion, this privacy to think whatever he wants. It’s a refuge. You never know when it can be taken away. When someone can unwrap your every thought, your every hidden intimacy, and use it against you is when life becomes fear one might lose the little one has. Without it, your identity itself starts to unravel. One becomes unglued, one ceases to be oneself, but somehow becomes part of everything.
Privacy. A thing whose value you don’t even know you have until you don’t have it anymore. A gift that you couldn’t wait to be rid of, yet no matter how much you want it, you can never have back.
Because even if you have nothing to hide, you hate the thought of someone watching you. Someone analysing your every move for something they can use against you. I am not a commodity. I am not information to be manipulated and controlled. I am someone.
You’re wondering where the voice is coming from.
Forever, this beautiful symphony of silence will be. Like yesterday. Like tomorrow. Like the next thirty years of our lives.
T minus 90.
I’m inside your head. I will never leave.
Huddle and wait. A chill goes through his body. Hands shake. Not even the hands know why. Insert a travelcard into a mouth that spits it out. Descend amongst the rest of them on the escalator. The heat is enough to invite sleep. The beautiful release. Down on the platform. Trying to ignore the voice in his head. No man can fear what he cannot see or touch.
Yes you can. Yes you do.
The world is curved. We often we mistake what we want for what we need. But what we need is different. It isn’t an artificial need, an imposed need, like a fast car, or drugs. It’s more basic, more fundamental than that.
The things that keep you awake are the things that make you want to sleep.
Life is a ghost. Occupying the same physical space as others, but this psychological space, this world we live in, is unique, to us and us only. Even someone seeing the same things, living the same life, with seeing through our eyes would still feel a different world.
To forget.
Any shape of sweet relief, anything that can ease this, anything that can lift the darkness.
Stumble, fall, sweat. Everything feels different. It only looks the same as normal.
Forever is more than you can imagine, less than you can enjoy.
He can feel that he’s being watched.
Switch to Camera Fourteen on the far end of the platform.
A rumble vibrates the air. Air pushes down the tunnel and tickles the hair of women. Rats freeze for the briefest of moments, then scatter to small holes hidden in walls. A light throws itself against a wall inside the tunnel. A dull roar of machinery and petrol. A shape. A train edges nearer, a bullet down the barrel of a gun, slowing towards the end of the platform. As it exits the confines of the tunnel, the train is still at a lethal, killing velocity.
Peace is just a step away.
Statistically, tube drivers encounter a fatality every 11 years. Or 100 suicides a year. The knowledge that every 11 years you will be the deliverer of a lost soul, a killer, the man who stands just inches away from someone as their meat is compressed against the window of your cab, their limbs and torso fall beneath the wheels and are dragged under, as eight pints of blood explode underneath the steel but are held by inertia and momentum to the front of a cab for a second, just a second, propelled forward in defiance of gravity, before gravity pulls the meat down, and under. Skulls explode from the pressure. The flesh is squeezed in a surreal collage of blood, bodily fluids, and internal organs.
These are called one-unders. And 11am is a very dangerous time.
You can’t help looking as their face is pressed against the glass for the last second of their life, see in their eyes that maybe this was a mistake, that if they could go back in time maybe three or four seconds and change everything, they would.
That’s the face some people see when they close their eyes.
Today is gonna be the day I’m gonna bring it back to you
T minus 10.
There are only 9 non-suicide fatalities a year on the Underground. Of the 91 other fatalities, One-Unders are the worst. Given the low clearance of tube cars and the large amount of body mass, cleaning and removing a suicide is a time-consuming, messy detail : it takes an hour at an absolute minimum to return a station to working order. Coroners and policemen need to be alerted. Photographs taken. Evidence collated, identified, reports to be written and compiled from CCTV footage. All these things happen at an instant’s notice.
Sometimes, the smell of meat in a supermarket can bring back for a second – just a second that feels like a year – the memory of trying to pick up all the dissected, random splinters of flesh that used to be a person.
To avert suicides, and also to aid cleaning up, most tube stations have Suicide Pits - deep gulleys of two or three feet deep below the main lines. When the body starts to fall, these initially throw the body at high speed below the wheels, where, whilst badly injured after impact, the passenger stands a 200% increased chance of survival than if there were no pit. Some people look down, trying to assess their chances. 50% / 50%. Take a chance on me.
By now somehow you shoulda realised what ya gotta do
Heads are thrown up, land at commuters feet. The most important thing you see today may be the last few seconds of someones life gushing from their severed arteries at your feet, ruining your shoes.
Outdoor stations are the worst. The head can go anywhere. Two days later, the head may be found. Hanging on the end of a fox’s mouth, or by a cleaner walking on a corrugated iron roof. Soulless eyes staring out at nothing, hung by their hair from the mouth of a fox foraging for food. This is the final exit.
A roar. A flash of light. Looking forward there is barely enough time to catch the driver’s eye, especially at the speed he is travelling. Someone mouths a word at him, trying to apologise for this. A briefcase remains open and unlocked on the platform. Someone’s secrets are in there, the explanations, the final, scrawled apology. The emptied bank statements, impending repossession orders, divorce documents from strange and estranged people.
Most suicides don’t leave notes. Most suicides are mysteries. The great unsolved murders of our time.
I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
Originally, in the 30’s, tube trains were painted red due to the large number of suicides. You didn’t have to wash the blood off.
Go on motherfucker. Jump.
T minus 1.
Someone walks forward, and a body jerks like a plastic doll thrown against a moving wall.
posted by Mark at 7:56 AM
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2 :
The front door was locked, which was odd. Maybe she was out. Maybe she’d just gone to the supermarket to get some milk and some bread.
In my bleary state this morning I’d fumbled with the idea of making sandwiches, but had quickly given up when I realised that the bread had turned mouldy. I might call her when I get in and let her know that we need something for dinner. I really fancied a pizza. Anything that didn’t really require any effort on my part because I was tired and it had been a fucking shitty day.
The type of day we hate. Delayed trains. Cramped offices. Junk food. Phones that buzz like flies. Emails that replicate like a virus. The endless chatter of people. People crowded round entrances and exits, unthinking clutter in the detriris of life. Standing like an Auschwitz Jew on a bullet train just to get home. An ugly day.
Cursing without thinking, I fumbled with my keys, pulled out a small bundle and fiddled through them to find the right one, placing it in the lock and turning and pushing at the same time. The door moved, but only a millimetre before falling back on the deadbolt. She must have double-locked the door.
I didn’t need this. I’d had a hard day anyway and all I wanted to do was put my feet up, and tell my girl about my awful day at work. Maybe we could curl into each other and watch some bad television later. I could check my email, maybe drink a beer from the fridge, have an ice cream. I was seriously fucked off. The kind of slow-burning fury that only a genetically mutated cartoon character could match. I didn’t need any more bullshit.
More and more reports. More and more frantic phone calls. More snide comments, suspicious glances across the office, surreptitious phone calls and emails I wasn’t copied in on. I really didn’t have the tolerance for even one more ounce of bullshit. This world is a prison. And I want to escape.
Fumbling with the keys again, I removed one ear from my headphones, where a tinny sound was telling someone to stop crying your heart out. I placed the big key in the top lock, felt the satisfying clunk of metal on metal, then put the other key in the bottom lock, turned. The symphony of sychronicity. As parts moved together.
"Darling, I’m home." Jack Torrance said.
Before you entered the main living room there was a small entrance hall with a Perspex full-length window. I dropped my bag in there, removed the other earphone from my CD walkman, and pocketed my keys in my jacket pocket, careful to switch the walkman off. I looked up.
Something wasn’t right.
The room looked different. Wrong somehow. The walls had the wrong shadows. The light was wrong. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I don’t know quite what was wrong, but something was.
I hung up my jacket, started to unravel my tie, and entered the living room.
But it wasn’t the living room anymore.
There was a hole where the television used to be. A hole where my DVD’s used to be. A hole where my life used to be. The computer desk and her PC gone. As if she was never there. As if she had never lived. Gone.
Burgled from the inside.
There are some moments that one can point to, and know that from that moment on, life will never be the same. That history had changed direction I had just entered one of those moments. I didn’t feel very historic. We, that is she and I, were history. There was no other explanation I could reasonably reach. When you rule out what is impossible, what is possible must be true.
My life had just been derailed and gone sharp left. Fucking fuck. After everything else, this?
My body suddenly uncoiled. A weight left me, replaced instantly by a different, other weight. This one was not the weight of time, but the weight of crisis. A relationship is, after all, nothing but a different set of problems.
My life would be different forever now. My life cut in half. My future stolen. Our children, unborn. Only what could have been, not what would ever be. The fucking cow ripped me off and left me whilst I was out earning money to feed us. I felt amputated. I had been chained to a trap, and I had been set free. But still you miss the limb. Still you feel where it once was.
We weren’t happy anymore. We weren’t unhappy anymore. We just troughed through the days, and thought this was what life was.
I turned to look at the rest of the room. The sofa was still there, tired holes and stains. Not even worth stealing. And on my computer monitor there was a scrawled, yellow Post-It note. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. Life is too short.
I tossed the note that announced the death of my marriage into the bin unread. I tossed my tie over to somewhere in the room, undoing the buttons on my shirt as I did so.
I wanted to wash the smell of her off my skin. I wanted to change my face, my clothes, my life. As if she were never alive. As if she were a mistake I had never made. A lesson I had played truant from. The bigger the mistake, the more you learn.
My shoes hurt. They always did after a day at work. These new shoes, their pinching soles and walls. I kicked them off, not even looking where they landed, because by now, I really didn’t give a fuck at all.
I walked over to the phone and fumbled with my wallet, taking out the bank card so that I may ring the right number. It was on the back in small print next to the legal stuff about how your house is at risk if you do not keep up with mortgage repayments.
I waited. A dial tone. I was now in a queue. The first voice I heard when my wife left me was a recording. Not even a real human being. They appreciated my call and one of their operators would deal with me as soon as they became available, as my call was important to them. Glad I was important to someone.
The first voice I heard in my life was a digitised imitation. A lie.
I am Simon’s raging impotence.
In the meantime, Simply Red were singing about the Stars that fall from your eyes. How callous love can be when one is without. I took off my shirt, contorting against the phone, slipping arms out as I cradled a receiver against a stubbled neck, listening for the sound of real people, sighed. Shit shit shit. There were so many questions that would never be answered. So many things to do. So many mistakes to put right.
“Good morning/afternoon/evening. My name is (insert name here). May I have your name and account details please?” it said on a monitor-prompt someone was reading out to me somewhere in Wales. Or in Middlesborough. Or India.
I didn’t want anyone to ask me anything. I didn’t want to answer anything. I didn’t want to be making this call. But not knowing was worse than knowing.
Two security questions later and I was in. Stuff anyone would know. Mothers maiden name, birthdate. How could she help me? I wondered. Well, she couldn’t bring my wife back. But I didn’t want her, not after this. In five minutes I had gone from loving to loathing. How fickle love can be.
“I’d like to freeze the joint account please. My wife has left me and I would like to prevent the joint account being misused please.”
Of course I wouldn’t like to report that. But I had no choice. I looked at the clock. 5.40. Just after branch closing time. Fuck. Maybe I couldn’t get the account frozen. Maybe she could empty it with her cashcard sometime in the next seventeen hours and twenty minutes. Maybe she already had. Maybe my whole life is fucked. Ruined. Maybe I was the bank being robbed.
“I’m not sure that’s possible. Let me have a quick look into it please.”
There was still time to go out, walk to the nearest Atm, and rob my own bank to prevent someone else doing so. I am merely buried treasure, waiting to be plundered.
At the end of the phone there was a click and an “er” and she asked a supervisor about something. At times like this you can’t think in any term longer than the next thirty seconds. My forward planning had become a goldfish. Left. Right. Clunk. Window.
“I know it’s an unusual request but these are very unusual circumstances. Is it possible?” I almost said into the hold music. For some reason, I was getting pissed off. But nothing pleases a cubemonkey more than having an excuse to terminate the call or pass you on, if you’re being troublesome. And calls are monitored for our own safety and protection.
Because we need protecting from ourselves. Look at the state of the human race, driving headlong into the wall of extinction.
I still had keys. But so did she. I could go out and walk to the bank, withdraw all the money myself if I fucking had to. It was a race against time. There was just enough money to pay the rent and all my wages had just gone in. Maybe –
“Yes, I can do that, I’ll need to take you through some security checks.”
More security checks. More hoops to jump through. Watch me, I am a seal. Reward me with cold fish when I have done well. I would be safe. I hope.
The account was frozen.
“Can I have the balance please?” I asked the girl.
“Certainly. The current balance is £497.51 overdrawn.”
Fuck. I hadn’t paid the rent yet and I had one hundred and two pounds forty nine pence to do it with. It’s not enough.
The fucking cow. She must’ve taken the maximum daily allowance out of the account at some point between my tired steps to the train and my tired steps home.
No money. No rent money. I am fucked.
“Can you give me a verbal statement please?”
I looked around. No kettle. No toaster.
“Certainly. Direct debits from NG Power, HJ Gas, British Telecom, and the County Council have all been paid today. As well as a cash withdrawl of £300.”
I knew it. I fucking knew it. Sometimes, I hated being right. Sometimes I wish I was wrong. So very, inexhaustibly, dreadfully wrong. I wish I was wrong now. But I wasn’t. For once, I was right, and I didn’t want to be.
Three hundred pounds is the maximum daily cash withdrawal you could make on our account. She never fucked me until she left. Then she fucked me as hard as she could.
“Thank you.” I said. My heart was beating faster than a Boeing. In it’s place a black hole of fear. What the fuck had happened? How? How could someone fall to think that leaving someone like this was in any way acceptable? Desirable? In any way anything even near the right way to behave?
Sometimes I think that I can’t relate to people, and when I think that people act like she did, I think that not being able to relate to people is a good thing.
The silence was longer than death and shorter than a heartbeat, as I thought for something to say.
I’d missed her by hours. If only I’d been here, been different, been able to stop this, but the biggest if only was… if only she wasn’t such a fucking bitch.
I fumbled with my mobile. I debated ringing her. Trying to find out what was going on. But it was really fucking obvious. I wanted to know his name. The man who had helped load all my stolen things into a hired van.
I wanted to know who was fucking my wife. I wanted a name.
But more importantly than that I wanted to know what was going on with my life.
I wanted to know where my life was going now. What I was meant to do with my life, Whatever it was, I was going to do it. I had no choice. Life was a speeding jet plane, and I was tied by my wrist to the turbine engines.
She wouldn’t’ve answered the phone anyway. She would’ve turned it off. Or seen my name and cancelled the call. It figures, if she didn’t have the decency to be honest about leaving me, she wouldn’t, couldn’t be honest about anything else.
“Thank you.” I said again. I am a robot. In emotional narcolepsy, I shut down, go on autopilot. Just carry on as if nothing was wrong. A robot, performing tasks that must be performed, because I need to survive now.
“I’ll need to go into my branch office tomorrow and make an appointment regarding the change in circumstances. Can you inform me please what time your branches open please?”
Tomorrow was a Tuesday. Late opening for staff training I bet you.
“Hang on I’ll just check.”
This girl sounded nice. I bet someone looked at her and thought the things I used to think about my wife. Heard her voice and experienced the slightest of tremors in their heart at the thought of her walking towards them.
At some point in my life I would have to – if I was lucky – meet someone new, fall in love again, make love again. But I was still in love with the person who’d just fucked me over and ripped me off. Twenty minutes ago things were different. But I couldn’t see beyond surviving today. I just had to survive. My victory was just staying alive. Living through this.
“Branches open at 9.30 tomorrow, sir. Can I be of any more help?”
Helpful as always. Still, I bet that’s what she was paid for. I bet I was the type of call they hated receiving, and yet always did. They go on training courses to deal with people like me on days like today. I bet this is one of those nightmare calls, the ones they train you to take but you dread, the anguished, ripped off, the desperate.
“No thank you. Can you just confirm that the account has now been frozen and that can be no further withdrawals from the account please?”
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really feeling up to making a joke of anything, but normally I would at least try.
“Yes sir, I can confirm the account has been frozen and there can be no further withdrawals without your permission.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, the kind that exists when you know you’ve only been majorly wounded and not killed. I married a fucking thief.
Tomorrow I would have to go forward and plead an extension to an overdraft, a new direct debit to be set up, a new everything. Just so I could pay the fucking rent. I don’t know how I would do it, I just knew that I would have to.
“Can I help with anything else?” She asked. Fuck it. I had to look in the freezer as well. She wouldn’t have stolen all the food as well would she?
Anything’s possible.
“Yes, can I have your name please?”
“Er….” Maybe she was thrown by the request. Maybe I was trying to breach company policy. “My name’s Natasha.” She had told me earlier, I had forgotten, when she was reading off that on screen prompt.
“Thank you very much, Natasha, you’ve been very helpful.”
Before she could thank me and bid me goodbye I hung up. I really didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now. I just wanted to get the fuck away from me, her, everyfuckingthing.
I sat on the sofa, wearing nothing but socks and my work trousers, ten minutes after my wife left me, scared for the future, ashamed of the past, and in the middle of the worst day of my life. And that is how my life changed.
In my bleary state this morning I’d fumbled with the idea of making sandwiches, but had quickly given up when I realised that the bread had turned mouldy. I might call her when I get in and let her know that we need something for dinner. I really fancied a pizza. Anything that didn’t really require any effort on my part because I was tired and it had been a fucking shitty day.
The type of day we hate. Delayed trains. Cramped offices. Junk food. Phones that buzz like flies. Emails that replicate like a virus. The endless chatter of people. People crowded round entrances and exits, unthinking clutter in the detriris of life. Standing like an Auschwitz Jew on a bullet train just to get home. An ugly day.
Cursing without thinking, I fumbled with my keys, pulled out a small bundle and fiddled through them to find the right one, placing it in the lock and turning and pushing at the same time. The door moved, but only a millimetre before falling back on the deadbolt. She must have double-locked the door.
I didn’t need this. I’d had a hard day anyway and all I wanted to do was put my feet up, and tell my girl about my awful day at work. Maybe we could curl into each other and watch some bad television later. I could check my email, maybe drink a beer from the fridge, have an ice cream. I was seriously fucked off. The kind of slow-burning fury that only a genetically mutated cartoon character could match. I didn’t need any more bullshit.
More and more reports. More and more frantic phone calls. More snide comments, suspicious glances across the office, surreptitious phone calls and emails I wasn’t copied in on. I really didn’t have the tolerance for even one more ounce of bullshit. This world is a prison. And I want to escape.
Fumbling with the keys again, I removed one ear from my headphones, where a tinny sound was telling someone to stop crying your heart out. I placed the big key in the top lock, felt the satisfying clunk of metal on metal, then put the other key in the bottom lock, turned. The symphony of sychronicity. As parts moved together.
"Darling, I’m home." Jack Torrance said.
Before you entered the main living room there was a small entrance hall with a Perspex full-length window. I dropped my bag in there, removed the other earphone from my CD walkman, and pocketed my keys in my jacket pocket, careful to switch the walkman off. I looked up.
Something wasn’t right.
The room looked different. Wrong somehow. The walls had the wrong shadows. The light was wrong. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I don’t know quite what was wrong, but something was.
I hung up my jacket, started to unravel my tie, and entered the living room.
But it wasn’t the living room anymore.
There was a hole where the television used to be. A hole where my DVD’s used to be. A hole where my life used to be. The computer desk and her PC gone. As if she was never there. As if she had never lived. Gone.
Burgled from the inside.
There are some moments that one can point to, and know that from that moment on, life will never be the same. That history had changed direction I had just entered one of those moments. I didn’t feel very historic. We, that is she and I, were history. There was no other explanation I could reasonably reach. When you rule out what is impossible, what is possible must be true.
My life had just been derailed and gone sharp left. Fucking fuck. After everything else, this?
My body suddenly uncoiled. A weight left me, replaced instantly by a different, other weight. This one was not the weight of time, but the weight of crisis. A relationship is, after all, nothing but a different set of problems.
My life would be different forever now. My life cut in half. My future stolen. Our children, unborn. Only what could have been, not what would ever be. The fucking cow ripped me off and left me whilst I was out earning money to feed us. I felt amputated. I had been chained to a trap, and I had been set free. But still you miss the limb. Still you feel where it once was.
We weren’t happy anymore. We weren’t unhappy anymore. We just troughed through the days, and thought this was what life was.
I turned to look at the rest of the room. The sofa was still there, tired holes and stains. Not even worth stealing. And on my computer monitor there was a scrawled, yellow Post-It note. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. Life is too short.
I tossed the note that announced the death of my marriage into the bin unread. I tossed my tie over to somewhere in the room, undoing the buttons on my shirt as I did so.
I wanted to wash the smell of her off my skin. I wanted to change my face, my clothes, my life. As if she were never alive. As if she were a mistake I had never made. A lesson I had played truant from. The bigger the mistake, the more you learn.
My shoes hurt. They always did after a day at work. These new shoes, their pinching soles and walls. I kicked them off, not even looking where they landed, because by now, I really didn’t give a fuck at all.
I walked over to the phone and fumbled with my wallet, taking out the bank card so that I may ring the right number. It was on the back in small print next to the legal stuff about how your house is at risk if you do not keep up with mortgage repayments.
I waited. A dial tone. I was now in a queue. The first voice I heard when my wife left me was a recording. Not even a real human being. They appreciated my call and one of their operators would deal with me as soon as they became available, as my call was important to them. Glad I was important to someone.
The first voice I heard in my life was a digitised imitation. A lie.
I am Simon’s raging impotence.
In the meantime, Simply Red were singing about the Stars that fall from your eyes. How callous love can be when one is without. I took off my shirt, contorting against the phone, slipping arms out as I cradled a receiver against a stubbled neck, listening for the sound of real people, sighed. Shit shit shit. There were so many questions that would never be answered. So many things to do. So many mistakes to put right.
“Good morning/afternoon/evening. My name is (insert name here). May I have your name and account details please?” it said on a monitor-prompt someone was reading out to me somewhere in Wales. Or in Middlesborough. Or India.
I didn’t want anyone to ask me anything. I didn’t want to answer anything. I didn’t want to be making this call. But not knowing was worse than knowing.
Two security questions later and I was in. Stuff anyone would know. Mothers maiden name, birthdate. How could she help me? I wondered. Well, she couldn’t bring my wife back. But I didn’t want her, not after this. In five minutes I had gone from loving to loathing. How fickle love can be.
“I’d like to freeze the joint account please. My wife has left me and I would like to prevent the joint account being misused please.”
Of course I wouldn’t like to report that. But I had no choice. I looked at the clock. 5.40. Just after branch closing time. Fuck. Maybe I couldn’t get the account frozen. Maybe she could empty it with her cashcard sometime in the next seventeen hours and twenty minutes. Maybe she already had. Maybe my whole life is fucked. Ruined. Maybe I was the bank being robbed.
“I’m not sure that’s possible. Let me have a quick look into it please.”
There was still time to go out, walk to the nearest Atm, and rob my own bank to prevent someone else doing so. I am merely buried treasure, waiting to be plundered.
At the end of the phone there was a click and an “er” and she asked a supervisor about something. At times like this you can’t think in any term longer than the next thirty seconds. My forward planning had become a goldfish. Left. Right. Clunk. Window.
“I know it’s an unusual request but these are very unusual circumstances. Is it possible?” I almost said into the hold music. For some reason, I was getting pissed off. But nothing pleases a cubemonkey more than having an excuse to terminate the call or pass you on, if you’re being troublesome. And calls are monitored for our own safety and protection.
Because we need protecting from ourselves. Look at the state of the human race, driving headlong into the wall of extinction.
I still had keys. But so did she. I could go out and walk to the bank, withdraw all the money myself if I fucking had to. It was a race against time. There was just enough money to pay the rent and all my wages had just gone in. Maybe –
“Yes, I can do that, I’ll need to take you through some security checks.”
More security checks. More hoops to jump through. Watch me, I am a seal. Reward me with cold fish when I have done well. I would be safe. I hope.
The account was frozen.
“Can I have the balance please?” I asked the girl.
“Certainly. The current balance is £497.51 overdrawn.”
Fuck. I hadn’t paid the rent yet and I had one hundred and two pounds forty nine pence to do it with. It’s not enough.
The fucking cow. She must’ve taken the maximum daily allowance out of the account at some point between my tired steps to the train and my tired steps home.
No money. No rent money. I am fucked.
“Can you give me a verbal statement please?”
I looked around. No kettle. No toaster.
“Certainly. Direct debits from NG Power, HJ Gas, British Telecom, and the County Council have all been paid today. As well as a cash withdrawl of £300.”
I knew it. I fucking knew it. Sometimes, I hated being right. Sometimes I wish I was wrong. So very, inexhaustibly, dreadfully wrong. I wish I was wrong now. But I wasn’t. For once, I was right, and I didn’t want to be.
Three hundred pounds is the maximum daily cash withdrawal you could make on our account. She never fucked me until she left. Then she fucked me as hard as she could.
“Thank you.” I said. My heart was beating faster than a Boeing. In it’s place a black hole of fear. What the fuck had happened? How? How could someone fall to think that leaving someone like this was in any way acceptable? Desirable? In any way anything even near the right way to behave?
Sometimes I think that I can’t relate to people, and when I think that people act like she did, I think that not being able to relate to people is a good thing.
The silence was longer than death and shorter than a heartbeat, as I thought for something to say.
I’d missed her by hours. If only I’d been here, been different, been able to stop this, but the biggest if only was… if only she wasn’t such a fucking bitch.
I fumbled with my mobile. I debated ringing her. Trying to find out what was going on. But it was really fucking obvious. I wanted to know his name. The man who had helped load all my stolen things into a hired van.
I wanted to know who was fucking my wife. I wanted a name.
But more importantly than that I wanted to know what was going on with my life.
I wanted to know where my life was going now. What I was meant to do with my life, Whatever it was, I was going to do it. I had no choice. Life was a speeding jet plane, and I was tied by my wrist to the turbine engines.
She wouldn’t’ve answered the phone anyway. She would’ve turned it off. Or seen my name and cancelled the call. It figures, if she didn’t have the decency to be honest about leaving me, she wouldn’t, couldn’t be honest about anything else.
“Thank you.” I said again. I am a robot. In emotional narcolepsy, I shut down, go on autopilot. Just carry on as if nothing was wrong. A robot, performing tasks that must be performed, because I need to survive now.
“I’ll need to go into my branch office tomorrow and make an appointment regarding the change in circumstances. Can you inform me please what time your branches open please?”
Tomorrow was a Tuesday. Late opening for staff training I bet you.
“Hang on I’ll just check.”
This girl sounded nice. I bet someone looked at her and thought the things I used to think about my wife. Heard her voice and experienced the slightest of tremors in their heart at the thought of her walking towards them.
At some point in my life I would have to – if I was lucky – meet someone new, fall in love again, make love again. But I was still in love with the person who’d just fucked me over and ripped me off. Twenty minutes ago things were different. But I couldn’t see beyond surviving today. I just had to survive. My victory was just staying alive. Living through this.
“Branches open at 9.30 tomorrow, sir. Can I be of any more help?”
Helpful as always. Still, I bet that’s what she was paid for. I bet I was the type of call they hated receiving, and yet always did. They go on training courses to deal with people like me on days like today. I bet this is one of those nightmare calls, the ones they train you to take but you dread, the anguished, ripped off, the desperate.
“No thank you. Can you just confirm that the account has now been frozen and that can be no further withdrawals from the account please?”
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really feeling up to making a joke of anything, but normally I would at least try.
“Yes sir, I can confirm the account has been frozen and there can be no further withdrawals without your permission.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, the kind that exists when you know you’ve only been majorly wounded and not killed. I married a fucking thief.
Tomorrow I would have to go forward and plead an extension to an overdraft, a new direct debit to be set up, a new everything. Just so I could pay the fucking rent. I don’t know how I would do it, I just knew that I would have to.
“Can I help with anything else?” She asked. Fuck it. I had to look in the freezer as well. She wouldn’t have stolen all the food as well would she?
Anything’s possible.
“Yes, can I have your name please?”
“Er….” Maybe she was thrown by the request. Maybe I was trying to breach company policy. “My name’s Natasha.” She had told me earlier, I had forgotten, when she was reading off that on screen prompt.
“Thank you very much, Natasha, you’ve been very helpful.”
Before she could thank me and bid me goodbye I hung up. I really didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now. I just wanted to get the fuck away from me, her, everyfuckingthing.
I sat on the sofa, wearing nothing but socks and my work trousers, ten minutes after my wife left me, scared for the future, ashamed of the past, and in the middle of the worst day of my life. And that is how my life changed.
posted by Mark at 7:55 AM
0 comments
3 :
I am not what I own. I am not what I owe. I am not my books. My CD’s. My girlfriend. I am none of these things. But I try to pretend I am. I try to assemble my personality in parts. A record here. A book there. A haircut. These are the things that define me, because there is nothing within. Only that I am without.
I am none of these things. However, what I am, is a mystery to me. An artificial construct. I am an assemblege, a piecemeal of beliefs and tastes. A jigsaw puzzle of reality. I take what I think represents me, what may gain me acceptance and security, and these things become Me. Even though there is no me, no I, no actual personality, just merely a compilation of beliefs, knowledge, information, material that most reflects what I – whatever I am, if there is an I – am.
There are no original ideas. No original ideologies. Only a moral code defined by the information we receive. Everything is a sign. Everything means something. The records we buy. The books we read. The clothes we wear. Even if we don’t care about books, about music, about movies - this too means something.
It means that you don’t care. That there are other things, more important things that music, records, books, ideology. More important things than the real world. Some people don’t care about these things. Some people don’t care about politics. Some people just don’t care. As long as they’ve got the things they want : the girl, the boy, the car, the house, the pint and the packet of fags, some people just don’t care as long as they are comfortable.
Ignorance is bliss.
And so every day, the hour commute between the station and the office, the bus, the train, this moving cell, tightly packed to capacity with strangers, all serving our own eight hour a day sentence, our own job for life sentence, and we have no option but to participate.
And so, in this hour, we sit with eyes squeezed tight, trying to close out the world however we can. Copies of bland novels, sold en bulk at newsagents, She’s Gotta Have it, Girlfriend 44, The Girl With Jimmy Choo Shoes, all of them packed, printed, pulped attempts to escape reality, to run away from the outside world.
If I was a tree, I would be ashamed to die for a book like that. If I was a tree I’d want to die for a masterpiece : a book that changed the world, and not The Bible. A novel that opened people’s eyes : that changed the way people think : the way people act. That changed everything.
Moral judgements are easy to make about strangers. Sit opposite me, reading a copy of Finding Mr Right The Wrong Way or Former SAS General Excalibur Jones’ The Omega Project, and I make a judgement.
How many lives are wasted this way? How many hours a day, a week, a year,a lifetime? Moving from one place to another, like commuter cattle, their eyes inside an imaginary world, trying to escape, trying to pretend that this comfortable prison we are in does not even exist. Where the world is made of wizards and general and deep ops SAS nutters and gangsters call "HardFace" and "Nutter". You don’t want to think about the world. You don’t want to change the way things are. You just want a comfortable prison. You don’t want to think about big things.
And sometimes, it’s entirely right not to want to change the world. But most of time, escapism is not an escape. It’s the temporary haze of oblivion. It’s fiddling whilst Rome burns.
I am not the books I read. The clothes I wear. The music I listen to. I am some vague attempt at a personality by compiling all these things together and somehow hoping that there is a me at the end of it.
And yet without these things by which I define myself, I am nothing.
And this is all we are. Animals in shoes. You don’t see Insects worshipping a big stone insect with white flowing mandibles. If they had opposable claws the world would be very different. Humans would be battery farmed and stripped of fles by white coated animals. You could smell our shit as it collected at our feet on the killing floor. Somehow we try to rise above this : we try to pretend we are not made up of 98% Gorilla DNA. It’s that 2% that makes all the difference.
It only takes 2% Sarin, 2% Tabun, 2% Methylphosphonic Acid for us to leave this planet.
We are all just 2% away from being zoo fodder. 2% away from spending our lives behind glass as exhibits, hunted, skinned, eaten, and sold in the animal trade.
Should the 102% Human arrive, our days are numbered.
Twice as smart and half as dumb.
Some would say that our days already are. That in time everything becomes extinct. Even the universe itself, given enough billions of years, has its survival rate fall to zero. It extends and shrinks, and eventually the universe, having expanded as fast and as far as it can, contracts. Everything becomes sucked into itself.
We are in a time of boom. The human race is endlessly replicating, expanding, and racing towards Maximum Capacity. Critical Mass.
The time of bust is inevitable. It may be tomorrow, or a year from now, or a thousand years from now. In the end, in a few billion years, our lives, everything we say, everything we do, everywhere we go, will not even be history, but will have ceased to even be a memory. As if they never happened. The world will contract to the size of a football. And then it will expand again.
And we will never know that this will happen. The universe will shrink and dinosaurs, God, love, life, everything, the universe itself will be nothing. There will be no history, no memory, no things.
And what does it matter anyway then?
I am none of these things. However, what I am, is a mystery to me. An artificial construct. I am an assemblege, a piecemeal of beliefs and tastes. A jigsaw puzzle of reality. I take what I think represents me, what may gain me acceptance and security, and these things become Me. Even though there is no me, no I, no actual personality, just merely a compilation of beliefs, knowledge, information, material that most reflects what I – whatever I am, if there is an I – am.
There are no original ideas. No original ideologies. Only a moral code defined by the information we receive. Everything is a sign. Everything means something. The records we buy. The books we read. The clothes we wear. Even if we don’t care about books, about music, about movies - this too means something.
It means that you don’t care. That there are other things, more important things that music, records, books, ideology. More important things than the real world. Some people don’t care about these things. Some people don’t care about politics. Some people just don’t care. As long as they’ve got the things they want : the girl, the boy, the car, the house, the pint and the packet of fags, some people just don’t care as long as they are comfortable.
Ignorance is bliss.
And so every day, the hour commute between the station and the office, the bus, the train, this moving cell, tightly packed to capacity with strangers, all serving our own eight hour a day sentence, our own job for life sentence, and we have no option but to participate.
And so, in this hour, we sit with eyes squeezed tight, trying to close out the world however we can. Copies of bland novels, sold en bulk at newsagents, She’s Gotta Have it, Girlfriend 44, The Girl With Jimmy Choo Shoes, all of them packed, printed, pulped attempts to escape reality, to run away from the outside world.
If I was a tree, I would be ashamed to die for a book like that. If I was a tree I’d want to die for a masterpiece : a book that changed the world, and not The Bible. A novel that opened people’s eyes : that changed the way people think : the way people act. That changed everything.
Moral judgements are easy to make about strangers. Sit opposite me, reading a copy of Finding Mr Right The Wrong Way or Former SAS General Excalibur Jones’ The Omega Project, and I make a judgement.
How many lives are wasted this way? How many hours a day, a week, a year,a lifetime? Moving from one place to another, like commuter cattle, their eyes inside an imaginary world, trying to escape, trying to pretend that this comfortable prison we are in does not even exist. Where the world is made of wizards and general and deep ops SAS nutters and gangsters call "HardFace" and "Nutter". You don’t want to think about the world. You don’t want to change the way things are. You just want a comfortable prison. You don’t want to think about big things.
And sometimes, it’s entirely right not to want to change the world. But most of time, escapism is not an escape. It’s the temporary haze of oblivion. It’s fiddling whilst Rome burns.
I am not the books I read. The clothes I wear. The music I listen to. I am some vague attempt at a personality by compiling all these things together and somehow hoping that there is a me at the end of it.
And yet without these things by which I define myself, I am nothing.
And this is all we are. Animals in shoes. You don’t see Insects worshipping a big stone insect with white flowing mandibles. If they had opposable claws the world would be very different. Humans would be battery farmed and stripped of fles by white coated animals. You could smell our shit as it collected at our feet on the killing floor. Somehow we try to rise above this : we try to pretend we are not made up of 98% Gorilla DNA. It’s that 2% that makes all the difference.
It only takes 2% Sarin, 2% Tabun, 2% Methylphosphonic Acid for us to leave this planet.
We are all just 2% away from being zoo fodder. 2% away from spending our lives behind glass as exhibits, hunted, skinned, eaten, and sold in the animal trade.
Should the 102% Human arrive, our days are numbered.
Twice as smart and half as dumb.
Some would say that our days already are. That in time everything becomes extinct. Even the universe itself, given enough billions of years, has its survival rate fall to zero. It extends and shrinks, and eventually the universe, having expanded as fast and as far as it can, contracts. Everything becomes sucked into itself.
We are in a time of boom. The human race is endlessly replicating, expanding, and racing towards Maximum Capacity. Critical Mass.
The time of bust is inevitable. It may be tomorrow, or a year from now, or a thousand years from now. In the end, in a few billion years, our lives, everything we say, everything we do, everywhere we go, will not even be history, but will have ceased to even be a memory. As if they never happened. The world will contract to the size of a football. And then it will expand again.
And we will never know that this will happen. The universe will shrink and dinosaurs, God, love, life, everything, the universe itself will be nothing. There will be no history, no memory, no things.
And what does it matter anyway then?
posted by Mark at 7:54 AM
0 comments
5 :
I woke with a start. And imediately wished I hadn’t. My head felt as if I’d had the shit kicked out of me. A type of pain that was almost impossible to see it’s way through. It was dark. I didn’t know quite where I was. Or when. I was, but that was all.
I’d lost maybe an hour, maybe eight. Maybe a day. Maybe two days.
If it was morning or night, I couldn’t tell. Around me it was black and quiet. Quiet as if even the insects were dead. As if there were no birds. As if it were Auschwitz, where the silence was louder than anything else. Where there were no answers, only questions
I was woken by the cold. It was too cold to sleep even when I felt like shit. When I felt like meat warmed up, sealed into a plastic box, microwaved and yet my bones themselves felt frozen. I felt reanimated. A zombie.
What had happened? Jeez. My head hurt. Pounded, as if my brain itself was throbbing. Pulsating inside my head like a cartoon wound.
Had I had too much to drink again? Jeez. I thought I had got past that. I was too old for this shit. Too smart to get fooled by the gentle, slow slide into intoxication. Maybe I had missed the velvet path to being a typical drunk fuck. Maybe I had outsmarted it.
The human body is an amusement park of sense. Each nerve a kaleidoscope of feeling. And most of them negative. Headache. Eyes raw, as if I need to take them out of their sockets and washed. Joints swollen raw. Muscles ache with exhaustion. I don’t remember being out again. Normally I would have a dimly formed memory, even if the details are hazy, of where I have been, who I was with. Normally I remember an anonymous chain pub in the financial sector. A basement bar. The odd joke. A new face or not. Normally I remember my friends, what they were wearing, their work suits relaxed, the ties loosened, the cold satisfying chill of glass and liquid in my hands. The hustle and bustle. People who shout at the bar and men trying to impress each other with hollow boasts. Frightened children in the bodies of men, hoping for some security, for some woman who can protect them the way their mother used to. Pretending it didn’t matter, that there were a million women out there who would have them if only there was the chance, but no, they had chosen you, just you, and if you didn’t want them, didn’t choose him, then there was always someone else they could turn, always another love.
Normally I remember something. Even if it is only a fragment, a splinter, a snapshot of a second.
I remember fuck all. I’m drinking too much. These blackouts corrupt me.
But nothing. No memories of aimless conversation. No memories of Paul bringing some bored, pretty girls from his work to try and pair off with us. Nothing. No attempts at stagnant conversation with hopelessly unsuitable partners by which all you’re trying to do is connect and all you’ve got in common is a sense of loss, and geography. You don’t normally even share the same age range with them, and definitely not a gender. They might not even remember Blue Peter, Godzilla without Godzuki, Scooby Doo before Scrappy came along, Charles & Diana’s wedding - anything. All you’re doing is searching for common ground, or at least enough to be able to have a conversation and maybe convince them that your dog can bury its bone. Love is …. so rare and so common that maybe, even I might find some. Sometime. Someone. Special.
My wedding photographs sit unused, unloved, in a drawer somewhere in the suburbs. In a drawer I know not where, a suburb I cannot name, as someone I do not know even exists sidles up next to my wife and holds her in his arms. Thank fuck I never had kids. Thank fuck I got out when I did. Even waking up now seems better than coming to in her unfaithful arms. It’s a mystery to me how the human mind works.
All we share is loneliness. The central fact of human existence. I’m alone now. Focus. The world comes into focus now. Dim shapes form into clearly defined shapes. I’m lying on something. Grass and dry, cracked mud. How the hell did I get here?
Even when The Titanic went down, everyone died alone. There’s no one else there when your mind goes black and shuts down.
Slowly, using one shaking hand as an anchor, then the next, I tried to stand up and stumbled. It was dark, of a sort. At the corner of night stood a thin sliver of daylight that was blinking its way into the dawn. Thankfully my coat wasn’t wet, despite the condensation of the autumn night that had fallen into the night and coated the grass with dew and made it sparkle in the light. Looking up, I could see stars and clouds. It looked so beautiful. How could anything on this planet matter when we can see entire other galaxies with the naked eye?
It makes me feel small. So small that I am not even an insect, an amobae on the face of the universe. What change can I make?
Fuck. My head hurt. Hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. Ached with that dull, constant throb of tedious pain that indicates some serious, painful injury. Waking was a struggle. Movement even more so. My muscles ached like split, strained tendons. My head throbbed like a pulsing, swollen sore.
Someone fucking switch my head off.
I was in the deserted grassy lot at the rear of some industrial estate. Around me in the vague distance, red brick walls, chimney arches, and monotonous grey fencing I could dimly make out in dawn’s shadow. CCTV cameras and guard dogs lay silent as tombs. An elevated railway line with hollowed out arches stretched from one end of the horizon to another. The dull grind of metal on metal of commuter trains, or the goods trains of late nights and early mornings, shunting nuclear waste and unyielded plutonium to Northern towns where the sky glows like distant fire. Streetlights at corners provided dim light. They twinkled like small fireflies or moths in the distance, half a mile away, peeking over the top of a low wall. I looked right.
The shilouettes of the ghosts of cranes, fifty, one hundred feet high, silent as tombs stretched into the sky. Illuminated only by the lights of streetlamps and dawn bedrooms on the other side of the river. It was earlt. I knew this because it was still dark. And before 5.43am, when the first train to Victoria came past here.
This was of course on the assumption that I knew Where The Fuck I Was. That I didn’t.
Jesus. How did I get into this mess?
This is London, right? Then where the fuck was I?
And more importantly, what the fuck happened?
Everybody knows this is nowhere baby.
Standing up unsteadily, I felt in my pockets. There was nothing. No wallet. No cash. No phone. No keys. Nothing. Nothing made sense. I still had my watch. But that was it. How much did I drink last night?
Had I been mugged? I don’t remember that. The last thing I remember was coming out of the tube station and turning left, but that was after closing time, on the far end of the line, one of the last, deserted tubes, at one end of the train, where the only people were drunk, confused, asleep, tired, their eyes half-closed,where the soft rocking of the tunnels is a lullaby to sleep.
My watch said it was 4.13am. It’s precision engineering, from the Swatch factory of Switzerland, tolled like a bell of the dead. The only sound that echoed in my head.
What the Fuck?
Had I been abducted by aliens? I felt the back of my neck with aching, torn muscles. The dull, evil stretch of tendons, so that my hands moved slowly, my breath coming in odd, stolen gasps. I couldn’t feel the three raised marks below the hairline, those normal indentations that are the only marks left behind by the survivors of a visit from the Little Greys. So what had happened?
I didn’t feel tired anymore. Or hungry. Or thirsty. Or anything. Just aching, painful. And with a splitting headache. There must be something terribly wrong with me. As if every part of my body was somehow broken and wrong. But what? I didn’t recognize this place. Where the hell was it? Suburbs are full of these conurbations, these anonymous grey places where people work and try to fulfil the promise of capitalism in their little empires. And where the failure of capitalism leaves small vacant lots of wasteland at the edges of town. And where developments rise out of rubble, to be sold to people who can barely afford the mortgage in times of spiralling inflation and uncontrolled interest rates.
So this, this was nowhere. This was no place like home. An industrial estate outside a suburb, down a road, a series of anonymous grey buildings with numbers and bland corporate names on their doors in red plastic on white. Somewhere with a fax machine, but without a soul.
For hundreds of yards around me there were a multitude of these places. Vacant lots. Empty space. Empires for rent. New flats being built, cranes reaching to the skies. Derelict, rusted solid cranes of abandoned dockyards, and faded, tired cranes of newly constructed apartments that are beyond the reach of even the most affluent of employees.
Around us house prices are rising like the army of darkness, the infidels, yet here are miles and miles of empty space, the unoccupied rooms. Yet a house, a home, even a flat, are beyond the reach of even those who earn well beyond the national average. One day everyone will be homeless, and nobody will own anywhere. We’ll all be hiring our homes, and all we need is one letter, one notice, and we will be sleeping on the streets.
I’m such a happy camper sometimes.
Slowly, democracy is taking back everything it ever gave us, and pretending that it’s still ours. Democracy is the right to choose. But the choice that is exercised is never by us, only onto us. And the only democracy there is, is the will of the law and the corporations. People exist only to consume and spend money to feed
corporations.
The real programming on television is the adverts. The programmes you think you are watching : they’re just the bait to lure us in. We are the product being sold to the advertisers.
I’m too hungover to think like this. At least I think it’s a hangover.
When the impossible is eliminated, whatever is left, however unlikely, could be the truth.
In these lonely hours, these abandoned moments, left with nothing but our thoughts, our minds race through all the possibilities, and land in the strangest places.
There was a padding noise. A flash of colour somewhere, out of the corner of my mouth. I could detect more the movement than the maker. A fox skittered passed me without even a second glance foraging for food. A KFC bone was wedged into its mouth, grease dripping onto hungry teeth, returning to Fox Base Alpha. I shivered. Even a fox cannot escape the encroaching, inescapable corporatisation of everything. The apocalypse will be sponsored by Barclaycard. Famine brought to you courtesy of McDonalds. Pestilence courtesy of Schlemburger-SEMA. War courtesy of General Motors and EMI Weapons Division. Death courtesy of the Oil Companies and the President.
I could see a dusty dirt track to the left of me, complete with what appeared to be fresh tyre tracks. The air shivered. I need to get out of this shithole. I need to find the way out. I turned around.
Fuck me.
It was huge. I mean, enormous. The type of size that makes you realise that six foot is not tall. Sixty foot is not tall. This. This was tall.
Behind me, about one hundred yards behind me, stood a massive wall. It was about one hundred feet wide and about two hundred feet wide. At the sides the wall protruded forward slightly. The windows set into the wall were dusty and cracked. Many were smashed through. Derelict. Vacant. At ground level, only a handful of pillars stood, supporting the weight of this shell, this wall. Behind the wall was grass and dust. Small trees. Fencing.
I was a dwarf. An insect on the face of the world.
It wasn’t just a wall. But something empty. A building with it’s heart ripped out, and nothing in its place. At the far end, about 200 metres behind the wall, stood another wall.
I looked up. Two huge white cannons, pockmarked, dirty with age, rose forth from the wall, three hundred feet tall. They reached to the sky impassively. They had seen many things. The rise and fall of Germany. The fall of communism. Their very own enviseration at the hands of architect butchers and years of neglect.
Chimneys. And behind them, two more identical chimneys, set on the far side of the building, this enormous shell.
So this was what 188 Kritling Street, London, looked like up close. Like a great natural cliff face, neutral, enormous, imposing, blank. Sad, faded, and yet more than any of us could imagine. It didn’t care if you were there or not. It was just there.
Fuck me. How did I get here of all places?
I gasped involuntarily. Stared for a few seconds at this huge, impersonal thing, towering above me. This ghost building. Watching and waiting for my next, improbable move in a day of improbabilities. It scared the shit out of me.
Stepping back, I tried to comprehend the size of it. A grand madness. Being this close to something this big made me feel suddenly, very very small. And, as if the architects were daring God with the size of their audacity. As if we were insects crawling on the face of something huge.
It’s not good to dare God when one is merely mortal. Whatever is immortal will always outlive you.
I turned round. I looked for a way out. In the distance, the sun was breaking over the shilouette of the estates.
I’d lost maybe an hour, maybe eight. Maybe a day. Maybe two days.
If it was morning or night, I couldn’t tell. Around me it was black and quiet. Quiet as if even the insects were dead. As if there were no birds. As if it were Auschwitz, where the silence was louder than anything else. Where there were no answers, only questions
I was woken by the cold. It was too cold to sleep even when I felt like shit. When I felt like meat warmed up, sealed into a plastic box, microwaved and yet my bones themselves felt frozen. I felt reanimated. A zombie.
What had happened? Jeez. My head hurt. Pounded, as if my brain itself was throbbing. Pulsating inside my head like a cartoon wound.
Had I had too much to drink again? Jeez. I thought I had got past that. I was too old for this shit. Too smart to get fooled by the gentle, slow slide into intoxication. Maybe I had missed the velvet path to being a typical drunk fuck. Maybe I had outsmarted it.
The human body is an amusement park of sense. Each nerve a kaleidoscope of feeling. And most of them negative. Headache. Eyes raw, as if I need to take them out of their sockets and washed. Joints swollen raw. Muscles ache with exhaustion. I don’t remember being out again. Normally I would have a dimly formed memory, even if the details are hazy, of where I have been, who I was with. Normally I remember an anonymous chain pub in the financial sector. A basement bar. The odd joke. A new face or not. Normally I remember my friends, what they were wearing, their work suits relaxed, the ties loosened, the cold satisfying chill of glass and liquid in my hands. The hustle and bustle. People who shout at the bar and men trying to impress each other with hollow boasts. Frightened children in the bodies of men, hoping for some security, for some woman who can protect them the way their mother used to. Pretending it didn’t matter, that there were a million women out there who would have them if only there was the chance, but no, they had chosen you, just you, and if you didn’t want them, didn’t choose him, then there was always someone else they could turn, always another love.
Normally I remember something. Even if it is only a fragment, a splinter, a snapshot of a second.
I remember fuck all. I’m drinking too much. These blackouts corrupt me.
But nothing. No memories of aimless conversation. No memories of Paul bringing some bored, pretty girls from his work to try and pair off with us. Nothing. No attempts at stagnant conversation with hopelessly unsuitable partners by which all you’re trying to do is connect and all you’ve got in common is a sense of loss, and geography. You don’t normally even share the same age range with them, and definitely not a gender. They might not even remember Blue Peter, Godzilla without Godzuki, Scooby Doo before Scrappy came along, Charles & Diana’s wedding - anything. All you’re doing is searching for common ground, or at least enough to be able to have a conversation and maybe convince them that your dog can bury its bone. Love is …. so rare and so common that maybe, even I might find some. Sometime. Someone. Special.
My wedding photographs sit unused, unloved, in a drawer somewhere in the suburbs. In a drawer I know not where, a suburb I cannot name, as someone I do not know even exists sidles up next to my wife and holds her in his arms. Thank fuck I never had kids. Thank fuck I got out when I did. Even waking up now seems better than coming to in her unfaithful arms. It’s a mystery to me how the human mind works.
All we share is loneliness. The central fact of human existence. I’m alone now. Focus. The world comes into focus now. Dim shapes form into clearly defined shapes. I’m lying on something. Grass and dry, cracked mud. How the hell did I get here?
Even when The Titanic went down, everyone died alone. There’s no one else there when your mind goes black and shuts down.
Slowly, using one shaking hand as an anchor, then the next, I tried to stand up and stumbled. It was dark, of a sort. At the corner of night stood a thin sliver of daylight that was blinking its way into the dawn. Thankfully my coat wasn’t wet, despite the condensation of the autumn night that had fallen into the night and coated the grass with dew and made it sparkle in the light. Looking up, I could see stars and clouds. It looked so beautiful. How could anything on this planet matter when we can see entire other galaxies with the naked eye?
It makes me feel small. So small that I am not even an insect, an amobae on the face of the universe. What change can I make?
Fuck. My head hurt. Hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. Ached with that dull, constant throb of tedious pain that indicates some serious, painful injury. Waking was a struggle. Movement even more so. My muscles ached like split, strained tendons. My head throbbed like a pulsing, swollen sore.
Someone fucking switch my head off.
I was in the deserted grassy lot at the rear of some industrial estate. Around me in the vague distance, red brick walls, chimney arches, and monotonous grey fencing I could dimly make out in dawn’s shadow. CCTV cameras and guard dogs lay silent as tombs. An elevated railway line with hollowed out arches stretched from one end of the horizon to another. The dull grind of metal on metal of commuter trains, or the goods trains of late nights and early mornings, shunting nuclear waste and unyielded plutonium to Northern towns where the sky glows like distant fire. Streetlights at corners provided dim light. They twinkled like small fireflies or moths in the distance, half a mile away, peeking over the top of a low wall. I looked right.
The shilouettes of the ghosts of cranes, fifty, one hundred feet high, silent as tombs stretched into the sky. Illuminated only by the lights of streetlamps and dawn bedrooms on the other side of the river. It was earlt. I knew this because it was still dark. And before 5.43am, when the first train to Victoria came past here.
This was of course on the assumption that I knew Where The Fuck I Was. That I didn’t.
Jesus. How did I get into this mess?
This is London, right? Then where the fuck was I?
And more importantly, what the fuck happened?
Everybody knows this is nowhere baby.
Standing up unsteadily, I felt in my pockets. There was nothing. No wallet. No cash. No phone. No keys. Nothing. Nothing made sense. I still had my watch. But that was it. How much did I drink last night?
Had I been mugged? I don’t remember that. The last thing I remember was coming out of the tube station and turning left, but that was after closing time, on the far end of the line, one of the last, deserted tubes, at one end of the train, where the only people were drunk, confused, asleep, tired, their eyes half-closed,where the soft rocking of the tunnels is a lullaby to sleep.
My watch said it was 4.13am. It’s precision engineering, from the Swatch factory of Switzerland, tolled like a bell of the dead. The only sound that echoed in my head.
What the Fuck?
Had I been abducted by aliens? I felt the back of my neck with aching, torn muscles. The dull, evil stretch of tendons, so that my hands moved slowly, my breath coming in odd, stolen gasps. I couldn’t feel the three raised marks below the hairline, those normal indentations that are the only marks left behind by the survivors of a visit from the Little Greys. So what had happened?
I didn’t feel tired anymore. Or hungry. Or thirsty. Or anything. Just aching, painful. And with a splitting headache. There must be something terribly wrong with me. As if every part of my body was somehow broken and wrong. But what? I didn’t recognize this place. Where the hell was it? Suburbs are full of these conurbations, these anonymous grey places where people work and try to fulfil the promise of capitalism in their little empires. And where the failure of capitalism leaves small vacant lots of wasteland at the edges of town. And where developments rise out of rubble, to be sold to people who can barely afford the mortgage in times of spiralling inflation and uncontrolled interest rates.
So this, this was nowhere. This was no place like home. An industrial estate outside a suburb, down a road, a series of anonymous grey buildings with numbers and bland corporate names on their doors in red plastic on white. Somewhere with a fax machine, but without a soul.
For hundreds of yards around me there were a multitude of these places. Vacant lots. Empty space. Empires for rent. New flats being built, cranes reaching to the skies. Derelict, rusted solid cranes of abandoned dockyards, and faded, tired cranes of newly constructed apartments that are beyond the reach of even the most affluent of employees.
Around us house prices are rising like the army of darkness, the infidels, yet here are miles and miles of empty space, the unoccupied rooms. Yet a house, a home, even a flat, are beyond the reach of even those who earn well beyond the national average. One day everyone will be homeless, and nobody will own anywhere. We’ll all be hiring our homes, and all we need is one letter, one notice, and we will be sleeping on the streets.
I’m such a happy camper sometimes.
Slowly, democracy is taking back everything it ever gave us, and pretending that it’s still ours. Democracy is the right to choose. But the choice that is exercised is never by us, only onto us. And the only democracy there is, is the will of the law and the corporations. People exist only to consume and spend money to feed
corporations.
The real programming on television is the adverts. The programmes you think you are watching : they’re just the bait to lure us in. We are the product being sold to the advertisers.
I’m too hungover to think like this. At least I think it’s a hangover.
When the impossible is eliminated, whatever is left, however unlikely, could be the truth.
In these lonely hours, these abandoned moments, left with nothing but our thoughts, our minds race through all the possibilities, and land in the strangest places.
There was a padding noise. A flash of colour somewhere, out of the corner of my mouth. I could detect more the movement than the maker. A fox skittered passed me without even a second glance foraging for food. A KFC bone was wedged into its mouth, grease dripping onto hungry teeth, returning to Fox Base Alpha. I shivered. Even a fox cannot escape the encroaching, inescapable corporatisation of everything. The apocalypse will be sponsored by Barclaycard. Famine brought to you courtesy of McDonalds. Pestilence courtesy of Schlemburger-SEMA. War courtesy of General Motors and EMI Weapons Division. Death courtesy of the Oil Companies and the President.
I could see a dusty dirt track to the left of me, complete with what appeared to be fresh tyre tracks. The air shivered. I need to get out of this shithole. I need to find the way out. I turned around.
Fuck me.
It was huge. I mean, enormous. The type of size that makes you realise that six foot is not tall. Sixty foot is not tall. This. This was tall.
Behind me, about one hundred yards behind me, stood a massive wall. It was about one hundred feet wide and about two hundred feet wide. At the sides the wall protruded forward slightly. The windows set into the wall were dusty and cracked. Many were smashed through. Derelict. Vacant. At ground level, only a handful of pillars stood, supporting the weight of this shell, this wall. Behind the wall was grass and dust. Small trees. Fencing.
I was a dwarf. An insect on the face of the world.
It wasn’t just a wall. But something empty. A building with it’s heart ripped out, and nothing in its place. At the far end, about 200 metres behind the wall, stood another wall.
I looked up. Two huge white cannons, pockmarked, dirty with age, rose forth from the wall, three hundred feet tall. They reached to the sky impassively. They had seen many things. The rise and fall of Germany. The fall of communism. Their very own enviseration at the hands of architect butchers and years of neglect.
Chimneys. And behind them, two more identical chimneys, set on the far side of the building, this enormous shell.
So this was what 188 Kritling Street, London, looked like up close. Like a great natural cliff face, neutral, enormous, imposing, blank. Sad, faded, and yet more than any of us could imagine. It didn’t care if you were there or not. It was just there.
Fuck me. How did I get here of all places?
I gasped involuntarily. Stared for a few seconds at this huge, impersonal thing, towering above me. This ghost building. Watching and waiting for my next, improbable move in a day of improbabilities. It scared the shit out of me.
Stepping back, I tried to comprehend the size of it. A grand madness. Being this close to something this big made me feel suddenly, very very small. And, as if the architects were daring God with the size of their audacity. As if we were insects crawling on the face of something huge.
It’s not good to dare God when one is merely mortal. Whatever is immortal will always outlive you.
I turned round. I looked for a way out. In the distance, the sun was breaking over the shilouette of the estates.
posted by Mark at 7:53 AM
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4 :
I will never be king. I will never be President. I will never be James Bond. I will never be a millionaire.
Despite what we’re told. You can be anything. You can be anyone.
In a land where anybody can be a millionaire, everyone’s going to try. And almost everyone is going to fail. And as time goes on you realise that you can’t be anything. You’re lucky if you’re anyone. Let alone someone.
There are always those who serve and those who eat.
There were things I knew I wouldn’t see - the Eiffel Tower at daybreak, the public execution of Margaret Thatcher, the inside of a Bond Girl’s apartment, but this was something that was beyond my imagination - even beyond my comprehension - as a possibility.
Something that you don’t even rule out as a possibility. Something so far beyond the possible that it is not even imagined by most people. Unimagined by me.
And here we are. Somewhere beyond imagination.
One thing I never thought I’d get to see is my own funeral. To see a casket containing my corpse consigned to a fire. I am ash. I am fire. I am burnt wood and rotten fibre. I am smoke.
With that event, there could be no rebirth, no revelation, no thing. No resurrection, no chance of my body crawling forth from the ground alongside the millions of others, our resurrected eyes blinking softly in the morning light as civilisation ground to a halt around us. No four horsemen of the Apocalypse, their stars aligned, their prophecies fulfilled, the fire and brimstone promised by a God that doesn’t exist.
There might be for the reanimated grey skeletons of the dead. But not for the army of the cremated. Not for me. Not unless every cell of our ashen cadvers were sucked back out of the air, out of the bodies of the doomed living, back to their component parts, back to form skin, flesh, bone, soul.
And I know that this was too soon, that something went wrong, that somewhere, something happened, that God, if that invisible superman-alien exists, forgot me, and all he (or she) needed to do was forget for me for one second, because it only takes one second to die.
And he has bigger things to do, more important things in his life than my life. Though life, time, none of these things are linear. What happens happens. There is no great reason, no grand architecture, no master plan. Things happen, things change, and what is real for me now is no more real to you than the events of five hundred years past or hence, or events five hundred miles away.
The human psyche just isn’t designed to accept this information. I. Am. The. Dead. My body is no more. I’m just a bunch of atoms and thoughts swirling around the room, around this world.
We live our lives as if we are immortal, invincible ; sure we all know we’re going to grow old one day, maybe die, but never until we stand on the edge of mortality, with the racked, stolen breaths of the dying, do we ever consider that it really is going to happen, and now. And then we repent. We find God, or maybe he finds us. And we beg forgiveness. Trying to cling to the last few seconds, minutes, hours of life. And always wanting more.
Just one more breath of acrid, polluted air. Just one more meal of modified, reformed dead animals and chemicals.
The repentant are always those who can feel their bodies growing numb, their heartbeats fade, the last trickle of blood travel around their bodies and everything grow cold. As the last heartbeat pulses round those thin, old yellow arms, that last minute as the blood makes it’s final orbit around the flesh, you know. It’s time. And nothing can change that fact.
You always believe in God when you no longer believe in life. The last minute rush for tickets to the resurrection. I have sinned. Father, forgive me.
In those seconds, as the body dies, as the flesh grows cold, as the soul desperately clings to even one more second of a life, that’s when one becomes repentant. Or suffers the furious impotence at a life wasted. That when one finds out what one believes in.
I pledge alleigance to fuck all. I believe in coyotes. And time as an abstract. And as that day comes, as our stomachs expand, our hair recedes, our vision fades and our wrinkles grow, until then, we believe that we are invincible : we can do anything, go anywhere, fuck anyone, and it doesn’t matter, that nothing will change, that we will never age, that we will be immoral immortal forever, because we are alive.
And life itself, just being alive, that is a victory. And I has lost this battle. There was still a war to be won. And like all wars, one day it would either end, or everyone would be dead.
We believe that whatever we do won’t kill us. The we are invincible. Superfuckingmen that can drink, fuck, kill and that there is no consequence. We will never die. There is no future. Only now. Whatever it is, it will just make us stronger. That we choose when we die. That we make the decisions. That we have the choices. But we don’t. Our choices are controlled by prisons : our ways of thinking, our limited options, so that we, like rats in a maze, follow the path others want us to. We are rats in a treadmill. Animals in an experiment of limited choices, watched by unseen eyes.
Death is invisible. We can feel it’s presence. We feel it walk in the room when our backs are turned. We know it is there but we don’t – can’t - see it. We block out the thought, the reality, death becomes some kind of impossibility in the mind of someone living. The complete negation of the self seems impossible.There will always be some mark to indicate that there was a me, there was an us, that I was here, and we all leave our own frail attempts at immortality : creating a new life, writing a great book, even something as flimsy as a good song – all these things are our ways of leaving footprints in the sands of time.
All these things are our way of trying to scratch a little immortality onto this planet. The planet that will be caught up in a black hole, sucked away by life, as the universe shrinks, as the sun shrivels to a burnt rock, and we are reduced to something less than memories. As if we never were.
The body that I had shaved, the body I have controlled, the hair I had meticulously combed, was going to be burnt like a piece of fucking trash.
At what point do these things cease to matter? At what point does one cease to shave, to wash, to clean, because we know that one day it will cease to matter, that we are all finite, mortal, flawed. When you’ve rocked your last roll, when you’ve reached the end of the line. A week before? A day before? The hour before?
When do you know that you’ve rocked your last roll? When the human race is run?
There’s a black hole in our core, where the knowledge of the inevitable death sleeps. A cloud of ignorance descends. The knowledge that one day we will die and all the things we have done will be meaningless is incomprehensible. You, me, every person sat in every room in every street in every country - everyone. Gone.
Fuck it. I’m dead. That seems impossible.
I’m. Dead.
It never gets any easier to comprehend. You can say it. Repeat it until the words become meaningless, irrelevant, like the endless, infinite habitual I love you’s of the suburban marriage.
You just kind of move through it. You can’t accept it – you live through it. Well, you don’t - you can’t live through it. You just try to find a way through. You always thought there might be something more, that death is not, can not, be the end, and that somehow there will be more, that something is beyond death, beyond life, but whatever it is, no one knows.
That whatever comes after death is a bigger, better experience. Better special effects. Life : The Sequel.
When I try to sleep, I still dream of life. I still dream of love. I still dream of nights spent out dancing, or mornings driving tanks or spaceships, wrestling sharks, punching snakes, playing guitar, or saving the world, or flying like Superman. Typical boy dreams, even when I age, and my flesh grows wrinkled and my hair pales to the colour of snow.
We know what we could see if we opened our eyes. And we keep our eyes wide shut so we can pretend that the monster that lurks in the dark under our beds isn’t there. If it cannot be seen, it cannot give us fear. A wilful ignorance of the fact that we’re feasting on carcasses, living an economic lie, deluding ourselves of our importance on the planet.
These hands, no more. These lips that kissed, no more. These loins that brought forth life, no more. The teeth that smiled, the fingers that shivered - gone.
That’s why I didn’t want to be there.
Sometime you don’t know where you want to be : but you know where you don’t want to be. Here. Anywhere but here.
But I knew I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting not going. And I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting going. There really was no other option - whatever choice there is, whatever action I took, I would regret it. I wanted to be somewhere else. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else I could actually be. Wherever I would’ve been my mind would have been here.
I don’t want to be brave. I didn’t want to make these kind of decisions. I didn’t want to be a leader. I wanted to be a chickenshit conscienmtious objector hiding in the trenches and charged with cowardice. Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in. Sometimes knowing what you don’t want is as important as knowing what you want.
Sometimes there is no such thing as a choice. The options become so narrow and restricted that choice is not possible. Devil. Deep Blue Sea. No choice. As much of a choice as the one between Pepsi and Coke.
Fuck man, I was scared. Scared in my soul. The type of terror that one could not see. When one feels things that one cannot see, when one fears what one can only feel.
I was scared in the way that you are when you have the taste of fear on your lips. Your heart in your mouth, on your knees in the dark with a man standing above you and a gun in his hand. And you’re spitting blood through your teeth.
I was wondering about the bacteria on the cold steel. I was hoping he’d washed that gun recently.
Sometimes you lose all sense of perspective. Sometimes only the closest thing can be seen in your vision, even as something far bigger in the distance is obscured.
I walked through the plots of graves around the church as if I were a ghost. No one has a grave any more. These days our lives are consigned to footnotes. Small plaques and names in guestbooks. Small vases and Tupperware boxes holding dust, which is seven/tenths is just incinerated wood.
I had time to kill. I was in no hurry to do anything ever again. I felt cold under my coat, despite the spring sun. The cold wasn’t on my skin. The cold was within my very veins, as if I had been immersed in ice - the type of cold that can never truly be escaped. Deeper than flesh, permanent like the scar of memory. It permeates the skin, permeates the blood, into the very cells. Of my soul. Like a wound. The doctor can sew it up, but they’ll always be the tear.
My soul was weary. My soul was cold. Cold like winter.
My grandfather served in the Second World War. He was a gunner in one of the British Regiments stuck deep in the forgotten wars of the African Deserts. After his return, he would always sit by the fire, tired and cold. Wrapped shivering in a jumper at the height of summer. The heating blazed like an annex to the afterlife. The cup of boiling coffee steaming by the table. And always, always, he was cold.
When the war was over, they sent him home. A man trained to kill with nothing to kill is a man lost. In the absence of a purpose, a man seeks a purpose. A soldier defines himself by his war. There must always be a war, for without a war, a soldier is without meaning. There is nothing to fight but himself. Without a centre, a void. We define ourselves by our enemies. We define ourselves by what we are not, not by what we are.
Every culture needs enemies. Every culture needs to be opposed to something. War is good for business. After the Boche was vanquished, there were the Commies. After the Vietcong, the Argies. After the Arabs, the Muslims. And finally they will come to the invisible demons. Those inside. The gays, the fags, the jews. The war was eternal : there was always something to war against that no amount of Playstations could fill.
To declare that there was no enemy was to declare that our culture, our society, is fundamentally unable to satisfy. That the enemy is ourselves. That we are the demon. And that our unhappiness is ours. It is not caused by anyone or anything else.
Therefore, our sense of unhappiness always came from those outside, those who threaten our way of life. So we always have an enemy - and if there is no threat outside of us, then we find one inside. We find immigrants. We find children who swear. We find music and movies are to blame for society’s ills.
We define ourselves by our enemies. When we have no enemies we turn on ourselves.
Men trained and bred to kill - to act as Gods emissaries and deliver the curs to their creators. Their sole purpose, with God on our side, missing, still had to fight a war. His war was against the cold. But the cold was on the inside. It was beyond the flesh - it was a spiritual cold. The kind of cold that allows a man to override any consideration beyond that of duty and murder another man.
That kind of cold. Cold as a tombstone. Fold open your wings, Uncurl your flight, Cease the pain and suffering, Know that redemption comes in heaven, You are free, Others will miss you, Until we are reunited. Yeah, death, fuck you death. I survived. But is this survival? Because it sure as hell wasn’t about being alive.
All these people, all these lives. Each name with a face, a love, secrets and memories. Each one a person. Each one whose actions could change the world, and whose actions would vanish in time. All that’s left is what we leave behind. Our children. Our actions. The love we make must be more than the love we take.
One of these stones could be my great grandmother. A woman, whom I never met, will never know, but without whom I could never be. A woman born in love, who died in love, more in love with life itself than anything else.
Died 1896 aged 36. "Brought back into the arms of the Lord." It made it sound so graceful, so peaceful, being separated from your body in the most permanent fashion. A grey stone, weathered and with its indentations worn thin with years of climate, overgrown by neglected weeds, for a family united again. These are my neighbours now.
I glanced at my watch, the time in a slow sweep of a long arm. Each second is just a second, but some are longer than others. Time is meaningless, when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do. And all of eternity stretches before you like the longest sentence there is. Maybe death – true spiritual death – is the sweetest release. To transcend into something else, to evolve. To truly leave it all behind.
I was a freak of nature. A stunted evolutionary growth. A missing link.
Ahead in the distance, two hundred yards away, through a thin grey mist of rain was a hearse. Black and elongated, reflecting little in its obsidian sides. A brown casket above, with gilt edged handles. Around it my brother, my friends, and two pall bearers. Just doing a days job, sir. My brother buckling under the weight of my flesh. Poor bastard.
I wish I’d lost a little weight before I died. I remember carrying my father out on a casket. That shit is heavy. There’s a physical weight no one warns you about. And even deeper inside, another kind of weight. The spiritual one. That when your parents die, there is no innocence. You can’t run away home anymore after that. Home is the clothes you wear, the life you make. The life other people take away. You can’t go back to your mum and dad, because there is no mum and dad.
Across the wind and chatter of insects I could hear music. This funeral, this was for everyone else to sit around and feel sorry for themselves. This was for everyone else to say their farewells. This was not for me.
I bet she’d chosen some gawdawful song I never loved in my life to consign me to my premature grave. Sombre, religious stuff I never cared for in life, and even less after death. The tendency these days is for people to play modern hymns at their funerals. "Angels", "My Heart Will Go On", "Highway To Hell".
With shit like that no wonder I didn’t want to be awake in there when I had to listen to it. God bless my Mum, but this funeral wasn’t for me. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be in Heaven.
I was supposed to be anywhere but here.
And there she was. Dressed in black, wearing those flat heeled shoes that she wore under long skirts, not because they looked good, but because they were the only comfortable shoes she could ever wear formally. Her heels were the wrong shape for the shoes they sold.
And there she was. With her eyes brown, dark as pools of blood glinting in the moonlight, hurt but trying not to show pain. Just get me through this, fo fucks sake. It was a duty. A horrible ugly duty. Not even trying to show a brave face. Just to show her face. Trying to lift one’s head up in the face of a cruel world. A world that is not cruel, but one that does not care, a world that will continue wether you are there or not.
Eyes dark as the night, deep as oceans, beautiful as the black polished stone of obelisks. Numb to this world that has fucked her over.
Thank God I had changed my will. Let my bitch wife inherit nothing.
If only we knew before, we’d be able to make our peace. But the things unsaid, the thoughts unsaid, the love ungiven in the haste of life, we cannot claim those things back. Not one extra chance, nor one extra second to whisper in a loved one’s ear. Not one moment to brush aside the trivia, the bullshit, the detritus that we call our lives, and say "I’m sorry" for all the pointless disagreements, the screamed declarations, that ultimately don’t matter when the Power Of Love comes to sweep it all away.
And there she was. Hidden behind herself, eyes pointing down to concrete. Sleepwalking through this. As if she were a zombie : as if she were merely someone who did things. Sleep. Eat. Drink. Walk. Work. I missed her. I just wanted to hold her in my arms and tell it was OK, that I wasn’t really gone, that I was just somewhere else, in another oom, a room she couldn’t go to, and it really wasn’t that bad.
The great unknown is somewhat frightening. But you cannot fear what you cannot change. There was nothing to fear anymore. I have seen the great unknown.
I wanted to do something to make it better. Anything, even if it wasn’t something that could make a difference. Something to make me feel as if I could change anything. Anything to make me feel less impotent. Anyfuckingthing at all. Please. Just give me a chance to heal this. To mend the hurt.
I prayed to a God who wasn’t there, as I had done when I was alive. I do so even less now I am dead than I did when I was alive. Then I didn’t know if there was a God or not. Now I know if there is a god, and if there is, he is a cunt.
And after this, when she gets home, slowly the books on the shelf, the text messages on her phone, the notes under her pillow, will be moved somewhere out of her daily orbit. I will become a unperson. A memory, history, a possible past. A son who never grew old. A father to a child she never had. A lover she never watched grow crinkle and fold in time. And slowly her sorrow will become normality, normality will become confidence, and someone will hold her in his arms and as his hands will stroke the skin of the woman I love, the thought will cross his mind : this, this could be love.
And all the time, at the back of her mind, the thought, dimly formed, that those hands should have belonged to someone else. My hands instead of his. My eyes she glances lovingly into instead of his. A future unlived. A life cut in half.
She will walk across a room as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if she was never broken, never beaten, never kidnapped. But it may only take a second, a glance in the eye, a familiar phrase, the smell of stale urine, and then all of a sudden, she is there – in an instant, the blink of an eye – back to the world she tired to forget. When she opened her eyes and saw her husband murdered, face down in a pool of blood in a dark room.
Eventually the snapshot of us taken at someone else’s engagement party will be moved from the mantelpiece and become an ornament in a cardboard box in a loft in a row of suburban semi-detached houses. To them all, I am already a memory. Someone who used to be here. An empty space in a family photograph.
They will never see me laugh, never see me irritated again. Never tell me not to mix my drinks, or suggest that I really don’t want even more junk food at closing time. Those things will never happen again.
I hear someone mutter that I died quickly, and now I am at peace.
Oh, I fucking wish. You only die once, and for each of us, unless we are stolen in the dark pit of sleep, it cannot be anything other than violent, anything other than protracted, as we cling to life for every last second, as we fight the numbness running through our fingers, racing over our bodies, hoping for even one more instant. I’m not in a better place, and I wish to fuck I was. I’m here. Stuck in limbo. Neither flesh nor spirit, but caught in an infinite waiting room. Looking for a door.
I didn’t - I couldn’t - go in to the church during the service. I couldn’t bear to hear some man I had never met relay anecdotes about me to a room full of people who are somewhat awkward, anxious, who don’t want to be there. Much like me. I pace the car park. I look through the window of the hearse. There is no reflection.
As if I was never there. As if I never was.
Not having a reflection scared the shit out of me the first time I ever noticed that particular fact.
I see the place where my body lay fifteen minutes ago. I see my brothers average car. The baby seat in the back. I hear the distant sound of a crying child, hushed by my brother. As I am consigned to the dark. I hear my brother shushing someone in his arms. Someone has lost an Uncle.
Fuck. I feel so useless. Why did I come here? I’ll only end up regretting it. I regret it now. If I hadn’t gone I could pretend that it didn’t happen.
If I could cry I would. But without a body there can be no tears.
My death was old news to me. It didn’t stop hurting. The sting of an old wound. But it had been months. A week before they found my body, and months until it had been released. And this, this was just the beginning and the end.
The end of my life. The beginning of a new one.
Despite what we’re told. You can be anything. You can be anyone.
In a land where anybody can be a millionaire, everyone’s going to try. And almost everyone is going to fail. And as time goes on you realise that you can’t be anything. You’re lucky if you’re anyone. Let alone someone.
There are always those who serve and those who eat.
There were things I knew I wouldn’t see - the Eiffel Tower at daybreak, the public execution of Margaret Thatcher, the inside of a Bond Girl’s apartment, but this was something that was beyond my imagination - even beyond my comprehension - as a possibility.
Something that you don’t even rule out as a possibility. Something so far beyond the possible that it is not even imagined by most people. Unimagined by me.
And here we are. Somewhere beyond imagination.
One thing I never thought I’d get to see is my own funeral. To see a casket containing my corpse consigned to a fire. I am ash. I am fire. I am burnt wood and rotten fibre. I am smoke.
With that event, there could be no rebirth, no revelation, no thing. No resurrection, no chance of my body crawling forth from the ground alongside the millions of others, our resurrected eyes blinking softly in the morning light as civilisation ground to a halt around us. No four horsemen of the Apocalypse, their stars aligned, their prophecies fulfilled, the fire and brimstone promised by a God that doesn’t exist.
There might be for the reanimated grey skeletons of the dead. But not for the army of the cremated. Not for me. Not unless every cell of our ashen cadvers were sucked back out of the air, out of the bodies of the doomed living, back to their component parts, back to form skin, flesh, bone, soul.
And I know that this was too soon, that something went wrong, that somewhere, something happened, that God, if that invisible superman-alien exists, forgot me, and all he (or she) needed to do was forget for me for one second, because it only takes one second to die.
And he has bigger things to do, more important things in his life than my life. Though life, time, none of these things are linear. What happens happens. There is no great reason, no grand architecture, no master plan. Things happen, things change, and what is real for me now is no more real to you than the events of five hundred years past or hence, or events five hundred miles away.
The human psyche just isn’t designed to accept this information. I. Am. The. Dead. My body is no more. I’m just a bunch of atoms and thoughts swirling around the room, around this world.
We live our lives as if we are immortal, invincible ; sure we all know we’re going to grow old one day, maybe die, but never until we stand on the edge of mortality, with the racked, stolen breaths of the dying, do we ever consider that it really is going to happen, and now. And then we repent. We find God, or maybe he finds us. And we beg forgiveness. Trying to cling to the last few seconds, minutes, hours of life. And always wanting more.
Just one more breath of acrid, polluted air. Just one more meal of modified, reformed dead animals and chemicals.
The repentant are always those who can feel their bodies growing numb, their heartbeats fade, the last trickle of blood travel around their bodies and everything grow cold. As the last heartbeat pulses round those thin, old yellow arms, that last minute as the blood makes it’s final orbit around the flesh, you know. It’s time. And nothing can change that fact.
You always believe in God when you no longer believe in life. The last minute rush for tickets to the resurrection. I have sinned. Father, forgive me.
In those seconds, as the body dies, as the flesh grows cold, as the soul desperately clings to even one more second of a life, that’s when one becomes repentant. Or suffers the furious impotence at a life wasted. That when one finds out what one believes in.
I pledge alleigance to fuck all. I believe in coyotes. And time as an abstract. And as that day comes, as our stomachs expand, our hair recedes, our vision fades and our wrinkles grow, until then, we believe that we are invincible : we can do anything, go anywhere, fuck anyone, and it doesn’t matter, that nothing will change, that we will never age, that we will be immoral immortal forever, because we are alive.
And life itself, just being alive, that is a victory. And I has lost this battle. There was still a war to be won. And like all wars, one day it would either end, or everyone would be dead.
We believe that whatever we do won’t kill us. The we are invincible. Superfuckingmen that can drink, fuck, kill and that there is no consequence. We will never die. There is no future. Only now. Whatever it is, it will just make us stronger. That we choose when we die. That we make the decisions. That we have the choices. But we don’t. Our choices are controlled by prisons : our ways of thinking, our limited options, so that we, like rats in a maze, follow the path others want us to. We are rats in a treadmill. Animals in an experiment of limited choices, watched by unseen eyes.
Death is invisible. We can feel it’s presence. We feel it walk in the room when our backs are turned. We know it is there but we don’t – can’t - see it. We block out the thought, the reality, death becomes some kind of impossibility in the mind of someone living. The complete negation of the self seems impossible.There will always be some mark to indicate that there was a me, there was an us, that I was here, and we all leave our own frail attempts at immortality : creating a new life, writing a great book, even something as flimsy as a good song – all these things are our ways of leaving footprints in the sands of time.
All these things are our way of trying to scratch a little immortality onto this planet. The planet that will be caught up in a black hole, sucked away by life, as the universe shrinks, as the sun shrivels to a burnt rock, and we are reduced to something less than memories. As if we never were.
The body that I had shaved, the body I have controlled, the hair I had meticulously combed, was going to be burnt like a piece of fucking trash.
At what point do these things cease to matter? At what point does one cease to shave, to wash, to clean, because we know that one day it will cease to matter, that we are all finite, mortal, flawed. When you’ve rocked your last roll, when you’ve reached the end of the line. A week before? A day before? The hour before?
When do you know that you’ve rocked your last roll? When the human race is run?
There’s a black hole in our core, where the knowledge of the inevitable death sleeps. A cloud of ignorance descends. The knowledge that one day we will die and all the things we have done will be meaningless is incomprehensible. You, me, every person sat in every room in every street in every country - everyone. Gone.
Fuck it. I’m dead. That seems impossible.
I’m. Dead.
It never gets any easier to comprehend. You can say it. Repeat it until the words become meaningless, irrelevant, like the endless, infinite habitual I love you’s of the suburban marriage.
You just kind of move through it. You can’t accept it – you live through it. Well, you don’t - you can’t live through it. You just try to find a way through. You always thought there might be something more, that death is not, can not, be the end, and that somehow there will be more, that something is beyond death, beyond life, but whatever it is, no one knows.
That whatever comes after death is a bigger, better experience. Better special effects. Life : The Sequel.
When I try to sleep, I still dream of life. I still dream of love. I still dream of nights spent out dancing, or mornings driving tanks or spaceships, wrestling sharks, punching snakes, playing guitar, or saving the world, or flying like Superman. Typical boy dreams, even when I age, and my flesh grows wrinkled and my hair pales to the colour of snow.
We know what we could see if we opened our eyes. And we keep our eyes wide shut so we can pretend that the monster that lurks in the dark under our beds isn’t there. If it cannot be seen, it cannot give us fear. A wilful ignorance of the fact that we’re feasting on carcasses, living an economic lie, deluding ourselves of our importance on the planet.
These hands, no more. These lips that kissed, no more. These loins that brought forth life, no more. The teeth that smiled, the fingers that shivered - gone.
That’s why I didn’t want to be there.
Sometime you don’t know where you want to be : but you know where you don’t want to be. Here. Anywhere but here.
But I knew I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting not going. And I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting going. There really was no other option - whatever choice there is, whatever action I took, I would regret it. I wanted to be somewhere else. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else I could actually be. Wherever I would’ve been my mind would have been here.
I don’t want to be brave. I didn’t want to make these kind of decisions. I didn’t want to be a leader. I wanted to be a chickenshit conscienmtious objector hiding in the trenches and charged with cowardice. Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in. Sometimes knowing what you don’t want is as important as knowing what you want.
Sometimes there is no such thing as a choice. The options become so narrow and restricted that choice is not possible. Devil. Deep Blue Sea. No choice. As much of a choice as the one between Pepsi and Coke.
Fuck man, I was scared. Scared in my soul. The type of terror that one could not see. When one feels things that one cannot see, when one fears what one can only feel.
I was scared in the way that you are when you have the taste of fear on your lips. Your heart in your mouth, on your knees in the dark with a man standing above you and a gun in his hand. And you’re spitting blood through your teeth.
I was wondering about the bacteria on the cold steel. I was hoping he’d washed that gun recently.
Sometimes you lose all sense of perspective. Sometimes only the closest thing can be seen in your vision, even as something far bigger in the distance is obscured.
I walked through the plots of graves around the church as if I were a ghost. No one has a grave any more. These days our lives are consigned to footnotes. Small plaques and names in guestbooks. Small vases and Tupperware boxes holding dust, which is seven/tenths is just incinerated wood.
I had time to kill. I was in no hurry to do anything ever again. I felt cold under my coat, despite the spring sun. The cold wasn’t on my skin. The cold was within my very veins, as if I had been immersed in ice - the type of cold that can never truly be escaped. Deeper than flesh, permanent like the scar of memory. It permeates the skin, permeates the blood, into the very cells. Of my soul. Like a wound. The doctor can sew it up, but they’ll always be the tear.
My soul was weary. My soul was cold. Cold like winter.
My grandfather served in the Second World War. He was a gunner in one of the British Regiments stuck deep in the forgotten wars of the African Deserts. After his return, he would always sit by the fire, tired and cold. Wrapped shivering in a jumper at the height of summer. The heating blazed like an annex to the afterlife. The cup of boiling coffee steaming by the table. And always, always, he was cold.
When the war was over, they sent him home. A man trained to kill with nothing to kill is a man lost. In the absence of a purpose, a man seeks a purpose. A soldier defines himself by his war. There must always be a war, for without a war, a soldier is without meaning. There is nothing to fight but himself. Without a centre, a void. We define ourselves by our enemies. We define ourselves by what we are not, not by what we are.
Every culture needs enemies. Every culture needs to be opposed to something. War is good for business. After the Boche was vanquished, there were the Commies. After the Vietcong, the Argies. After the Arabs, the Muslims. And finally they will come to the invisible demons. Those inside. The gays, the fags, the jews. The war was eternal : there was always something to war against that no amount of Playstations could fill.
To declare that there was no enemy was to declare that our culture, our society, is fundamentally unable to satisfy. That the enemy is ourselves. That we are the demon. And that our unhappiness is ours. It is not caused by anyone or anything else.
Therefore, our sense of unhappiness always came from those outside, those who threaten our way of life. So we always have an enemy - and if there is no threat outside of us, then we find one inside. We find immigrants. We find children who swear. We find music and movies are to blame for society’s ills.
We define ourselves by our enemies. When we have no enemies we turn on ourselves.
Men trained and bred to kill - to act as Gods emissaries and deliver the curs to their creators. Their sole purpose, with God on our side, missing, still had to fight a war. His war was against the cold. But the cold was on the inside. It was beyond the flesh - it was a spiritual cold. The kind of cold that allows a man to override any consideration beyond that of duty and murder another man.
That kind of cold. Cold as a tombstone. Fold open your wings, Uncurl your flight, Cease the pain and suffering, Know that redemption comes in heaven, You are free, Others will miss you, Until we are reunited. Yeah, death, fuck you death. I survived. But is this survival? Because it sure as hell wasn’t about being alive.
All these people, all these lives. Each name with a face, a love, secrets and memories. Each one a person. Each one whose actions could change the world, and whose actions would vanish in time. All that’s left is what we leave behind. Our children. Our actions. The love we make must be more than the love we take.
One of these stones could be my great grandmother. A woman, whom I never met, will never know, but without whom I could never be. A woman born in love, who died in love, more in love with life itself than anything else.
Died 1896 aged 36. "Brought back into the arms of the Lord." It made it sound so graceful, so peaceful, being separated from your body in the most permanent fashion. A grey stone, weathered and with its indentations worn thin with years of climate, overgrown by neglected weeds, for a family united again. These are my neighbours now.
I glanced at my watch, the time in a slow sweep of a long arm. Each second is just a second, but some are longer than others. Time is meaningless, when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do. And all of eternity stretches before you like the longest sentence there is. Maybe death – true spiritual death – is the sweetest release. To transcend into something else, to evolve. To truly leave it all behind.
I was a freak of nature. A stunted evolutionary growth. A missing link.
Ahead in the distance, two hundred yards away, through a thin grey mist of rain was a hearse. Black and elongated, reflecting little in its obsidian sides. A brown casket above, with gilt edged handles. Around it my brother, my friends, and two pall bearers. Just doing a days job, sir. My brother buckling under the weight of my flesh. Poor bastard.
I wish I’d lost a little weight before I died. I remember carrying my father out on a casket. That shit is heavy. There’s a physical weight no one warns you about. And even deeper inside, another kind of weight. The spiritual one. That when your parents die, there is no innocence. You can’t run away home anymore after that. Home is the clothes you wear, the life you make. The life other people take away. You can’t go back to your mum and dad, because there is no mum and dad.
Across the wind and chatter of insects I could hear music. This funeral, this was for everyone else to sit around and feel sorry for themselves. This was for everyone else to say their farewells. This was not for me.
I bet she’d chosen some gawdawful song I never loved in my life to consign me to my premature grave. Sombre, religious stuff I never cared for in life, and even less after death. The tendency these days is for people to play modern hymns at their funerals. "Angels", "My Heart Will Go On", "Highway To Hell".
With shit like that no wonder I didn’t want to be awake in there when I had to listen to it. God bless my Mum, but this funeral wasn’t for me. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be in Heaven.
I was supposed to be anywhere but here.
And there she was. Dressed in black, wearing those flat heeled shoes that she wore under long skirts, not because they looked good, but because they were the only comfortable shoes she could ever wear formally. Her heels were the wrong shape for the shoes they sold.
And there she was. With her eyes brown, dark as pools of blood glinting in the moonlight, hurt but trying not to show pain. Just get me through this, fo fucks sake. It was a duty. A horrible ugly duty. Not even trying to show a brave face. Just to show her face. Trying to lift one’s head up in the face of a cruel world. A world that is not cruel, but one that does not care, a world that will continue wether you are there or not.
Eyes dark as the night, deep as oceans, beautiful as the black polished stone of obelisks. Numb to this world that has fucked her over.
Thank God I had changed my will. Let my bitch wife inherit nothing.
If only we knew before, we’d be able to make our peace. But the things unsaid, the thoughts unsaid, the love ungiven in the haste of life, we cannot claim those things back. Not one extra chance, nor one extra second to whisper in a loved one’s ear. Not one moment to brush aside the trivia, the bullshit, the detritus that we call our lives, and say "I’m sorry" for all the pointless disagreements, the screamed declarations, that ultimately don’t matter when the Power Of Love comes to sweep it all away.
And there she was. Hidden behind herself, eyes pointing down to concrete. Sleepwalking through this. As if she were a zombie : as if she were merely someone who did things. Sleep. Eat. Drink. Walk. Work. I missed her. I just wanted to hold her in my arms and tell it was OK, that I wasn’t really gone, that I was just somewhere else, in another oom, a room she couldn’t go to, and it really wasn’t that bad.
The great unknown is somewhat frightening. But you cannot fear what you cannot change. There was nothing to fear anymore. I have seen the great unknown.
I wanted to do something to make it better. Anything, even if it wasn’t something that could make a difference. Something to make me feel as if I could change anything. Anything to make me feel less impotent. Anyfuckingthing at all. Please. Just give me a chance to heal this. To mend the hurt.
I prayed to a God who wasn’t there, as I had done when I was alive. I do so even less now I am dead than I did when I was alive. Then I didn’t know if there was a God or not. Now I know if there is a god, and if there is, he is a cunt.
And after this, when she gets home, slowly the books on the shelf, the text messages on her phone, the notes under her pillow, will be moved somewhere out of her daily orbit. I will become a unperson. A memory, history, a possible past. A son who never grew old. A father to a child she never had. A lover she never watched grow crinkle and fold in time. And slowly her sorrow will become normality, normality will become confidence, and someone will hold her in his arms and as his hands will stroke the skin of the woman I love, the thought will cross his mind : this, this could be love.
And all the time, at the back of her mind, the thought, dimly formed, that those hands should have belonged to someone else. My hands instead of his. My eyes she glances lovingly into instead of his. A future unlived. A life cut in half.
She will walk across a room as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if she was never broken, never beaten, never kidnapped. But it may only take a second, a glance in the eye, a familiar phrase, the smell of stale urine, and then all of a sudden, she is there – in an instant, the blink of an eye – back to the world she tired to forget. When she opened her eyes and saw her husband murdered, face down in a pool of blood in a dark room.
Eventually the snapshot of us taken at someone else’s engagement party will be moved from the mantelpiece and become an ornament in a cardboard box in a loft in a row of suburban semi-detached houses. To them all, I am already a memory. Someone who used to be here. An empty space in a family photograph.
They will never see me laugh, never see me irritated again. Never tell me not to mix my drinks, or suggest that I really don’t want even more junk food at closing time. Those things will never happen again.
I hear someone mutter that I died quickly, and now I am at peace.
Oh, I fucking wish. You only die once, and for each of us, unless we are stolen in the dark pit of sleep, it cannot be anything other than violent, anything other than protracted, as we cling to life for every last second, as we fight the numbness running through our fingers, racing over our bodies, hoping for even one more instant. I’m not in a better place, and I wish to fuck I was. I’m here. Stuck in limbo. Neither flesh nor spirit, but caught in an infinite waiting room. Looking for a door.
I didn’t - I couldn’t - go in to the church during the service. I couldn’t bear to hear some man I had never met relay anecdotes about me to a room full of people who are somewhat awkward, anxious, who don’t want to be there. Much like me. I pace the car park. I look through the window of the hearse. There is no reflection.
As if I was never there. As if I never was.
Not having a reflection scared the shit out of me the first time I ever noticed that particular fact.
I see the place where my body lay fifteen minutes ago. I see my brothers average car. The baby seat in the back. I hear the distant sound of a crying child, hushed by my brother. As I am consigned to the dark. I hear my brother shushing someone in his arms. Someone has lost an Uncle.
Fuck. I feel so useless. Why did I come here? I’ll only end up regretting it. I regret it now. If I hadn’t gone I could pretend that it didn’t happen.
If I could cry I would. But without a body there can be no tears.
My death was old news to me. It didn’t stop hurting. The sting of an old wound. But it had been months. A week before they found my body, and months until it had been released. And this, this was just the beginning and the end.
The end of my life. The beginning of a new one.
posted by Mark at 7:53 AM
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6 :
Then one day, without warning, my life became a song by The Clash. I wasn’t Joe Strummer. I wasn’t even Mick Jones. I was Lost In The Supermarket.
The most terrifying place of all to be lost. I, alone like a child, surrounded by strangers, marooned in a sea of people who looked as if they knew what they were doing, where they were, who they were with. I was a big boy now, everything looked too small, and nobody would help a grown man. It wasn’t as if I could walk up to one of the checkout girls and hold her hand, tell her I was lost, that I had lost her, that I needed her back. Nobody would listen to a thirty three year old man.
I was lost in the aisle. I knew what this place was, but not where I was, let alone how I get out of there. The one thing I wanted was the one thing they wouldn’t sell.
I want you back. Another song.
Admittedly, I didn’t actually want her. I wanted what we had, what I lost. No. I wanted what was taken away. I wanted love. I wanted the knowledge that somewhere, someone who wasn’t my mother loved me, and that that someone somewhere didn’t just love me for my mind. I wanted to be safe ; I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be standing alone at 31, in the eye of the storm of people, lost in the supermarket.
I stood there, alone in a crowd. A walking cliché. Go on now, I thought, go, walk out of the door, just turn around now.
I could do this. I could live alone. I could be brave. But this wasn’t being brave, this was survival. No less. No more. Around me, children played, babies ran, mothers choose between brands of corn puffs, and fathers sighed and their minds dwelled on football. Trollies crashed, phone buzzed. Old ladies – The Octogenarian Army – sleepwalked through their retirement, and I, my Lord, may I say nothing?
I know this place. I’d been here before. But I couldn’t find what I needed, let alone what I wanted : I knew I needed to do the daily things I had to do, I needed the mundanity of life, the comfort, the order of boredom.
Bread. Milk. Bacon. Where was the Bacon? Dammit. I used to know this. I’ve been here before. I used to know who she was, I used to know how to make love. I only needed the simple things, but even those seemed a lifetime away. Break. Milk. Bacon. My impossible dream.
And then someone came when I wasn’t looking and changed everything. Everything moved and nothing was ever going to be the same again.
I no longer knew where I was. What I wanted, I could not have. And I didn’t know the way out. Stuck between Haberdashery and Heartbreak, this was my limbo, the loneliest layer of Cupid’s Inferno.
I was lost in the supermarket. Neither going backwards or forwards, I wanted a love of my own. I didn’t know where I was I was, or where I should go. From despair to where. There were no answers, just more and more questions, and I needed to know. I was lost, and I wanted to be found.
The most terrifying place of all to be lost. I, alone like a child, surrounded by strangers, marooned in a sea of people who looked as if they knew what they were doing, where they were, who they were with. I was a big boy now, everything looked too small, and nobody would help a grown man. It wasn’t as if I could walk up to one of the checkout girls and hold her hand, tell her I was lost, that I had lost her, that I needed her back. Nobody would listen to a thirty three year old man.
I was lost in the aisle. I knew what this place was, but not where I was, let alone how I get out of there. The one thing I wanted was the one thing they wouldn’t sell.
I want you back. Another song.
Admittedly, I didn’t actually want her. I wanted what we had, what I lost. No. I wanted what was taken away. I wanted love. I wanted the knowledge that somewhere, someone who wasn’t my mother loved me, and that that someone somewhere didn’t just love me for my mind. I wanted to be safe ; I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be standing alone at 31, in the eye of the storm of people, lost in the supermarket.
I stood there, alone in a crowd. A walking cliché. Go on now, I thought, go, walk out of the door, just turn around now.
I could do this. I could live alone. I could be brave. But this wasn’t being brave, this was survival. No less. No more. Around me, children played, babies ran, mothers choose between brands of corn puffs, and fathers sighed and their minds dwelled on football. Trollies crashed, phone buzzed. Old ladies – The Octogenarian Army – sleepwalked through their retirement, and I, my Lord, may I say nothing?
I know this place. I’d been here before. But I couldn’t find what I needed, let alone what I wanted : I knew I needed to do the daily things I had to do, I needed the mundanity of life, the comfort, the order of boredom.
Bread. Milk. Bacon. Where was the Bacon? Dammit. I used to know this. I’ve been here before. I used to know who she was, I used to know how to make love. I only needed the simple things, but even those seemed a lifetime away. Break. Milk. Bacon. My impossible dream.
And then someone came when I wasn’t looking and changed everything. Everything moved and nothing was ever going to be the same again.
I no longer knew where I was. What I wanted, I could not have. And I didn’t know the way out. Stuck between Haberdashery and Heartbreak, this was my limbo, the loneliest layer of Cupid’s Inferno.
I was lost in the supermarket. Neither going backwards or forwards, I wanted a love of my own. I didn’t know where I was I was, or where I should go. From despair to where. There were no answers, just more and more questions, and I needed to know. I was lost, and I wanted to be found.
posted by Mark at 7:52 AM
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7 :
7:
You’re just a girl. And I am just a boy. Just like everyone else. Just like me. You’re, say, somewhere between five foot and six foot tall, and so wide, and like me, like everyone else, you’re an individual. An selection of personality traits taken from supermarket shelves and factory assembly lines. Maybe you’ve got a tattoo – a flower, or a animal on your ankle, or a star on your belly. An individual, like everyone else. And we all stand, like the rest of us, in our hundreds, our thousands, the three and a half million of us that commute into the Big City every working day, streaming into the heart of the country in cars, carriages, trains and tubes, we all stand, yawning in the morning, waiting to go, to find somewhere to sit for fourteen hundred pounds a year, and not even knowing if you’re going to have somewhere to sit.
And sometimes, if I am brave, if I think I can somehow pass for something other than a jaded insomniac, I try to sit near you. I try to catch your eye. Find out what book you are reading. How it might influence you. What you might do about it. What that says about you. Hoping you might notice me as more than just a shape that you have to avoid when the train gets into the city. Hoping that this Commuter Bullet, that shoots us to and from our places of work, might just be the place that our first moments of love blossom.
And there you are again, with that coat, with those shoes, those dull, tired eyes, that squeeze shut, trying to block out the world, and so I realise that there is probably some special someone somewhere , who sees your face each morning, each evening, each night, who kisses you hurriedly whilst he too races for the morning train, each rushed morning kiss and each sleepless kiss of dreams, and he may not even know how lucky he is, how lucky we all are, to live in this world of comfort, privilege and Playstations.
I knew this would happen, someday, one day. I just didn’t know when. When we would part, as all of us eventually do, be it death or work, without ceremony or tears, when you would move to a path different from I. And you slip away, out of view, no longer headed to the same place as I, no grand farewell, we both disappear. And I know that today, like yesterday, like tomorrow, will not be our first day as lovers.
You’re just a girl. And I am just a boy. Just like everyone else. Just like me. You’re, say, somewhere between five foot and six foot tall, and so wide, and like me, like everyone else, you’re an individual. An selection of personality traits taken from supermarket shelves and factory assembly lines. Maybe you’ve got a tattoo – a flower, or a animal on your ankle, or a star on your belly. An individual, like everyone else. And we all stand, like the rest of us, in our hundreds, our thousands, the three and a half million of us that commute into the Big City every working day, streaming into the heart of the country in cars, carriages, trains and tubes, we all stand, yawning in the morning, waiting to go, to find somewhere to sit for fourteen hundred pounds a year, and not even knowing if you’re going to have somewhere to sit.
And sometimes, if I am brave, if I think I can somehow pass for something other than a jaded insomniac, I try to sit near you. I try to catch your eye. Find out what book you are reading. How it might influence you. What you might do about it. What that says about you. Hoping you might notice me as more than just a shape that you have to avoid when the train gets into the city. Hoping that this Commuter Bullet, that shoots us to and from our places of work, might just be the place that our first moments of love blossom.
And there you are again, with that coat, with those shoes, those dull, tired eyes, that squeeze shut, trying to block out the world, and so I realise that there is probably some special someone somewhere , who sees your face each morning, each evening, each night, who kisses you hurriedly whilst he too races for the morning train, each rushed morning kiss and each sleepless kiss of dreams, and he may not even know how lucky he is, how lucky we all are, to live in this world of comfort, privilege and Playstations.
I knew this would happen, someday, one day. I just didn’t know when. When we would part, as all of us eventually do, be it death or work, without ceremony or tears, when you would move to a path different from I. And you slip away, out of view, no longer headed to the same place as I, no grand farewell, we both disappear. And I know that today, like yesterday, like tomorrow, will not be our first day as lovers.
posted by Mark at 7:51 AM
0 comments
8 :
This is how I fell in love again. After too many lonely, directionless nights, not really knowing where I was going, or what I was doing, just blindly improvising my way through life, I started to think that maybe I could love again,
I would love to say our eyes met across a crowded room, but they didn’t. In fact, I don’t even remember the first moment I became dimly aware of her existence. In a crowded jostling pub, at about 6 on a Friday evening, I suppose my life took the first steps to changing.
Before that I was living in a dull greyness I used to call freedom.
I could get up whenever I wanted. See anyone I liked. Go anywhere I wanted. Fuck anyone I wanted. If they wanted me. I was king of a small world.
But that type of freedom was a prison. The one thing I wanted to do more than anything I couldn’t do. The one person I wanted more than anything I couldn’t have. The one love I used to cherish had gone away.
It’s the same old story. Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Girl likes Boy. Girl goes home with Boy. Girl and Boy decide to live together. Girl moves out one day whilst Boy is at work and pretends Boy didn’t exist, was never even alive, was never a part of her life. Boy find it’s difficult to trust human beings again. Yeah, the usual.
The usual story of suburban heartbreak and emotional abuse. Everyone’s got one.
That’s how I became a divorcee.
Divorce isn’t something you plan. It isn’t something that happens willingly. You don’t get divorced - divorce is something that is forced upon you. Like violence. And divorce, the twist of separation, that’s the kind of violence no one can see. That leaves no bruises. Only scars on the inside. The worst kind of violence.
Divorce is inflicted upon you.
Who could love a thirty something divorcee? A man who made the ultimate commitment, yet been spat out the other end? A man who pledged the rest of life to someone who changed her mind?
Could you love someone else’s rejects?
I don’t know who could love a man like that. A man like me.
Of course, she has her side of the story, and for her, it makes perfect sense. But not to anyone else. Whatever her mother tongue is, it doesn’t make sense. I’m so glad she left me though, even if sometimes I don’t necessarily sound it.
And so I drifted on the current of life, moving from situation to situation, tide to tide, as if I were a free agent. A loose cannon. A vagrant looking for a direction.
Free I was, but freedom includes choice. I had no choice about the situation I was in. I wanted us to be a continent, a united state, but I was an island. I’d had enough of these things. Too much freedom. Too much time.
There were still papers to sign. Arrangements to be made. That type of thing. A divorce is having to be polite through gritted teeth to someone you do not wantr to have any contact with ever again.
There was so much I missed, as if it had been rent from me, as if it was just a part of me that had been amputated. I missed her hands. I missed the wobble of her cellulite. I missed the smell of freshly washed hair, of talking in bed, of arguments over the distribution of the duvets, of accidental nudges in the kitchen whilst cooking, of holding hands in public places. I missed the casual security of knowing that somewhere out there was someone who cared. Someone who would leap unthinkingly in front of a bullet for me. And knowing that I’d do the same.
I didn’t miss who she was. I missed being in love.
My senses had become dulled by a lack of stimulation, by an overdose of solitude and poverty. Things had turned grey, cold. And where I live was no longer home. It was a house with bad memories and bad debts. I was the Dead Man. My heart, so full of love and trust, felt aborted. Cut short.
I knew about the glory of love. About the new colours and different shapes it gives life. But it was bullshit. Love was, is a weapon. The power of trust means the power to abuse trust. And I felt fucked by love.
So I wasn’t exactly looking for it, but I knew it was out there, somewhere. If only had her phone number. If only I had the details. The email address. The inside leg measurement. The bra size and postcode. If only I had some way I could let words fall out of my mouth that could convince her, whomever she is, to collapse completely in my arms and admit that I was the way, the truth, and the light. And there was no way to happiness except through me.
Instead I ended up crucified on love. With the nails of bankruptcy, loneliness, poverty, and hurt hammered through me. Self-pity is my drug of choice on lonely days.
But I believe. I believe in the power of love to change. To transform darkness into sunshine. To transform night into day. To make sad into unsad. To make me love again.
It was then that I met her. Only the brave love in world so cruel.
I could only hope that whomever she was, wherever she was, she could show me a world I’d never seen before. The glory of domestic shopping. The beauty of sofas. The bliss of joint accounts and of Sunday mornings choosing fridges, washing machines, third rate remote control packages and commuting. The joy of meeting her friends, her relatives, her nieces and nephews. All that stuff I craved.
Craved like an addict who’d overdosed, been brought from the dead in the back of a speeding ambulance with a heroin shot. Knowing that I couldn’t take anymore. Knew I was dying. Killing myself with love, yet I couldn’t help it. I needed one more kiss. One more affair. Another lover.
This was my world, but not of my making. I craved something else.
But I daren’t appear desperate. Women can smell desperation at a thousand paces. The sense that a man is looking for someone translates as a man will accept anyone. And a woman is always someone. She is never just anyone. And a man who will have anyone will end up with no-one. That’s why we say we’re looking for someone special.
And so, in a loveless state of grey freedom, aware yet wary, scared yet hopeful, I met her. I don’t even remember meeting her. I don’t remember being bowled over by her. I don’t remember heavenly choirs of angels, massed chords of Hendrix, and a heaven-sent shaft of light beaming down. I remember Paul saying to me "and this is Helen" at the end of a sentence I was half listening to. I glanced over, caught her eye, and rolled my eyes to the heavens in the unspoken gesture of greeting.
Love is so prosaic. It starts in the most mundane of places.
Paul was just some guy I worked with. Helen was just some girl he knew who knew some of his friends, people, friends of friends who used to work at the same place Paul used to work. Paul went onto work somewhere else, as did his friend Paul. And Paul worked with Helen. I liked her hair.
Everyone knew Paul was a tit. I’m not sure exactly what characteristics exactly make someone a tit, but I know for a fact Paul was one. The smell of desperation reeked off him. Years and years of renting in Central London, years and years of failed relationships and so-so jobs, years and years of waiting to be plucked from obscurity into the fame he so rightly deserved, years and years of masturbating like a bastard and failed chat-up lines had given him a scent no aftershave could remove. He drifted like rubbish in the sea, too strong to sink, too weak to swim.
This man needed marrying. And the first man, woman, rock or fish that would say Yes would get the accolade of Mrs Paul. Helen knew it. I knew it. The world and his dog knew it. You knew it before you even knew of him. Because he wasn’t the only one. The world was crammed full of millions of men like this. Millions of us with hopes, dreams, aspirations, and no chance of meeting the woman who would spark our souls on fire. The scent of despair ran into his very soul.
This is why, when Paul was talking crap about something or other I’d already tuned him out of my mental radar and was concentrating on something else which, whilst highly boring, was infinitely more exciting than whatever Paul was saying. Honey, he could bore for England. These people aren’t my friends. I just happen to know him. In the same way as I know my dad, but he isn’t exactly someone I’ve got much in common with.
And so, when Helen was introduced as ‘yet another pretty filly in my harem’ (except Paul pronounced it Hah-ream, I think he thought he was posh or something), she did the same as I, inwardly she shuddered, outwardly she smiled, and we caught each other’s eye. I rolled my eyes, and we both knew what it meant.
Take me away from this horrible place full of beer, fags, and desperate men called Paul.
I now have telepathic powers. That’s my secret X-Men power I wanted when I was younger. Telepathy. Then nobody could betray me. I could see their thoughts form in their mind. And I’d never lean forward to kiss a woman who’d silently be thinking please don’t try and kiss me.
And with that, I just fell in love. I tried not to, but slowly I did.
I didn’t want to be hurt again. Love hurts. Love hurts, because you’re exposed.
The kind of love that comes from slow evenings. The kind of love that comes from stolen glances across crowded pub tables when your mutual friends surround you and all you really feel like doing is getting to know someone a little bit better without the babbling of fools and drunks crowding you. When it gets too much, we all retreat into our shells, detune from the static, find the internal monologue. When someone else is talking very loudly about something completely meaningless you cease to hear them. Whatever they’re saying just ceases to exists, gets detuned, disappears.
We were both lost in thought. For a second. She smiled. And we both knew. A silent click was heard. I wanted to get to talk to her a bit. And so when Paul wandered off to visit the gents after regaling her for a few minutes about his new Hire-Purchase Car and his Mobile ring tone, I slowly, nervously slid across and sat next to her. I don’t know what I said next. Nervous. My hands were shaking more than Michael J Fox on a rollercoaster. But whatever it was, she smiled, she still spoke to me, and sometimes the rest of the world just disappeared, went dark and quiet, as if we were alone under candlelight.
Unlike the rest, I didn’t have to try and talk to her. She just seemed to know about what I was saying. Conversation fell naturally. Everything lead neatly to the next thing. Every nugget of information was quietly stored in my mind for future retrieval. Age, gender, likes, dislikes, music, football, where she worked, what she did. All thrown into that confused filing mechanism called my brain and kept for future use. In case I ever needed it. And Paul? He just started talking about cars with a bloke from my office called Steve. Boring for England again.
Heaven take me away from this babbling circus of fools.
I would love to say our eyes met across a crowded room, but they didn’t. In fact, I don’t even remember the first moment I became dimly aware of her existence. In a crowded jostling pub, at about 6 on a Friday evening, I suppose my life took the first steps to changing.
Before that I was living in a dull greyness I used to call freedom.
I could get up whenever I wanted. See anyone I liked. Go anywhere I wanted. Fuck anyone I wanted. If they wanted me. I was king of a small world.
But that type of freedom was a prison. The one thing I wanted to do more than anything I couldn’t do. The one person I wanted more than anything I couldn’t have. The one love I used to cherish had gone away.
It’s the same old story. Boy meets Girl. Boy likes Girl. Girl likes Boy. Girl goes home with Boy. Girl and Boy decide to live together. Girl moves out one day whilst Boy is at work and pretends Boy didn’t exist, was never even alive, was never a part of her life. Boy find it’s difficult to trust human beings again. Yeah, the usual.
The usual story of suburban heartbreak and emotional abuse. Everyone’s got one.
That’s how I became a divorcee.
Divorce isn’t something you plan. It isn’t something that happens willingly. You don’t get divorced - divorce is something that is forced upon you. Like violence. And divorce, the twist of separation, that’s the kind of violence no one can see. That leaves no bruises. Only scars on the inside. The worst kind of violence.
Divorce is inflicted upon you.
Who could love a thirty something divorcee? A man who made the ultimate commitment, yet been spat out the other end? A man who pledged the rest of life to someone who changed her mind?
Could you love someone else’s rejects?
I don’t know who could love a man like that. A man like me.
Of course, she has her side of the story, and for her, it makes perfect sense. But not to anyone else. Whatever her mother tongue is, it doesn’t make sense. I’m so glad she left me though, even if sometimes I don’t necessarily sound it.
And so I drifted on the current of life, moving from situation to situation, tide to tide, as if I were a free agent. A loose cannon. A vagrant looking for a direction.
Free I was, but freedom includes choice. I had no choice about the situation I was in. I wanted us to be a continent, a united state, but I was an island. I’d had enough of these things. Too much freedom. Too much time.
There were still papers to sign. Arrangements to be made. That type of thing. A divorce is having to be polite through gritted teeth to someone you do not wantr to have any contact with ever again.
There was so much I missed, as if it had been rent from me, as if it was just a part of me that had been amputated. I missed her hands. I missed the wobble of her cellulite. I missed the smell of freshly washed hair, of talking in bed, of arguments over the distribution of the duvets, of accidental nudges in the kitchen whilst cooking, of holding hands in public places. I missed the casual security of knowing that somewhere out there was someone who cared. Someone who would leap unthinkingly in front of a bullet for me. And knowing that I’d do the same.
I didn’t miss who she was. I missed being in love.
My senses had become dulled by a lack of stimulation, by an overdose of solitude and poverty. Things had turned grey, cold. And where I live was no longer home. It was a house with bad memories and bad debts. I was the Dead Man. My heart, so full of love and trust, felt aborted. Cut short.
I knew about the glory of love. About the new colours and different shapes it gives life. But it was bullshit. Love was, is a weapon. The power of trust means the power to abuse trust. And I felt fucked by love.
So I wasn’t exactly looking for it, but I knew it was out there, somewhere. If only had her phone number. If only I had the details. The email address. The inside leg measurement. The bra size and postcode. If only I had some way I could let words fall out of my mouth that could convince her, whomever she is, to collapse completely in my arms and admit that I was the way, the truth, and the light. And there was no way to happiness except through me.
Instead I ended up crucified on love. With the nails of bankruptcy, loneliness, poverty, and hurt hammered through me. Self-pity is my drug of choice on lonely days.
But I believe. I believe in the power of love to change. To transform darkness into sunshine. To transform night into day. To make sad into unsad. To make me love again.
It was then that I met her. Only the brave love in world so cruel.
I could only hope that whomever she was, wherever she was, she could show me a world I’d never seen before. The glory of domestic shopping. The beauty of sofas. The bliss of joint accounts and of Sunday mornings choosing fridges, washing machines, third rate remote control packages and commuting. The joy of meeting her friends, her relatives, her nieces and nephews. All that stuff I craved.
Craved like an addict who’d overdosed, been brought from the dead in the back of a speeding ambulance with a heroin shot. Knowing that I couldn’t take anymore. Knew I was dying. Killing myself with love, yet I couldn’t help it. I needed one more kiss. One more affair. Another lover.
This was my world, but not of my making. I craved something else.
But I daren’t appear desperate. Women can smell desperation at a thousand paces. The sense that a man is looking for someone translates as a man will accept anyone. And a woman is always someone. She is never just anyone. And a man who will have anyone will end up with no-one. That’s why we say we’re looking for someone special.
And so, in a loveless state of grey freedom, aware yet wary, scared yet hopeful, I met her. I don’t even remember meeting her. I don’t remember being bowled over by her. I don’t remember heavenly choirs of angels, massed chords of Hendrix, and a heaven-sent shaft of light beaming down. I remember Paul saying to me "and this is Helen" at the end of a sentence I was half listening to. I glanced over, caught her eye, and rolled my eyes to the heavens in the unspoken gesture of greeting.
Love is so prosaic. It starts in the most mundane of places.
Paul was just some guy I worked with. Helen was just some girl he knew who knew some of his friends, people, friends of friends who used to work at the same place Paul used to work. Paul went onto work somewhere else, as did his friend Paul. And Paul worked with Helen. I liked her hair.
Everyone knew Paul was a tit. I’m not sure exactly what characteristics exactly make someone a tit, but I know for a fact Paul was one. The smell of desperation reeked off him. Years and years of renting in Central London, years and years of failed relationships and so-so jobs, years and years of waiting to be plucked from obscurity into the fame he so rightly deserved, years and years of masturbating like a bastard and failed chat-up lines had given him a scent no aftershave could remove. He drifted like rubbish in the sea, too strong to sink, too weak to swim.
This man needed marrying. And the first man, woman, rock or fish that would say Yes would get the accolade of Mrs Paul. Helen knew it. I knew it. The world and his dog knew it. You knew it before you even knew of him. Because he wasn’t the only one. The world was crammed full of millions of men like this. Millions of us with hopes, dreams, aspirations, and no chance of meeting the woman who would spark our souls on fire. The scent of despair ran into his very soul.
This is why, when Paul was talking crap about something or other I’d already tuned him out of my mental radar and was concentrating on something else which, whilst highly boring, was infinitely more exciting than whatever Paul was saying. Honey, he could bore for England. These people aren’t my friends. I just happen to know him. In the same way as I know my dad, but he isn’t exactly someone I’ve got much in common with.
And so, when Helen was introduced as ‘yet another pretty filly in my harem’ (except Paul pronounced it Hah-ream, I think he thought he was posh or something), she did the same as I, inwardly she shuddered, outwardly she smiled, and we caught each other’s eye. I rolled my eyes, and we both knew what it meant.
Take me away from this horrible place full of beer, fags, and desperate men called Paul.
I now have telepathic powers. That’s my secret X-Men power I wanted when I was younger. Telepathy. Then nobody could betray me. I could see their thoughts form in their mind. And I’d never lean forward to kiss a woman who’d silently be thinking please don’t try and kiss me.
And with that, I just fell in love. I tried not to, but slowly I did.
I didn’t want to be hurt again. Love hurts. Love hurts, because you’re exposed.
The kind of love that comes from slow evenings. The kind of love that comes from stolen glances across crowded pub tables when your mutual friends surround you and all you really feel like doing is getting to know someone a little bit better without the babbling of fools and drunks crowding you. When it gets too much, we all retreat into our shells, detune from the static, find the internal monologue. When someone else is talking very loudly about something completely meaningless you cease to hear them. Whatever they’re saying just ceases to exists, gets detuned, disappears.
We were both lost in thought. For a second. She smiled. And we both knew. A silent click was heard. I wanted to get to talk to her a bit. And so when Paul wandered off to visit the gents after regaling her for a few minutes about his new Hire-Purchase Car and his Mobile ring tone, I slowly, nervously slid across and sat next to her. I don’t know what I said next. Nervous. My hands were shaking more than Michael J Fox on a rollercoaster. But whatever it was, she smiled, she still spoke to me, and sometimes the rest of the world just disappeared, went dark and quiet, as if we were alone under candlelight.
Unlike the rest, I didn’t have to try and talk to her. She just seemed to know about what I was saying. Conversation fell naturally. Everything lead neatly to the next thing. Every nugget of information was quietly stored in my mind for future retrieval. Age, gender, likes, dislikes, music, football, where she worked, what she did. All thrown into that confused filing mechanism called my brain and kept for future use. In case I ever needed it. And Paul? He just started talking about cars with a bloke from my office called Steve. Boring for England again.
Heaven take me away from this babbling circus of fools.
posted by Mark at 7:49 AM
0 comments
Links
Chapters
chapter 01
chapter 02
chapter 03
chapter 04
chapter 05
chapter 06
chapter 07
chapter 08
chapter 09
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
chapter 30
chapter 31
chapter 32
chapter 33
chapter 34
chapter 35
chapter 36
chapter 37
chapter 38
chapter 39
chapter 40
chapter 41
chapter 42
chapter 43
chapter 44
chapter 45
chapter 46
chapter 47
chapter 48
chapter 49
chapter 50
chapter 51
chapter 52
chapter 53
chapter 54
chapter 55
chapter 56
chapter 57
chapter 58
chapter 59
chapter 60
chapter 61
chapter 62
chapter 63
chapter 64
chapter 65
About The Author
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