different worlds

1. A Hand on a Guitar

The wind ran through him in the wet light of summer’s end, the trees spoke with it and at their bases there were in parts spatter and also piles of different dog’s waste, richly toned organic evidence that seeped and oozed into soil and back into the cyclical and bore characteristic resemblances to the mental processes or the faculties or temperaments of its creators, highly personalized genetic units that would sink one day back with all of their broken down dead bodies to where it began, to the rank monocellular genesis of life replicated into complexity under the watch of stoic indestructible matter towered ancient and pristine and unmoved above the unfurling, for they are but reconfigured shit reborn, reformulated death rebuilt. Rustling leaves like waves hit and breaking, or like the thrum of a motorway, a flowing carbonated product, or a large gathered audience in a city theatre caught mid-mantra instigated by an inexplicably persuasive public speaker, a disrupted distress call subdued by signalling errors and inappropriate transmission conditions and rendered futile even humorous by static-staccato adjectives and feedback-abbreviated clauses that made a new incomplete linguistic framework. His thighs soaked through with conviction he sat on the memorial bench and the world happened, the bench he had mythologized into essence in an earlier consideration, the biographical information engraved on its scuffed brass plate distilling a lifetime into four innocuous words: he loved this place, the heartbreaking irony of the faeces and the piled – or not piled, the randomized disorder of unpiled rubbish feeling like an act of wilful disrespect to a nation of the dead – drinks cans and plastic food trays and wrappers that blew around the half-demolished breeze-block structures that had never progressed beyond the stage of rusted scaffold somehow lost in the obvious sincerity of the chosen font, eighty years and a life had amounted to this, an embryonic council initiative botched and aborted, stark reminders of a half-century’s misjudgements like warnings themselves, monoliths of failure. He sighed at the sound of an infant crying and let the rain hit his face like needle-pricks, a schoolyard taunt, the flushing toilet, the five-six faces all ass smooth and terminally cruel, die needle-prick die, the cubicle door slamming behind them muffled by the water of the washout pool. He remembered the face of an ex-girlfriend; her skin had been tightly drawn over her skull like a primate, and drew back from her lips in huge sincere smiles that punctuated everything she or anyone said. Her breasts had been microscopic beneath her clothes but he had taken a strange comfort in them in the two or three days their relationship had begun, existed and then finished; sleeping together to alleviate the loneliness of the summer, where the fact of their mutual lack of attraction was insignificant compared to the intrigue they felt towards their diametric genital specifics, the first kiss had been good as he explored her taut lips and her white teeth and held her face between his two palms like a ball, and they had ended up in bed and naked although he couldn’t remember how they had become so or what thoughts had led to it. The intercourse had been bad in the daylight that came through the curtains that were striped and too small for the two windows, worse than laying silently afterwards with the warmth of her flat chest – its nipples and areola like rubbery adhesive novelties – pressed against his own side, their breathing off-kilter and disruptive. They tried to kindle something again over the following days and nights but it didn’t get going. During the empty moments of which there were many she picked at an old guitar that she said her father had given her but he had seen a receipt for in her purse. He sat on the edge of the bed and she stood up in front of him in her underwear which he pulled down without thinking and looked at her pubic hair which was long and which he liked. Then she sat on the chair at his desk and played the guitar naked, a hand on a guitar, her torso short behind the curves of its body. While her hands moved across the strings with careful touches that drew notes that grated him inside he told her that if she didn’t stop playing he would put the guitar on the fire; it was a running joke they had and she laughed and continued to play. Later while she slept after against her better judgement he had come inside of her – and for nothing, she thought asleep – he took the guitar outside to where his friends were sat around a fire pit and laid it gently across the flames; all musicians they watched reverently while the hollow body caught fire and like Cerberal tongues the flames licked around the edges of the sound hole and the strings snapped with a weird atonal twang; when the guitar had fallen apart it felt symbolic but he couldn’t be sure why. He turned around and the girl was standing at the back door; she had got dressed hurriedly and was crying, he could see the wet tears in her eyes lit up by the flames, and she walked soundlessly down the steps and into the garden and slapped him hard across the face. The crack of the impact echoed horrifically around the neighbouring gardens. He thought for a second that felt like minutes and slapped her as hard as he could; she fell over onto the concrete but nobody moved to help her, even though he still had the smell of her vagina on the same fingers with which he had slapped her. They were supposed to go to the chemist the following morning for emergency contraception but it would never happen now. She stood up and walked back into the house. They heard something breaking and the front door closing loudly. All but the headstock had burnt away, left ashen like the pallets and logs and secrets they had already burnt. The next day he would run his fingers through the still warm ash morosely and think of himself.

2. Shopping

He didn’t have the shopping channel now although it was one of his favourites, not since the TV had fallen down the stairs in an argument a few weeks earlier – he had wanted to watch repeats of late 90s episodes of The Bill on a classic mediocre drama channel which shunned any programme with a consensus of critical acclaim in favour of cheap and readily accessible long-running serials; it had not, preferring rolling news content or – at worst – home improvement programming – “it has a practical value!” it said, communicating in teletext-provided subtitles awfully pixelated in one of eight colours in a jarring monologue at screen-bottom – and now it was in pieces, its plastic casing irrevocably cracked and its screen shattered in with a dull implosion and its once vital CRT now smashed into fragments and dead like the technology itself at the foot of the short staircase. When the magnitude of the situation started to dawn on him he knew quickly that he would have to make his own shopping channel by watching people shop in public retail outlets. A born spectator, he had little interest of doing any shopping of his own and no money besides; it was the idea of shopping that excited him, the possibility of the products and the people who did buy them. He liked it when the presenters on the shopping channel demonstrated a kitchenware live on air as though it were a complex piece of highly scientific if not dangerous equipment, when it truth it was a slightly awkward and cumbersome way of chopping vegetables for the left-handed, as large as a tissue box with a crude white plastic finish and packaged like the culinary revelation it was guaranteed to never be. He found himself privy to rough erotic fantasies that grew from the perfectly compiled features of the daily presenters: lines of his own spunk shot across the beautiful eyes and blonde blonde hair of Carmel Thomas; a considered handjob from beneath the salt and pepper stylings of Dale Franklin’s pouting, concentrating face, explaining as he did it the quality of the craftsmanship of the parts involved at the bargain price of not ten but only eight GB pounds sterling and ninety nine similar sterling pence; moving himself firmly into the bared reluctant anus of a distant Claudia Sylvester, a consummate professional, who recited reams of national rate telephone numbers throughout the bit with a glassy expression, her voice fading and returning rhythmically with every cock push, and the lines of her cunt struck out behind the channel logo in the name of decency; his mental close ups tended to flick between her face, which moved with the numbers, and his own two slightly bent knees. While the specifics of the faces of the presenters ebbed day-by-day into weird composite photo fit representations that were childish even macabre inaccurate messes of eyeballs and skin tones and entirely inappropriate genital positioning that were now confined strictly within his memories like the very products they had sold (“My Electronic Messiah Pocket” [£19.99 all in], “Thin-Vegetable Presentation Salver with FREE endearment engraving for loved one only [max 6 characters]” [just £79.99 plus courier P&P]) he told himself that he would not be disheartened, and made for the shopping centre, which crouched at the edge of the city like a secret grey mongoloid sibling that you sometimes heard groaning at night but still pretended didn’t exist, a sprawling complex once lauded as architectural futurity and now loathed as a dated and very grave error. First he followed a single mother as she bought cosmetics; her two children cried loudly in the aisles, and he mouthed at them to shut up. She bought a foundation cream, shampoo and conditioner in two separate bottles, a packet of sanitary products and some what looked like body spray, but he couldn’t be sure without asking her. Although she had not discussed the products as she would have been expected to do on the shopping channel – apart from perhaps in split-second mental processes that even she hadn’t noticed – he felt strangely alive or complete, almost as if he had bought the products for himself. This was the natural completion of the shopping act, transaction orgasm, the exchange of product. The world had become his television, he thought. He felt momentarily sad for his broken TV set; it was a lost friendship. But really, friendships didn’t mean a lot. The single mother was assimilated into his presenter fantasies; he would perform cunnilingus on her as she verbally demonstrated the versatile uses of shampoo around the household. Next he followed a teenage boy into a games shop; the boy browsed the cases of the games and read the text on the back of some of them. He watched him carefully from the other side of the shop and could almost visualise the telephone numbers displayed in a constant loop on his own shopping channel, the testimonials from satisfied customers that scrolled down the right hand side of the screen as text messages sent directly to air, spelling mistakes and all. In his fantasies this boy would urinate into empty glass coke bottles and drink it in perpetuity inside a salt-circle flanked by raucously masturbating schoolteachers while people phoned up for a limited edition ornament. It was an exciting time to be alive.

3. My Best Friend

They called Tidswell Childs ‘Boy Solicitor’, because of his age and because of his unlikely profession. At twelve years gone he felt more boy than man but reality disagreed, expectation too, and Boy Solicitor he was, would always be. The age slipped past the Norfolk legal profession unmentioned, like the paraphilia, and while some of the backstabbing shit-shots from the Cathedral Close would make infant jokes or nappy jokes or little bollocks jokes or hairless kid jokes or fish finger sandwiches on white bread without crusts jokes (like Q. “What does Tidswell Childs have for lunch in his child’s lunchbox?” A. “Fish finger sandwiches on white bread without crusts, fucking nappy-wearing hairless little bollocks good for fucking nothing infant shithead.”, &c.) in the soulless lawyer bars at the end of the working week, to his face they gurned with professional respect and clapped his suited shoulders – he got his gear in the specialist tailor and youth clothier ‘Manboy’ – and shook his hands like equals. His latest case was defending some guy called himself ‘The Human Landscaper’ and left flyers pasted up in underpasses and on lampposts: “I WILL DEFLOWER BY APPOINTMENT”, and other such sloganeering of no doubt psychopathic intent, his sexual services (they paid him, with pocket money or in grocery items taken from their parents kitchens!) now a menace through the high schools and the churches and beyond. His real name was Carl Sturgeon, 43, and – a walking self-fulfilling prophecy – he had a number of Piscean features and he had come to Tidswell Childs after his fourth arrest because he had heard Childs was good. The best. He was. The first time Childs laid eyes on him, hunched over double in a hard plastic chair in the police interview room with a face streaked with knuckle-sized bruises, the kid had punched him so hard in the balls that Sturgeon had thrown up thin bile onto the edge of the desk. “We’re not best friends,” Childs said, as he said to all of his clients to sever the personal. It was the motto of his chambers and printed on his letterheads. Tidswell Childs Boy Solicitor: Sever the Personal. It was sound legal practise and the two hit it off pretty well soon after. Sturgeon had been picked up for statutory rape, sex with minors and soliciting for sex as, weirdly, he had been selling his own body to those of virginal females for a bespoke deflowering service. For a guy with his modest physical attributes (Piscean, see above) and limited carnal experiences his human landscaping business had been quite successful, and the charges against him said that he had personally, through business transactions, deflowered as many as seven girls aged fourteen to sixteen – each of whom had paid him a nominal fee of about a fiver (the invoices, written in his own handwriting and with his name and address printed carefully at the top, were some of the more difficult evidence for his defence to deal with) and was apparently anxious to avoid the stigma of virginity loss within the closed ranks and guffawed fumblings of their own peer group – and one adult woman aged thirty-seven, although she was seldom mentioned in the legal documents. His adverts had been published in the local presses under ‘Other Services’, and when the police searched his flat they found a calendar that indicated approximately five other scheduled deflowerings over the course of the coming months, a success that Sturgeon put down to good marketing. As Boy Solicitor, Tidswell Childs had little interest in sexual matters, and what interest he did have was really abstract and essentially filmic and a long way removed from the actual physical coupling of two or more genitals in any real or tangible sense, and as such he considered himself to be perfectly suited to Sturgeon’s defence without being sullied or biased by the apparent severity of the alleged crimes. They discussed the possibility of pleading insanity over ice cream sundaes that Tidswell Childs’s mother had prepared especially, but they knew it wasn’t going to wash. It was in all respects a clear cut case: there were the achingly detailed and painfully honest testimonials from the traumatized girls (“he sweat into my hands”; “less than I anticipated”; “always imagined it to be better”; “the thing he shouldn’t have”; “if he was a real gardener my parents said they would have fired him and my parents aren’t those kinds of people generally and said as much”, &c.); DNA evidence found on or in underwear, nightclothes, bedclothes, genitals; invoices as aforementioned; the adverts themselves, as placed and paid for by one Carl Sturgeon; and Sturgeon’s own written confession, business model and business projections for the coming tax year (prior to arrest and detainment), presented bound and with charts and graphs as contextually appropriate (which in another high profile case also implicated his lenders and investors). And yet despite the damning evidence, Tidswell Childs said that the best they had were the two quite flimsy potentials which just might lessen the sentencing. The first was the intrigue – how had he done it, how had he made those girls pay him for their sex? There was something perversely thrilling about the whole enigma, and depending on the jury it could go either way, either jealously condemning with the full force of the law or, conversely, unconsciously impressed into clemency; the second was the unquestionable success of the business model, which showed spunk (no pun intended) and initiative and might be put to better use in serving the struggling Norfolk community. They were incredibly long shots, but Tidswell Childs was an incredibly competent solicitor and a master orator. His courtroom rhetoric was rife with abstract theoretical concepts and pop-culture metaphors that were at once archly modern and demonstrative of a profound wisdom way beyond his years. “You know Sturgeon,” said Tidswell Childs, his chin a mess of melted ice cream and stringy chocolate sauce, “I’m not sure we can win this one. But for what it’s worth you seem a good enough guy to me.” Sturgeon looked at him and gave him a blank business card. “Thanks Boy Solicitor,” he said. “That means a lot.”

4. The Party

It was the newest – not funnest – party (political) in town: the Badshirts. It was like the Blackshirts only badder (in shirt quality) but about equal in prejudice and (late) popularity, and formed by a guy who had convinced his own children that he was descended from a secret carnal affair between Oswald Mosley and his (the guy’s) maternal grandmother, a locally treasured Norfolk fascist from the Jarrold family who used her publishing connections to print BUF pamphlets in the early 1940s. Her extensive diaries were published in a limited run and gave detailed written accounts of their intercourse and correspondence, but the veracity of her claims has never been proven and most people tended to dismiss it because she was partly retarded at the time. The city’s long history of anti-Semitism crystallized into a kind of acceptability in Margot Jarrold, whose spirited and staunchly nationalistic speeches had been a regular feature at a variety of East Anglia’s gala events until her death in 1984. She called Jews devils but with sneering affection, as you would an infant relative whose shit you’d just sat down in, which oddly won her sizeable public approval. It was funny the way she slurred her words and trembled uncontrollably when she talked about birthrights and strongholds, everyone thought so. Although her desperate defence of Mosley’s Nazi alliance was always left bubbling under the surface of her ever-slackening drunken pallid chops, the legacy of importance and infamy was enough for Ferguson Cusp (he had lost the nominal department store heritage because of conjugal decisions and had had no contact with the Jarrolds’ since his parents had divorced twenty years ago and he been stuck with his oafish father’s sideburn oil and the vast lakes of sweat pooled on the ridged horizontal crest of his stomach) – he felt the blood of Mosley in his veins and he had a responsibility both to his ancestor and to the memory of the great politics of British fascism. He recruited three or four of his handful of close male friends with the promise of civic significance and a good meal and began educating them on poorly understood fascist history, paraphrasing ideological content into digestible, easily replicable quotes which made little sense once the surface had been even slightly scratched away. He shunned economic concerns and a wider sense of their own place within a broader political spectrum and instead tended to focus his politics on the decadent evils of the international Jewry (his grandmother had once famously derided the Jewish faith at a customer evening and had always refused to eat Jewish-influenced bakery products) and the debauched degeneration of the non-British peoples of Britain (in point of fact he had already had his first slogan, the profoundly odd “Get Lost, n-B P o’ B!”, printed onto a bulk box of five hundred car window stickers, with the Badshirts symbol smack bang in the middle [they had wanted to use the red/white/blue flash and circle motif of the BUF to give themselves some tangible association to their own imagined history but were legally obliged not to, so instead he inverted the symbol, which looked and was stupid for two reasons he failed to pick up on: firstly, it made it look like the lightning bolt was striking upwards, which felt much more wrong that it should have when you saw it; and second inversion was often considered not as an homage to but in fact a rejection of the symbol theretofore inverted, meaning that Ferguson Cusp’s inverted flash and circle looked superficially more like a specifically anti-fascist symbology, indicative of the kind of mistakes that would plague the Badshirts, after the joint decision to print all party stationery with the inverted flash and circle and later not have enough capital left to replace it once the anti-fascist suggestion had been pointed out to them {as well as typographical mistakes in the local presses which rendered Badshirts as Badshits, which – statistically – is one of the sixty most common typos made on QWERTY keyboards}]), mainly because the Jewish population of Norwich was probably less than three hundred and because most of East Anglia was fundamentally racist; curtailing minorities made for achievable goals. They shopped for hours for unanimous polyester-blend shirts, invariably bad because money was tight, and ended up with a few entirely shapeless mostly beige numbers, styles made all the worse because they didn’t look like as though they didn’t care but like they did care but had still failed; tucked into grey cargo pants that Ferguson Cusp had had left over from a part-time maintenance job a few year earlier – smothered in superfluous zips and pockets and clasped to their buttocks like oiled cling-film – they looked entirely absurd, like shitty carpenters who had lost their minds on what was supposed to have been a leisure-centric walking holiday. Regardless of the negligible quality of the garments the Badshirts felt the instantly gratifying sense of camaraderie and the psychological crutch that comes with donning a uniform however grotesque, and they felt motivated and invigorated and part of a bigger picture for probably the first time in their lives. Ferguson Cusp motioned for the mandatory wearing of hats but all they could find at short notice were a few lime green baseball caps, which they proudly wore despite themselves; Cusp even tried to grow a moustache like his hypothetical fascist ancestor, which he believed would give him a certain charisma that would invite people’s trust, but he had only been doing it for less than a week and so far only a few awkward tufts jabbed out from his philtrum at awkward angles with great patches of bald skin between them. Whilst no one really knew who they were they felt incredibly powerful in the streets, although based on the values and expectations of the twenty-first century their commonality of attire made them seem like an esoteric boy band of middle-aged, average-looking males, a world away from the bland, faceless, suited, corporate-looking pricks with all the magnetism of a wilted pot plant who had become synonymous with contemporary UK politics. With the fire of ignorance in their bellies they took a bus out to the cemetery, where there was a segregated section for the burials of the Jewish community. They began to push at a couple of the memorials, pressing their shoulders firmly into the stone and trying to turn them over, scuffing the lawn and soil at the base of the gravestones with the soles of their shoes and thinking general anti-Semitic thoughts. It was a futile act but in the cold light of day and with everything else he had been trying to organise like the shirts and the car window stickers with the flawed symbol Ferguson Cusp had not really had the time to give a great deal of thought to how he could essentially initiate his political party, with manifestos and public speaking and local councils and policies. He had enrolled himself onto a public speaking course at the college to try to learn some kind of rhetorical dexterity but it didn’t start for a few weeks and the combination of his dreadful machine-gun stammer (that actually did sound worse than he imagined it to, as opposed to the opposite which applies to most people with stammers whereby the audible stammering is not as debilitating as the stammerer imagines it to sound and is just the result of some self-conscious amplification of the impediment within their own head) and broad Norfolk dialect made everything he said sound as though he were undergoing a constant stream of intense strokes, particularly when he was nervous. Across a knee-high wire fence a handful of mourners from the main cemetery were pointing at the desecrating Badshirts, who had failed to make any real impact on the burial sites, and Ferguson Cusp raised a fascist salute and tried explain who they were and what they were doing, for their children and for Britain itself as a physical country, ridding them all of the foreign plague and returning the country to a state of false ancient purity. When the police arrived and pushed him into the car he was still stuttering over the first syllable of the word Badshirts, his face contorted with the pointlessness of the effort.

5. Snow Fun

The two policemen leant nervously over the gearstick and the handbrake – their stab vests creaking with the displacement, their radios turned low but still transmitting hissed warnings – and kissed gently in the darkness, and ionised snow fell outside the windscreen. It caused sparks to flare like bioluminescent insects when the snowflakes hit the bonnet, a tender light show that left the smell of charred vehicle paint and distant burning dense in the air. They tugged at each other’s belts with the apocalyptic urgency of the unexplained phenomena, the whole sky alight with the immense electrical blizzard. At the bottom of the hill unfortunate pedestrians fell to the floor and tried to cover their faces, to protect their skin from the jolt of the snowflakes, but they were far too many and they slowly fried on the pavement in huge numbers laid head-to-toe, cheeks left plague-blackened by the impact, the cumulative effect of hundreds, thousands of small electric shocks wearing away the threads of their lives like the elbows on a loved jacket. Birds dropped dead from the sky, hearts burst in their chests, and the river surged with a faint blue aura that hovered inches above its surface. The policemen heard the chaos below them; heard power surges and desperate pleas; heard crying children whose plastic anoraks had melted to their skin while they tobogganed down short grassy hills; heard the terrible drone of vehicles turned blind without traffic lights and staggering to forgotten destinations while their sat navs – circuitry corrupted by the charge of the snowfall – instructed them calmly to rest, rest, rest; heard one hundred thousand tearful telephone calls to say goodbye or to hear a voice or to feel the rapture all amplified through the æther; heard the elastic scrape of the flexing bristles of the City Council workers rubber brooms while in protective gear they swept the snow into huge non-conductive vessels that hummed louder with every deposit like portable substations, and vibrated slightly with the weight of the energy; heard the creaking alien twang of the falling pylons that flanked the peripheries of the city as they buckled to their knees like Goliath crushed, lashing cables tossing sparks with sharp whip-cracks propelled by their own tension, the sound of the collapsing metal like an ancient scream rendered obsolete by the glut of the ionized snowfall. They heard it all and they listened, and felt the weight of the guilt of their profession in every piece of uniform they shed.

6. Spring Clean

They called themselves ‘Murder of Prose’ – oh were they ever happy with that, such multifaceted nomenclature, the symbolism, the wordplay, the slightly ominous (Southern [Norfolk {of Norwich city, at least – to wit, Surlingham}] Gothic) allusiveness, the Poe referential, the unmistakable and publically verifiably creative intellect behind any such titular pronouncement of bloody great greatness; it was trouser-droppingly, eye-wateringly, perineum-clenchingly terrific, and it was theirs, they, them had done, which is to say named, it, or rather, THEMSELVES, given birth to their own personas; fucking geniuses was the consensus among them about them, geniuses, genii even, whichever the righter these writers most certainly were – and each of the four longed to reconstruct their entire lives as written, specifically prose metafiction, leaving just their own unpublished representations – albeit at once infinite and bi-cosmic (mac- and micro, pertaining to [a] scope and [b] event stature/assessed mundanity) and perpetually incomplete – behind for historical record and or interest and or lack thereof, replacing the physical life of repayments and gainful employment and what they collectively termed the LCs (or lower concerns) with extensive fictionalized autobiographical accounts of the minutiae of the lives they imagined but didn’t and wouldn’t live. “The big picture,” they smirked as one into wine glasses half stuffed with tepid Pinot, any sense of individual voice long-absorbed in the kind of highly nasal self-congratulation that an incredible arrogance affords, “is beyond passé to the extent that to call it passé is itself passé thus rendering all comprehensible notions of ‘passé’ and what it means to thereby be so considered – and in fact any attempt to render any kind of emotional or theoretical response to absolutely anything outside of oneself – profoundly meaningless, and it’s fucking boring and bourgeois to even think about momentarily let alone speak of even though I have now here right now accidentally spoken of it but only in order to assemble a point of higher intellectual standardization that as cultural commentators it is our duty to undertake, my faculties are larger than yours (by which yours I refer of course to the wider ignorant public person rather than to my own prose associates seated in positions thrice around me as such, gesture, gesture, gesture); in recapitulation: give me the SMALL picture and note even comment on the irony of my deliberately capitalized speech pattern.” Appreciative titters, rippled applause you just wouldn’t hear elsewhere. This was the literary elite that that cunt Amis could only dream about. They would renounce the lived life, it would all but cease, the dirty and the physical both, abstracted into sentences and dialogue and webs of intertextual reference; relationships would be plot devices, characters mere vessels of ill-conceived ideologies, events and traumas clumsily symbolised out of meaning with a hearty sweep of the keyboard, swamped by the void of absent reality, all the worth of a fundamentally racist joke told to a room full of sleeping children, no context. For life itself was hard, shit too; all the better to create a life of one’s own in some wilful act of atheistic intent. Fuck God! Fuck you! “Our balls will be clean, impeccably so, distinct as they are from the life outside of our – as singular personages – selves.” They were all depressingly in the midst of the 35-45 years demographic and on the face of it – how right that face was, how right and telling and insightful – none had amounted to a great deal of the kind of value they aspired to, save for a comprehensive and unshakeable sense of their own self-worth which sat uncomfortably with the stark minimalism of their own proven skill sets. Curtis Bunyan was the – mostly self- – appointed leader of the collective, an oxymoronic nominal title that he especially relished. He was a former performance poet, whose okay/decent live sets were rendered worthless by the flat, drab pamphlets he insisted on publishing once a fortnight. He had alienated his old literary circle – poets – by proclaiming with the tenacity of a French theorist that his remarkable intellect was limited by the poetic medium and that he himself was better – which is to say too good for and to associate with by proxy – them (his old literary circle). The other three were all slightly in awe of his hostile personality, and all had been personally insulted by Curtis Bunyan at his final poetry performance – at which his wife had given a pretty uninspired reading of her prepared statement which outlined her intent to leave him for the master of ceremonies, a twenty-three year old shit with a Faber pamphlet under his belt – and the palpable tension between Bunyan and the rest of them felt like drowning on television. He had singled each of the three (Murder of Prose) out for particular, mostly unwarranted criticism; they had performed some of their own prose-poems during the open mic section that had preceded his finale and Bunyan, near immobile with drunkenness and public shame and embarrassment and a whole lot of other bad or otherwise negative feelings, deconstructed their personalities at length in – to his credit – measured stanzas of iambic verse that became more slurred until, with the lights up to full and the room pretty much empty, chairs being stacked around him and the guy behind the bar cashing up the takings, Curtis Bunyan was just shouting noises and sobbing in a weird kind of rhythmic breakdown. He had been unemployed for thirty-six months, a calculation he insisted on doing in monthly increments for the added gravitas, despite his CV containing a wealth of carefully selected superlative adjectives. Keith Denmark had been especially enamoured by his first taste of the scene; his own persuasions had emerged at eight, when past a mouthful of white Granny Smith flesh in his primary school lunchroom he honked the rather one-dimensional and entirely mortal line “apples are beautiful” with all the meek sincerity of a romantic, an image only slightly scuppered by the pools of digestive saliva that dripped clear as day from the corners of his lips that had been puckered into whistle shape by the half-chewed fruit. The other kids beat him shitless with the kind of humorous determination that sticks through the whole of a school career. They quickly formed a collective, the collective (made an unholy foursome with the addition of a pair of brothers who for reasons inexplicable had by idiot parents both been christened Neil), and threw themselves into theoretical prose around Curtis Bunyan’s dining table. Glasses refreshed, then, the matter at hand remained pertinent, even grew in pertinence with each conceited declaration, four faces further reddened (to crimson, to claret, to – even – Burgundy!) with the delirious unchecked pomp of desperate dreams. “We must write ourselves out of existence!” barked Bunyan, slapping his open palm onto the surface of the table, the wine glasses clinking themselves in an unconscious but unanimous ritual of agreement. “Bloody bastard well out of it!” Even the walls groaned aye. “And how – YES! – how do we do it, Curtis? How do we WRITE OURSELVES OUT OF EXISTENCE?” Curtis Bunyan swallowed down his wine in an ugly gulp – the wine got cheaper as the night progressed, from five (half price) to three (full price) pounds with the dead hours – and dropped his glass onto the wooden floorboards his wife had chosen – shitty varnish. The master of ceremonies for fuck’s sake. Cunt called himself postmodern in self-publicity! Fourth rule of literary longevity, but fucked if I can remember the other three: don’t call yourself postmodern in self-publicity – and it smashed easily, like it was made to do just that. Then he took the bottle and swallowed what was left, about half a glass worth; there was a gag reflex mid-swallow which the other three tried not to notice, but he had been shaken by their pitying squints and they knew that he knew it. He dropped the bottle too but it didn’t break and only made a noise that was drawn out by its loud circular Sisyphean arcs back and forth across the oak. The neighbours would be knocking soon. Unsteadily he stood up from his chair, which fell onto its back behind him, and walked around the table taking the three glasses of the other three writers and drinking their respective quantities of the wine and then dropping their empty glasses onto the floor as well. “It’s very simple,” he said, lurching back to his chair with an accidental urgency that motivated the others in spite of themselves. “Very bloody simple: we write.” He nodded with his eyes closed, basking in the majesty of the truths that he had revealed. “We keep on fucking writing. Just stop doing and start writing; and the first one to stop is out. Out? An easy quiz.” He pointed to the door. “Now write,” he said. Keith Denmark nodded excessively and watched Curtis Bunyan’s head roll slightly on its neck. “WRITE!” He shouted this and the sound of his voice reminded him of his own gone wife. They picked up their satchels and pulled out netbooks and wrote lives for themselves from the confines of a lamp-lit room, their lips moving with the birthed words, their own memories replaced by the false ones they created, the awful inevitability of real events completely erased by the genuine excitement of things that could but never would happen. They wrote with the desperation of pricks. So when Curtis Bunyan’s sister came into for a spring clean two or three weeks later – she did it every three months – they were all still sat at the table, only the place really stank and their trousers and pants were full to bursting of weeks of their own shit and piss; their netbook batteries were long expired; their unshaved faces cast hideous shadows on the highly polished floor; and reams and reams of printed manuscript all double-line spaced and of Times New Roman font were piled unfinished at each of their sides. They were still and cold and colourless. Oh how they had written themselves out of existence! How dead they really were! She flicked through some of the pages but soon stopped; it was quite a lot of what she’d call – and she’s not a literary critic but she does know what she likes, Curtis – shit, not really her kind of thing at all; no real purpose to it, no proper ending etc. It just stopped.

7. A New Boyfriend

Her new boyfriend was one hell of a guy, that’s why she made him up. He had all the best chat-up lines: “I dreamt I held your cunt cupped in the palm of my hand”; “butcher’s counter! baby your decorative facial components in the light of the refrigerator are decently prepared meat cuts to me at attractive prices also”; “please let me bask in the imperceptible motion of your triangular tits like skin stickers on your ribcage”; “in the right light – which is darkness or near-darkness, half-light, dusk – your simple face like heavy-handed etching into slabs of solid limestone can almost look prettier than it otherwise might”; “your unintentionally cruel mouth looks less so when it’s parted around my half-hard glans”. She imagined his jaw and his thumbs so vividly. She was a chronic frotteur, had been for years, a condition she attributed to what she considered to be her excessive height although she was only five feet ten tall. Her pale plain face glowed eerily in the dark at rock concerts, the sadness of its structure made all the more terrible by the insistent creamy hue of her sunken cheeks. When she closed her eyes, laced heavily with pouched black bags sagging beneath them like some alien marsupial, she heard his voice loudly and felt his hot almost rank breath in the canal of her ear – he always whispered in the left ear – and it made her squirm some and the hairs on her forearms stand up. He would say the cunt thing, grunt it with an incredible declarative urgency – she loved the idea of her cunt, the whole cunt, being held in a hand as though it were a separate entity disengaged from the complexity and awkwardness of her body, just a fleshy composite of self-lubricating physical entertainment as transportable as any other handheld article of modern social life but rich with nerve endings and receptors instead of solder and microchips – or perhaps some other innuendo or a directly sexual observation or proposition and she would feel herself swept away into the ringing delirium of what she considered to be love, and she felt deaf and her head went hot and she almost blacked out. He was an amazing guy and an even better lover and she imagined his fingers in place over her vulva and it was exciting because nobody else knew about it or even saw him let alone the handful of fingers he had slipped under the waist of her jeans in primary colours and was right there going to gently fuck her with to a forgettable indie band. Before she made up her new boyfriend the frotteurism had been getting out of hand and she was rubbing against usually six or seven separate people in a given day. At the start it had been quite discreet, just hands or arms against the same in crowded public places like shops and station concourses, where among security announcements and luggage she made herself come with the delicious sensuality of unspoken, unreciprocated and unnoticed physical contact. The three un’s became the hallowed triad of her blossoming paraphilia, and she often told herself that is she ever had the spare cash then she would have the words tattooed above her pubic hair, each word forming one of the three sides of an isosceles triangle. In queues in the supermarket she would brush the outside of her hand against the hand of another, little finger side out, and it was amazing to feel close to something; hurriedly it escalated to buttocks, her hand pressing into, and it was so intense that she had to make a conscious effort to not shout or scream out. She found the flat shapeless buttocks of otherwise fat men to be the most alluring; she didn’t know why but assumed it to be something to do with her childhood. And also the buttocks of other women; she hadn’t ever felt sexually attracted to a woman and didn’t now, but the fact that their buttocks like hers and all women’s led onwards to a vagina made them seem quite special. Sometimes people would notice her rubbing her hand up against their private buttocks but she always looked away and folded her arms, and nobody ever said anything; hands on buttocks is a pretty common phenomena in well-peopled locations, and the exhaustive statistics she had constructed showed that 46 per cent of the body parts of 66 per cent of people had at some stage in their adult or child life been non-consensual party to frotteurism, statistics which she thought must surely speak for themselves, if at all. Over time the frotteurism progressed to more conspicuous body parts like thighs and her own glutes and frontal pelvis; she rubbed her thighs against people’s idle hands and imagined they were involved in a passionate physical relationship, the kind depicted in passionate TV films. If she was sitting next to somebody in a cinema or on a bus or something she would start gently rubbing her thigh up against their own, testing the water; when the two thighs touched the resistance was arousing, and she would do it gradually more and more until they would usually just reposition themselves so their thighs were out of reach and probably think that she had some problem or was mentally retarded. The pelvis and the glutes were much harder to achieve but was the fetishistic end point, and the thought of it preoccupied her until she had to leave her job. Over a period of weeks she found that the most likely place to get away with it – please remember the three un’s – was on rush-hour underground services, and she visited London for days on end to scale these new heights. When the trains were at their most congested and the stench was of combined strangers most confidential body parts she let her body move with the rhythms of the train and the tracks, the turns and jumps in the lines which she memorized, and at the right moment would thrust her intergluteal cleft back onto the thigh of another passenger and rest it there for fractions of a second, or allow herself nearly imperceptible vertical movements which blended meticulously with the atrocious conditions of the morning commute. She straddled the correctly angled legs of commuters she would single out, left each of her legs flanking their own, and with every jerk of the carriage let her vulva collapse onto the thigh, itself tensed for stability on the moving train. On the several occasions that this went noticed she found it difficult to explain, and the interpretations were usually so far off; people thought it meant that she wanted to fuck them, that this was part of some primal seduction that predated language and emotion both. Some of them would follow her off the train and she would usually let them do it, although she wasn’t really into it, because it seemed the polite thing to do; they were always silent and very quick because they had wives at home – rings, eyes guilty and apologetic – and didn’t want to be late for work, and in the quiet streets around stations their moving cocks just felt so dead compared to the triad. She decided to try psychiatric therapy to address what her doctor had said was a problem, although in truth she couldn’t see how it was that much of a problem for her or anyone else. As is often the case the therapy proved to be much weirder than anything she had ever done herself; a room of three women including her and six men all dry humping mostly limbless androgynous mannequins – they had no arms and their legs stopped just after the buttocks – while a therapist took notes from a chair at the front of the room and two or three more therapists watched on monitors in neighbouring rooms. She assumed that the men must have gone at it until they came in their pants and found it unsettling that they never went out to clean up and just sat back down in plastic chairs with slightly ruddy cheeks and waited for the therapy to continue. The therapist explained that frotteurism was an essentially incomplete act that never allowed for healthy climax, and it was this lack of any tangible conclusion that gave them the patients these terrible psychosexual issues; by allowing them to pleasure themselves frotteuristically but to the fullest extent – i.e. sexual climax, with the supplied mannequins – the therapist was confident that he would show them that genuine sexual pleasure and fulfilment could only be attained through the complete (linear/Aristotelian) act of sexual intercourse and not through practice of the frotteuristic triad (although he didn’t use the term ‘frotteuristic triad’ because that was her own personal term and thus not recognised in the psychiatric community) that was, he said, fundamentally anticlimactic. She disagreed silently because she routinely reached a particular kind of orgasm during her frots. The crazed eyes of the other patients as they ground their pelvises into the mannequins were almost inhuman; it would be one of the images that stuck with her throughout her life. She sipped weak instant coffee whitened with powdered milk from a polystyrene cup with her mannequin sat on the plastic chair next to hers. The therapist tried to engage with her and asked her why she didn’t want to rub herself against the mannequin but she ignored him as politely as she could and left after a few of the sessions; they were voluntary anyway. She booked tables for one for her and her new boyfriend, and ordered soup with crusty bread and listened to him talking all night, then swigged from a bottle of cheap white wine while they walked each other home. The new boyfriend had had a positive effect on the frotteurism, too; she no longer rubbed up against strangers, the triad not forgotten but just a memory. All she needed to rub against now were the imaginary body parts of the new boyfriend, willing her very buttocks against the sensual abrasion of his day blue jeans. He stripped her in her mind and they rubbed together in white clammy skin and attentive palms, and his chat-up lines grew exponentially into an endless text of swelling signifiers and astonishing beauty. In those times and others they were real lovers and were complete.

8. The Girl in the Red Dress

The girl in the red dress waited outside his office for him every evening, piles of discarded chewed nicotine gum dotting the pavement around her in a semi-circle like the amulets of a bizarre suburban witchcraft. She wasn’t a girl at all but a woman of almost fifty – a dark bottle blonde former club singer whose strained movements and erratic gesticulations made it seem as though she was always one step away from collapse, and her painted bottom lip trembled rapidly when she let her guard down – with the promise of wordless intercourse beneath the tight red dress. He had met her in the train station a week or so earlier; she had been sitting on the floor in convulsive tears, the other commuters walking in large circles around her as if she were half-completed cordoned-off maintenance work. With her knees pulled up to her chest and tight balls of sodden toilet roll stuck to her face he could see up her dress right to her underwear, to the thick pubic hair that curled out of its sides. Even from fifteen or twenty feet away he could smell the sharpness of mid-range vodka on her breath and the intensely artificial scent of her perfume brought literal tears to his eyes like strong eucalyptus medicine, so strong he could almost taste it. He had recently got involved in an internet circle of “Sombre Porn”, which at its elemental level was based around the paraphilic enjoyment derived from the weeping of women of a certain age (usually over 40s, whose sadness always seemed more convincing); it was an increasingly popular niche, particularly with the Chinese and the Russians (something about their red past or present seemed to lend itself to eroticised sorrow). The usual formulaic scenario for the sombre flick would be one crying woman and at least two guys – the woman would get fucked by one of the guys, crying all the time, while the other one watched them both doing it. The really exciting part came from the metafictional techniques that tended to be a feature of the genre: the second male (i.e. the one not fucking) would frequently look directly at the camera and slowly masturbate while addressing the audience with a hauntingly detailed expositional narrative regarding the origin of the woman’s grief – maybe a dead spouse or a long-term debt problem or something – the hearing of which recounted in such a cold and detached voice making it far harder and worse for the woman, of course, and making her cry all the more as the gravity of what she was doing kind of sank in right at that moment, and the devastating eye contact of the masturbating narrator whose measured blinks were tantamount to hypnosis coupled with the woman’s sobbing and the other males two moving buttocks or sliding cock and awful white British thighs patched with spots of hair was somehow deeply arousing, atrocious and pitiful all at the same time. He had got into it through a guy he knew from work, both administrators within the health service – they enjoyed giving out their public sector email addresses on internet forums, like an instant token of their own self-worth, and used their computer ID cards for discounted takeaways. The girl in the red dress had been trying to lever herself up from the station floor without success and he offered to help her, eyes of the whole station watching with comprehensive expressions of disgust drawn over their flowing cheeks, the embarrassing spectacle of the whole bloody thing frankly improper and ripe for judgemental recounting, for use as a comment pertaining to something wider, of national significance, the drunken bitch in the red dress symptomatic of a more generic degeneration of the UKs moral code, their lips so stiff with genuine almost maddening revulsion that their mouths looked like wounds hacked into the cold vertical flanks of slaughtered pigs. She clutched her mottled arms around his throat and he led her out of the station; she wanted to get a drink and they sat in a pub across the bridge looking at each other over the table, she doing these half-smiling apologetic shrugs for the state she was in but then snorting out tears the minute he said it’s fine, her face looking younger in the flickering blue and red lights of the video quiz machine, its fine lines filled with occasional bursts of ominous music, the theme of a dated TV show that really showed its age among carpets and a uniform choice of mundane lagers; she stopped crying after a few doubles and her hands steadied and she started to explain, her voice deeper than his own. Her husband had died quite suddenly a few days earlier, diagnosed only a month before that with some kind of cancer – she thought pancreatic, but the medical specificities eluded her in the haze of empty glasses – and she was ruined by the grief. Loosely he held her orange leathery hand while she spoke and she pressed her long white fingernails down into his palm and told him how alone she was, how she didn’t know how she would cope, how she was still young at heart and only slightly older in body, and he looked at her breasts and the edges of the underwear that crept above her hemline. Two drinks a piece later and they were in the toilets locked in a cubicle, kissing with the kind of fervent adolescent awkwardness which suggested that neither had ever done such a thing; she knelt on his suit jacket on the tiled floor and sprawled across the open toilet seat, and he fucked her from behind and was finished almost instantly. They straightened their clothes in the smell of pub piss and the whine of the extractor fan, her knees red as her dress in circles from the hard floor. When he asked her if she had the money for the train fare to wherever it was she was going she started to cry again, and thanked him for letting her feel close to somebody even if only for a brief time – which made him feel momentarily inadequate – and she hoped he didn’t think badly of her for doing something like that so soon after her husband’s death but that grief was strange and she needed to feel needed or even alive. It was getting late. He said he didn’t have a telephone but would like to see her again and so told her where he worked and said she should meet him at five o’clock one day, if she wanted too. A handful of trysts followed an almost identical pattern and always climaxed in the same pub toilet cubicle, every day as though they had never met before – she tearfully took him through the story and he emptily consoled her into mechanical intercourse. On the sixth working day again she was there outside his office; he walked over to her and shook her hand – they performed this odd formality religiously, gave their meetings a superficial hint of respectability – and said that he wanted her to meet some of his friends. Her eyes were dry and it was the first day that she looked as though she hadn’t been crying since he had met her in the train station, and even the smell of vodka was weaker or maybe not there at all; she hugged him and he felt her breasts pressed into his chest. They took a taxi from the rank at the station to a small flat in a red-brick block on the edge of the city, the face of the building dotted with enormous satellite dishes that were now entirely functionless but left pointing at the sky as though the earth had been abandoned. She followed him up to the second floor and into one of the flats where two men were standing with nothing on but white sport socks that were dirty black on the soles and with half-erections hanging in front of them. There was a digital camcorder set up on a tripod, pointed at a queen-sized double bed with a cheap armchair next to it. The men said hello to him but barely even acknowledged her and she felt startled by the camera and by the big spotlight that one of them turned on at the plug. “Take your clothes off then,” he said getting behind the camera, and she felt afraid and didn’t want to do it and considered her dead husband, but in tears – they came! – she did as she was told.

9. Pizza and Talking

The fire swept through the house over pizza and talking on the night of June twenty-fourth. Peter Falk had died the day before and there was no better way to commemorate his life than with three or four slices each of quite mediocre supermarket-bought pizza. We’d been an item for a week or two, had hit it off at a bus stop with a limp Benjaminian (she said even Nietzschean) analysis of Wings of Desire. “These angels,” I said, “Are Benjamin. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front on his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’” I said it like I was paraphrasing but of course I wasn’t. “That’s the thing – they sacrifice it all, all this divine atemporality, this immense kind of boundless knowledge, all of eternity just a timeless mess of crossed wires exploding in the same instant. They sacrifice everything for the taste of a hot cup of coffee from a portable vendor, and to dress badly and to fuck a circus acrobat. They throw it all away to enter the horror of the world. Their angelic paradox! Born into time, from one hopelessness to another. And Peter Falk was one! The Angel Columbo.” We played out our favourite scenes and drank jugs of coffee until we felt sick, and I thought a lot about Peter Falk. She was my Solveig Dommartin, I her Bruno Ganz. We didn’t clutter our short relationship with sex. We crept through the remnants of Norwich’s ancient city wall as though we were defecting in 80s Berlin to the promise of the West, which somehow felt pertinent in Norfolk, geographically at least, even if not ideologically. We sat on armchairs carried from charity shops in the heart of the wasteland at Anglia Square, our own pre-re-development Potsdamer Platz flanked with flyovers and traffic calming measures and history crushed beneath mistaken policies, Berlin’s infamous graffiti poorly replicated on our local government-allocated fascias with the principles stripped away, soullessly marking territory with paint cans and illiteracy as the new scent glands, a Sisyphean attempt to come to terms with mortality – to beat it with the permanence of spray paint – that could at least keep them busy until the inevitable, this endless futile spraying, their pigmented particulates carried off by the terrible wind in faintly coloured gusts before a mark was even made. In shirtsleeves I held the ropes she would swing from, looped over lampposts in quiet streets undisturbed by police. We strode the library’s first floor in overcoats attempting to tune into the internal conversations of the handful of readers who littered the leatherette suites, but they were silenced by bored librarians as soon as they opened their mouths, and the elderly seemed fearful of the length of our coats, as though we planned to strike terror into the hearts of the reading public with an unimaginable devotion to the discreet eavesdropping of their routine conversations, of the simmering profundity of shopping lists or worsening health issues or unquestioned nationalism. We preserved reality itself with endless rolls of monochrome film in old manual SLRs, and we were struck by how each of our hundreds of photographs was so tedious or lonely but was so important because of it, and we stuck them all to my bedroom wall and felt like we had transcended time. When we heard about Peter Falk on the news she clutched my arm and cried as though each of her family had died of simultaneously befallen traumatic injuries, a car crash or gas explosion. His was a horrendous death. The almost-greatest American detective ridden with dementia following dental procedures. It didn’t make any sense. We waited for the headlines: “what would Columbo say?”; “just one more thing... what was I saying?”; “solve this one”; “FALK DEAD! (also Columbo, by association)”; but they ran with gravity: “Columbo actor dies aged 83.” “He wasn’t just Columbo but an angel also,” I said. Ass-backwards. Glass eye. Brando tongue. Virgo Jew. Jesus, Peter Falk: when you died you didn’t even know who the fuck Columbo was. The one thing you couldn’t preserve was always going to be yourself. I put the supermarket pizza into the oven and we re-watched the scene where he talks about how it feels to smoke and have coffee, and we sat at either end of the sofa. There could be no romance without Peter Falk; no memories either – just endless empty time. We watched the scene over and over until the pizza was ready; I sliced it badly into six uneven pieces and put them all onto one plate. She stayed in the front room listening to Peter Falk. When I went back in she had set fire to the corners of the curtains and the armchair and a couple of parts of the carpet and they were slowly starting to catch, intense orange flames flaring behind the thick black smoke from the artificial fibres. She was crying and watching the plumes of smoke and Peter Falk was saying “there’s so many good things”, and I led her to the sofa and we sat down and ate the pizza carefully, just as we imagined Peter Falk would. We talked with the pizza; it felt like the first time we had ever talked, and we both agreed that this – us – wasn’t going to work out. It wasn’t that kind of thing, we agreed, and it felt terrific to agree, and the fire swept through the house. And we ate pizza from that one plate, and watched Peter Falk who had died the day before.

10. Jim’s Band

In the erotic weeks of the media’s new century, of everyday sexuality made public through continuously blogged thoughts and contradictory broadsheet polls – filthy angels sanctified hairless vaginal declivities! heroic iron pectorals pointing ever downward in lines of defined muscle to modified similarly iron cocks smooth as rubber, literally or almost! – whose goal was to purify the brute out of congress, cleansing the nation’s final sweaty hump and trembling-kneed bunk-up into the endless tedious annals of normalcy and social acceptability, the violent romance and mystery of fingers and secretions and tights patches of sensitive skin at first touch unrecognisable in the dark instead made a point of public record and expectation, an hygienic and sellable commodity rendered sterile by creams, washes and feminine fragrances that dulled the essential odours of life until the taboo of merged genitalia could be stultified into afternoon TV material (“you can even do it on a semi-crowded city bus route, so perfect are your genitals”; “please do objectify your children’s currently ill-developed future bits, it is both normal and proscribed by the consensus formed by your voting choice to protect future investments, appendages &c.”). In the Bortholinian depths of staunch carnal fanaticism that grew from our great British repressiveness he – Jim – was humiliated by police investigations of his preposterously flaccid hard drive – just a few Word and Excel docs, family photographs, no more than a handful of MP3 files (mostly repetitive positive mantras looped over archaic string instruments or Christian-focused spiritual self-help dictations) – and scribed onto the Nonviolent and Asexual Offender Register (or, absurdly, NonviAsOr). He was a marauding Christian whose ethical considerations pertaining to the sanctity of the physical body, love and Christ the saviour left him harshly opposed to not only sexual promiscuity but also the commodification of sexual intimacy – or more specifically the social expectation to be sexual in every aspect of life both public and private, both in- or outside of a nominated bedroom facility – that had flourished with the boom of late-capitalist media giants who had ironically achieved far greater results than any economic revolution had managed before them in making people – all people! – believe that everyone deserved everything, particularly surgically-enhanced sex organs and a constant stream of sterile sexual intercourse that like a film unfurled plotlessly and with negligible human interaction and was unmarred by mess or unpleasantness of any kind physical or otherwise and that was instead simply two hyper-stylized husks of what was ostensibly just sculpted genital meat rubbing clinically together with all the urgency and beautiful smut of a couple of shrink-wrapped androgynous plastic dolls, photographed and uploaded before it had even happened, the coldness of the act somehow washed out by the impeccably high definition of the pixel-count that made minor stars of even the most pointless amateurs. The contradiction of their idiocy made him reach for his dead sister’s Bible in desperation. They professed a moral abhorrence of both sexual intercourse as a genital act – it was horrible and nasty and perverted and wrong, something to hide behind MDF doors and be ashamed of as an unfortunate occasional necessity, an unavoidable component of reluctant conjugality, the Augustinian procreative method – and as a theoretical or visually represented aesthetic yet conversely also idolised the same – so long as it was sterile and glamorous and acceptably distanced from the tedium of their own bedsheets, which left the real sex of moving parts loathed and the plastic sex of mass media doctrine worshipped at like a flawless flesh altar. They wanted to shelter their children from the reality of sex, to punish their erroneous adolescent hormones and to petition against institutionalised sex education, all its talk of penises and vaginas and choice so grimly believable, but thrust them into a world of Lolita-brand child beds and padded bras for the early teens; they condemned the terrible vulgarity of page three girls – never the advocated chirping ignorance of same – then gave waxing tips for euphemistically named body areas in girls magazines and derided anything but complete hairlessness. It was make-up they wanted, spread like camouflage over every imaginable organ, sanitary congress entirely free of the truth. This Jim found objectionable. He had started a campaign, Jim’s Band, and threw rallies in community centres across the city, promoting abstinence to rooms of baying thirty-something men whose very facial expressions spelt out free internet pornography around their cans of tepid Fosters, and grave young mothers whose magazine choices and idle dreams of labiaplasty sat uneasily with the £3.50 they had given Jim’s male assistant for a shitty silver abstinence ring for their under-tens. He alluded to the Bible abstractly but knew it was pointless in his secular misery. His rants against sexual commodity became increasingly impassioned, and he promoted what he called observable abstinence; that is, abstaining from the observable facets (i.e. pictorial representations [of genitals so removed from life to have been constructed in controlled laboratories and extracted for the shoot only moments before], [poorly] written articles, television quiz shows, &c.) of sexualized social norms by not allowing oneself to succumb to media expectations. “Allow children to be children”, he implored, arms outstretched, “without a wide sexual vocabulary still meaningless to the limits of their own physical development; allow yourselves to be happy with your physical lot, to relish the God-given idiosyncrasy of your conventionally abnormal genitalia or erogenous pieces; do not fetishize the perfect non-drip intercourse of your perfume advertisers three minute narratives, where declivities smooth as dolphins heads conjoin in sweat-less filtered light, for this is not even a myth but a lie; the absurdity of our promiscuous culture must cease lest our future sexual expectations become even further perverted by the wicked desires of our media barons.” The mood at the rallies was sour from the beginning; no one wanted to be told what they were doing wrong by a stranger, condemning everything they held dear: the Friday night fingering in the pub car park; the Saturday morning wank over the fashion pages of the broadsheet glossies; the deafening innuendo hollered by an entire pissed demographic like prayer above the dire music of chain wine-bars, alluding with increasing impropriety to the joyless horrors of the pending inevitable and sniggering blushing into their mates ear that someone’s looking over; the nipple slips and bared buttocks of the great night out; the tearful kid inexplicably slathered in orange like a fancy-dress shoe, the acceptable face of child molestation; the double-espresso glugged over the full bikini wax. His fourth rally of the week was in Catton Grove, and due to bad planning was still going on at pub closing time. A small crowd of Baptists and one or two young couples soon swelled to about forty people, all filling up polystyrene beakers with thin tea and sachet after sachet of sugar, laughing loudly every time Jim mentioned sexual intercourse. He kicked the flipchart over – just thick fibre-tipped text saying NO was all he wrote at all the rallies – and his voice started quivering with the impotence of his own celibacy; he pointed at individuals stretched like proven dough into pastel polo shirts or short sleeved supermarket cotton, berated them with a really intense attention to detail, told them the media sanctioned genitalia they set as their wallpaper or numerically valued excitedly spluttering out crisp crumbs in pub debates was making loveless bastards of them all, was stripping all the warmth and beauty out of the sexual act and leaving it as clinical as surgery. Made whores and outlaws of their children. They were told to desire lies and they lapped it up like a pack of wankers, he said, vaguely crossing himself with every expletive; they might as well shit onto every page of the Bible. “Shit on every page of the Bible,” he commanded. When the police showed up Jim had taken to his knees and was still yelling but the words were unidentifiable, just noises, collections of glottal syllabic gasps, the crowd silent but bored and refusing to leave for reasons they wouldn’t consider for days afterwards. The officers couldn’t believe the nerve of the man. He was arrested on charges of asexual harassment, as well as intent to incite abstinence, destructive self-discipline suggestive of mania, and the wilful and disorderly public condemnation of harmlessly arousing media portrayals and the associated expectations as translated to the sexual attitudes, preferences and normalized desires of the average twat on the street. The stigma of his asexual tendencies would be a matter of public declaration from thereon in, on job and credit applications; he was a danger to the industry. Nauseated by the deviant sex acts of the working classes the two policemen proudly compared laminated photographs of their wives designer vulvas and gave detached assessments of their value – monetary and aesthetic – to unspoken criteria as though they were appliances, and Jim prayed for deliverance from the packaged sexual commodity, an ideological intercourse now strictly a pursuit of the rich, the poor far too ugly for carnal experience. Filthy bastard dreams of discharge, they chuckled into their notes, their own genitals sterile in the vacuum of their underwear.

11. Happy Ever After

It had been his dream since youth: a Chinese restaurant. Didn’t have a Chinese bone in his body – just Scotch/English with Fallen Catholic parentage – but neither did Uncle Ben. That’s what his mother had said, the subtly racist implication being that to be Chinese was of no fundamental or necessary value (to wit: was essentially a purely linguistic – rather than characteristic – distinction of occidental construction that required no grounding in Chinese history, culture or demography and was at best a determination in the culinary sense and certainly not resultant of any birthright either jus soli or jus sanguinis in claim). Uncle Ben was purportedly the African-American agricultural whizz of rice growth, the Johnny Appleseed of perennial cereals and starches, who – bow-tied! be-suited! – transcended his slave status and attained self-endorsed (but US government approved) nationalized Chinese status through generalized Western culinary interpretations of oriental food aspects, through sweet and sour sauce production and the parboiled rice commodity; he could do it because he – that grin!, the grin that would be inappropriate or even perverse or doltish on a younger guy, an arrestable doped grin exemplifying in its gentle inanity the reasonable suspicion to justify unwarranted police interference if facially present on an African-American youth circa the present, etc. – was of the west, rendered so by the punishing capitalist regime of nutritious worldwide suppertimes, because he (the generic he, as in: the royal we) made the narrative. His mother and he had eaten chow mein several times a week and lost themselves in its soy sauce. At night he dreamed of water chestnuts and pak choi, of incisions in his skin that in an uncanny act of will poured noodles into the world, all stir-fried and plated up as they hastily emerged from a handful of newly tailored orifices labelled with intricate Chinese characters whose meanings eluded him. If as the old adagial concoction goes ‘there are two loves in every man’s life’ (or something to that polygamous effect, although the love can of course refer to both a symbolic and/or intellectual and/or abstract – and as such pertaining to the intangible and the non-anthropic – understanding of the terminology, as well as a physical even carnal allusion to the material male/female binary), then Chinese cuisine was one of them. The other was the music of the Beatles. He chose to play “A Day in the Life” at his poor mother’s funeral; towards the end of the song the vicar looked nauseous, and barked in the last thirty seconds to the tape operator, “turn it off; please turn it off immediately,” and the silence that filled the space left by the disorientating loop was incredibly uncomfortable. The vicar’s face was streaked with blood vessels and small pools of saliva had gathered angrily in the corners of his mouth which he wiped on the sleeve of his vestments. He had expected a hymn for the end of the service but the son chose “Julia”, his mother’s name. It was unorthodox, even more so because of the preserved body that was displayed by the altar standing – or rather mounted – upright in a climate-controlled glass case like V. I. Lenin and overseeing the whole ceremony with a cold and imperceptibly crooked stare (he had not wanted the eyelids to be stitched carefully together as most people do, haunted as they were by the perceived fundamental life and essence – the real memories – associated with that most personal organ, but irrespective of technique or protocol or any kind of cadaverous semblance of personhood or morality, embalmers simply could not prevent the decomposition of the soft tissues of the two organic eyeballs, so he had requested instead the use of two pretty artistically convincing glass eyes in a considered shade of blue that unfortunately didn’t sit quite right in the orbit and drooped some with the death of the whole thing beneath lids tacked discreetly to the skin immediately above and below). Inside the case she was looped onto an industrial steel bar at three key points up the length of her body, and the conditions were monitored by sensors and required a constant temperature of 16˚C with an 80-90 per cent humidity to prevent decomposition, and daily he had to moisturise the features and inject further preservatives on top of the already performed arterial and cavity embalming. They were rituals he would soon absorb into his own daily routine and even look forward to, and he felt a real closeness to his mother as he carefully undertook these ablutions for her and eased the hypodermic under her clothes with an almost erotic tenderness. Everyone agreed that at fifty-five she had died too young. At the end of the funeral a couple of the mourners, people who he didn’t recognise but who seemed to know his mother quite well, helped him lift his mother in the large glass case onto a flat-bed trolley and wheel her into the car park; a wedding party was arriving over the street and when they saw his mother their eyes burned with hatred and also sadness. They shifted her into the back of a minibus taxi which had the seats removed at his instruction and strapped some lengths of rope around the case to hold it in a steady position, and he left after cursory handshakes, the taxi ride strained and unpleasant. With the payoff from her life insurance policy he decided to open a Chinese takeaway in the suburbs, as both he and his mother had always known he would, in memoriam. It was an unspoken agreement between them that exemplified their shared passion for both the sweet and the sour, and through a combination of the takeaway restaurant – a lasting remembrance of past dinners enjoyed – and the companionship of his mother’s preserved dead body he thought it would be as though she had never died at all. He bought the premises outright and moved into the flat above the takeaway space below. It had been a kebab shop before that, and the vendors had agreed to leave him some of the kitchen equipment: stainless steel refrigerators, hot plates, a large glass fronted counter, a griddle still congealed with the encrusted fat of a thousand shish kebabs and discount patties. He cleaned it all up as best he could and kitted out the kitchen area behind with eight-hob ranges and deep fat fryers and two or three microwave ovens. He called the place ‘We Can Wok It Out’, his hand-painted signage combining staples of Chinese marketing – pagoda, oriental-styled Latinate lettering, wok, Chinese characters of indeterminate meaning – with a part-convincing silhouette of the fab four themselves. The name had just come to him one night: ‘We Can Wok It Out’. It’s a brilliant pun, he thought, and laughed when the sign was erected above the window. He had no menus or chefs in place for the grand opening because he didn’t know anything about Chinese cuisine apart from that he loved the taste of those Uncle Ben’s sauces and Vesta chow mein’s with the crispy noodle topping. The opening of the Chinese restaurant was about something far more personal and complex than the provision of Chinese food to paying customers; it was a chance for his mother and he to still be together. With his preserved mother’s corpse overlooking the barren counter and the empty spotless kitchen – a Fu-Manchu moustache drawn meticulously onto her unyielding formaldehyde features and her skin lovingly yellowed-up with restorative artistes L’Oreal and a tailor-made cheongsam tied in loose knots at the back, in front of the industrial steel mounting bar – it reminded him of the old times. What greater mark of respect to both his mother’s short life and to western notions of the orient could there be? No crowd gathered as first he unlocked the door. He just played Beatles tapes on an old two-deck tape recorder and spoke to his mother’s body, and would later heat up a couple of Uncle Ben’s meals of rice and sauce in the microwaves. “There is peace in these tiles,” he said to her preserved self. “And something grandiose in the sterility of unused caterers’ stainless steel. Surfaces that shimmer in strip fluorescence.” He wept as he spoke because of the perfection. Some groups of teenagers had started lingering outside as the evening went on; they peered through the window at the yellowed-up dead body and squealed with equal parts excitement and disgust, then disappeared only to show up again later with parents, who came into the takeaway and told him that he was sick and that what he was doing was wrong and that they would have him closed down because of health and safety, and he nodded at their points and listened to his Beatles tapes and eventually they left him to it and swore as they closed the door behind them. At nine o’clock he put two Chinese microwave meals into heat, then carefully spooned the scalding food onto two plates, one each for him and his mother. He opened up the glass case in which her body was mounted and unfastened her from the supporting steel bar. She slumped forwards into his arms and he propped her into a soft chair; when she looked comfortable he parted her cold lips and put a forkful of the sweet and sour chicken into her mouth. Of course it just stayed there unchewed and unswallowed, then fell in hot lumps down her frontage. He watched her and had a forkful of the food himself. It tasted really delicious. “Different worlds,” he said, because things had changed some but were really the same as well. That was just how things were. He held his mother close to him and they ate the food together.