conversation #93.12

"I need to be able to conduct my nocturnal pursuits of the flesh with some semblance of secrecy, mystique even."

(folding trousers, blouse, arranging on chair) "You what love?"

"I want to fuck you in private you bint!"

"..."

(growled) "Bint!"

(turning down bedclothes) "Shall I leave the wall lights on?"

on your special day

The rain fell and from the peripheries of the gazebo's minimal coverage he cursed the world its ills. It had been short notice, shotgun, they’d have called it behind closed doors, and they hadn’t been able to arrange a marquee, left instead with six different gazeboes of disparate sizing erected around each other like weird zones. “The erogenous zones,” he had sneered as the two blokes erected them, cursing and sweating even in the rain, as though the very existence of such purported zones were of nought but pure fantasy at best, at worst the lies of the leisured classes peddled to belittle the best efforts of their weary underlings. "Fucking Twilight Zone more like it."

The day would be a certain failure. Gusts had soaked the still cling-filmed M&S buffet trays in rainwater and they looked sorry and pointless and sparse, and regardless of whether the food beneath was protected he knew, knew the truth of their futility in light of the elements. He opened a bottle of the champagne – waste of money, he said, Cava he said, pleaded even, did they listen? did they fuck – and glugged from the bottle until it fizzed in his nostrils and his eyes watered and he spluttered the drink from his lips and it gushed from the bottle neck in a great white plume and he heaved over it. He stuffed the open half-sunk sticky bottle back into the ice bucket and dried his hand on his suit trousers. The gazebo was sagging in four pits on each of the quadrants of its canvas roof structure where the sheer weight of rainwater had pooled without recourse in precise tarns. The blokes had advised caution given the relative seasonal fragility of the gazeboes, designed as they really were for summer usage and light showers at most, and not the torrential rain to which they were currently exposed, but he had paid them angrily and told them it would be fine, it would all be fine, in a way that their faces made clear was – and that he knew to be –unconvincing in an absolute sense.

They’d got the gazeboes up too late, it had already been raining for days, and the ground was churning up into soft almost liquid mud beneath his feet; when the rest of the hundred or so guests were trampling it the mess and the damage would be unimaginable. He thought about soiled dresses and the ruined carpets that were sure to follow them when the selfish bastards stomped through his hall on their way to the bathroom and spat harshly. Christ almighty, he wished he’d arranged a Portaloo. Let them queue three deep in the rain only to revel in the stench of their own stools! He reached up to the roof to disrupt the pools to the sides of the canvas but couldn’t reach high enough to get it over, so jumped some inches from the soft earth to achieve the same. The predictability of his fall would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so awful. He picked himself up, his suit trousers soaked through and caked in flattened soil. The pools remained.

He imagined with great pleasure the creaking of the gazebo’s frame, struggling beneath the weight of the weather, and grinned as he imagined the whole bloody thing coming down on top of them, his daughter’s face as the water soaked her dress and plastered her £100 hair to her face like a greasy slap, her bloated, simpleton, fiancé-soon-husband flailing his way absurdly in effort to inexplicably preservation of egg and watercress sandwiches, resting paper plates over the sodden bread parts as though he were performing some civic duty of the most significant order like he fucking paid for it, his own pissed wife done up like a dogs meaty supper, flirting her way to later apology, mud on her palms where she'd already slumped over trying to limbo to “Love Shack” - second dance for fuck's sake! - and mistook the laughter of the young to be appreciative and not the hateful derision he alone would know it to be, he saw it all as clearly as if it had happened already.

He looked around the food, the drink, the PA system – they’d plug an iPod into it later, not even a DJ! progress my penisroot, he thought, nauseous with hate – shrouded beneath tarp like Christ at Easter, the folded chairs, the piles of napkins, the table decorations, the damp tablecloths, the hope, whatever, all of it, he looked around it and felt the most debilitating sense of revulsion and of pity, not just for them but for he, too, indeed for all people, as though why, why, would we, they, anyone bother?, and what could possibly be the point of it, which is to say, anything at fucking all? He pushed the food tables over and stamped the sandwiches and sausage rolls and Indian snacks and chicken skewers and salad bowls and what have you into the mud and it sank in easily and rimmed his shoes in mayo and spreads and shaved meats, then strode past the house and up the side and into his car and he drove off quickly into the miserable afternoon. The limo'd be there for her soon.

conversation #376.24

I'm an aggressive guy, and this is really what I'm about. And you know what, if you don't fucking like it I suggest you try fucking off. Go on, try it. Try fucking off. Try it. Try it. Try it. Go on you cunt. Try it. Try it. Try fucking off. Try it. Try it. Try it. Fuck off.

the hirsute gentleman

The hirsute gentleman proceeded hither and yon, his great tufts emergent like ancient dismal secrets from the hemlines of his vest. He smoked despite himself and constant, his dense moustache stained city sunset yellow and coiled into the corners of his mouth, rancid from spit and chewed up with foodstuffs as he ate or otherwise. He reeked foul like trod soft onions, the streets parting about him like a Red Sea of disgusted flesh alive with its own scorn. In his youth he worked in high finance, the story went, but he turned ghastly post- some kind of personal or spiritual epiphany, the details were hazy and likely fabricated. No matter, said most. It figures. He asked for nothing and wanted for less, had reached a type of harmony with his surroundings that were of urine and sick and excrement, of the basest functions of existence. He felt at ease amongst his own emissions and others and meditated his path to eventual submergence into them, self-loss, which must surely, he considered, be imminent, where he might finally be nought but they. When shit sank him he would soar he would, he confessed at the graveside of his long dead young. He would.

the drilling sounds

The drilling sounds persisted. They ran through his skull badly, left his rudiments shaken, it seemed. He felt them all about his person, like blood in his veins, in his bowels and also in other physical locations he preferred not to mention. He presumed them the result of microwaves or radiation or one of what he termed the “modern phenomena”, although this was a term meaningless to the description of such occurrences or notions. They were at their grave worst when he sought the solace of sleep as he did daily. The silence of the dark room was an environment especially conducive to the drilling sounds, and their oppressiveness at such times was unbearable and relieved only – and only some – by his screaming into the night, which he did reliably, and to the consternation of his neighbours.

He eyed technology with suspicion for its almost certain role in the commencement some months earlier of the drilling sounds that now tormented him, and shunned the varying devices of convenience and modernity that were so prevalent in the lives of his peers. He had until such time owned one device relating to processes of the most basic telephony, but as the drilling sounds worsened had deconstructed its casing and interior assembly with a variety of tools and implements until he was as certain as he could be that the emission of microwaves or radiation from the device were minimal if not non-existent. He left the fundamental components – as broken down as had been possible in the circumstances to their most basic aspect – at a variety of strategic locations around the city, each a minimum distance from his own residence to, he hoped, negate the impact of any residual microwaves of radiation that might still be emitted from the device and into his own head and thereby responsible for the perpetuation of the drilling sounds. He performed similar acts of disruption to the handful of other electrical items he kept in his lodging until a sufficiently primitive state was attained, but still the drilling sounds persisted. He was acutely aware of the continuing presence of significant electricals within bare metres of his own lodging and which it was simply impossible to avoid within an urban environment such as the one in which he resided, and he felt hopeless and even desperate towards his plight and unable to conceptualise relief of any kind for as long as society proceeded on its present trajectory, in thrall – as it was – to technology and purported “advancement”, when these two "benefits" had such severe impacts on the physiological and psychological processes of the human person, even if such impacts were unproven and ignored as, he knew, was so often the case with facts before they become so.

He had on one or two occasions mentioned to his neighbours the drilling sounds and his hypothesis pertaining to the harmful microwaves or radiation from the myriad devices that were so common at that time and that caused them, which is to say the drilling sounds, and proposed an amnesty, of sorts, in which those devices were safely destroyed at a site chosen by him of adequate and safe distance from their own lodging, but his neighbours observed him cautiously as though he were in some way faulty and suggested he sought assistance from a kind of trained counsel either medical, psychiatric or both, and asserted their wish to not speak to him at any length or for any reason until such assistance had been sought. “One cannot judge an orange by its segments,” he said certainly, but they had each dispersed before the words were emerged. He had imagined similar but felt pessimistic at their ignorance, such was the lot of the chosen and the great, who throughout all human endeavour felt great scorn from the fearful masses who yearned only for constancy. Exhausted, he clutched at his head upon both of its sides and gripped with what little might he could muster from his tiredness, and dug his fingertips into his scalp in great grindings until the discomfort was tangible, as though the pressure applied might relieve the drilling sounds within, and his eyes watered as he dug and his nails cut into the pale skin and the drilling sounds abated not at all and in fact if anything worsened as the pain subsided and his scalp was tacky with some slight blood of his own hand. He presently began to punch and hurt himself in other ways in myriad failed attempts to distract from the drilling sounds that made sleep impossible and that had become already inevitable. His bruises were a source of great wonder when the drilling sounds permitted.

Badly sleep deprived he devoted many hours to the building of microwave and radiation detectors from solely organic products: sticks, mud, grasses and foliage, the like, to capture and reprocess and somehow soften the intensity of the waves about him, but these constructions were futile.

Over time he may come to cherish or comprehend the drilling sounds, of this he assured himself. He could not foresee such a time, he accepted, but it may come, it may.

the creeps (fragment)

Bored shitless, they formed something of a micromob in the corridor among the office gear, the pot plants, the waiting facilities - chairs, business cards, some literature, other items. The Creeps. It was a way to combat the tedium that although not comprehensive did offer some relief. They met at the photocopier at set times and passed printed documents amongst themselves, the text aggressive and nihilistic or often sexual in nature and regarding other members of the working office, often repeating aphoristic phrasing in complete coverage across the full A4 side with hints of psychopathy flitting around the edges of their production methods. They sniggered at each other’s observations and felt immeasurably superior to their colleagues, whose dreary lives and ideologies they lampooned so effectively in their strictly Calibri invectives.

Alone they were nothing but as The Creeps they found voice and the confidence to honk it. They strode four abreast about the employment complex and bugger the consequences. They commandeered the water cooler for their own thirsty ends. They “played mad”, and watched the world shit with fear around them at their convincingly delusional performances. They wrote graphic elegies for the quietest females of primarily temporary employ whose flesh was firm and very young and – they believed – ready and left them visible on desktops or in pigeonholes, a trail of blushing destruction and initiated harassment protocols left in their wake. The littered the hallways with incendiary literature and hand drawn anatomically precise sketches of genitalia and denied their involvement unconvincingly when pressed by superiors who they deemed quite the opposite. They printed reams and reams of mob stationery adorned in the header with The Creeps logo and charged it to the office account through a web of laughable subterfuge and poorly falsified signatures. They carried membership cards in their wallets like large employed children, trimmed paper affixed with glue to slightly thicker cardboard of standardised sizing. They strove with devastating failure rates to use their mass influence as a tool of seduction but were instead just five cowards licking their lips at every passing skirt, easy to ignore and even easier to despise, their conversational or social ability infinitely less eloquent than their printed literatures.

access please is by boat only (fragment)

The silent fens saw day come and were sated. The night had been desperate and long and rich with woe and the relief of the sun was palpable, its tender fingers eased into the cracks of the landscapes with the surety of a proficient lover’s explorations beneath spent ragged sheets. The rich soaked grass, the clusters of wind-gnarled stumps, the staggered belching waterways that led like arteries to aged triumph, all were lost beneath the bodies.

The village could only be accessed by boat, a knackered rower left in dock at either side of the main riverway for the purpose, pooled water gathered beneath the rotten benches that flaked along the seat in great splinters, the oars coarse and worn and laid like downed weaponry along the floor of the vessel, with two large handbells left in wooden boxes on either bank to summon the villagers in such event that the boat was docked on the opposing bank (during better times two or even three vessels had adorned the banks but the times now were worse and the vessels now remnants, jutting skeletally from the water or upturned like dead whales, riddled with large holes many feet from water’s edge); arrivals were uncommon however, the last of the surrounding settlements still untouched by the paved roads, served by few amenities but those of the village itself. Two isolated tracks accessed the western quarter but the stony pocked surface and awkward topography was inaccessible to cars or motor vehicles and kept a primal isolation prevalent in the villages continued existence. The handful of residents who used or owned motorcars left them some miles away at the crest of these tracks, parked in circular ground where the road ended like the end of the world itself; unmarked by signage or warning, it only ceased, as though materials were exhausted, the tarmac severed in some erosive drop, snapped apart, the layers of construction visible in cross section between the rich weeds and grasses that accumulated at the end, like the final collision between two disparate times.

the fruiterer (fragment)

In the darkness she fell far to the bed of the male and woke swamped in its linen, the sheets earthy damp, the tang of his profuse sweat on her tongue, the sheets vast too and about her as killers, the feel of his movement still in the unnamed, the sheets stained too with streaks of shit left forgetfully with the downward pressure on his buttocks prized apart with the effort of sex (the shame! he would be mortified, she would relish it), the cooling lacquer of his festering seed dripping from hole to hole and leg also. She could hear him whistling in the kitchen and the clatter of glasses and crockery; forgetting whether he had left for hot drinks or cold she assumed the worst, his limp tea, his cheap wine, his impossible coffee granules.

They had met in a local shop, a fruiterer. Her personal sense of consumer ethics urged her to shop for fruit and vegetables at independent local businesses rather than supermarkets, but she regretted the same on a near daily basis due to the consistently low quality of the products on offer: spongy apples, bruised pears, mostly off bananas, loose rubbery broccoli, tasteless shapes the lot of it, and all so dulled and uninspiring in its palette like partial blindness, antithetical to the highly waxed platonic forms the supermarkets buffed to perfection, disappointing food made all the more so by the inflated prices necessary to the furtherance of the shop’s meagre survival. He shopped there, she ascertained quickly, because his unsophisticated tastes expected nothing more, and besides his weekly – without fail! – handful of only the most obvious items likely offered little in the way of inconsistence, it was too tedious for that. They chatted for a minute or so, his desire for her apparent from the outset, and though she was repulsed by him, she nonetheless felt something resembling an attraction to his unashamed arousal and, given her boredom and propensity to continual self-destruction of the most futile type, invited herself back to his place. He carried her blue plastic bag of fresh peas (he hadn’t known what they were, didn’t know peas came in pods), celeriac, wilted kale and heritage beets soft enough to burst with a misplaced thumb with a chivalry as ludicrous as it was surprising, gripped to his chest like a priceless artefact.

please listen, it's over

The letter was sealed within manila and left upon the chopping board on the kitchen work surface, where he prepared a daily sandwich of meagre filling. He slid the cheese knife into and across the envelope to open it and pulled out the scrappy piece of notebook paper. “Please listen. It’s over,” it said. “Have an okay life.” He read it two or three times before returning it to the envelope and proceeding with his sandwich. Eight words, one for every year. It amounted to little. He made breakfast and sat to eat it at the table they had shared, and there read the note a further time, loudly slurping the chocolate cereal into his mouth as he did so. He finished the cereal and carried the bowl and spoon to the dishwasher, and went upstairs to get dressed. Sure enough, her bed was empty, wardrobe too, the doors still ajar and coat hangers and a few stray garments and pieces of underwear left on the floor around the furniture. Must have packed quickly, he thought. She was always such a tidy person. He picked and folded the clothes and returned them to the correct places. Her wedding ring and her engagement ring were on top of the chest of drawers, threaded onto a piece of elastic; he picked them up and inspected them and stroked the metal gently with his fingers and recalled the joy of purchasing them with remarkable clarity, as though it were a very recent event. He dressed in his own room and sat on the edge of the bed there and read through the note another few times, hoping for some kind of clue or sign or symbol of which there were none.

Please listen. It’s over.

He dialled her number from his mobile and it began to ring and he was relieved that she had not switched her phone off and considered this a positive sign, but he soon heard a loud vibrating from her bedroom, and when he entered the room he saw the phone lit up on her bedside table, obsolete and abandoned as he himself was. He telephone the office and explained that he would be unable to get into work because of a personal issue, and although slightly frustrated they were sympathetic and asked if there was anything they could do and other such pleasantries, and he thanked them and assured them that he simply needed a brief period of time in which to get things organised and that he would be more than able to accomplish this himself. They advised him to take care, which he ignored. After hanging up he noticed that he had been crying which no doubt his colleagues had heard but it was of little concern. He placed his own phone and the phone of his wife into the toilet and flushed it; whilst the devices remained visible at the base of the splash pool he was certain their electrics would be compromised by the water, and flushed the chain a second time to ensure this all the further. He went back downstairs and enjoyed an espresso from his machine. He removed his belt from his trousers and tied it in the correct way, then observed and considered the drop from the landing banister. Although imperfect he supposed it to be adequate. An okay life was little life at all.

“Please listen,” he said aloud. “It’s over.”

And so it was. He needed only to catch up.

the right woman

He strode the city’s hallowed ground in search of the right woman. He knew not what type of woman she would be, only that her nails would be painted perfectly and her perfume strong, and that she would weep when he approached her with something like gratitude, as she would when he led her by the arm to the small hotel room he retained at discount for just such occasions. She would work him with her hands, the nails gleaming against the white of him, would praise the efficacy of his lovemaking methods, would buy him breakfast afterwards. These were among the many things the right woman would do. He was certain of it.

the things we want them to want

The creative committee met thrice monthly to assign workloads and brainstorm the future. The BBC had been finished off by scandal and licenses allocated to local entrepreneurs to enable provision of mostly deregulated television content across limited geographical areas, usually within county limits. In Norwich and environs media oligarch Thantre Seale rose to dominance over extant independent local concern Mustard TV, crushing it beneath the particular blend of unashamedly populist prejudice, anecdotal real life and mindless entertainment that fared especially well in the region.

“You,” said Seale, sucking on a tumbler rim-loaded with scotch, “you gutless nobody, your role is to hold their dicks while they piss their money into my fucking gob. By which I mean bank account! As a result of continuing viewership! TV is my foul bed now, understand? I make it however the fuck I like. We’re not here to give the people what they want.” He threw an ice cube towards the immense glass window that leered at the city street below like a whore on a corner. “Look out of that window. Don’t get up! Imagine you’re looking out that fucking window. You know how to imagine, you string of fucking turd? Come on, you’re supposed to be creative – create me a fucking scene outside that window and do it silently.” Four or five unpaid interns from City College, 16-17 year olds, were clustered around the other end of the table, scrawled notes and doodles on Pukka Pads spread out in front them, homework diaries, smart phones in brightly coloured skins and cases, Sprite bottles. He only used unpaid staff, made a point of it, had an arrangement in place with the council. A couple of them closed their eyes, trying to get into the role, to visualise the etiquette of the writers rooms and workshops they’d seen in films and play it now, about as convincing as their attempts to not cry or run out of the room and back to their parents or their course supervisors. This, this was real life. Seale leaned down, his lips an inch or so away from their ears, hissed “Wake the fuck up. I’m not not paying you to sleep on the job. Christ, you have to close your eyes to imagine, do you? You, the future of the creative industries? Jesus wept for all of our fucked futures!” He scraped all of the papers and pads and from the table and scrunched them into tight balls and fed them out of the window painfully slowly, the glass only opening a crack of a couple of inches because of safety locks, then picked each of the pens from the table and stamped on them one by one, a process lasting several minutes. When his phone rang he paused and took the call, then resumed the stamping when he’d finished, the whole thing in weird silence. “Out that window,” he said, rubbing four fingers quickly across his forehead to flick the gathered sweat off the sides, dried his fingers on his trouser thighs. “They don’t even know what they want. And you know fucking what? We tell the dumb cunts what we want them to want. Yeah? And what they want, and what we give them, is outrage, blame and grim mirth.” He counted the three off on his fingers as he recited them like sacraments cast in stone, the fundamentals of the media. “By the bastardy bucketload. Shit comes in threes. Keep them happy, keep them watching, keeps me in booze and bitches.”

He poured out another scotch and drank it down, poured out another and flicked the TV on. A repeat of Holiday Park Howlers. Some kid getting burnt on red-hot barbeque coals, skin charred right off down to meaty tissue. He sipped his drink and laughed, his whole body quivering with his own local success story. He muted the TV but kept it on, a couple of pixelated grotesques fucking in a static motor home; laughs were, he farted every time his balls moved. Lost some of the magic without the sound.

“This is priceless,” he said. “I am TV in this town. Look at me. Look! Do I fucking look like TV? The fucking answer’s fucking yes, cowards!” He swallowed the scotch down and staggered up from his chair, knocked a Bisley over, drawers open and stationery dumped out over the coarse carpet tiles, envelopes, whatever, and pissed pure foam into a huge plant pot in the one of the corners, could hear it seeping into the soil. The smell was fierce and mammalian. “All this” – vaguely gesturing around the room, at the screen, the felled Bisley, the drink, all of it – “is me. All this work, these shows, this audience. It’s for me. It’s business. Bottom fucking line. Hot wet cash in the hand. Slurp it up.” He made a slurping sound, sucking in, thrust his hips in a manner simulating sexual activity. “Tastes fucking lovely,” he said. He smelt his fingers, licked them even. “Smell that? That’s the smell of creamy cash. It’s money, it’s all money.” He sat down and drained the dregs of scotch from the bottom of the bottle, gazed into the empty glass. There were tears in his eyes. “Beeb was a fucking moral bastion,” he said. “Values that, values this – had values spewing out of its arse, for all the good that did it. Values, responsibilities, it’s all bollocks, it’s all… pointless.” He looked at the screen. Couple of women driving a red Nissan Micra over the Cliff Edge at West Runton. A tragedy really. He looked reflective, almost pensive, as much as was possible past the shit-eating half-grin. “People don’t want that now. World’s changed, nothing I can do about it. Shit just is.” He felt that rising sick feeling and thought he was going to puke but didn’t. Could taste it, feel it on his teeth backs. “Only responsibility we can have’s to ourselves, to making as much fucking money as possible before something else comes along and does it instead. We hold to two values and two alone: hatred and desperation. The only things that matter to the Great British scum. They made this,” he said, almost pleaded, a moment of intense, bilious, drunken focus. “That’s the order of things. Dumb comes before dumbing down. They made a market and I took it. I don’t feel culpable, I’m not and never claimed to be a fucking moralist. If you take any one thing away with you just fucking make it that, okay? They made this. People get the media they deserve.” He took his tie off, inspected it, great silk, power pattern, they called it, chevrons to somewhere, rolled it up, put it in his jacket pocket. The credits were running on Holiday Park Howlers. The clicking of the dry mouth of one of the interns was like a metronome counting down to unimaginable horror.

He pressed into his eyes with a thumb and forefinger to clear some funk and rubbed his palm over his face and stretched and shook his head as if he’d just woken up or recalled his privilege and drummed his fingers on the table and grunted a couple of guttural chants out, part of an awful corporate posturing that synonymised commercial or business protocols with the necessary violence of an ancient lifestyle or the spiritual significance of ritualised trance. He clapped his hands together with great force.

“Right you slags, where the fuck were we. Ideas. I want an idea each out of the lot of you, one line, one fucking idea. Clear?” They nodded paperless. “Fucking go then,” he said, pointing at the first, a tepid gimp in a too-big suit that made him look like a drowning doll.

“Bar Fights,” the intern said, face flushing the colour of his acne as he did. “Fat blokes provoking fights in pubs and filming it on smartphones, narrated by Jake Humphrey.”

“Love it. Good. Two hundred budget.” The miserly and completely arbitrary nature of his budgeting was renowned in the industry, producing a real breadth of low quality output with huge potential for profits. “Fucking smartphone TV, aesthetic fucking wonder of the modern age. Next.”

“Car Boot Live – a real time chronicle of Aylsham’s Saturday car boot sale.” Kids hands and voice were shaking as he spoke

“Boy I can hear your fucking brain spunk, this is TV gold! Have you seen that fucking freak in the burger van works that car boot? That alone is a spin-off waiting to happen, travelling the county to low-grade public events in a stench of day-old spunk and grease, all perverse sex and racist soundbites a huge polystyrene boxes of grotesque food, congealed before its even cooled down. It’s ideal Norwich fare. Fuck, Freak in a Burger Van, sold like some fucking B-movie, posters, DVD specials, whatnot. So good. I am, I mean. It’s fucking character driven. We need characters. People love them, love to get behind and despise the poor pricks in equal measure, like that twat with the puppets. Hundred should cover that, few quid for tea and coffee. Borrow the rest of the gear from college. Next.”

“I’ve got Adventures in Sugar Beet Fields.” She was the only female and more than held her own round the table through a combination of complete detachment and psychopathic aggression. “A period romance set in the heart of the north Norfolk countryside, all buxom wenches played on the cheap by local landladies getting dry humped in the earth by thick oafs. Wrap a loose story around it. something like that.

“Fuck yes, love your ambition love. High time we had a drama.” He scrawled a name and phone number on the back of a business card. “Call this number, ask for Accruel. He’ll sort you out for costumes, cunt owes me at least two favours. Just sauce the whole thing up a bit, make it current, switch the dry humping for gang rape and the countryside for Mile Cross circa 1976, and you could be onto something very, very big. ‘Adventures in Car Parks’, or something. Give the arseholes something they can relate to. I’ll do you five hundred for that but I want change. Next.”

“Gut the Mustard,” said the fourth, a squat mean kid who refused to fear death. “Feeding very hot mustard to the very young until they cry.”

“Not bad,” he said, “not going to set the world on fire but it’s solid daytime TV. Get the schools involved, headteachers, dinner ladies, usual shit. Sponsored by our friends at Colman’s. Fifty quid. And finally.”

They all turned to the last intern, a milk white weed with near-translucent skin like something pulled out the broads by hooks and rods, great red rings around his lips like a corona where he couldn’t stop licking them in the cold weather, tufts of moustache – so flimsy it looked like it’d blow away if he sneezed – poking creepily from the valley of his philtrum, glassy eyes darting, his palms visibly moist beneath the LEDs.

“My notes,” he said, barely audible through the deafening expectation. “I had an idea, but it was written on my notes.” Seale had made a steeple out of his forefingers. He leaned back in his chair, then stood and walked to the corner of the room farthest from the failure, as though the presence of his very person were a curse or a communicable disease from which he wanted no risk of infection.

“Well remember,” he said, snarled really. “Fucking think. Fucking remember. It’s what your fucking brain’s for. Remember you worthless fucking cunt. One idea, one fucking line. Fucking think.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve tried. I just… I can’t remember it. I’m sorry it’s just, it’s gone.” He swallowed very loudly and opened up his Sprite bottle. Seale ran towards him and yanked the bottle from his hand and poured the contents over his head, slapped him in the face with the empty green plastic, then slapped him again with his hand, pushed him backwards off of the chair. The other four interns stood up and clutched at each other and all jostled to the opposite side of the room, a couple of them crying openly.

“Get the fuck up,” said Seale. The kid did, and Seale shoved him down onto the table. “I’m fucking Caesar,” he said. “The fucking Caligula of the airwaves. Say it.”

“The Caligula of the airwaves,” the intern said, sobbing badly, kind of gnawing on the back of his hand.

“All of you,” said Seale.

“The Caligula of the airwaves,” they said in unison.

“Hail fucking Caesar,” said Seale, leaning down to growl it into the intern’s ear. He could feel his chin on his cheek. “Say it you cunt.”

“Hail” – the intern was gasping too much to speak – “Hail fucking Caesar.”

“Fucking right,” said Seale, pulling the intern’s trousers and boxer shorts off over his leather shoes, pulling his own fly open. “You’ve got a smartphone good tits,” he said to the female intern, arms folded over her chest, chomping on Juicy Fruit like it was the 80s. “So fucking film this. All New You’ve Been Reamed.”

He got to work.

the bibliophile kid (2)

In response to my failing marriage, our mutual intellectual deconstruction of my personal – which is to say romantic – life which so inevitably followed the shared infidelities of two so neurotic souls, I befriended a bizarre troupe of sixteen year olds, ten strong (who I would only later learn to be the VHS Crew) a symbolic grasp for freedom, for the liberation that oozed through their constant swearing and that their poverty and joblessness afforded. Our meeting had been unplanned but was life-changing within moments. In the light of sadness I tended to walk quickly between streets, hurrying to places I had no interest in being, and none more urgent than the underpass that crossed four lanes of medium flow traffic a few minutes walk from my house. Landscaped trees dotted the concrete at the two entranceways but it was still a place resolutely uncluttered by the niceties of urban redevelopment, the trees themselves half-stunted, dwarfed by the enormity of a derelict and grey former office complex sprawled stark over a vast floor plan, its angles like the ancient architecture of a distant past, as inconceivable as history itself, its windows bent and boarded, the whole place reeking with the incompleteness of unfinished plans, of stalled momentum and brutalist assertions. Rusted long-defunct aerials still pointed skyward, transmitting pleas for deliverance and redemption, their signals unidentifiable through the murk of occurrence, unheard and futile, residents left voiceless by change. The road tore through memory like the underpass tore through the earth, and the youths approached me in the dim ceiling lights that flickered with every vehicular passing, only five of their number, each clad tightly in heavily stonewashed bright blue denim, fashion relics, monuments to the decades that preceded their birth, an historical re-enactment that – instead of the slayings and bloodsheds of which any Briton can be proud – created a palpable sense of the youthful ennui and disenfranchisement of the 1980s, their white socks glistening at the gap between trainer and jean cuff, their inaction somehow more authentic than any documented source. Their faces betrayed no such awareness. Guttural groans echoed from their parted lips and around the tiled walls of the underpass, graffiti dowsed, streaks of spilt ketchup like theatrical blood in violent knife-spatters right up to the ceiling and which left the place with the slight tang of vinegar among the embedded piss. Declarations of illicit desire were transcribed with a thick tipped marker pen. “For my urgent relief please call”. They all forget to write the number, countless handjobs left hanging in the ether of possibility, of drunken consideration, experimental abandon, never performed. Or “Human landscaping: I WILL DEFLOWER BY APPOINTMENT”, humorous sloganeering of unusual intellect, betraying no doubt a dangerous psychopathy. The rest of it just tags sprayed carelessly – the paint dripped dry beneath the body of the text in thin lines, marking territory like giant bald cats, paint cans and illiteracy the new scent glands. Any artistry in the underpass was borne of life not of spray paint; tags became photographs, family portraits, old super 8 films unearthed in the dust of locked attic rooms, lives observable through their poorly executed lines and patchy colours. It was their only shot at permanence, made all the more futile by the high pressure water jets that would monthly return the walls to cheap virgin white, a museum robbed of exhibits or burnt to the ground. A Sisyphean attempt to come to terms with mortality, it could at least keep them busy until the inevitable, this endless spraying, their pigmented particulates carried off by the terrible wind in faint coloured gusts before a mark is even made. The eyes in this circle of youths around me spoke of windows dripping with condensation and yellowed net curtains stuck to the damp, the limp colour of pain in the faded brickwork of factory exteriors. They peered at me hesitantly, one of the males half-gesturing towards my trouser pocket with a loosely clenched fist. I impulsively drew a handful of change, held it extended in the flat of my palm like a holy truth, the five moving in shuffles around me, as if they were nervous of the money or in reverence of it like a strange sovereign idol, the coins themselves of soul, spirit, life, shackled to banks and treasuries and forever desecrated and blasphemed in pockets and purses and desired and manipulated across generations by all who learn of their weird power.

Another of the males looked closely into my hand, his head cocked on its thick meaty neck like straining gammon. “We don’t want none two pence,” his accent a strange bastard of Norfolk vowels and inflections and urbanised street impropriety. “We ain’t want none two pennies from yo child hands.” I was surprised to be called child as I was at least ten years older than he was, but it somehow felt correct.

“Not gold for our wants mister,” another male said. He wore a sweatshirt in oblongs of primary colours, with three press-stud buttons running from the neck to the shoulder; they hung open over a black t-shirt, the peripheries of its design edging past the deep yellow fabric. Fragments of wispy moustache peppered his lip like the remnants of an earlier meal. They had circled around me, told me later it had been unconscious movement. He tore a scrap of paper from an A4 sheet he had unfolded from the back pocket of his stonewash jeans and put it into his mouth, chewed it like decent gum. “We not none too interested in you fakkin pences, pounds or otherwise leggy tappy tappying, y’got me,” he said, past the sodden paper.

“I don’t think I know what you want,” I said. My voice sounded a long way off, as though it had come from somewhere else. In a strange way it felt good to have somebody to talk to.

The first leaned into me, the paperboard bill of his baseball cap jabbing into the side of my head. Embroidered on its front there was a truck and the words Necton Diner, a long derelict building rotting along the exponentially bleak fenlands of the A47 towards Kings Lynn. It had to be an old cap, its white crest blotted yellow with the sweating scalps of years if not decades. “We be wanting the whiteness,” he whispered.

“The white juice,” said the second youth, lisping slightly because of the claggy paper in his mouth. He licked his lips while he said the words. They were all licking their lips. The only girl among them was oddly attractive in her scraped-back hair. She was silent and pale and I guessed sixteen. Her jeans were so tight I could see the declivity where denim and genitalia eventually connected. I felt morose in light of it and wondered who at that moment my wife was with.

“Mister got the white fluids? Gottem for us eh mister?”

“Do you mean?” I said pointlessly. The girl looked at me then half turned away. The loose change in my pocket suddenly felt heavy and superfluous. The other four were all nodding, nodding and licking their lips.

“White mate,” they said, as though unanimously stricken with a debilitating speech impediment.

“It ain’t goin hurt you like child,” garbled a voice from behind me. I knew there was hopelessness in my eyes, could feel it in their dead weight. I couldn’t see the mouth the words had come from. The reluctant hum of moderate weekday traffic sank through the concrete above our heads and was dull like the underpass itself, wheels purring in echoes that bounced from the tiling and the posters for unheard reggae acts hung with duct tape.

“Nah mistah an we is in appreciate.”

“Yeah mistah.”

“Yeah.”

“You is a urban hero of them east anglan skies my mate.”

“Bona fide!”

“Pistachio!” they chimed harmoniously, like some two-bit MC outfit who prowled Norfolk communities in search of social commentary, deconstructing definitions for their own skewed and private communications, where edible nuts formed salted green-tinged declarations of celebration. They spoke a language not of the streets but of the wastelands; their libraries were burnt out cars, their churches empty industrial buildings. They made love on lush green beds of broken beer bottles, felt the romance of dog shit left amongst knee high scrubs whose small white flowers were the architecture of these kids’ own metropolis.

“Okay,” I said. I felt my phone vibrating in my coat pocket and squeezed the screen between my thumb and forefinger until I felt the plastic crack. It was probably my wife, still out of breath and of musky genital and locked in someone’s bathroom where she would piss after coming, urgently reporting a digested account of her encounter to be elaborated upon later. She found this kind of hurried impulsive honesty important. I was always the first to know when they had finished. I think this was supposed to make me feel significant and like I shared in the excitement of her perverse therapy. The silent partner. She was right in some ways; I got fucked too. There were often footsteps in the background when we spoke like this, or running showers, or TV sports turned low, details that built an awful and vivid picture of the encounters she described. I was sure she would leave a voicemail. “It’s white fluid you want?” Half delirious and out of my depth in even basic conversations, I had been long silenced by my wife’s absent sexuality, slave to the crumbling futility of our marriage. Words felt wrong together, and even grammatically incorrect sentences were deafening expressions of heartbreak in all of its legitimized finality, vessels of the revelations of adultery that conspired against me in purposelessness, rendered true by narrative.

They started clapping, not as applause but as unpredictable, arrhythmic, spontaneous, piercing slaps that cracked through the tunnel like gunfire, a further extension of their building frenzy. The girl’s eyes narrowed and she looked half away from me. It was sultry in low wattage.

“You gettin the gazebo!” whooped the kid with the taut porcine neck, more boy than man with his eyes electric.

I unbuttoned my fly. It was a difficult time. They talked about white fluid with the fervour of the idolatrous, desperate for life. I thought their ambiguous anti-literate allusions and their gang intimidations referred to the forcible public release of my semen; that they were street-queers out for nameless intercourse kept clean through anonymity, or that in their self-made new Norfolk neo-Borboritic religious sacraments – scratched on brick walls and discarded cardboard sandwich cartons – they had canonized a new Eucharist for the porn-addled young, where seminal emissions formed the figurative consumable blood of a contemporary electronic messiah with real life oozing through its enzymes, to be collected and worshipped with all the underhanded devotion of any Christian artefact, to get one step closer to the salvation and eternity promised in its coagulated globules, tenderly wobbling spilt on the skin of the holy, in the beginning was the seed. So ravaged with the vulnerability of my phone’s vibrating message alert – the cold mechanistic articulation of her voicemails left me mundane with remarkable efficiency – I relinquished all sense and propriety and social acceptability and I screwed taboos and social mores, desperate to feel myself and my organs connected once more to a world that needed and even wanted them, slightly less alone for as long as it would take to come. The recoiling youths hit me in the face at once and my hands instinctively moved to the sting, my fly open and shamed with the wind running through the fabric jamb.

“You terribly fucken faggot queer bastard!” said one.

“Of all me fucked plops!” said another.

“Fuck I puked inside of my head!” said a third, large faced youth.

The folded arms of their female associate spoke pages of perfectly-crafted, targeted criticisms, entirely devastating in their simple honesty. “Brothers a apricot,” she said, her voice a higher pitch than I imagined it would be, like a sound escaped from complex machinery. Her inconsistent syntax sat uncomfortably with her pencilled features, her city sneer, her eyes that swam in memories of domestic abuse; beneath her unbranded sweatshirt would be bruises and scars, brush stroke markers laid down in vivid colours against the white of her skin in awful rituals in the darkness of home; the smell of other people’s beer would always make her sick although she would like to drink beer herself; her ribs would be promontories between which my fingers would rest; I would mean everything I did. She looked at me properly for the first time. My dropped fly had been my fall from acceptability; from the cracked tiles of the underpass the world had risen above me. I glimpsed recognition on her face and her thick lip gloss caught the light and glistened wet, half-angled in a smirk, huge gold hoops in her ears like archaic scientific instruments that quivered with urgency at the pitiful, accidental indecency of my incomprehension. I saw a barely perceptible tic of her trapezius, flickering like a computer monitor, and in that reflex felt a bond with these weird youths, whose anachronous clothing and Norvic patois and fundamental communality was somehow as ancient as the crumbling city walls, flecks of time unfettered by progress. I gasped an apology and zipped up and heard the click of crisp leather business shoes striding down the stairs to the underpass in the determined 4/4 rhythm of executive dreariness, the artillery precision of a life spent moving between office complexes, conference calls and regurgitated data, packaged in plasticized document wallets and expressive graphical representations, hyper-cleaned carpets and stainless underpants each less than six months old, unused kitchen surfaces moist with Dettol and unused wives drenched in the boozy tears of coffee mornings and shitty paperbacks. We all turned to look at him as he strode into the light, sliding thick fingers across the screen of a device clasped with the affection formerly reserved for infants or mammals in the crook of his left palm, fingering it with such considered strokes it almost felt obscene to watch. We caught his eye a few steps before he was on top of us and his stroking hand fell limp, his mouth dropped open, his greying hair and perfectly shaved face concealing unmentionable suburban horrors beneath the cold rubbery skin of commercial relations. He spoke not a word but yanked the leather shoulder bag from his – shoulder – and threw it towards us, and in tears ran in fits and awkward sprint-steps in the direction he had come from, his sobs just audible above the scuffing of soles upon concrete. The bag slumped untouched between us all like a monolithic idol.

“You fucken people is all the same,” said one of them, a terrible honesty to his voice that made life feel grave and pointless. “Perverts and animals.”

“Don’t yo see kid that white juice a life we want to feel drunk up right in the side of us?”

“Please,” I said. “Please do tell me what you want.” I had an ugly tendency towards pleading; my wife had asked me to try to control it when we first got together and I pretended I had, but it kept on happening. I revoked agency.

“Shat your snakes cunt you don’t listenin! We ain’t about for your cock or your bollick or even your wordsearches!”

“Contrarywise and sunder, we come here for milk, sir, of bovine udder, and you goin get us some.”

Milk. Just milk. There was something improbably sensible about this group of calcium crazed hoodlums running gently, thirstily amok through the city centre, congregating outside grocery shops and express sized supermarkets for the civilized consumption of pint-sized increments of lactate. Hardly the antisocial regimes constructed by the alienation of the twenty-first century’s faceless and unchecked capitalist infrastructure. They existed outside of life.

“Milk,” I said in disbelief. Like Catholics they each crossed themselves as I uttered the word, the crosses encompassing the mammary with the reverence of touch and the eternal significance of monotheistic religious symbolism.

“Fuck mistah shhhh your flaps up!”

I didn’t want to question the ritual and I imagined milk drenched sexual rites, milk intersecting through vaginas and anuses and lubricating the same in warm abundant showers of erotic lactation. I imagined the girl’s two breasts in my hands and felt immediately sorry.

“Okay,” I said. They had a look of milk in their eyes. “Follow me. We’ll go the red brick shop down the way.”

We left the underpass together and towards the shop, a hopeless Norfolk department store of 1950s gents polo shirts and giant cotton trousers that pleated around the waistband, empty metal shelves left rippled at the back with rust specks and hung at all the wrong heights, linoleum tiling that failed to reach the peripheries of the floor that was grey and damp-looking at the edges, waiting for the inevitable. They youths kept a distance of a few feet behind me which made me feel like a perverse authority, and they made heavy disorientating tribal beats with an interplay of their mouths and tongues, screeching unintelligible mantra over the top at an almost destructive pitch. They sounded like pack animals speaking the language of the early days.

In the shop they pushed past me and through the entrance barriers – a pointless emblematic signage envisaging an abundance of customers where in truth there were handfuls – and knew exactly where to go, drawn like insects in some transverse orientation to the dairy fridges that hummed in flickering light bulbs, a mating call to the yearning and the lactose idolatrous. They paused for a moment before the fridge and gazed through its glass, the cartons lined symmetrically across the shelves, perfect white and near-pornographic in ascending size order. The whiteness of the milk. With an unspoken declaration of movement they pulled the door open and each grabbed a four pint full-fat jug and unscrewed the blue plastic caps – the five of which dropped rattling to the floor, light discarded obstacles that seemed to speak volumes about our youth and our cities – and carefully peeled off the thin plastic stopper that popped from the rim with a fine splash of milk droplets and they drank heavily and determined into the blissful electric silence, their pleasured gulps masked by the drone of the open refrigerator. A shop worker’s crooked face looked on disgusted, eyes sodden and narrowed and his thick red cheeks fluttering with breaths of disapproval, cold and gruesome and hard under strip lights, a frozen turkey that would never thaw; he was gesturing with tics to some colleagues a few aisles away, and I could almost see the anger entering the body of a middle-aged woman dressed head to toe in standardised uniform-issue red synthetic fibres with a face like a battered puppy long-past affection, her sculpted hair quivering about her like a picture frame in an earthquake.

“Hey shoppy” I said, and threw my wallet at his feet. “They’re with me.”

He counted the five milk jugs twice, I saw his lips moving, and crouched down and picked up my wallet and pulled out a ten-pound note. He threw the wallet back onto the floor and shook his head as though we had made him a desperate witness to the most indecent thing imaginable. The woman walked with him to the checkout, both vibrating with a world of injustices, caught in the field of each other’s hatred like magnets, pointing and throwing hands and scorn back through the aisles to where we stood. And the youths they drank and drank, pint after pint, neatly piling the empty plastic jugs at their feet, thick white moustaches left decorating all of their lips like crude disguises. A wholesome drink for strong bones and teeth. They sure loved milk.

They weren’t mugging old ladies or taking drugs or doing unprotected sex with each other. They were drinking milk.

Struck like a car accident with a sudden feeling of clarity I cracked open a four pint jug of my own, so cold and creamy.

the bibliophile kid

The cracks appeared in the gaunt face of my young marriage when my wife asked me what the wildest thing I had done as a teenager had been. I’m nearly 30, it’s irrelevant really, everything is. It was about six months ago. They – the cracks – had been there before, whispered threats composed of incomplete sentences left hanging in guesswork amidst glottal stops and cryptic intonations, possible future occurrences, quantum-scale geneses of unfolding heartbreak, but they became visible then, when the question left her silence, these huge blots blemishing our shared frailty, suddenly so real. Their edges spread frayed like ink with time and now only they remained. I feel partly responsible because the question made me feel trivialised. She knows that I hate to talk about the past because I have a terrible memory unless it’s for a set few triggers of tender nostalgia, and I knew that the question was a thinly-veiled attempt to reflect upon how boring I had become, a truth of which I was acutely, almost debilitatingly aware. I grew into monotony over years as one does an oversized piece of clothing bought second hand. We had met as teenagers, at parties, and we first fucked drunk sitting down on a foldable garden chair in darkness and the sporadic glare of the security light that kept picking up our thrusting with its poorly placed motion sensor in a friend’s parent’s garage. The urgency of youth intensified our lives. I was probably always inclined towards tedium, it’s in the blood, encoded into my genes; it lurks under the surface of my half-cocked nihilistic pronouncements (nihilism’s the perfect cover for the boring), and I think she knew it too, but we were in love, and told ourselves that as long as we had each other then everything else would be fine. It was a weak mantra, and false. I never felt boring as such, in the way the very old feel just eighteen inside, but I am, the kid she once fucked on the chair now lost amongst financial insecurity and endlessly researched projects that amount to little at best. I can’t blame her for losing interest; I’d lost interest in me too.

Shortly after this she had started having affairs but called them encounters, somehow romanticising her daily betrayals; she was very honest about them, and explained them to me at length without invitation, which was supposed to make it easier for both of us and would probably even help us because of the science behind the human brain and the ways in which it processed information. One of her friends had told her that, a mental health nurse who she had slept with two or three times with varying levels of success. I didn’t think a nursing qualification – even with a psychiatric specialism totalling some twenty-four months of training – really put you in the best position to make assumptions about other people’s lives and relationships and reactions to complex personal information relating to fidelity and love and socio-behavioural interactions that would generally be accepted to at best be hard to deal with, but my wife seemed to give his limp theorizing – a nurse! – some kind of credence, despite the obvious bias associated with his intermittent interactions with her curious cunt. She’d always had a thing for public sector email addresses. We talked about the encounters with all the superficial politeness of work friends at obligatory drinks both attended and unwanted by all – me afraid to give any kind of reaction and so straight-backed and gurning, cheeks sunk against the effort of the gritted teeth that held my composure together, nodding her story onwards to its inevitable coital conclusion, as though her extramarital interests were the expected results of two years of wedlock, and she animated like I had never seen her – she was always so stoic with me, as though smiling were a gormless weakness she would not allow herself – her huge eyes moistened with the verbalised recent reminiscence and her whole body incorporated in expressive gestural re-enactments of the key moments of the recounted relationship, a sexual ballet performed for – but not about – me, rendered as I was the most pathetic of all voyeurs: non-consensual, involuntary, powerless.

She had taken to engaging in her encounters every other day including weekends, which totalled four fucks a week, each of which she narrated to me with the warmly evoked gynaecological precision of an all-girl coffee morning. Sometimes there would be repeat efforts with the same man – the mental health nurse being one such example – but she said that this mostly defeated the object of what she was doing, which required a different male each time. Though I didn’t find it helpful to hear about her intercourse she did seem to genuinely want to help me through it. We had drifted into that kind of relationship.

the all-time great prank

It was the all-time great prank. They took her margarine – this was in a shared accommodation – from the fridge, about half-used or maybe slightly more or less, it doesn’t matter, there were a few fingers of vacant space in the tub, Flora or Bertolli or something, maybe Benecol (she spoke at length about her cholesterol, but in the kind of half-hearted way that suggested an adjustment to her choice of butter-alternative spread was about as far as she was prepared to go to remedy her preoccupation, if it was that, which it might not have been, the years have not been kind to the clarity of the weeks preceding it, the all-time great prank), I think the tub was aesthetically vivid is why I suggest these brands, known for just that. Maybe Vitalite. The mood in the shared accommodation had become very low by this wintry point in the year, the socialisation and communality ever unsustainable beyond even the first couple of weeks, and relationships were badly broken if they had ever been otherwise in the first place. She was of well-off stock and sporty and had a stolid and permanent face that looked like it would weigh a tonne to carry as she did, day in, day out, and whilst I had no or at least little problem with her as a person others certainly did, and as a principle she was appalling; with several friends of similar ideology she had quickly formed a sniggering unit within hours of our arrival in the shared accommodation, and their good humour and premium including fresh ingredients and devil-may-care attitude and cultural illiteracy made them immediately repulsive to a particular pocket of inhabitants of the shared accommodation and whose ranks I occasionally straddled (although then as now I prefer to exist quietly, drifting between the expectations and associations of myriad disparate factions), feelings further complicated by the desire felt despite this repulsion by the majority of the largely male opposing pocket of freethinkers to engage in some and/or any form of sexual experimentation with this sniggering unit, a desire resultant primarily of their apparent permissiveness and self-professed wide experience in the fleshy arts, of their frequent use of sexual swear words (at once both, again, suggestive – in the apparent ease with which they discussed such matters – of their own varied experience pertaining to the acts so explicitly described and also profoundly and, I know, ridiculously enticing when originating from the mouth of a female), of their desire for what they termed “casual and fun experiences whilst resident within the shared accommodation” and of their general physical shape and construction which conformed to many of the more predictable measures of what would customarily be considered attractiveness as contemporarily portrayed (i.e. breasts: full and firm; legs: long and strong; rear ends: round and comfortable with a promising declivity to the vaginal locale; faces: well-maintained; etc.). As the days progressed and it became apparent that carnal investigation of any – even minimal – kind was not on the cards, and that their lewdness was an affectation at best, carefully modelled around primarily mainstream filmic and musical appropriations, the mood worsened and conflict increased exponentially, the unit’s near-constant laughter, increasing insularity and allusions to physical love becoming not only overbearing but also somehow foul, and their frequent jovial critiques pertaining to abhorrent kitchen and bathroom habits of the shared accommodation’s other tenants becoming more vindictive and – in their unavoidable truth – personal. Desire was soon replaced by hatred, in the way these things routinely happen. I for one certainly desire what I hate, and I hate almost everything.

In was into this difficult environment that the all-time great prank found form. They took her margarine as discussed from the refrigerator and slid a palette knife carefully around the edges of the block of fat, to loosen it from the plastic casing, and then by a process of gentle squeezes and depression of the tub’s two longer sides managed to free the spread in its totality onto a saucer. To see it there I simply couldn’t believe it wasn’t butter as I knew it not to be, and I imagine this to be much as those of a religious persuasion feel on a near daily basis. The most depraved of the shared accommodation’s assembled free thinkers held the tub between both of his hands as though it were sacrosanct or highly breakable and left the kitchen. They waited for some moments for his return, watching the pleasing dimensions of the spread as they did so, and expecting the imminent arrival of the giggling unit and the subsequent certain failure of the all-time great prank. Time was, however, on their side on this occasion, and the most depraved of all of them soon returned with a very grave expression on his face and thrust the tub to one of the rest. He opened the lid and laid across the base of the tub was a perfectly formed stool, still warm to touch through the thin plastic of the margarine tub. The foulness of its stench was immeasurable. The essence of the prank lay in the assumption that, once cooled to fridge temperature and in effect “sealed” beneath the returned block of spread the stool would remain unnoticed until such time as sufficient margarine had been consumed to reveal the telltale streak of faeces in the final stroke of the butter knife. The psychological damage caused would be major, the knowledge that stool had been consumed by proxy for however many weeks it would take to reach the bottom leaving an awful scarring horror that it would be impossible to wash away. For me, the all-time great prank was fundamentally a step too far, but it was beyond me to step in and put a stop to it this late in the game, and furthermore it would be a waste of my stool to do so. No, I allowed them to proceed, to return the margarine to the tub and the tub to the fridge, and life continued apace.

We watched the giggling unit consume their ‘buttered’ toast slices after a night of Prosecco, or scramble their breakfast eggs in it, or stir it into sauces or pasta, or weigh it out in precise measures for baking, and inside we smirked at the silent misfortune that befell them every single time they did. The tragedy was that none of us witnessed the revelation, if there was such a thing. One third of the giggling unit became romantically involved with one of the other members of the shared accommodation, one who had been vitally involved with the implementation process of the all-time great prank, and we were never able to clarify whether he had tipped them off, so to speak, to prevent the girlfriend whose mouth and lips he – presumably – kissed and explored fully with his own oral apparatus from inadvertently consuming the stool of a male associate, or whether he had simply disposed of the margarine in its entirety, thereby avoiding the no doubt difficult admission that he had been party to the application of a secreted stool to the base of their communal spread. Irrespective of truth the giggling unit were seen less and less frequently in the kitchen area of the shared accommodation. When pressed for information relating to the physiological assets of the his new romantic partner and for vivid verbalisations of their performed acts, he had been amenable initially, and attempted to explain the feel and taste of her key areas with the kind of ambiguity and inarticulacy commonly exhibited by the very young when attempting to describe pain to doctors or other medical professionals; however such requests were soon not only ignored but even aggressively rebutted, and he advised us in no uncertain terms to “get lives”, to “fuck off”, and other similar beacons of intelligent and persuasive argument. I was surprised to hear him say these things, as he more than anyone else was intimately familiar with the all-time great prank and how it, in its conception, its creation, and finally its performance, was perhaps the very essence of the “life” he claimed we should endeavour to get. I said as much to his girlfriend and the giggling unit when I explained the whole thing to them. You must appreciate that this was his idea, I said. He is a persuasive entity. The source of the stool itself is deeply irrelevant.

They’d see the funny side in the end.

your father

“Your father was retarded,” she said. “Simple as is. Retarded.” She repeated the word with some relish, the perfect summation, as it was, of her husband’s more notable traits.

“Mum, you can’t say that stuff anymore,” he said. “You just can’t.”

“Defective then. Broken, maybe even incomplete, something… missing. Something important. That thing, its absence. Left him retarded.” She sipped the tomato cup-a-soup, closed her eyes to savour it, necked a fist-sized hunk of farmhouse, almost stale, just the way she liked it. She left the loaves to go hard over a course of days then broke them in splinters to crunch through during conversations, in front of films on TV, a distracting pleasure, harder and sharper of edge than even the best available crisps. All were as croutons to her. “He was a charmless man,” she continued. “Dense and unyielding, stunted emotionally. He was forged of an intense ugliness, of both character and appearance. Joyless, unfunny, simply incapable of pleasures either high or low. There was no connection there,” she pointed to her head as she spoke, “no connection at all. To anything. He just… was. Though what he was is unclear.”

He cleared the soup cup away, rinsed it beneath the tepid tap water, the sink rimmed with a watermark line of gelatinous orangey scum, the soups of a lifetime having finally left their mark.

“You refer to him in the past tense, mum,” he said, failing to dry his hands on a sodden threadbare tea towel. “He isn’t dead, or gone, or lost to this world and others before it.” He filled the kettle and turned it on. Yet more boiling water. He tired of the sound, the bubbles, the taste and proceeded regardless. Was he too defective? He had heard tell of the genetics of these matters, the defectiveness and ugliness, the uncompromising and inevitable power of heredity. Condemned to his paltry lot, so to speak. The selfish bastards. “He’s upstairs.”

“Upstairs, downstairs, gone, otherwise,” she said. She was crafting a cigarette little thicker than a cocktail stick, a hair’s thread of tobacco drawn tightly through its middle. “Matters not.” She lit it and sucked on it greedily, swamped as it was within her thick wet lips, its empty end saturated and inconsequential between them, paper severed by the sheer weight of flesh. “Fact remains.” She finished it off, the minute strand of combustible plant racing like a fuse to the bomb of her skull. “Retarded.”

He sorted the tea out, milky and weak and very sweet.

“You married him mum,” he said. A boy himself these affairs of the heart were of great interest to him. They defied science as he understood it and succeeded in so doing. “Why would you do that? If he is so… defective?” It felt less true – which he knew it to be – if he whispered the last word.

“His dick,” she said, holding each hand some two feet distant from the other. “Huge.” He squinted in repugnance and wished himself absent. “Now come and kiss your mother.”

He did as asked, obedient boy, those fleshy lips on his like hands round a throat.

“Tell me you love me,” she said.

“I do.”

“Tell me then.”

“‘I love you.’”

“Good boy.”

her predominant odour

Her predominant odour amongst the many was of bacon grease, off-putting at first but soon rich and complex and wonderful, to the very roots of her hair. I would crisp her up and then consume her ravenously, move her stench around my mouth with every gulp. When I walked past a certain type of café I would pause and double take, expecting to see her inviting me into shadows and doorways, but it was only the smell of the cooking food. “Cook me!” she’d command, among the more passionate times in which we found ourselves engaged. “Press me down in the pan! Flip me over and do it again! Mop the juice off with kitchen towel! Plate me up!” Yes! I’d reply, and mean it. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Slathered in butter, condiments, garnishes, even, I’d take it all in, right down to the oily residue beneath the roots of her breasts and on her pink palms and at the backs of her ears and to the last vagina, left tantalizingly prepped like a handful of decent rashers waiting for the grill before my hungry eyes.