the evolutionary necessity of the avoidance of I

Strange hearing the youths on the bus talk, in aggressive slurs, profane declarations, and how little has changed since my own youth – now, what, more than 20 years since I was their age. “Right here, right now,” they said, emptily alluding to fisticuffs, the same pointless phrasing that echoed around the school corridors in rural Sussex c. 1995. They’ll learn, I suppose, with time, that their considered oafishness betrays a fearsome ignorance. At least some will, the stick thin wimps who promise violent retribution in their enormous trainers whole handfuls of sizes too large who couldn’t even possibly hurt themselves, the enormous, brutish klutzes aged 16 but looking 30, thickly stubbled, frighteningly muscular, voices so deep they sound like transplants from some other, more primitive species. There were always those anomalous kids at school, the boys dumped prematurely in men’s bodies. I remember being taunted cruelly by other children for failing to shave off my first wispy moustache in the requisite timeframe, its very presence a point of offense, an affront both to youth and our future adulthood, and not even realizing that such interventions would be necessary. Such acts were the acts of men, which I surely wasn’t. It took a decade, more even, of being referred to as a man by children, in shops or other public spaces, for me to realize they were talking about me. When I refer to my daughter it sounds like I’m joking, the shapes of the words alien to my tongue and lips and the interaction between them, the awkward tones of my voice hijacked by inexplicable artifice for no doubt nefarious ends. Vomiting on a coach once, at the end of sixth form, some black tie monstrosity of shuffling to dated beats, hopelessly drunk, the lads in the seats around me chanted the names of high-cholesterol foodstuffs in an attempt to further my discomfort, “bacon sandwich”, “fried egg”, “Kentucky”, each barked out like celebrants as I swooned in the discomfort of a prolonged period of retroperistalsis, the patter of the expelled content providing a dim white noise to the disgusted vehicle. I remember two slobs punching each other’s faces as they crossed the stepping stones on the ornamental lawn beneath the staff quarters. Even during sixth form I spent free periods friendless, alone, reading in the same chair of the public library, comic fantasy, dystopian sci-fi, the existentialists, buying mugs of filter coffee, yum yum’s, greasy pastry stuff from the bakery. There was a single bus back to my village one day a week. I waited for it beneath the clock tower with a pocket full of coins, hoping that the compressed-faced girl – herself with certain traits of dwarfism, though a gentle soul – who resembled an unspecified creature of non-human origin and who I had loved for some months would ride the same bus to her own village, and we could awkwardly converse in fragments that I would hungrily dissect for days afterwards for measly scraps of onanistic fodder. I would be horrified to hear of her sexual conduct, mainly because of the continued non-existence of my own. At some point I became consciously aware of the fact that I was practicing conversation with a girl in a head brace with whom I shared a desk during a modern language class. The eloquence and fluidity with which we spoke was profoundly absent from any other interaction I made, particularly with females. At the instigation of my sobbing acquaintances, who had blackmailed me into action one lunchtime in a particularly unjust way, I asked one heavy beauty if she would go out with me, whatever that was supposed to mean, aflame with the absolute shame of unrequited desire, and God only knows what I might possibly have done with her assent, and felt immense relief when she flatly, coldly told me no, that she had a boyfriend, which of course I didn’t believe and to this day don’t, though felt relief regardless, and she looked unsure of whether to laugh or to completely strip me of dignity, and I could hear my acquaintances behind me stifling great ripped snorts of mirth like crudely torn material. Even the fluorescent green boomerang I had received as a gift from an ‘uncle’, a depressed Jewish homosexual friend of my parents from deep in their pasts, they had no contemporary friends, even the boomerang wouldn’t come back to me, would defy its very nature, its essence, only to avoid me, as though the brute fundament of things, whatever slight reason they might have for being, would be replaced by the evolutionary necessity of the avoidance of I – snubbed by even games for one, too alone for even loneliness! I used to get terrible headaches when I spoke at length to anyone, would get home feeling spent and abused, a single eye watering, paralyzed by inadequacy. I would lay on my bed and listen to the creak of the tubular metal frame. Didn’t have a decent mattress until adulthood. Are such facts tantamount to abuse? I recall one lad, as popular as he was retarded, a disruptive presence, pierced ear, hair flayed into a sheer step of medieval absurdity, a small and rude little devil who inexplicably charmed our peers with a complete absence of decency, brawling ineffectually in heavily branded clothing, resigned to and prepared for and even looking forward to his certain adulthood of low-level manufacturing operative on one of the many industrial estates in the surrounding villages, whose whispered promises of small brown wage envelopes stuffed with dirty tenners proved too alluring for the short sighted idiots who formed the majority of their male population, hungry only for pints in the local and footie in the local and a chance to empty one’s seed out on occasion in bursts of brief lust that edged toward desecration, his brand of cruel humour and disproportional aggression and access to his mother’s bulk packets of Rothman’s proved a desirous cocktails for many of the teen girls who shared our classrooms. I felt a great sense of mourning on discovering the loss of his virginity some time around our thirteenth birthdays, to a leathery-looking local girl two years his senior with a tremendous body, and who he had humped in the play tunnels in the recreation ground and elsewhere. Enshrouded in awful clothing that alluded to a drug culture of which I had no knowledge whatsoever, grasping at off-the-peg identities in the increasingly frenzied hope that one might stick, I could not understand how such wanton anti-intellectualism could be greeted with anything but derision, least of all the firsthand genital experiences of a fully sexual nature that he described in purely animalistic terms while we and others waited for lessons to commence. He could scarcely conceal the sum of his pleasure, and reasonably so – the rest of us sexless nerds wouldn’t have known where to slip our parts, even with explicit invitation. I remember him scaling the wall bars in the smaller of the two gymnasiums and seeing two enormously distended testicles bobbing under the ballooning fabric of his sports shorts, adjoining a standard sized if shockingly hirsute penile assembly, testicles so distended that I wondered if they were not, in fact, the product of some ague or disease, or else if it was they and they alone that proved so anatomically irresistible to the two-years-older local girls that it was all they could do to immediately copulate with him on or around children’s play equipment, the measure of a man or boy operating in direct correlation to the longitudinal circumference of his sexual hemispheres. He had pleaded once for me to punch him in the face, to rile me into passion amidst the vandalized science benches, but despite longing to do so, to accept his offer wholeheartedly and to pound his vacant crest, the shit, I felt a temporary paralysis, a limbic stasis, and much to his scornful amusement began to visibly tremor. Such tremors have proven a common point of ridicule throughout my life, no more so than during the infrequent games of Subbuteo I would play with my father as a younger, purportedly more carefree minor, where my fingers would lock into rictus as my hand crouched lamely in the flicking position at the edge of the eighteen yard box, so beset by performance anxiety as to be incapable of facilitating more than the barest of contact and of course total my total failure – the same performance anxiety that sees me staring into dry urinals for sometimes minutes, unable to urinate for as long as the sound of the tap or conversation or even the silent presence of another male behind me in the confines of a public convenience continues. From where did this self-consciousness materialize? Certainly fat, in hand-me-down denims, the very cheapest of trainers, plus sized t-shirts, I relished the posturing of over-staged photo ops: boy holding his favourite VHS tape; boy wearing a fancy dress cowboy hat and holding a Count Duckula cuddly toy; boy doing a thumbs up in front of White Hart Lane; boy wearing a toweling head band and blowing a whistle; boy smothered in impetigo and modelling a homemade Snowman hat; boy in a Campri jacket under a tree in Greenwich park with the part-completed Canary Wharf development a building site across the river in the distance; the photos – long before digital, before every event no matter how trivial warranted twenty or more identical snaps that one will absolutely fail to choose between – all overexposed or underexposed or blurred or spoiled by fingers, or else overly, agonizingly, minutely planned, to instill as much possible value and context and merit in such limited opportunities for permanence as was feasible to do, or else without viewfinders, without the capacity for immediate self-editing or aesthetic selectivity or filtering that contemporary life demands, finding only vast catalogues of photographs of absolutely nothing: walls, aerial wires, unrecognisable landscapes consumed by their own ill-framed scale. Photography once existed alongside life, occasionally even captured it; now life exists alongside photography, forms one part of the narrative of ourselves that daily we present to ourselves for the approval of the strangers of our pasts. Early experience as a subject saw me relish the gaze, despite my numerous physical deficits. Now I sweat during routine conversation, my glasses steam up with it; I look for routes to liberty and encourage sweating all the more through the terrible exertion of fantasy. I wait for a break of eye contact so I can mop my face with any available fabric, shirt cuff, shirt flap, paper towel. I have a shirt in a shade identical to the kind of standard green paper towel that is synonymous with the workplace. It had not been a conscious decision to purchase a shirt in this shade, and in fact had I been aware of the similarity I think it is fair to say that I wouldn’t have purchased it. Unfortunately it was only whilst drying my hands with one of the standard green paper towels in the workplace toilet and in fact seeing myself do so in the mirror of that toilet that I made the connection, chastised myself, ridiculed myself even, said aloud “why are you dressed as a paper towel?”, a humorous question to which I responded with laughter whilst at once sweating with the embarrassment of the ridicule I imagined encountering when my colleagues made that same connection. I find the ridicule that has not yet happened but that one can imagine might to be the worst of all. Such is the agony of hyperhidrosis, the sodden fool wearing ever more layers of garment to disguise the fact of his sweating that is exacerbated exponentially by his wearing of ever more layers of garment to disguise the fact of his sweating. I form complex patterns of pictorial damp across cotton, a simple diagram of the female reproductive system drawn by the particular curves of my belly and pectorals and the pooled sweat around them every time I cycle beyond a certain velocity. The first girl I fingered was done briskly by an old sink in a friend’s basement at a NYE party; I methodically jabbed in a couple of feeble digits without a clue of what to expect, arrhythmic plunges as though scolding a child, draped around her motionless body like a grotesque scaffold. The nervous sickness I felt was incredible – I feel the same sensation each time the telephone sounds. When on a settee I lapped her pearl white clitoris and the vertices of her very cunt and watched her thick thighs tremble with the almost pain of my heavy handed technique, which has scarcely improved, it was as though I had taken my absence from the functions of reality, could barely focus on the lusty gestures, on the damp earthen flesh both anchor and destroyer of worlds, an anticlimactic replicant of the two dimensional erotic idolatry that had been my formative education in matters such as these, a replicant complicated by consciousness and agency and anxieties her own. Even during the act itself, even in the midst of that scalloped miasma, that non-verbal conversation of working tongues, of flecks and slurps and shifting weights and secretions dried and treasured in nail beds, I found myself considering other, more interesting acts, bored by reality even as it happened to me and in thrall instead to pure theory. This is a fact of some pertinence to my adult life and something to which I have devoted quite considerable thought, is indeed, perhaps, the fact, which is to say that all facets of lived experience, even those that would appear the most engaging, are in fact the hopelessly tedious subjugates of the topography of the imagination. And so even during the act, the foremost of its ilk in my meagre pickings of experience, I agonized over how it might be improved, even during it, I drifted, the expectation being for more, for some devastation of the flesh, not this glub of dissent. All such future acts of love have been so tarnished by apathy, with even fantasy not impervious, ending as it does in remorse or apology expertly choreographed. I long in principal for the having of sex, long to feel myself consumed within the vagina’s machinations, but feel bereft at the anatomical limits with which such consumption is cursed. Could any one cunt consume me as I need to be consumed, away, off and away from the desire for it? I need to spill my sauce like any other but such needs are mechanical and can occur with or without investment. I do not fear investment but do fear results. Now I’ll be bored before I’ve even managed to visualize how they might look naked. I pique my interest with anomalies, the wistful older lady basted in regret; the slightly fat; the oddly simian; the apparently cruel; the single mothers who have not been penetrated or otherwise attended to in years; the grossly remedial – perchance dormant violence awaits ignition behind the many veils of disappointment that comprise their minor arsenal against this world or others. They may unfurl for me a brilliant bright future of erogenous structures so fulfilled that the brains firing is diverted into downright formlessness, untethered from the trifles of skin and bone, the scraps of self at the mercy, only, of exploding nerve endings and hot staggering union. But they, like all alike, leave me vacant, jettisoned on great black wretched oceans of woe. Of course, my self-consciousness would extend to my genitals on occasion. Whispered observations, spoken as the sun rose upon my narcotic failure to harden, condolences. “No, it’s a nice size”. Such addenda to her pudenda – it was like rubbing two raw steaks together. I had lunged for her in a Brixton establishment of the night, not through any real or desperate sense of attraction but as some demonstrative point to myself, to know I could. We kissed like idiots with uncontrollable mouths. Minutes earlier I had been asleep across three chairs. I awoke wanting to be for an instant a forger of destiny and for a terrific moment as I gripped her cheeks the certainty of our coupling as a module of that night became clear, those rare instances of inevitability when the outcome of any one act is set but prior to both its happening and its having happened. There can be little sexier than the knowledge of certain sex; while working for it renders one exhausted at the whims of evolution, and having it is akin to the mockery of reality (this is it?); knowing it to be of imminent discharge is a pinnacle, indeed. As it was, before we had even boarded the night bus with friends I was bored. By the time we were welcomed by my mattress, that derisive jury, knowledge had swerved into experience; I fought for erectile stability throughout the night hours to hopeless effect. When eventually through the concerted efforts of the two of us we succeeded in eking me into her reticent fundament the associated frictions bore grotesque results of singular gloom. Did I feign orgasm? I do not recall, though have on occasion, as a means of drawing the expectation prevalent in such interludes to a close. Although please do not misunderstand me – the traits of my mean performance are typically characterized by an immeasurably swift plunge-to-completion ratio. I spent an entire sexual relationship spanning a period of some three months deliberately failing to germinate, as I made committed inroads into the cavity of a dear friend without the protective coating of a prophylactic, a luxury I had scarcely been able to afford at the time as now. She urged me categorically during the sessions to not, a pressure sufficient to have my mind wander to personal administrative tasks or other issues of the day, even as I charted the terrain and bore samples of its fruits, and I went about it with the standard cues until after a time my key indicator would wilt and emerge shyly from the shadows and permit us rest. During the entirety of our recurring tryst there was a single application in which spillage was permitted, for we had gathered a single sheath through undiscussed means, and we set about our duties as though under some unspecified menace in the attic room in her father’s premises. Whilst fearing a discharge of lightning productivity, after many weeks of conscious incompletion, I attended in slow stabs, clenching of the anal sphincter and tested distraction techniques, in an attempt to prolong the inevitable remorse and clean up, and in the room the daylight had been stark; minutes in, no more, we heard tyres through gravel from the open Velux, her father, she said, shit, she said, and then come on, quickly, come on, she shouted this, and began almost standing from the bed while still entangled, and I committed myself with increased almost psychopathic erraticism until fractious delivery offered scant relief to all. I believe the only real fight to which I ever bore witness during the pedagogical years, that exceeded the comparatively workaday shoving and grunts and possibly headlocks – I myself cherished the headlock, an assaultive ritual as close to stopping time as was possible to achieve in the viscous testosterone that was the encircled brawlspace, a dance, broaching tenderness and violence both in some sublime synchrony – took place, perfectly, in one of several changing room facilities on site, this wine adjoining the smaller gymnasium which had been superseded some years earlier by the larger gymnasium, and both of which doubled as exam rooms at the relevant times of year. It was a semi-organized encounter, as such encounters tended to be, preceded by weeks of threatened retribution for unspecified acts, until a date was set as though the encounter was a wedding or pleasure cruise and not the premeditated pasting it was in fact to be. I found the need for structured planning amongst the rogues and swine who partook in this public brutality to be a curiosity, directly at odds with all other aspects of their lives as were apparent, and with the spontaneous impulsivity that, at least as I reckoned, facilitated fury enough to bear fists and, by extension, generate pain. Which is to say, I would find it close to impossible to stoke and sustain sufficient ire to then clash with any efficacy at a set future point, and I believe the ability of those who can, who can nurture violent hatred like a secret infant and deploy it at will, to be amongst the hallmarks of the utter sociopath. When the moment came my ears rang with anticipation as the years largest boy swaggered through the peg racks and socked a puny herbert who professed to fearsome fighting skills a good handful of times on the forehead and cheeks and skull. He attempted lamely to block the batter and slipped to his knees like a dropped glass, but the arms were whirling with incredible speed and the noise of the contact was dull and hard. To his credit the victor, one of those anomalous brutes who excelled at sport, academics and punch ups, appeared to take little pleasure in the performance, and mumbled words to the effect of “don’t do it again”, though none of us present and I suspected he too had any idea of what it is that he was reported to have done in the first place. I remember being shocked at the speed of life on display, incomprehensible speed. It would be forgotten by the end of volleyball regardless. Those extraordinary days of sanctioned violence that over years equate to a youth, the endless transgressions relished without consequence – let us sin, sin, sin, sin in the lawlessness of our own childhoods, immune to the regulation of our elders, the gravity of our acts ever disproportionate to the weakness of their penalties – as law permits children beaten at the whim of the father so it permits them beaten at the whims of the peer. In a world without rights, all is permitted. Violence is a language all its own. I watched a merciless deviant throw his rucksack at the running feet of a fat epileptic, who fell hard and went into seizure where he lay, tongue lolling and eyes white in the skeletal leaves and drifts of gathered buddleia seed, an act of singular cruelty met with cheers and laughter and not so much as a lunchtime detention. Throughout the decade specific learning difficulties remained incongruities to be ridiculed, sniggering as an increasingly panicked dyslexic in the lab stool next to mine failed to transcribe a chemistry dictation, his primitive written English quickly descending to unrelated letters and then symbols and eventually just lines, pure nonsense, as the passage continued, the teachers face a heavy slice of sadistic mirth as he observed and relished so complete a miscarriage of effort. When the same boy was reluctantly issued a note taker some years into his schooling, a rake thin waif in Dr. Martens and neohippy garments hardly older than we were ourselves, we flirted with her desperately, terribly, tried to will her tiny breasts to freedom, to the freedom of my trembling hands, rendered weak-kneed by the lines of her body, the seams of her jeans in perfect convergence at the event horizon of her intergluteal declivity, at the fact that she was in the school but not of it, and we fought like apes to convey a notional sophistication entirely impossible in an obese teenage boy wearing a school polo shirt. I used to fantasize about girls in school uniform when I pleasured myself in the bathtub with the shower head trained upon me, rich spunk pooled in my navel, but I was then at school myself and so did not consider it a perversion or anything like it, a failure of imagination if anything. When I see the uniformed girls today, on buses, in streets, gathered outside the usual clothiers, smearing thumbs across smartphone screens, I’m taken aback by the critical mass of my own age, as ancient to them as obsolete technology, too old for even their pack mockery, faded into the same anonymity as the upholstered bus seats, someone else’s old problem, someone else’s father. Perceptions adjust, they develop – beauty found once in the pristine and the unspoiled is found instead now in the weathered, the experienced, the pocks and scars of a subtly painful life. Attractive, conceivably, in the abstract, though desire will peak exponentially as hope is broken, as opportunities contract. Nullified possibilities – preempt dissatisfaction. Lust will wait to pounce when nil better is expected. Some dreadful friendless bloke-height tomboy with a hold all and tailored slacks in the year above slurred at me past great sheets of teeth, “you have big red ears”, as though with such austere anatomical descriptors we had reached the limits of playground goading, metaphor or literary styling or deeper insight instead superseded by stark declarations of observable fact (harsh but fairer, in its way, quantitatively unobjectionable reflections of experience that positioned all on some egalitarian continuum of physical asymmetry), a stretched and murderous wretch from the outskirts of my village, an archetypal bad seed, smudged with a dermis of freckles and a corvid bellow and incredibly straight ginger hair and – such delicious irony – two slapped cheeks of raw rosacea that oozed past the freckles like something molten or alive beneath the crust of her foul face. There was nothing to do but concur – the pair of facts abutted from my head like waymarkers leading on to some inbred backwater. I’d be pushed to call it a life. I emerged from the waters aged eighteen. I performed cunnilingus on the hills above Steyning in the moonlight. I fingered a girl on the floor of the airport and walked miles home. When would the respite come? These adolescent dramas, playing out throughout forever – they, like us all, will come to realize that nothing matters, nothing at all, and certainly not they, nor theirs, the hard facts of life, nothing. The waters would bear us all.

I would like secretly to fuck you

I

guy’s a real hoot –

saying when he used to visit his girl back

when she was a student

and when he used to visit his girl

in the village he’d

back in the village he’d

always take something “for kitchen” –

seeing as how he was working and that

moneybags in admin

or in mags, the displaying of

smiths, junior retailer, just smiths

uniform, dim grin, name badge

great white silence

though regrettably not

steering cagefuls of spent

publications, scores of kgs of them!,

glossy slabs for pulping

and steering nil more –

and he’d take bread and butter!

thought he was going to say beer or wine

bread and butter

party king

  II

what a contentsless penis

saviour of the office

I don’t think

and won’t too

“prepare yourself, the wife: initiating phase 2”

he embraced the counsellor

in a slithering manner

a fattish guy playing his own

thickness for touch

beige as a washed potato.

Of all the sex lives of the all

the colleagues his is the one

I would least like to visualise

a peeled Maris piper soused in talcum

and yet there he was

arms at side, legs just apart

hips thrust forward

a gesture of –

we hope –

subconscious lewdness

a step away from demonstrating

his mediocre techniques

III

shudder then vomit at the thought of the micro-appendage secreted beneath white folds

IV

likes to parade his wife

like a farmer at market

this is the wife

this is the nameless appendage

long-nurtured specks of hair urged

to surface

to take an edge off his

large pale face but

in fact drawing ever more attention

to its forgettability

he’s Mrs-Brown’s-Boys-and-a-can-of-Heinz

or some such similar monstrosity

Lemon-and-a-Lucozade

McIntyre-and-a-supermarket-pie

Flanagan-and-a-couple-of-cheese-rolls

Manford-and-a-Rustlers-rib-sandwich

the little tongue

the little lips

the little tin of balm

the Carmax

in the watch pocket of his jeans

for quick access

the tongue itself a nub of sorts

a taut pointed thing

tough as a bicep

lips as greasy as a pair of eels

the ungrateful prick

I imagine underpants

milk white flesh

soft jazzy tunes

the stench of flatulence

French kissing like it’s 1975

  V

last night I dreamt I was being driven by a

homosexual to a dairy farm on the edge

of Norwich, near Whitlingham, up a

small lane called Dairy Farm Lane

a steep winding hill that looked

down upon the dead industry

and railway sidings that flank the Wensum

an old Norfolk bloke was gathering small dogs there

Yorkshire terriers perhaps

and slitting their throats and

tossing their unskinned corpses into an enormous pizza pie

saying “come on baby, before someone puts you in a pizza”

even though he was putting them in a pizza

 

VI

I could imagine him in a threesome

with two blokes only

only blokes

a pair of them

a pair of blokes

plus one makes a gaggle

of hard ons twitching

like dowsing rods

scratching each other’s monkey nuts

playing MOR rock classics

wanking onto dart boards or whatever

no wrong in blokes

ask the other

“s’anyone interested in

unusual cloud formations?”

he’d say

and we in silence just “no”

I was talking to him and

he suddenly turned away

and thrust his window open

and was darting his head around

like a sparrow

trying to see the clouds

saying “it’s coming this way it’s coming this way!”

as though nuclear war were in action

conversation a distant second to

unusual weather conditions in this office

explaining to any’ll hear

how wind is the one type of weather

he doesn’t like

“immense potential for damage”

horror, disgust

“plus noisy”

got a good seeing to at the weekend gone

from a 40 year old man

the 60 plus old boy coming this weekend

putting the ‘anal’ in Canal Street

without a single criteria in place

look like him and he’ll hit it

fixated on the nice guy Hugh Jackman maybe is

kind of guy you could have a beer with

and a laugh with

how’s he know these things?

Mrs “Mother-of-Hugh” Jackman

Norwich truly has it all

they should cup each other’s balls

the pair of them

cheer themselves up further

  VII

he and I rode a train

this is a dream

he and I rode a train

to a station in the SE of London

something like Lewisham

or New Cross but different to both

where we then attended –

do recall

this is still a dream –

a Sainsbury’s car park

air heady with the orange of the signage

to be briefed by some rep

on some vacancy that we neither of

us wanted but would apply for still

and learnt very little

the vacancy reference code perhaps

and so hurried to the station

for the last train home

and as we did a bearded male emerged

from a hedge

carrying a car wing mirror

breathing heavily in great stereotypes

and I ran on ahead towards the platform

and the man was trying to convince him

this real fucking hoot

bread and fucking but-the-fuck-ter

convince him I’d abandoned him

in the night

he appeared frightened

though by then I had checked the timetable

and returned and he was visibly relieved

his wan skin aglow with sweat

and I was struck by a feeling of

imminent violence waiting

and to my surprise

he pulled an empty pint glass –

ostensibly to glass this bearded stranger –

but was so pitifully weak that the glass

remained in tact

until I took it from him and smashed

the bearded man in his

bearded face and we descended

to the platform

(earlier in the dream

I’d been running

through unfamiliar

Norwich streets

allusion to reality

without trousers

and also without

knickers but

with the rest

of my clothes

and I’d draped

a hand towel

around the area

as I ran

and it was dark

and two yobs

on bmx bicycles

tried to swat

the towel away

to unearth my little cock

and I bought

some boxer shorts

in Sainsbury’s

tearfully

but had to pay

for them before

I could wear them

served by a tattooed lady)

VIII

revolution fuelled by nothing but sugar and uncontrollable rage

IX

you and your Basque separatists!

great to get off with

could never resist a Basque separatist!

draw the faces of crushes

upon their white hoods

I must imagine your presence

behind my wall of monitors

by your mouse clicks alone

you know you’re irreplaceable

I might have said

not funtime cannonball donuts are all good

which I did for sure

in a moment of wild indulgence

I bought two custard slices

and a pack of raspberries

on my way to work

I’m powerless against myself you know

these messages are not morally dubious

the lips of the boy

and the flute of the boy are haunting

fucking brain rotting on its stalk

what’s her name – Barbara – is unbearable

bucking around with squeaked laughter

at shitty innuendos

when I see

what’ her name – Janet – I imagine her praying

sobbing too

holy yep

tall one loitering like the shadow

of a monolith

smirking at his own trivialities

making the same joke every time

he gets an unbranded biscuit

X

this could be my future

mapped out in the intricate vein

and blood vessel networks

of the human penis!

f’it’s any consolation she

makes no sense whatsoever

like listening to a malfunctioning turntable

every time she opens her lips

a barrage of misinformation

while she stuffs a sandwich into her gob

and nods like a dashboard ornament

hiding it behind her hand as though

she’s going to finish

her mouthful before speaking

but then stuffing another one in

my face hurts from grinning

by the time she’s done with me

throat hoarse with artificial mirth

I like the idea of you being

designed for potatoes

the western working week is so

arbitrary and outdated

and crushes the joy out

I only don’t want to drift until one day I realise

that I’m old and will die

XI

it’s a terrible paradox of life –

terrified of change but yearning for it constantly

is this an existential crisis caused by

creating like gods new life

I feel somehow bereft

and this job unsustainable

can barely sit through it

and it

– life or whatever –

must amount to greater than this

 

XII

this is true

XIII

Manchester

& song have become a drychiineb - and it's angau

Lock Concert, you must answer

With song to one of foes

Sound not hate advanced noise

XIV

I remember it was a Valentine’s day

or around there

when I must have been, like,

10, a girl called

so what, it was 1991

1992, something then

those weren’t the days

called Rachel Dorrington

a girl

red hair and face

had her father bring her to my house

bright blue Bedford and

matching Levi’s

the other half to our other half

brought her round so

she could give me a card

a lame teddy bear

of course I found the whole thing

awkward and of course I longed

to cry during the exchange on the doorstep

(I didn’t even invite her in!

so thick!

we were 10!)

and in unspoken revenge

a year or so later she and

a friend were grilling me

on risqué topics of the flesh

in the classroom

trying to humiliate me or

have me demonstrate my inexperience

or whatever

and she asked me

“you know what horny means?”

(this at a time when youths used the term to mean ‘attractive’)

and instead of saying that I blurted

“desperate to fuck”

and they laughed at me for ages

even though I was right

XV

I was with Maya at dusk

in half-empty shopping streets

something like Woolwich

we were kicking tin cans around

and waiting for a cohort of acquaintances

it felt like a Sunday

and was grey and slightly sad

in the way that British

shopping streets are in the dusky hours

we went into a pub for a drink and crisps

and sat to wait on high stools

along a bar by the window

after a time passed I saw a huge lion –

near elephant sized –

in the street outside

staring at the window

furiously

as though it may charge at any moment

at first we and the other punters

were captivated, awestruck, thrilled

or whatever,

then I started to panic

and tried to lift Maya away

to run or hide

but nothing seemed to work and we could

only slump to the floor

and cower under the bar

as the lion began to run at the window

and shattered glass fell

and I answered my phone

and it was my friend Conrad asking

“where are you where are you”

and I could only say lion repeatedly

its teeth sank in

and I don’t know what happened to Maya

(After some indeterminable period I was

with a former nemesis

[a Portuguese called Simao

from whom I had seduced a Russian girl

in 2003

{she would become my girlfriend for a time}

and who then seduced her back from me

a year later

in 2004

{she would become his girlfriend for a time}]

in the same pub for inexplicable reasons

when I was fired for gross incompetence

of an unspecified nature

then beaten up badly by the director

who punched my face and kicked my ribs

and stomach and smashed me up real bad

I managed to punch him once or twice

to call him repugnant and little

but I was left pleading for money because

I had bought a new house and

he was a cruel weasel

I walked with my Portuguese nemesis

out for retribution

but found none

then attended the office –

then a vast commercial enterprise

housed in something like The Shard –

to demand reinstatement

but was instead told to fuck off

by a slick suited marketing type)

XVI

does he really believe in pixies and gnomes?

he is slightly gnome-like himself

but always seems to want to present himself

as some bastion of rationality

not simply a tiny prick in a giant suit

who murders cats and eats their ball.

guy like that has a pliable jaw

I imagine he can dislocate it

like a snake or something

so he can ingest large items of absolute perversion

items greater than his own meagre mass

and just keep adding more and more items into it.

It’d all be:

\white buttocks flecked grimly with hair coarse like flies legs

\angry gestures

\cruel kissing

\debit card payments

\UKIP propaganda

\lynchings

\skipping ropes

\off-kilter penises

\grey socks still on

\cold carpet

\bacon grease

\breadcrumbs scattered over loose pectorals

\trafficked Romanians forced to gnaw his scrotum

\stench of flatus

\UHT milk cartons

\great big suit

\little chair

\withered body

\turkey sandwiches

\orange in his gob

\£5 wine bottle up his arsehole

\writhing about on A3 excel print outs of financial data/budgets

\stabbing convincing fruit effigies of colleagues with old biros

\drinking lambs blood

\slaying virgins

all the above

all of it

the detritus of the senior figure

  XVII

as a kid I used to cut

pictures of eyes out of

the glossies and collect

them in a little book

it was only when I

found them years later

that I realised what a

psychopathic thing that was to do

like something you’d see in

a hard-hitting drama

XVIII

mumbled piss-taking is the very foundation of this office’s limited unity

  XIX

and

/breathy

come here

and I would like secretly to fuck you

the nuclear powered heart

After a miserably long editing period side-lined by myriad other projects and the birth of two children, and after some 18 months of consistent rejection from a broad selection of the nation's literary agents, I've published my novel "The Nuclear Powered Heart" myself.

You can buy a copy in paperback here.

************

The blurb says this:

“The nuclear powered heart will rewrite the history of the world and it will do so in our image. Everything that man has ever learned, or written, or spoken, or thought; the very way the world works, the way we live on it – all will be redundant. All will pale in comparison to the beautiful, blinding light of this wonderful creation. Nuclear power will be our ally, a new deity for a secular age. Where religion has failed we will triumph.”

1944. Parallel to the Manhattan Project, the exhausted war effort demands that KINGDOM develop a bionic heart powered by uranium. The nuclear powered heart. The greatest of all medical constructs, indeed the final medicine, the sheer force of the nuclear material sufficient to eradicate illness and even death itself, a gesture of hope and good will from a government pummelled by war. Despite successful trials the project was shelved and the record erased from history, KINGDOM relegated to the stuff of conspiracy and urban legend, forgotten by all but a few

1999. Britain is a kingdom of fear. Decades of subterfuge and nuclear competition have left deep scars on international relations, and Britain has severed itself from all former allies to rebuild itself in the image of some mighty fantasy imperial past. Prime Minister Avalon Fylde leads the new government that’s resurrecting the nuclear powered heart through shrewd marketing, committed manipulation and violent force. It’s the must-have prosthesis of the coming century.

Only one small band of petty revolutionaries, teenagers, narcofreaks, and seers stands between the heart and the destruction of humanity, certain that the end, some end, must and will always come for all of us.

One fuck of a millennium party.

we's the real

I've written and illustrated a short pamphlet about sin called "we's the real".

It was produced entirely during the lunch breaks of my menial administrative job and is hand-folded, numbered and printed in a very limited run.

It's only available directly from me for just £2 (via Paypal).

reflections and miscellany

When I was 18 my friends and I garnered some local notoriety for destroying a wooden bench in a churchyard for firewood. We were sleeping outside in an old castle (Bramber Castle – just earthworks really, with some chunks of wall and whatnot) without gear. I remember stamping through the seat in Converse and it shattered like an old man’s wrists. Once the bench had burnt, which it did as easily as driftwood as it was incredibly old, we returned to the church and tore a few fence panels out of the earth and burnt them as well. We were wilful atheists and at the time had tried to imbue some deeper meaning or philosophical import upon our acts of vandalism, but in truth it was rebellion only in the most general sense, and we had just wanted to keep warm. We theorised it into significance after the event over swigged port wine, to appease the fragmented guilt we probably felt for our efforts. It was reported in the local press in a way that suggested some kind of cult practices or Satanism at work, but fortunately the baying mob that comprised the fiercely religious local population didn’t find out who’d done it or they’d have no doubt destroyed us, in a way that only the spiritual think it appropriate to do so.

*

Its interesting (though of course isn’t) how the names of many of the UKs butterfly population sound like WW2 radio call signs.

“This is Red Admiral calling Cabbage White, Red Admiral calling Cabbage White. Cabbage White, are you receiving, over. Gatekeeper is down, repeat, Gatekeeper is down. Scotch Argus alone in the field. Squad decimated. Repeat. It’s all over Cabbage White. The whole damn lot of it. I… Cabbage White, if you’re receiving this I… my wife. I… I adore you Cabbage White. Man or no. I…”

“Red Admiral, this is Cabbage White. Could you repeat that sir. Over.”

“It’s… no. Goodbye Cabbage White. It doesn’t matter. It… nothing matters, Cabbage White. Over.”

“Goodbye sir. Over.”

“Goodbye. Over.”

“I’m going to hang up now sir. Over.”

“Fine. Farewell Cabbage White. Over.”

“Farewell sir. Over.”

There's an incredibly middle class comedy sketch in there waiting to deconstruct its own body and regrow into something beautiful.

*

For some reason whenever I speak on the phone I always say something along the lines of “okay, let me just make a note of that”, even if there is nothing to make a note of or it is something I can easily remember without the aid of written notation. I don’t know why. During a conversation just a moment ago I said this exact phrase, and wrote the word “male” on a green post-it note.

*

I strode with Maya ‘pon the south downs, trying to see the shattered and charred remnants of road that had been decimated by the air crash but I couldn’t find the correct angle, while she calmly explained over and over that she was ready for blackberries now. Our hands were stained dark with juice by the end of the walk. The stench of sun baked dog shit will be forever synonymous with that part of Sussex.

Later that night my brother in law – a gentle and good if flimsy hypochondriac – arrived and after some modest pleasantries I listened to him weep for about an hour, blowing his nose in the lavatory and standing outside for “air”. He hadn’t really processed the death of his grandmother nine months earlier, and I felt profoundly awkward sitting with my mother-in-law (who was also crying, about her dead mother, her demented father and a 26 year old friend, “my other daughter”, who first had both legs amputated into stumps and then died soon after as a result of an extremely rare complication from mild heart surgery a few months ago) and trying to smile while my wife comforted her brother and my daughter slept in the next room. I drank US craft beers and waited for the time when I could leave politely.

Once the tears had ceased by around 10pm I held court with increasingly energetic and heavily drunken reminiscences that felt out of place emerging from my mouth but did regardless.

*

Blackberries, like so many things in life, require a certain level of reckless abandon – one has to give oneself over to the fruit completely for even the possibility of reward, however meagre. They are one of the least, if not the least, consistent of the berries. I recall my parents spending hours stripping elderberries to make wine on Sunday afternoons listening to The Smiths, their fingers black and thick, immediately prior to blazing rows that ended in violence. The demijohns lined the walls of our living room like the equipment of psychopaths. The wine never fermented for long; they’d glug it early and raw like devoted alcoholics.

*

You are now entering

Morehamlike

Please drive carefully through the village.

*

I started writing The Nuclear Powered Heart in 2002. I’d seen the words on TV late at night, at a narcotic gathering at a friend’s parents’ house. I don’t think the sound was on or certainly don’t recall it, or the images that accompanied the words The Nuclear Powered Heart. I recall only the word themselves and how very tired I thought immediately that it was the book I would write. We had a gathered a supply of mushrooms from within a sodden field in the pointless Sussex village of Small Dole, famed only for the monkey farm which bred primates for animal testing, often targeted by animal rights activists. The chalky soil at the foot of the Downs was ideal for the mushrooms which thrived among it. My friends and I harvested the field bare, enough psilocybin to see us through the winter months (or at least the next couple of weeks). At an earlier party I had eaten handfuls and hallucinated windows. In my friend’s parents’ house we ended the night wordless at the foot of the television. The specifics blur into the wilderness of that whole half-decade or so. The urging of the television was insistent and convincing. My friends did not see the text as though it were for me alone, which is not to say it wasn’t there.

I was of course a worse writer then than now. The first book was a collection of – I said, quite falsely – thematically linked short stories. In truth there were several stories throughout the collection, relating a basic narrative of a boy and his grandfather, the latter of whom had a nuclear powered heart, the result of some unspecified government conspiracy. At its most fundamental level, the plot was written and so it would remain. Yet despite it being a particularly prolific period of work (some of the stories from these “Wilderness Years” [2001-2006] would go onto feature, in one form or another, in my later collections So Long! Godspeed! So Long! [2013] and Smiling I Blame TV [2014]) the story was haphazard and the writing unconvincing, an awkward mixture of Burroughs and Brautigan that sat uneasily with what I was trying to do (ever in thrall to the Americans it was one of my great struggles as a writer to find the right way to instil a singularly British futility into my work, which would provide it with some of the authenticity otherwise lacking in my earlier efforts, to strip the influences back; interestingly, moving to the famously bleak county of Norfolk helped with this immeasurably). Surreal and trite in all the worst ways – the wonderful thing about Brautigan is precisely how it isn’t – I knew almost instantly that it was for naught. I carried the 150 or so page manuscript around and tried to convince myself it was more than the sum of its parts when in truth it was far less. I intended to return to the Nuclear Powered Heart and left it for years.

When I graduated from Goldsmiths College – three wasted years in which I told people with terminal self-consciousness that I was a writer and that I was working on a novel called The Nuclear Powered Heart and had in fact written almost nothing – I moved from South London to a small studio flat in a converted church in Kilburn with my then girlfriend, now wife. Freed of the intense despair and clashing egos of communal living I began to write the book again, with just an A5 summary of the entire thing as a guide. My wife was living in Cambridge during the week and I wrote a lot, and felt – for really the first time – the great exhilaration of writing just coming, of pages filling, of consuming digression and relishing it, of spiralling tributaries of plot diverging and converging and then re-emerging, bound together and stronger and richer for it.

*

Whenever I utilise the gents lavatory and find Ian stationed at the urinal he uses one arm to brace himself against the tiled wall and kind of doubles over while he performs his ablutions. It seems to take great effort and is, of course, off-putting in extremis.

*

You know me: people person. It’s tattooed up my spine in aggressive font.

*

In a haunting nightmare last night I dreamt I returned to Bertrams which was now housed within a vast tower block and every time I told lewd jokes – which was frequently – a sombre male reprimanded me for it.

*

In fairness to him he was pretty remorseful. It was his fault though, the shit. I remember sending him a message from my hospital bed along the lines of “thanks very much for making it necessary for me to have two operations and making interaction with my four-month-old child next to impossible; our crucial father/daughter bond will be – like my wrist – forever damaged”. He sent an impressively oblivious reply along the lines of “LOL thanks for letting me know mate get well soon mate LOL.”

The night in hospital was a delirious traumatic mess. I was reading a book about Vietnam (the war) and high on liquid morphine and weirdly unable to urinate despite a powerful urge to do so. I had to wear plastic underpants for the surgery (presumably in case I fouled myself while unconscious) that were like a cheap shower cap. How degrading, I though, as I willed myself to urinate in the sink in my room without success. Kelly had a can of coke when I woke up and it was the most wonderful thing to have ever passed my lips, cold and delicious.

*

Every time any poor sap mentions the word “airport” the mug’s putting the call through to me, like some fella in Dubai asking if I can pick him up at Heathrow at 2am. I said DO I LOOK LIKE AN AEROPLANE?

*

What a great way to start a chilly Monday, thinking of a colleagues stools.

*

My office is a spluttering nightmare of slupring honks, like farting drains or sodden fenland. Winter’s coming, etc.

*

During yesterday’s Apprentice (please note: I despise the Apprentice with a passion, but I allow myself one or two mindless TV shows on occasion per season; in the past this was Masterchef – I had a strange obsession with Michel Roux Jr, for one – such a gentle man – and there was one particular series of Celebrity Masterchef which featured one-time staple of UK Saturday night telly and reformed alcoholic Les Dennis, which was like watching a man’s very public complete breakdown and eventual reconstruction – the red faced Les Dennis [who reminds me of my father] grew ever more red faced and wept almost continually and apologised for his failings as a chef, a lover, a HUMAN, for God’s sake. I bought a second hand copy of Les Dennis’s autobiography on the strength of the show and though I haven’t read it yet I imagine it will be desperately illuminating) one of the grotesque simpletons clutched a spring onion and asked: “it this an onion?”

Britain’s brightest ladies and gentlemen. If immigrants were stealing our jobs – as the right wing presses would have the dumb believe and which of course they aren’t – this would be precisely why.

Is this an onion.

A complex philosophical quandary for the postmodern age.

Is this an onion?

*

I had a strange conversation with my father – ostensibly an alcoholic – yesterday, where he told me that he had dreamt that Neil Young was burned alive by Victorians. He looked very tearful as he told me.

remembering insults (3)

Also, at what must have been twelve or thereabouts I yelled "go fuck your nanny!" to an older arsehole named Robin, who lived in a house with his fucking enormous parents and grandmother at the end of the street (a different street to the foreskin scenario).

In fact, many of my interactions with Robin were memorable, the stuff of personal legend.

In homage to the eponymous bird of vibrant plumage, and noting Robin's leanings towards the fat end of average, I commonly referred to him as Robin Big Breasts, although likely only did so in my imagination. He was close friends with a leather-lipped fucker whose name I have thankfully forgotten, a cruel little tanned weasel with an undercut and a bomber jacket.

remembering insults (2)

The best insult I ever gave was "go suck your foreskin!"

I shouted it to a twat from across the road.

I was seven years old.

remembering insults

There was this one kid, year older than me, I called Bother Cheeks, shouted victoriously across the playground, myself a fat swine in school-crested sweatshirt, polo shirt, simple shoes, the works. It was a comprehensive animosity borne of nothing verifiable. His horde of mindless friends were each as bad as he, though none were that bad. We were just kids finding our way I suppose. One of them looked slightly like a gryphon, which is what we named him, another looked like a human foetus at 7-8 weeks, slightly (mythic) reptilian. “Foetus,” I honked from behind a copse, “go to your womb.” It was a tremendously proud moment for me. After weeks of limp insults Bother Cheeks got me in a headlock and I had an asthma attack, over within minutes.

the lady

He linked his fingers and nestled his hand behind his head and felt the exquisite relief of accomplished defecation and through the slit windows above him the sky was fiercely blue. His kimono was open and its halves hung on either side of his legs like the trampled flags of an occupied nation. His paper white skin was rough on the flanks for it dried out terribly in the cold, and was pocked with what looked like claw marks and resultant hives that rose like landscape from his softening paunch (his kitten displayed a singular cruelty to all in its path and to him more than any; he chased it screaming to the cat flap and yearned while there to lynch it in majestic ritual and to watch its pretty eyes bulge, but could not quite bring himself to cross that line; they both preferred instead this daily minute torture, ever back, ever forth). He had spent almost an hour tending his sanitisations, methodically scrubbing his – in particular – genital and anal areas until the buffed skin felt more utensil than organ, a plastic expanse of functional utility that was at great remove from the conventions of emotive morality against which one might customarily assess these areas and their goings on.

In moments The Lady would knock. It was as he had arranged. A great many months of planning had led to this February afternoon, and he had delivered his careful instructions to The Lady’s employer in the week then passed, with a further smaller set of instructions themselves demanding absolute adherence without exception to the already provided careful instructions. His passion for endless regression being what it was, he could have proceeded with ever-increasing webs of instructional allusion, instructions for instructions for instructions for and so on, were it not for the fact of The Lady’s employer’s insistence that he didn’t. The Lady’s employer was an especially no-nonsense sort of a do-as-I-say-will-you-or-else-(makes-throat-slitting-gesture-with-index-finger)-do-you-understand-me fellow and one to whom he felt almost violently compelled to listen. Though the instructions were far too complex to discuss, their undeviating discharge was assured. The Lady was an experienced professional, it said as much on the accompanying literature.

THE LADY
An experienced professional

For an experienced professional it was safe to assume that the undeviating discharge of even complex instructions was guaranteed. There are too few experienced professionals in this world, he thought to himself whilst shifting one buttock in his seat. Little wonder instructions counted for shit. He relished an ordered universe. He enjoyed taking instruction and he enjoyed providing instruction, and found that the taking and provision of instructions perfectly suited the disparate poles of his personality: he yearned for a life of absolute thoughtlessness, a sacrifice of self to occurrence, amply provided by the taking of instruction; similarly, the dictatorial tendencies that he secretly nurtured like youth and that he found reached their peak within the confines of the bedroom were given generous room to develop in their provision. It was perfect.

There were three firm knocks upon the door, as the instructions had stipulated. He unlinked his fingers and rested his palms flat upon the arms of his chair. He felt an association of emotions that straddled excitement and terror and he felt his minor genital appendage stirring. Though no visible change occurred to the appendage it slumped to one side with the distant building blood like a dropped soft ornament. He felt suddenly ravenous. The disgust he felt for his own body was exemplified in this combination. The dark hair that grew at the small of his back and into the slice of his arse and from there in on-off routes around his thighs and elsewhere was, he thought, foul, queerly monochrome set against the sallow skin, and gave him an appearance somehow of absolute malfunction, but marginally less foul, he thought, than its imagined removal. He would – and did – pay great sums for the enactment of such instructions of his exact design that would liberate him from these thoughts of such despicable self-appraisal. The kitten watched him from the carpet with profound distrust. There were a further three knocks at the door and it took focus not to answer it. He had a number of photographs of his mother framed and hanging on his wall, taken during her youth. She had been a mostly attractive woman with a very tall if shapeless body, though her face was asymmetrical and had the appearance of having been whittled into form from a harsh material, rendered angry by the struggle of a complex build. He had draped lengths of kitchen towel over the photographs as though she were Christ, to shield her from the coming acts. Although she had been dead for almost three years, or perhaps because of it, he would be unable to enjoy himself under her gaze, which in life had been morose even at times of intense jubilation. The front door handle turned and the door was rattled and pushed and he then heard the shifting of small items. The instructions had stated the location of the spare key and when to locate it and implement its use. The door opened and The Lady entered, and in a moment of unexpected reticence he drew the halves of his kimono over his penis, which was venison red at the crown and flopped like a small and hardly-filled sock from the centre of his distended mons.

The Lady was some five foot eight in unbranded trainers, compact and powerful looking and thickly bearded. Neither spoke as The Lady went about the essential duties, placing an Asda bag-for-life onto the small dining table that could comfortably accommodate two people at most. The Lady approached the lamp in the corner of the room and tentatively fingered the light bulb, which was cool enough to the touch, then unscrewed it carefully and replaced it with a bulb of deep green pigmentation. The light it cast was eerie and disorienting but also seductive, like watching post-watershed programmes on a stranger’s television. It was not for The Lady to question why only this one bulb should be replaced, with the room still fringed with the workaday white aura from the left-on lights of the neighbouring rooms so as to provide an almost pointless effect; suffice it to say that it was a stipulation within the preparatory phase of the written instructions that had been memorised in their entirety with brute professionalism. The Lady approached him and stood at a distance of two-and-a-half feet from his chair, a faint pencil guideline still mostly visible on the carpet from an earlier visit.

“Take off your dress please,” he said. The Lady was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and removed both garments. So it had been written, so it would unfurl.

“Take off your knickers please, and bra,” he said. The Lady wore only boxer shorts that were shed accordingly.

“Touch yourself softly,” he said. “Between the legs and similar erogenous locales.” The Lady moved not an inch.

“Make tender love to me please,” he said rather desperately, gripping to the arms of the chair. The Lady frowned quite slightly.

“The instructions stipulate no such love.” The Lady carried a deep and powerful voice.

“Fuck the instructions!” The kimono slipped with the force of his words, the genital beneath it less noticeable than ever.

“The secondary instructions stipulate no such dismissal. To defy the instructions is to negate the instructions.”

“Fuck the secondary instructions too. Please just…”

“This interaction is not within the remit of the instructions provided. My role is to not deviate. The instructions stipulate: ‘prepare Reuben sandwich in green lighting wearing underwear garments drawn from The Lady’s own collection’.”

The Lady returned to the small dining table and began to draw ingredients from the bag for life. The kitchen towel fell from the photographs of his mother, dislodged by movement; he squirmed beneath their contemptuous scrutiny and felt himself flushed and stood to remedy the exposure. “Sit the fuck down,” The Lady said, slicing four three-quarter inch slices of rye bread and throwing a printed copy of the instructions into his revolting lap. He glanced at them. In the event that I should attempt to deviate from the instructions myself, they said clearly, I should be reminded without exception that the world is nauseated by all I am. He lowered himself back into the chair. “The world,” said the Lady, “is nauseated by all you are.” He nodded compliantly for it was very true. The Lady whisked mayonnaise, horseradish, Worcester and Tabasco sauces, sugar and dill into a decent Russian dressing, then slathered it generously onto the prepared rye with pastrami, Gruyere and sliced gherkins and cut the sandwiches in half for eating. They looked tremendous. The two of them ate the sandwiches in silence, the Lady standing behind the kitchen table and chewing methodically, he sitting in his chair and trying not to cry. He adored Reuben’s, especially well made one’s such as this, but they were a poor substitute for the physical companionship of a lost parent. He would have to redraft his instructions. Professional or no, The Lady had only so much to work with. He was confident that The Lady’s employer would not only permit but actively encourage some orthodox sensuality.

After the sandwiches were consumed The Lady washed the plates and other equipment and returned empty packaging and scraps to the bag for life, and dressed and unscrewed the green light bulb and replaced the original as though change was little but fantasy glimpsed in snatches from something incredibly fast moving. Though they still were it was as if The Lady had never been there.

He gestured towards the sideboard, laden with his mother’s crystal ornaments.

“There’s money,” he said. “Please take it and go.”

“You make the arrangements with my employer,” said The Lady. “As before.”

“Yes.”

“See you.”

He rolled up the printed instructions and held the cylinder aloft.

“Now pop that up your pussy and piss off,” he said unconvincingly. The Lady said nothing. “See you next week.”

The Lady nodded and opened the door and left, and he could hear the shifting of small items and the retreat of footsteps and what must be life, he supposed, if you could call it that.

the symbols of non-christmas

The weeks around Christmas were the worst, he had found, the very sludge of life. He purchased several bottles of the cheapest Advocaat and for breakfast took to stirring it with oats and frying it in great panfuls into weird faintly alcoholic cakes which he ate by the plateload swimming in a glaze of melted margarine and uncooked drink. It had been a wet autumn which continued into the winter months, and the fallen leaves in immense flattened piles at the edges of the pavements stuck in slaps to the toes of his shoes like ham on tongues. Some months earlier he had tried his luck with a catholic girl, an attempt he knew to be futile even as it was happening but which he felt powerless to resist, as though some power even higher than his own needs was moving through him as he did so. In fairness he had not known she was a catholic at the time and only gathered this fact later, and immediately regretted - given the catholic perception of adultery - having told her he was married as part of the kind of reverse psychology he had on occasion found would lure women into his bed, and regretted all the more so because he wasn't and indeed never had been. Although they had really only spoken for less than an evening with others also he had taken the loss - if one could call it such, the failure to gain - badly, and in the weeks that followed had tried to assure her that he was in fact not married, that that was the truth, desperately, certainly so, in such a way that gave the opposite all the more credence and elevated his pointlessness to sublime heights. While he did not blame the catholics for his problems per se he also did, her in particular, and when her religious tendencies were clarified through the discreet use of social media (she belonged to several "hip catholic" groups) he was moved to disgust - as though he had been duped in some way, fucked over by Christ (again) - and to an even fiercer level of arousal than he'd originally been, as though she were a conduit with which he could fuck his way into the very heaven in which he categorically did not believe. The fact that he couldn't and indeed wouldn't would soil Christmas, both then and in the future. He yearned to ingest her guilt, her sinfulness, her penance.

The grey sky was embedded and defiant and sneered like a yob at the flat land below and he cursed it, slicing cheddar a centimetre thick from a cheap block with an unsuitable knife and sinking it quick-fast. What happened to white Christmases, snow now superseded by a slew of white goods buried in feet of polystyrene protectors and glistening under halogen like the capitalist festive fantasy. The white that counts is borne of green. He yearned to feel the spirit and crushed a bag of ice in his food processor cocktail fine, which he compressed into solid snowballs between his ungloved palms, but they were so hard they cut the little kid he threw them at in the street outside his house, trying to coax her into the abandon he thought he must have once felt, tore open her cheek and lip and left her bloodied down her face and her dress front in the 12 degree drizzle, the kid's dad swearing at him and spewing threats as he closed the front door behind him, skin of his own fingers split from his grip on the ice. You could report crimes online - it was a feature of the local constabulary website. That's what he'd do, if he was the kid's father. Report it online before you have a chance to calm down, an aggressively recalled fact the most valuable of all. The wonderful thing about the internet is that it wants us to be asocial solipsists - demands it even - and removes the barriers of politeness and etiquette or expectation or emotional subjugation that might otherwise prove problematic in a conventional, functioning, actual community. The catholic had desired him he was sure, he was that kind of person, of appeal to the seriously religious.

He visited his small group of friends, all of whom he despised but saw at least semi-regularly regardless as a break from his own company. They were arranged in a circle – their breaths above them in the darkness like a furnace – in the courtyard garden of their shared terrace property, around a few small but well decorated Christmas trees of some three feet only, the kind of stunted trees they shift at the entrance of supermarkets or from the back of people carriers in the car parks of the grimmer pubs, coins exchanged around e-cigs and house shorts. Each was urinating freely in steaming jets upon the trees and the piss dripped from the branches and the baubles in hot heavy droplets like a grotesque fondue. “Fuckin Christmas,” they were muttering, “fuck you”. He asked them what they were doing and they said they were tired of being nothing so were making symbols of themselves. They all still held their genitals in their fingers as they spoke. He asked symbols of what, exactly, and they said only of non-Christmas. He hadn’t the heart to tell them that replacing nothing with nothing was just nothing, not at this time of year. He left them to it, keen to be gone before they needed to defecate. There was a potent stench of gas in the air from the outlet pipes of combi boilers and the wheelie bins left out back of the houses in the alleyway between streets reeked of rotting foods and chicken carcasses and week old baby shit, decay intensified by the mild weather.

The catholic girl was squat but tender and through recollection alone he tried to will touching her into existence, his hands on and across the legs of her black jeans and her bare ankles, her soft giving flanks and her mainly sound breasts, her part-pocked face and square nose, her golden braid and her Christian ideology. They had embraced on departure, he had stooped to hold her and confront his many errors by way of it, but there had been no further touching. He found memory meant little but as wish fulfilment, truth twisted into hope, the fact of its happening irrelevant – so he thought it to be, so it was, alive by virtue of imagination alone. Her whole mouth looked like it had been painted on to the kiln baked face he clearly remembered holding between his hands though he hadn’t, not the lips alone but the whole ajar structure. They had discussed the flaws of his writing. He found self-deprecation among his greatest assets as a meagre seducer. Though she hadn’t read his work she was quick to offer insight into its failings, took to it impeccably; the painful part was how right she was, just two hours into a one-off conversation, dissecting his entire personality into clearly demarcated issues. You wear your tiny heart on your transparent sleeve, she said ruthlessly, in a way that suggested she liked it. He shrugged in agreement and presumed they were in love. Quite the judge of character. A catholic trait. Guilt and doubt'll do that. He’d seen the cross around her neck but assumed it a fashion accessory. She was mean for Christian and cynical and was cruising for intercourse. Or that might have been him. Was.

The Christmas lights in town made him long to feel warm but not actually feel so and were like golden tears in the murk. The world is a cruel and repugnant place, he said, salivating over electrical goods through well lit windows and imagining using them for their intended purposes, over and over again. He passed a cluster of aged homeless fellows at the fringes of the underpass and considered the season and wanted to dig deep, to somehow appease the entire guilt of the affluent West in one extravagant gesture, but he knew he only had a tenner in his wallet, which was too deep, about two times too deep, he calculated, and besides it was mild. He stuffed his hands in his pockets until his jacket stretched and hastened promptly past. They swore to the tune of "Last Christmas" and he carried it with him for yards.

He took lunch to a bench as he did daily, corned beef, raw onion, cheap mustard, the very worst of food in which he took great relish as though atonement of some sort. As he chewed the food he saw movement at his feet which was some hundred or so live maggots writhing dreadfully upon the crooked paving slabs. Perhaps half of them were red in colour and he immediately blamed the fishermen. Dumb fucks, he thought, carefully lowering his feet onto the maggots that though half-squashed continued to writhe at least parts of their form, stuck to the sole of his shoe. He watched them and felt deep sickness. He dropped the rest of his sandwich amidst them and they turned on it immediately as though it were lush rich death and not the weird muscular composite it in fact was. Their disappointment could be matched only by his own. He could hardly tear his gaze from them. He stamped them frantically until the slab was still with carnage. Dumb fucks, he said again, very loud. He could feel the fishermen encircling him from afar: feet, metres, miles. Dumb fucks.

There was a small group of children gathered in shin-high leaves and squealing with delight in thrall to two apparent leaders, both swollen yobbish types with the faces of their fathers in immense and very expensive trainers of brilliant white that in their obscene excess were like stylised corrective footwear as bloated as the boys themselves – who reeked of Gregg’s and chips and the Rothmans they snuck solo from their mother’s knock-off Louis Vuitton – at the base of their worn school trousers. The two spat compulsively in near-constant sequential flecks that they pushed out with tongues in weird foamy spheres that caught the breeze and spiralled to nought, and smoked incompetently in gushing exhalations that belied their carefully projected experience. Closer to apes than they would ever be again they oversaw the handful of others with a shit unity of high-pitched grunts and odd slaps and with clusters of brilliantly compounded or abbreviated profanity in the accented English that would forever tarnish their futures, condemned to Norfolk and Norfolk alone from the very earliest of ages. As he approached their number they made no effort to move and he no effort to move them, and he walked instead silently into the heavy traffic and the sludgy detritus of the gutterway that he slurped through like spread hands in jelly. There was an injured robin in their midst, dragging itself in circles with one fucked wing, plaintive song it’s only entirely inappropriate protest. He’d assumed them to be playing with milk caps or similar, if children still did that, but they were taking it in turns to stamp upon the injured bird. The yobbish two would have its beak, the trophy, one half each, would wear it on a shoelace like a hallmark of psychopathy. In their accidental symbolism was Christmas destroyed.

In earlier times he had attended his parents place for or around Christmas. They did a three bird roast which he found desperately morose to eat. What I wouldn't give for just a bird, he'd said, with a paper hat drawn low down his forehead. They laughed passionately, assuming it a festive witticism of the kind he had written out as a dull child and not the wretched admission of absolute loneliness it truly was. The myriad poultry jokes of the festive season were as anathema to the isolated: breast, leg, stuffing. He'd mutter the words to himself as he jerked off in the bathroom later, enveloped in the stench of his own three bird shit. Man's gotta do something to keep warm, he'd say when he'd finished, rinsing the tap onto the gathered muck, weeping into his reflection.

At the Cathedral he stood in the cloisters and listened to the readings and the carols through the loudspeakers. There were masses of people gathered around the entrances and into the afternoon like burst blisters, too many to be contained within the cathedral itself, all anxious to experience the real meaning of Christmas and ready to fight for it. One of the antechambers had been given over to the storage of shopping bags; an elderly volunteer issued tickets for money and piled the bags high. He cherished the architecture. He watched a couple wander the labyrinth deep in meditation, grass immersed in the churned mud that coated their shoes thickly. For some moments he envied them and their tranquility but when they reached the centre and embraced and then kissed and he saw the man's hands move to the base of her loose buttocks he knew them to be as he, if happy.

He left to go home and over in the doorway of the closed lobster joint across the road he saw the catholic girl. Perfect, he thought, where else?, though the catholic cathedral was on the other side of town. He felt courageous and exhilarated and as though the world were finally, finally with him. As he approached the doorway he saw within the shadows - the sun already mostly set - some male. He had his arms around the catholic girl and was nuzzling, he supposed, into her neck, as though it were far colder than it was. She was smiling while he did it in a way that alluded to happiness and she angled her face back towards his for a kiss, then turned around and did it further and more elaborately. He was unsure whether she had seen him but assumed she likely had, that this performance was for his benefit, an exemplar of fine lust and of all he hadn't. She was mean for a Christian. The male would probably finger her in the doorway to the lobster joint. That's what he would do. Finger's fine in the eyes of God. That's scripture. Her tan coat rode up as she took to her tiptoes for passion and he saw her jumper beneath, cable knit and pale. It was a very sensual experience. He thought about thigh fucking her in the toilet of a nightclub and his seed shot right up her belly and set off for home.

if walls could talk

“There were great piles of charred food over the pavement. They spread everywhere leaving blots of oil and specks of ash in their place when swept away. The weird contradiction between grease and dryness was testament to an amazing party.”

“I explicitly demanded access to the secret place over supper – she granted it, grudgingly, and farted me out as soon as her requirements were met.”

“We cycled in the near dark beneath the huge circling murder of crows as they came into roost. Must have been a hundred birds or more. The noise was frightening and very loud.”

“Three of them there were, each perfect, all skin, pores, hemispheres. Three of them.”

“I heard they carried his body from the lake and through the middle of campus covered in lost property garments and stored it in a cold room in the registry building for hours before the ambulance or whatever could get through the traffic.”

“She leant over the back of the chair and rested on her thick forearms on the table between us and I watched her teeth specifically while she confirmed our evening arrangements. They were wet with spittle and slightly overlapping in the right places. Later I would recall this happily while we were at it on my pouffe.”

“Yeah, no hands, the fuckin simpleton.”

“Same time every day. Older than I go for – forties, later even – but the jeans sink perfectly where they should. She looks tired, which I like, and glum. I follow her into the trees. Though we don’t speak I know she wants us to. She looks at the book I’m reading when she walks past and I can see she’s impressed. Her wellingtons slurp like sex through the churned soil. I saw her squatted over, pissing a steaming stream with her back to the footpath just a few metres into the foliage while her dog sniffed about. Her wax jacket offers some camouflage. She didn’t see me. Her bare ass, the orange brown leaves, the rain.”

“The guy absolutely stank of oranges, but off ones, rancid. Took your breath away.”

“Can’t remember his name but he had this huge Alsatian. Used to menace the Italian in the ice cream van with it and always got a free 99 and a screwball for the Alsatian. Just had to hear the lead jingle and he was getting his Flakes out, like a Pavlovian thing. A response. Ate ice creams all bloody summer he did, didn’t cost him a penny. What was his name?”

“I find that using the tools of my trade to self-harm is both incredibly cathartic and the most delicious irony, given that it’s my job that gives me all the motivation I need to self-harm in the first place. Staples, paperclips, drawing pins, all in the forearms; those staple removers like fierce mandibles around the fingertips; flogging with 30cm rulers until my flanks are cut. Helix, Staedtler. I’m in admin.“

“I don’t want to drink but I know I will. I turn nasty when I drink.”

the swan upping

The four friends assembled in a rough semi-circle around a laptop to watch a YouTube video of a swan being punched that a sort-of acquaintance had uploaded and was likely to become a sensation. The swan slumped from the shallow water and onto the boardwalk for bread and slightly opened and closed its beak as though this were in some way integral to it. It’s cold tongue curled upwards inside like a dead leaf. Their sort-of acquaintance approached it and decked it without warning. It’s neck snapped sideways and it hissed as it went down. It didn’t attempt to flee or to stand up and just sat where it was, its head at a kind of broken angle at the top of the long neck. “Come on you cunt,” their sort-of acquaintance goaded. The four friends cheered, were clapping each other’s shoulders, thrusting lager cans upwards and to the heavens, uncontrollable with delight at the mindlessness of the act. “Up you get you cunt. Swan cunt.” The swan's eyes were closed though it was unclear if it was dead. The video had already had some eight hundred views and this would only escalate. At its close one of the friends, wild with the excited idiocy of shared experience, leaned in and kissed another because he thought it not only right but also necessary to do so. There was for a moment silence as their lips felt around but it was soon shattered by ridicule and threats and deep disgust. He laughed it off, said I thought you were a bird ha ha, them little hands ha ha, and gradually their reproach became good-humoured and they settled with fresh lagers and played the video again. He felt tremendous confusion like the weight of damp piled earth on his chest. In their minds they were already deleting him from their social networks.

the addictions of today

I am a small man with a huge addiction. The addiction is not in thrall to the ways of the flesh: narcotics, alcohol, coital practice, the like, but an altogether graver and more complex addiction with neither precedent nor approved treatment programme. My addiction is to the authorship of extensive, eloquent, verbose letters of complaint to my local municipal offices. The issues to which I take umbrage are perhaps petty, at first – a fact my wife goes to great lengths to express while she threatens to leave me – but I find without exception that after sufficient words have been authored and sufficient time spent doing so, even the pettiest complaint can take on immeasurable significance and easily escalate into gross violations of the fiercest and most depraved type.

The scale of the addiction is great. By night I creep from my mattress in exaggerated gestures that themselves would be comical were it not for motive (being to work on the letters); after eating my meal rapidly I excuse myself from the dinner table under the muttered pretense of washing the pots and the pans and pen hurried notes and primers on the back of the used envelopes I store for the purpose; throughout the course of my working day I check my personal inbox some ten or maybe twenty times for replies or updates or automated responses, or else to fine tune an already lengthy draft, to add footnotes or addenda or to correct anomalous referencing as circumstance dictates. Like the freshly loved I yearn compulsively for the letters when I am unable to work on them and think of little else, a fixation almost certainly, a fact my wife goes to great lengths to express while she threatens to leave me. As I noted astutely some nine months or more into the Watt Correspondence to one A. Watt (a markedly short-lived correspondent – I have noted throughout the development of my addiction that a given respondent will seldom remain as such for more than one or at most two of the letters or electronic correspondences, I presume because of the departmental structuring within the municipal offices, making the establishment of a relationship of even the most meaningless sort an impossibility; somewhat oddly I find this enticing more than frustrating [a sure indicator of addiction, I would suggest, given my research into the area and into standard responses to same], and indeed commonly relish the opportunity to repeat the particulars of a given complaint from the very beginning – often collating an abundance of source material for the purpose – when several months into it (a repetition that would infuriate the clear majority to homicidal reverie), adopting more and more obtuse and sneering tones while referring extensively to reams of references, photocopied supplements and intertexts): “[…] if you ignore enough of the letters of even the most level-headed complainants you can make almost anyone feel like a madman.”

When – as does happen, if infrequently; any responses are rare, adequate ones all the more so – the letters receive what I would by way of verifiable assessment criteria deem “inadequate response”, with no reference made to the flair of their composition or the exquisiteness of their language, my cravings only worsen, and the desire to write further letters as even greater exemplars of these two very traits becomes an obsession. It is fair to say my functioning is moderately impaired or worse. I am nonetheless a fair man, and pride myself on an aggressive politeness that though loathsome in the spoken conversation would surely be deemed “confident” in prose. I adhere to the timeless adage that “please and thank you and all cost all of you fuck all”, as was summarily taught to me by my mother and her mother also (to wit my mother’s mother). They were careful swearers and did so only in the form of ever-more obscene maxims and similar – which I have no doubt made them (both maxim and blood relative) all the more memorable to the lad of some youth and inexperience I then was (in fact to this day I feel great arousal in the presence of a swearing women over 40) – and as a pair were quick to castigate me should I attempt any use of such words outside of the aphoristic context they had made their stock in trade (they despised: the ‘blue’ comedians, modern literature, cinema, essentially all artistic endeavor, and by the time of their deaths, some coincidental week or so apart when I was in my middle teens, conversations with them were almost impossible to either have or understand, as they drifted from one aphorism to another, each unrelated by either meaning, theme or sense, like conversing with fortune cookies of the lowest price point as their lives whimpered before their eyes, small talk in extremis, the comfort of the mutual repetition of their familiar non-sequiturs guiding them gently to the blessed end where silence would come). In the letters I am, so to speak, sociopathically polite, clenchingly empathic, at once sympathetic to the futility of my correspondents, their roles, their tireless efforts against the bureaucracy of a large office complex, their limitations as employees of the municipal offices and humans alike, whilst being at once clear that irrespective of these accumulated nonsenses they have nonetheless failed in the most fundamental ways. Though acutely aware of the struggles of being a functioning and ostensibly decent human I take care to point out precisely what they have done wrong whilst simultaneously congratulating them for doing it wrong with such singular flair, exhibiting a remarkable skill for sublime failure. By way of illustration the following is excerpted from the Watt Correspondence:

“Dear Officers of the Municipal Offices,

Thank you for ignoring my recent extensive (copies enclosed) highly literate narrative(s) pertaining to alleged parking offenses for a period of many, many months. This narrative has apparently been forwarded to your office’s “Parking Department” for their singular and I presume professionally trained ignoring.

While I have no – of this I can assure you – doubt, none at all, that the individual officers of the individual offices of the municipal offices must be incomprehensibly busy – for how could they not be, ignoring letters and electronic correspondences indiscriminately with the kind of blanket disdain that entirely transcends individual prejudices – and despite the full-time focus such comprehensive dismissal necessitates, it really does represent quite appalling customer service and a blatant disregard of your own supposed charter and/or policies (please do clarify – your online resource appears to use the term interchangeably, a telling error I would posit). Well done!”

On the rare occasions that reply is made with some feeble justification, assuming that with great relief that will be the end of it, I too reply forthwith with an increasing level of bitterness, like a jilted lover who refuses to relinquish the last word of an SMS dialogue to the firm farewell of his wayward ex, the sheer pointlessness of the task mounting with each new composition, the message diluted with every printed paragraph.

The intense pain of withdrawal instilled by the silence from the municipal offices is matched only by the euphoria I feel during the arrangement of the letters, transcending the tedium of one’s everyday concerns, a fact my wife went to great lengths to express while she left me. I wait hungrily for the post, for the white window envelopes they favour and the revealing franking upon their corners. They fall like precious commodities to the soiled mat.

“Dear complainant,

Your complaint has been passed to the relevant department within the municipal offices for investigation. Thank you for taking the time to register your feelings with the municipal offices. Your feelings may be monitored. The municipal offices value your composition.”

Considering the time I devote to the letters I find the impersonal address of deep offense, and said as much in my return complaint. The officers are of relative intelligence and attuned to the needs of the human psyche; their responses provide just enough and never more: just enough hope, promise, openness, dialogue, as though they can listen and want to and will.

I entered a long correspondence with one M. Parker, and that I refer to as the Parker Correspondence, pertaining to the state of disrepair within my local municipal park some five minutes walk from my residence, a park in which I have spent many hours during these last five or more years and have witnessed first hand its degradation into a foul grim parody, with each of its focal aspects decimated by neglect, ignorance or public sex acts. The park is fringed by a small wooded pocket that is bordered on three sides by shallow water – the Wensum on the west and the awkward curve of the so-called ornamental waterway on the other two – known locally as “the Islet of Doggers” in perverse homage to the capital’s own bastion of enterprise that was itself until recently a derelict and abandoned wasteland as, some may argue, it remains. This Islet accommodates the lions share of the public coition the park is renowned for and that is advertised within the myriad toilet blocks of the city’s other public spaces (for example: “gay roy. best cock. wensum park sunrise.”), secreting as it does within the depths of its dense foliage a bed of unrolled bright orange plastic safety fence, pegged down at a length of some six feet on a flat stretch of soil about the width of a standard single mattress, an ideal protection mesh for casual fornication. It is encircled by brandless condom wrappers and their well-used former contents and, weirdly, numerous empty milk cartons of various size. By day these woods are a rank but unpopulated place to stroll with a child but under cover of darkness they become a hotbed of perversion. The small red brick toilet block that overlooks the river’s camber, too, houses the men who prowl the gravel paths with their phones clutched to their chest trying to pinpoint homosexual engagement, grunting in the cubicles, rushing back to their families after a quick Saturday morning session, their balls still ripe with spittle. My child and I would see them or worse, hear them during our early visits (we are poor sleepers). It didn’t take long for the letters to follow. I find numerically presented lists to be a useful format to attempt extraction of definite responses to clearly demarcated concerns, and technique I employed immediately within the Parker Correspondence.

"1. The so-called “ornamental waterway” – what riveting irony you municipal lads enjoy! – is in fact ankle deep, entirely blanketed in eutrophication, thick with litter and reeking of the foulest sewage. This had once been a pleasant part of the park but it really is now quite grim if not toxic.

2. There is a distinct lack of rubbish bins, meaning a huge number of irresponsible park users dump their mess – fast food wrappers, cigarette packets, nappies, tabloids – all over the floor and into the river. Indeed the immediate bridge area of the “ornamental waterway” as discussed in point 1 (above) contains a number of thick plastic sacks of the kind commonly associated with the aquatic disposal of body parts and/or domestic animals that appear to have been both submerged and then held to the riverbed with quite significant weights. Whilst I am, of course, suggesting no connection between the degradation of the waterway and the illicit disposal of human remains, a focused dredging of the “ornamental waterway” and environs would no doubt remedy this and other issues surrounding the same.

3. The water feature/fountain is seldom switched on. An off fountain really does represent the very height of futility and is not commensurate with a relaxing visit.

4. Myriad willow trees were felled in a tremendous spot by the river for no comprehensible reason aside from the whims of the municipal offices. This localized deforestation has left a patch of miserable wasteland in place of the trees, populated only by thistles, weeds, broken glass and decaying excrement, all of which are entirely unsuitable for children.

5. The park is crawling with functioning doggers and cruising homosexuals, which leaves the patch of woods that adorns the riverbank covered in spent condoms and milk cartons, and shifty gents gripping their smartphones as they hover around the toilet block and thumb their way through Tinder.

6. I have on multiple occasions encountered needles and drug paraphernalia amongst the playground equipment and in the pavilion, as well as the stench of presumably human urine and excrement in same. My child’s football was soiled by same, and she watched as I burst it whilst shouting. I imagine this one terrible experience has caused irreparable damage, both to our relationship and to her future psychological wellbeing."

In fairness to the man Parker I did receive an above-adequate response to my complaint, albeit after a period of some twenty working days and not the fifteen working days stipulated within the various literatures produced by the municipal offices as guidance for the complex complaints procedure. As satisfactory as his responses might have been I remained – indeed, remain – unhappy with park, and pen notes to Parker reflecting the same almost weekly, often just single lines or bulletpoints on scraps of paper, thoughts or responses to a given park-based stimuli that really falls well outside of his purview. There have been scant responses since his first but in the circumstances I care little; the catharsis of the Parker Correspondence is singular and unmatched by my other more aggressive lines of complaint.

Since leaving me – and she too a victim, she purports, of a decidedly modern addiction, collateral damage, as it might be – my wife has found another male and assimilated him comfortably into the occurring of her life, a male in the employ – perfectly! – of the municipal offices, a male who does not – she assures me with crushing brevity via SMS – suffer from an addiction to the authorship of extensive, eloquent, verbose letters of complaint to his local municipal offices (which given his employment status is quite understandable, as without the comfort of geographical dissection such letters would be directly received by his employer and likely cause all manner of complex interpersonal and intradepartmental tensions that would combine to create a working environment of some distress). What he does for either work or leisure without the purpose of the letters is a mystery. I have begun to address my myriad correspondences to him personally by way of the municipal offices, though I have no knowledge of his place within the organizational structure of that immense body or of his ability to address my increasingly pressing concerns with any satisfaction.

“Dear Shitter,

You will forgive me, I trust, if I refrain from addressing you by name (within the body of the letter at least; to ensure you received it at all it was essential that I did so on the envelope); I loathe you like an atrocity and can’t bear to see it – which is to say your name – borne. And, the fuck, what – fucking well? – is a name? Well?

While it is not within my nature to complain without cause I feel I now must about the loss or, more accurately, persuasive removal of, my wife by you, acting (I assume) on behalf of the municipal offices.”

I still wait his response and visualize its certain inadequacy with some relish. It will thank me for my patience, for my time, and for the physical hospitality my wife extends to all employees of the municipal offices. There will be derisive sniggering within its poor punctuation. I will read it many many times until I feel quite nauseous. I will complain about her absence to the very top. This time the municipal offices have destroyed the wrong man. I shed tears as she packed her bags and my child’s little bags, and complained determinedly about fairness, vows, even love. Perfectly, there was no response.

I know this is a problem, letters, dependence, a very real one. I only don’t care. Everyone needs something.