X44 – NOR – AYL – CRO – SHE

I was exhausted on the bus and drifting into a kind of fitful half sleep and a bald man was in the seat in front of my own, and in my delirious dream-like state I thought that my baby – who is also bald – was sitting on my lap, and I felt myself leaning forward to kiss her on the top of her bald head which was in fact the bald head of the bald man in the seat in front of my own, and fortunately I stopped myself from doing it before my lips made contact with his tufty skin and I would’ve had to explain just what exactly I was doing. I dreamed you were my baby. Such are the perils of parenting. If you hear racist youths on the bus should you tell them to shut it, as in “the fuck up”? There was some yod-dropping Norfolk bumpkin in tracksuit and grease saying how he’d seen a black boy “so black he was shiny”, and one of his friends told him he was racist and he said he wasn’t being racist, just describing him, and I turned and said in fact it and by extension he was racist, and he blushed and told me it was none of my business. It’s the quandary of tolerance– should one tolerate intolerance? Should one sit back while injustices unfurl around them? In London there was an oafish slob shouting at and eventually pushing at his female companion, both drunk apparently, but she was telling him to “get off me”, to “stop stop”, and being drunk myself I suggested he leave her alone as she clearly wasn’t enjoying it, and he punched me in the face for my trouble, and neither the few friends I was with (including the sister of an ex-girlfriend who I had been in love with for a half decade [the sister, not the ex-girlfriend; years later we would finally kiss – I mean we had before once or twice {once} but only ever in such a way as felt like the reluctant concessions made to a friend at the end of a rough week – with something akin to passion, outside of a pub in New Cross where we had drunk for a few hours in near silence, only pressing into each other with increasing desire as the time passed, her toes against my flanks, my head buried in her hair, curled together like serpents, pulling away between lengthy slurps to look at each other’s faces, and she urged me to go back to her place but for reasons that I cannot comprehend even now I refused, only kissed her some more times, and refused again, and left reeling and wired and hysterical with lust, and on the train home thought about what might have occurred as I have ever since, about her genitals bared in a dark street, about cunnilingus pressed up against university property with a leg over my shoulder, about my cock in her mouth, about fucking her, finally, while she writhes and mutters, and softening and oiling her tremendous little arsehole and going at it that way, gripped around me like a psychopathic aggressor, about the pair of us left clammy and expended on her soft mattress with the door to the garden wide open to the morning, I should have gone, should have, should. We hooked up a week or so later, a day in the park, the pub, intense frisson, uncontrollable erections, and when I left we kissed again, more calmly by then, tender as children, as though we had all the time in the world; we haven’t spoken since, the copulation left as a thing only of imagination]) nor any of the other many passengers on the bus came to my aid – though the female companion called me a gentleman as she alighted with her abuser. The easy thing is often the wrong thing and we must not be complicit in the wrongs of the world or else be the cause. Welcome aboard. The girl, vile girl, belched loudly in defiance of decency. Her face was a smudge of features, remnants of an ill-resolved cleft palate that had entrenched her with the very psychosocial problems of which the belching was no doubt symptomatic, wilfully abetting her obvious misfortunes with acts of digestive hostility. She was a mean-hearted bigot, a Norfolk soul, slurring muttered insults through her own speech impediment at passing pedestrians, the wonderful irony of the truly ugly sitting in the harshest judgement of the appearance of others. The belches shook like seismic events with every turn of the bus wheels, superseding language, any communication with her couple of grotesque friends reduced to bodily noises, emissions, grunts, farts, endless dreadful laughter. Was there no sense of silence, the under twenties deafening the sound of their own pointlessness with a barrage of biological commentary. They would fall asleep eventually, ten or so miles out of the city, shattered by the intake of oxygen from the spasm of their diaphragms. One fat driver closed the doors as the final passenger before changeover alighted in the city and a gathering crowd waited in a vicious breeze to be permitted access for the return journey. They relished the flaunting of such meagre authority, the drivers, idly watching the waiting watching until arbitrarily they deemed it time. He hunched over the steering wheel behind which his fat scarcely fit as though falling asleep or squinting upon a small font but soon was seen to hook a thick squat cock from his fly and then shepherd it to popping while the assembled watched aghast. The bus reeked of glans when they boarded, face as red as slapped hide, the exertion of pleasure almost too great. A mournfully pale teen wandered the commercial areas waiting for transport to the barren coastal town that heaves with spent opportunities and miscarried enterprise and in which he resides with his two parents who are themselves emblematic of such miscarriage. He had incredibly short arms, unusually so, as though suffering from a mild achondroplasia, despite his being of average height, his minor hands balled in fists in front of his immense fleshy pectorals that like meringue attain firm peaks visible beneath his attire, his feet equally inconsequential, perhaps an eight, perhaps less, such judgements can be difficult during motion. Little feet little soul and little ponce also. He bore the hallmarks of the fan of the metallic musical genres, adorned in clumsily applied eyeliner that appeared spooned on in darkness and greasy black locks scraped back into a stump of pony tail, a ghostly moustache smeared like food across his philtrum, a memory of a moustache, an allusion to the possibility of one, and on the rear of his black hoody was written in a large serif typeface “The streets were lined with a mixture of faeces and gore”, and I thought this a ridiculous and strange mantra to exhibit on the rear of one’s garment. Beside him was a tall fellow in ill-fitting black jeans streaked with mulch, a red flannel shirt, a pristine Marilyn Manson t-shirt, obviously new. They walked some feet apart but were evidently together, testing the costumes of nobodies and doing so very convincingly. She was cruel looking and sharp featured and sat only with her partner, a tall nonentity stuffed with teeth who in a child’s voice spoke of the motorcycle projects he undertook with his father and showed pictures of engines, fenders, various components that he kept on his phone. They seemed an unlikely coupling, she viciously gossiping about the transgressions of college associates and he thinking only of motorcycles, but appeared committed to one another in the way that the slim pickings of the rural townships that encircled the city instilled in their populace. On a late bus with a paucity of passengers, likely they’d been on the drink, their cheeks were flushed and they hummed of fruity ciders, she bade him finger her, down to the knuckle, with scant regard for privacy. The sloppy sound of his moving fingers, of the flesh of her cunt at work, were audible over the engine. As she approached orgasm she began to chirp like a songbird, a trill glissando from deep in back of her throat, an odour of flatus freed by the violence of her muscular contraction. He closed his eyes and pictured motorcycles cleaned and reassembled. “I’m skinny for my height.” Bird faced, thick hair, a non-entity. Most are until our twenties, even older. Clawing around for some key identifier that never comes. May I amount to more than the sum of my parts. “But even as a skinny guy I’m weak. Particularly. Only I can’t become stronger. No amount of effort will grant me the muscle of the better.” Cargo fashion slacks, elasticated waistband, two feet of pulled drawstring, pulled up above the navel. Didn’t know they existed outside of the end pages of the tabloids of middle England. The slack for the very thin and the very fat. Comfort and style, although not style. Comfort only. A slippery looking fiend creeps into the throng at the crowded bus stop, great pink lips like a couple of pink eels, grossly pallid, straight grey hair falling like coarse fronds about his huge ears, he presses up to the advertisement hoarding, elbows past the elderly and crippled, leather jacket in the cut and style of a blazer, desperate to board first despite the bus being empty, panicked, face a wash of reds and similar and greys and similar, spam a great plain of bulging veins, black boots that looked as though he’d sculpted them himself out of kids modelling clay, chomping at the bit for entry, squirming for it, why, cunt nabs the same seat every workday, but he’s crouching, crossing his legs like he’ll piss himself quickly. Please driver, grant entry. Cleave! Imagine his head cleaved open. I do. Cleave! Split down the middle like a prepped nut. CLEAVE! On comes Nanny Red – must be 60 if she’s a day. Always puts a smile on your face. It will be a fitting epitaph, when the time comes. A career whore. Best hand job in the eastern counties. Can work her palm across the top of the tip like poured custard. Knocks your legs out. She doesn’t fuck anymore, doesn’t need to; she was always a shrewd businessperson, paid into her own pension, retired from the more demanding acts by 45, but in her heyday she was mythic across the towns for her indiscriminate approach to the construction of utter pleasure, worked her tricks like marionettes, carefully aligned with their place in her narrative. They would count out their currency with trembling fingers and ponder how life could be the same after such enormity of feeling. She was a big fat bastard now but still turned cocks to rock, still forged fearsome desire like a skilled smith, and she still did the odd fast-five, for the art more than the pennies – the market had changed considerably since the days of (her) empire, lucky to scrape a tenner for an old-fashioned these days, less in the sticks; the ubiquity of porn had made the humble okie-dokie a precursor, at best, to something bigger, certainly not the grand finale; the lads of today wanted the endpumps of their hasty denouement to be rectally sleeved, the shoot-out facially deposited, or else cream-pied and foaming and Instagram fresh, so were the tropes we were fed by the erotic custodians of millennial lust. So fickle, the tastes of the flesh, ever in thrall to trend. There’s a pair of genuine anomalies, birthed as adults from the foul Norfolk quag, loud, thick, near toothless, the coarse thorny chin of lefternmost, the face sunk in on itself, imploding into its own catastrophe, nylon, muck, tapered ankles, corrective footwear, Velcro fastening, beige undergarments, genuine confusion, caged beasts turned free after decades, blinded by the patina of reality. Beneath a woollen bonnet – in June! – he blew raspberries, presumably unconsciously, with every exhalation, certainly a strange tic, but did not during conversation, if it could be considered as such. “Smartphone?” “Yepyep”. “You understand it? Understand how it work?” “Off outten Great Yarmouth amorrow.” “Oh yepyep.” “Gettern dustpan’n’brush’ll fer me sister.” “It’s’n day out hintut.” “Day out.” “That be the Thai place.” “You like Thai boyo?” “That I do.” “What’ll it be? Pasta spaghetti?” “Noo yer fucken mawkin, it be different items.” “My heart, life be a rum ole job life be.” “Do he do as he do do.” “Backards en forrards.” “Fare y’well’n.” The gaps punctured by the blown raspberries that went unmentioned by the other passengers, too cowardly to draw focus towards such obvious deficits. The civic operatives had constructed a portal for the eels at New Mills Yard, allowing passage for the slimy bastards past the torrential sluice and its gathered bobbing detritus, part of a misjudged river regeneration project to return the once navigable, now shit river to the centre of the city – floating businesses, outdoor bathing, formalised walking routes. They’d have to clean up the johnnies and syringes first, pressure wash the goose shit. Reassemble lost faith. All of it. They’ll not have mine. “Dauntless Rubberline,” fuckin ha ha, “this is for you.” Fuckem. I’ve a note or three about me, perchance I could sling one to Nanny Red, have her slop me out while I wreak squalor and agony amongst the commuters. Such scant hope for society when even the educated classes of which I am one choose depravity. A simpering young mother tiptoeing on razor heels dropped her baby, poor ruddy dolly flipped in its car seat off the back of a travel system it hadn’t been properly affixed to, hit the pavement with a thump that turned my guts, left hanging in darkness beneath the upturned seat; she bent for it, the mother, gripped to her champagne Huawei, trembling with that dreadful realisation of what might be, but the kid was okay, sobbing, blonde, floppy, incredibly red, but apparently not unusually so, and she said to a passing enquirer “why do they test us like this?”, and inevitably I imagined death and thought that if there was a test of competency set by the infants to entrap their inept guardians, which there wasn’t, then – if there was – she had failed it admirably. She’s left me/without a word/and her/the other/they’ve all of them gone. Raiders cap, I'll open you and bleed you over my balls you interminably fat fuck, you coughing oaf. And then this fuckin sad sack, fuckin paprika moustache, block of muddy hair, mute nobody, jeans so blue they’re white, Christian bookshop carrier bag, bus pass, stood stick straight waiting for the bus to stop, small talk black hole, all suggestions of conversation consumed into his void. Pathetic face, probably a destroyer of a kind, some depraved fundamentalist disguised behind misfortune. All roads then lead to cunt, like the creases of her jeans as she seats herself all sink into the unsinkable vessel. Her fingers are long and thin, slender, inches of curled white nail that would reach back and pull the lips of her cunt apart, God forbid she put her phone down, tits aloft with the perk of youth, child’s nipples really, fine points, poles of the perfect hemisphere, the geodesics of her naked flesh, tea cakes, whispered, TEA cakes, I’m salivating with impulses I’m too pathetic to curb, her knees like toffees beneath he gaping slashes in her denim as is of fashion once more, though saw me – along with the Bermuda short kid – banned in my day in ragamuffin hand-me-downs and a “relax” t-shirt some twenty-five years previous from all non-uniform activity, and I the vanguard, and now they’re all at it, slit jackets, bare backs, her eyebrows an arch construct of her own doing and shaped in assurance of tremendous carnal promise. I would disrobe her bit by bit and would relish her judgement, or adequacy or otherwise, would take her critique on board, then silence her with aggression as sheathless I’d slip from cunt to arse, finish with a shit rimmed dickhead saucing where the cunt ends, tears a serenade. Next came a red faced woman with staggering tits distended out of the sides of her dress, sipping a tepid long drink out of a Tommee Tippee bottle, could smell the vodka over the tinned pineapple, who boarded with Debbie, a gruff voiced brute, 5 ‘o’ clock shadow, receding thatch, ovoid bulge in the leggings, where the balls were. I’d have Debbie’s cock worked while the poor old fellow grunted out. She bent to retrieve change and I saw the gusset of her soiled pants, waning twixt her raw chapped thighs, soaked by Debbie’s persistent advances, roving paws. There was a buttock-faced pimp who it was rumoured had defecated onto the door handle of a flatmate as reprisal, but in an act of amazing thickness had had a friend film it for social media and since had his life ruined, his friends, his family, his work colleagues, all of them now intimately familiar with the rhythmically contracting muscles of his working anus. Vicar boy boarded, 70s, face as red as raw genitals, dog collar, button-down black despite the dreadful heat, poor twat tripped on part of the step assembly and smashed his face pretty hard when he went down, ha ha, nice one, Lord, you fuckin clown, ha ha, there’s joy there right, even the holiest done by circumstance, it’s justice of a sort, right, the fearsome wrath of the non-existent; there were some blood specks in his white goatee, the hair on his neck sodden in sweaty clumps at the lower rim of his panama. Reading the bible – fuck, there are other books, like, other fictions, you fuck. Why not them – Bible’s nothing new you sexless husk. And you madam – you going to cry? Fuckin clutching the seat in front like you’re on a fucking fairground ride. Don’t shit yourself, we’re all going to die. I had been the unconscious perpetrator of an historic sexual assault, when in the moment of happening passion one’s determination, grit, persistence, hint of forcefulness, felt like fair game for courtship, the way to go about things, and not the imbalance and disregard it in fact was and would come to be. She younger, Christian, proficient in kissing but sexually inexperienced (she had claimed that her few attempts at coition with her previous boyfriend had failed because her cunt was simply too small); I plied her with Archers and lemonade and took her back to my stark mattress, and we kissed and groped for hours into the night, and though I knew she didn’t want to screw I made my case in assertive gestures, and I was charismatic in my way, made her feel like she felt excited, stripped her of her clothes, clawed at her flat chest, fingered her utterly dry cunt in the dark room lit by the LCD display of my hi-fi, the hollows around her rib cage, and laid out like that she appeared scarcely more than a child, but I was drunk and young and selfish and I wanted to pop, and I kept at her and at her, licked her up and over like a sloppy lolly, went down on her, flipped her about the bed, tried to get the tip in through her closed legs, felt her pubes on mine, humped down in her direction, inexpert untargeted stabs in the dark, and in desperation and appeasement she began to clumsily fellate me, her oesophagus a bludgeon, all teeth, palate, devoid of pleasures, and I finished myself to a mess on the white of her stomach; she didn’t say no, I insist on it, she didn’t say stop, but I knew she wanted to and still I didn’t, and is why I was so offended when she casually mentioned to a friend that I had raped her, which seemed patently false – I hadn’t so much as got it in! – and also shamefully precise, an abuse of the power I hadn’t known I had but over a drunk seventeen year old had in abundance. To feel guilt now borders on senseless but these ways of seeing cast dismal woe over the impulsive narcissistic inadequacies of my formative years. The driver, awesomely fat, limped from his seat clutching a flat, white, sweat-mottled cushion from beneath his arse, which he placed on a vacant seat and sat a while, his trousers faltering beneath his guts at half-mast, his pinprick eyes and nondescript features like the aspects of a thin face peering helplessly from within the swelling waters of morbid obesity. He was nil but his fat. And it was that girl – not the ex-girlfriend but her sister, the sister of the ex-girlfriend – it was she who broke me, or who like a twisted Oxfam campaign gave me the tools to break me in perpetuity; I loved her with such pointless devotion that I had to be broken to survive her absence. I’d made her my whole life and without her was only vacancy; she wasn’t around corners in museums, she wasn’t reading on my bed in odd socks, she wasn’t making tea, answering the phone, she was nowhere at all but somewhere else. How do you convalesce from a loss of this stature. I don’t. Failed to reassemble the fragments of decency. As she stretched recumbent and moaned a little and raised her arms up above of her head her armpit appeared a perfect vagina, its shape, its dimensions, and I was paralysed by the need to finger it, to trace its lines with my index fingers, to lick it out, to – of course – fuck it. I commonly scoffed at such obvious fetishization but for this not a bit of it. Years of life lost with her. If I saw her again would things be different. Nothing changes. I recognise that shuffle – Rita de Passage, ceremonial fundament of near every local lad’s erotic development. Like the unwilling vessel of genetic necessity she had borne young but had done so exclusively by caesarean section, ergo, she would assure the assembled congress of imminent suitors all vying for first dibs, cunt like a twelve year old – an obvious falsehood, if for no other reason than the sheer weight of cocks that had ensconced themselves within, for however brief a session – though remarkable Kegel strength did afford a certain ham fisted grasp, it was true. Now you, you slimy bastard, you leather lipped piece of prick – my, I can think the talk – I’ll hold your flopping wodge of banana skin hair while I scald your shit face with fucking spoons. I’m not aroused by violence but it interests me, hardens me also, I suppose, if I’m truthful; the old swell, feel it in my jeans with every thud of fist on flesh. Iron whiff of spilt claret. Finally fucking moving. I have tried to be a better man. I can’t atone. Misanthropy intersects with ego. Was there a festival on, a performance. Everyone in the street clad in white hoods. Was there a festival. There’s nothing to see with my eyes closed. There’s nothing. There’s. Eye holes cut in the hoods. Nothing. There’s. White cuts. Eyes. Slit. Nothing. There’s. There’s nothing. There’s. There’s. There’s. Holes. Eyes. Nothing. There’s. White xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The bus was parked in a clearing in dense pine forest, out Shorthorn, out Strawless, the trees tall and straight like the vestiges of a lost civilization. The ground outside was swathed in brown dropped needles that champed under foot. The utter swine, the cretins and cunts who passed for passengers, all were alighted, the top deck barren and stifling. My hands were tied together and to the seat back. I tried to pull them free but the binding was clean. Sweat decanted in torrents over my brow, into my eyes. One hoped for life to amount to something more than this but expected if anything less. I tried to blink the brine out enough to see. Through the condensation on the bus windows. The assembled figures were hooded in white, had formed a circle around a large fire. Their naked bodies were scarred keloid with occult geometry. Several individuals had been recently branded with a specific collation of runic symbols across their breasts, the flesh raw and weepy, though they exhibited little discomfort. A fawn was tethered to a stake, of sobering beauty, appeared almost mythic when not decomposing and bloated on the shoulder of the A140. One of the hooded figures, great sacks of breasts scribbled blue with complex venule networks, entirely hairless pudendal cleft dangling in two slack halves like a tectonic fault, approached the frightened animal and knifed its trachea and delved the knife around deep and carefully widened the hole and held its head still while it jerked spastic and bucked around, legs going like a gragger, and she lifted her hood a way and pressed her mouth to the jetting blood and seemed to drink it like ambrosia. She stepped back and carved the head from the creature and effluvia slopped in gory lumps from the neck and fell upon and around her feet. I was pleased to see Nanny Red when the hood was removed, dear old Nanny Red. She held the fawn’s head afore her own to the jubilation of all, a grim mask of clear black eyes coolly clouding over. A hooded male with a pitiable erection approached the slain body and with little ceremony began to fuck the neck stump. Most of the remaining celebrants started to copulate indiscriminately amongst themselves, an engorged fluid blur of mutable flesh, though some handful adorned with ornate regalia chanted incantations and soused unguent upon the tremendous blaze. The noise of the chanting and the sight of the fornication left me feverish. Their acts of depravity would draw the horror of history from the trees and earth about them. After a time a very fat male broke from the entanglement and gathered the recently branded females and with the assistance of others proceeded to subsume them into the fire’s very core. Their flesh caught quickly like meat, contracted and tightened and blistered and crackled, softest parts gone in a moment, their screams concealed somewhat by the loudening chants and by the groans of release, and when they tried to escape from the unbearable heat as of course they did they were pushed back into the blaze with a number of long iron poles and held there in place until their screams soon silenced and their cremated forms crumbled cooked and unrecognisable amongst the coals. It was compellingly unfamiliar and I could not bear to watch, though did, completely. Complicit in my spectatorship. How quickly they became not human, scarcely even mammal. Food, spoiled food. I turned from the window and Nanny Red was before me, the moustached passenger behind her. She was caked in drying blood. She jabbed at my face and my body. She crept around me. She did not speak. She stood inches away and turned her back and bent forwards and pulled her buttocks open and bared her anus, wide and rimmed with blood, and pushed it into my face and I slathered it hungrily without a splinter of want. She extracted and towed my dick out and worked it manually into something dense and took a knife from the moustached passenger and sawed it off at the root and blood all over there was all over there was blood xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx an master an majesty I poked the little severed thing up me and I fucked me with it reet afronta him and he were blacking out’n boyo slap him up to keep him up an say ar ya reet bor an he were fucken lolloping he were and blarin an crockin an thas a fucken rumun areet we reckon he wanta see it an’ I fuck it till it wrung out like a fucken dirty sock hintut an me boyo drant he mawkin bonce up fer a gawp an I shew him when I pull the fucken stannicle out o’me troshel an cast it up me gob an drant it down t’swallowed xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx passed out and back and out my head was bobbing and nodding and my screams sounded separate like tape recordings and blood there was all over there blood I was puking awful fibrous chunks there was burning my nostrils and chunks there was all over blood and there was over all chunks blood there all was fibrous bilious chunks there was blood the moustached passenger sawed hacked really sawed my wrist my hand blood all over and chunks fibrous chunks and my hand dropped as litter and the stump spat the moustached passenger blood Nanny Red all over there was fibrous chunks stump passenger Red and all over blood over all and he the moustached passenger pushed me pushed my legs around the stump all the while spitting blood all over and there was fibrous chunks snagged he pushed and bared and gripped my forehead and held my eyelids open and his thin little dick and there was blood so much of it all over and fucked me and Nanny Red cut out my tongue while he fucked me and swallowed it as I great clots swallowed while he fucked me wrought delirious with iron and all over chunks and all over blood there was all over such viscera that had been of me and was now not and he fucked me and Nanny Red was and all over was I was my was all there wasxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx an him’n dew keep a troshing fumble fisted at he rum chute, got on um an he illun wus up, an he mob a rumun when I had his slug out an necked his lingo, an he fuck’um suffun savidge he do, roid him up atill he war up, an afore he cast out guzunder, afore he crocking an puckaterry, we hull him atop and over skoots an over troshel an out of the bus and forrards down atop the slar a pines as tarl em drift xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx handless dickless tongueless I wondered there was such blood I wondered had justice been I wondered all over blood viscera I I there wondered all over handless dickless tongueless I wondered how could I not I wondered has justice I wondered has justice been meted out in this trinity of absence I wondered and all over was blood for my stumps were many such was justice I wondered xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx we staked him down for master an majesty as were his lot as hoddy-doddy offerings by sky as air as burn we offer this up master an majesty we offer up to you we do we bred an born we be fer yor darkness me master hear me blar bear us out from ahind a pootrud shiver o’ life xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx they soused me in noxious elixir my hair and eyes in my nose the sting of my stumps my trinity of justice meted soused all over there was xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx master an majesty hear me blar it hear my offering to sky to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx they had me down and soused and my anus done in and soused and three stumps blood all over there was and soused and I was down I was and soused and blood given over to xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and he ablaze like phlogiston his crockin sonorous licked aflame he body and he now as ameant fer thee master an perchance we as arst fer y’ lug an yer honour to see as fit fer a foison annum ya reet xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx taste myself cooking I the sousing roared through it I can it roared through my passages it there was I can it dried the it was very hot everything dried even the everything that was all over had been now was not was dried I could taste and it was hot and all over there was xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx master we xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I was soused I was xxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx not a deen xxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx all over I was all xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx nor a drant xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx over xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 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recent work, pamphlets, portraits

This past year or so I've been making a lot of pamphlets at work. It started off as a way to fill the days of utter monotony that accompany an administrative role in the education sector and to make the fullest use of the unmonitored free printing credentials that represent the single perk of same, but has since become an enjoyable way to undertake a load of small but tangible projects that I can actually complete, and that would otherwise be long forgotten. I've formatted, illustrated and designed all of them, with varying degrees of competence, printed them onto A4, usually in runs of 10 copies per title, and then hand folded and stapled each one, with each of these elements being conducted within the strict temporal parameters of the working day (was 09:00-17:00, now 08:00-16:00 [following recent move to rural Norfolk]).

To date, the pamphlets and ass. ephemera produced within the above stricture are as follows:

1. we's the real (a motley confluence of sin)

relating to the myriad transgressive doings within student body and faculty of the University of East Anglia.

2. the house by the sea

a focused revivification of my apocalypse yarn. each copy (total 10) is accompanied by a handpainted watercolour of Happisburgh, where much of the story takes place.

3. cirrus mercurio sends greetings from the HISM

self-help guide - LEARN how to harness the power of the cosmos to effect productive assertive action! UNDERSTAND the HISM (human intellicore synaptic mainframe) through the practise of IDCRotSI (Internally Driven Cosmorphic Realignment of the Synaptic Interchange)! REBUILD your linguistic foundations to engorge the cosmos within!

4. postalcards

a set of 16 A5 postcards, illustrated on one side, short fiction on the other. originally I had intended to publish the month of stories I had written a couple of years back as a set of 31 postcards in a presentation envelope but the printing costs were very expensive, and many of the stories far too long to fit within the limited word count necessary for such a small vessel.

5. herman henschel koprowsky's encyclopaedia of imagined objects: fuckpillow (with an introduction by nicholas flower)

a slick edition of this seminal work with an introduction exploring the absolute futility of my own writing practise. the encyclopaedia and koprowsky are both key elements in the novel I am currently writing, an enormous and erotic work of myth and literature and the fragility of truth, and a book about writing books. it is the culmination of my extensive norwich work which I may finish within the year (though I doubt it).

6. herman henschel koprowsky's encyclopaedia of imagined objects: barry chuckle's experience projector (with an introduction by nicholas flower)

see point 5 (though the introduction to this object explores in brief the place of the encyclopaedia within the canon).

7. I would like secretly to fuck you

delirious and scornful poems of seduction and collapse (with an intense yellow cover).

8. the evolutionary necessity of the avoidance of I

death of pleasure/no more feeling/maniac reminiscences/of a nobody.

9. narratives from the fenland township

obliquely charting parson grunther's steady rise, this collects four narratives from the fenland township - the crows what came, the great british carnival, the idiot child and the hungry earth - in one minimal volume.

10. animal police

work of the famed norvic-neo-noir subgenre (of which I am the only practitioner), this gathers both extant animal police stories in an act of complete posterity.

11. X44 – NOR – AYL – CRO – SHE

a dissection of regional bus travel in the almost rush hour of norwich city and environs: driver, passenger, reflection.

if you'd like to buy a copy of any of these, contact me.

It's also been a way to get back into drawing my stock-in-trade "so weird they're shit" portraits.

Here are a bunch of them.

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.