the nuclear powered heart

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

You can buy a copy in paperback here.

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

The blurb says this:

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

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

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

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

One fuck of a millennium party.

we's the real

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

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

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

reflections and miscellany

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

*

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

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

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

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

“Goodbye sir. Over.”

“Goodbye. Over.”

“I’m going to hang up now sir. Over.”

“Fine. Farewell Cabbage White. Over.”

“Farewell sir. Over.”

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

You are now entering

Morehamlike

Please drive carefully through the village.

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

Is this an onion.

A complex philosophical quandary for the postmodern age.

Is this an onion?

*

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

remembering insults (3)

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

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

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

remembering insults (2)

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

I shouted it to a twat from across the road.

I was seven years old.

remembering insults

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

the lady

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

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

THE LADY
An experienced professional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck the secondary instructions too. Please just…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“See you.”

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

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

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

the symbols of non-christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

if walls could talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, no hands, the fuckin simpleton.”

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

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

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

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

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

the swan upping

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

the addictions of today

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

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

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

“Dear Officers of the Municipal Offices,

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

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

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

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

“Dear complainant,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear Shitter,

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

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

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

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

lost kid card co.

The late year light was weak like sun drowned in the scale of its own sky. The security lads tossed their cards down onto a pallet they’d stretched a worn t-shirt over and grunted fare thee wells. The dumped Jacks sneered into the chill. Dispersing there was a din of geese overhead that was loud and amplified by the natural contours of the landscape, and the throb of their flapping wings was eerie and mechanical as it passed, like an electrical transformer humming into darkness. They landed some distance away and pecked at the grass in hasty gobbles, some of the larger birds lashing at each other, their great swinging necks like the detonated chimneys of industry, the wonderful symmetry of their skein but a smokescreen disguising the deep hatred and ancient rivalries that coursed through their number and that could on land be given due attention.

Budd stroked the cards up and put them back into the sleeve. “Lost Kid Card Co.”, it said. There were detailed pencil illustrations of infant graves printed on the reverse of each of the 52 cards, the perfectly realised miniature headstones surrounded by several square feet of whirligigs, teddy bears, photographs, poetry, garments, which made for a sombre gaming experience but added an unarguable gravity to their every throwaway gesture. He propped the pallet up and drew the bolt across the small fenced area they used for these sessions. The others were by then out of sight behind the stark grey concrete buildings that thrust to the sky in sheer angles and were themselves memorials to dreams as pointless as any.

He turned his radio on but kept the volume low for his hearing was sensitive to interference. The slight feedback was punctuated with stuttered briefs, info, descriptions, some banter undertaken exclusively in acronyms. Soon it was intense silence. He held the radio to his ear and heard nothing at all, so increased the volume setting in increments until the maximum was reached. The trees were engorged with incredible solar colours and for a moment he felt quite afraid for reasons he could not grasp. He pressed down the talk button on his radio unit and spoke his name but noted that his voice was distorted and unrecognisable, and he recoiled and threw the radio onto the floor; the slight feedback recommenced and so did the stuttered briefs, info, descriptions. He retrieved the battery pack from the rear of the radio unit and put it in his pocket and left the radio unit itself on the damp grass. His mouth tasted very dry and foul. He walked hurriedly towards the lake and felt the stare of the buildings boring into him. The grass was long and soaked the bottom of his trouser legs, and gnawed tennis balls poked from its riches like fungus, dumped rancid by psychotic dogs. At the water’s edge he looked as best he could around the largely ovoid shoreline and saw not a soul, only the shapes of mute birds stood sentinel in pockets of the trees already laid bare and skeletal by the falling temperature. The geese converged about him and soundlessly opened their beaks in turn, their tough tongues stiff and coarse as fingers inside. In unison they honked with such ferocity that he was startled. He had seen a home video embedded within an internet resource some years ago where a vast gaggle of geese was silenced by a man across the water merely yelling out something unidentifiable. Nervously he shouted “hello” and his voice was perhaps even more distorted than before, amplified grotesquely and barely language. He clasped his flat hands to his ears. The noise of the geese was unchanged.

He began to run along the pathway that was heavily trodden into mud, wanting to scream but afraid to vocalise. He fell to the floor and with hands to his ears felt his undefended nose hit the ground and break easily and he writhed to his feet and continued to run. He passed a young fondling couple on a bench and fell to his knees before them.

“Please,” he said, his voice grinding like the crushed metals of a serious car accident. “Please help me”.

The couple bade him watch as they fornicated in the muck before him and then left him prostrate, their satisfied sniggers as honks in the afternoon.

efforts at courtship

Her skin smells of the coal tar soap she buys in incredible bulk from special suppliers in case of emergency. She slathers herself in it, foamy and rich. Her cunt smells like barbecue beef Hula Hoops and lingers through washes on his hands for hours. Her fingers are very long and double jointed and they grip him like an instrument. Her face is narrow and pale and dusted lightly in freckles and curls wonderfully in smile. Her face is immense too, almost geological, and fiercely etched beyond her tender years. She grows from her trousers as though from the earth. She laughs in a silent tremor behind her hands and oddly her eyes sadden as she does so. She assured him that she routinely wanted what she couldn't or didn't have, a point he took as truth and confession both and of immediate sexual pertinence to their own relations. Clothed her torso looks squat though he presumes it to be the tailoring of her garments or the way she chooses to wear them. Her accent is of the northern quarters, a fact he notices only during the daylight hours; drunk in clubs, bars, whatever, it rises above such pointless distinction. When she held him goodbye the day they first spoke she was very warm against him and the feelings were ones he recalled. He embedded an invitation with profound subtlety into the body of a paragraph of an email. When she made no reference to it he tortured himself for a fortnight or longer over the fact that she might not have seen it, that its subtlety was simply too profound, but he dared not mention it again in case she had. Everything petered away quickly to nothing.

buy the URINE-8 experiment in paperback

My long essay The URINE-8 Experiment - which first appeared on this blog in 2009 but was left unfinished until 2014 - is now available to buy here.

Do buy a copy - it is my best and most complete work. So goes the motto: all roads lead to URINE-8.

The blurb says this:

"In 2014, writer, low-level administrator and “roaring unsuccess” Nicholas Flower – struck by the impotent failure of his creative ambitions and the reverberating shock of recent fatherhood – devoted himself to the instigation of a cultural revolution (plus menial work for money), beginning in Norfolk and moving, as it must, ever west from there.

"At its centre was the self-styled Ballardian boyband URINE-8: wilfully unlistenable, cerebral and ludicrous, contemptuous and intellectual, subverting and deconstructing what a twenty-first century boyband could be and promoting a radical sexual ideology as a means of liberating the miserable and broken of the over-sexed if deeply unsexy postmodern age.

"A celebration of the lasting power of music to effect real change and the importance of dissent, this book is a hilarious, absurd defence of the necessity of free thought and impossible demands, and a ridiculous distillation of the cultural analyses of our woefully recent past."

a return to the house of death (10)

For weeks now he had seen the memories of others like dreams and the house was full of them. The past and the future had engulfed the present and one another and all that remained were isolated occurrences shorn of greater meaning. The wheelchair followed his thoughts in desolate silence. During lucid moments he imagined life continuing, taking employment, discovering romance, starting again. He washed the dirt from his hands and body but the smell remained for it had moved inside and become of thought. He folded her remains carefully within their best linen, a present from her mother when they had moved into the house, and returned it to the grave he had dug once before. While he felt little as he did so he was aware that he should and so said goodbye although this was not goodbye but only something happening then that at another time wouldn’t be. Everything was a minor event that bore a universe around it of absolutely no consequence. She would return tomorrow, yesterday, a week from now, or wouldn’t. Little matter. The bodies of their friends were less decomposed and far messier and he sloshed them into sheets and buried them in a shared grave and the utility of the unconscionably large flowerbed became clear. For them he said nil but they had been good friends in their way. He would forget them. He already had. The wheelchair watched him work. He climbed the stairs back into the house and walked its hallways and rooms. There were many voices speaking but nothing discernible; as one they roared into obsolescence. He tried to recall if he had always heard them but conceptually always meant so little as this was this only until that was this. He went upstairs and into their bedroom and in the bottom of the wardrobe found his better belt. He tied it firmly around his neck in the way that he had shown her. The sunlight that shone through the window on the stairs was dulled by the weight of the dreadful cloud but was quite beautiful. He had never noticed it before and had thought the window was a mirror, that the houses and gardens and trees across the old loam pit were its remarkable revelations. He stood on the top of the bannister and pulled himself up to the open loft hatch and tied the belt around a timber joist. The house around him moaned in celebration. There was a ringing in his ears and a great elation and his vision clouded in a roseate hue and yet he saw everything at once and felt fiercely holy. This would not be happening tomorrow.