the mysterious pink envelope

I


Lucille stood in front of the long mirror to open the pink envelope. It had arrived two days ago and had been sitting on the battered oak table, untouched but not forgotten. Her name and address were perfectly written on the front in a thick black ink. She had been a little afraid of what it might say inside the mysterious pink envelope. It smelt vaguely like unsmoked tobacco, rather moist, and fresh like a good shower with soap, and her fingers as graceful as crystal swans trembled a little as she ran them across the seal. Lucille jumped as she cut her skin ever-so-slightly on the paper and a tiny trail of pale red blood emerged between previously unnoticed folds of skin. She gently sucked the wound with an optimistic sigh. Sliding her index finger beneath the self-adhesive strip she moved it along horizontally, one end to the other, and the noise in the silent drawing room was like the whoosh of a firework. Blue paper was inside, pale like eyes. It hadn’t been folded because it was so small a piece of paper. The new smell that left the inside of the envelope reminded Lucille of cut grass and running hosepipes, but a lot of things tended to remind Lucille of these things lately.

Lucille’s hair was fair and long to her back, her body curved like a chocolate Venus but with two good arms, her eyes melted like butter on a sun-struck windowsill, her breasts rose high with every breath and she had bare feet when she read that one square of blue paper:


“You are the most beautiful
girl
I have ever been without.”


She clasped it to her chest: oh the smile! Rain hit the window and sounded like a birdsong, and there sneaked a flutter at the top of her thighs, and she looked deep inside the same pink envelope and saw a glorious grassy knoll, and without a word she fell right onto it.


II


But a knoll, and in an envelope? Lucille didn’t think that it was really her place to question such matters, so she lay herself down on the grass and hummed in the sunshine, which shone with the force of reality, despite its existence within the confines of the mysterious pink envelope. A few peaceful moments later she was disturbed by something prodding into her side. How frustrating, she thought on the knoll in the envelope that had made her feel so beautiful. It was a hot dog.

“What’s all this?” asked the hot dog in a surprising voice.

“Just a grassy knoll,” replied Lucille rather curtly. She had just been woken up after all, although she didn’t think she had been asleep.

“Not all this,” said the Staten Island Dog, slapping the grass. “This grassy knoll is always going on here.”

“If not all that then all what?” asked Lucille, who was becoming more interested in what the hot dog had to say.

“All this!” it exclaimed, and slapped Lucille in the face. Shocked and with thick red lips Lucille immediately put the hot dog in her mouth before it even had time to belch its distaste. She dozed back off cheerfully.

A semi-hour later and Lucille woke up, only this time the grassy knoll was grass no longer but sharp jagged rocks, the sky looked like a furnace and Lucille’s arms and legs had somehow become – albeit beautiful and perfectly formed and soft and gentle – hot dogs. Surrounding her, rather eerily she thought, was a pack of singing sailors hats.


“Ho ho ho and a case of good rum” – they sang –
“long might we drink it
now and forever
so as we might forget the embarrassment
of being the all-singing
all-dancing
drunken sailors hats.”


They offered Lucille a dark brown bottle because she looked upset and the dancing and the singing continued, feeling as though everyone should clap their hands. The hats, of course, didn’t have any. Lucille brushed her hot dogs together and moved awkwardly about in the rocks.


III


“The rum keeps flowing
all night long
until we can’t remember
anything at all.”


The sailor’s hats seemed to be getting more reckless and more miserable, and Lucille didn’t like not being able to stand up because her legs were of hot dog. It was an unusual sensation. The rocks that hadn’t always been looking like they were breathing and moved themselves in a revelation. What are you doing? she wanted to ask the hats.

“What are you all doing dancing and drinking like this in the afternoon? And where has that lovely green grass gone to?”

The sailor’s hats ceased all activity at once and not one of them said a word in direct reply. “Listen to her,” said one; “she’ll never understand!” sobbed another; “nothing the matter with her, look, with her perfect hot dogs for limbs!”; “we’re the one’s suffering,”; “grass?”; “grass, she says!”. Lucille managed to manoeuvre herself backwards. The hats threw the rum away, smashing the bottle; it screamed as it broke and Lucille watched the broken fragments of glass transforming into trees as if released from some eternal curse. They piled before the girl with the hot dogs and with one last lament went forth in song:


“Oh oh oh
oh oh oh
oh oh oh
What it is (to be me!)”


They even managed to sing the parenthesis but it was too late for punctuation, and the hats plummeted from the tall rocky edge and Lucille screamed “no you don’t have to!”. But they had fallen straight down onto the heads of 1950s dockworkers, tattooed and laid and moving on with a cargo of elegance and decanters, and they kept their mouths shut.

Lucille closed her eyes but heard a voice shout “Jork!” at one side of the stage, and a telephone ringing at the other, and it was raining, and she seemed to be on a football pitch. Green grass! The silver tipped mind balloon! But what’s this? An office complex? Legs are legs once more. Good. Those dogs were making me hungry. Although my arms are now… forks?

Ah, it’s Jork. The cutlery amalgam.


IV


“Behold me missy I have the head of a fork”, spoke Jork. What hot rain there seems to be on this young field, I can feel it melting right through my clothes, thought Lucille. And office block with windows like this could only be in the commercial sector. No football match but all the white lines seemingly in place, and then this darned tower like a big thingy in its midst.

“Behold me I said,” said Jork disgruntledly. “Your head cogs are turning in the perpetuity of a solipsistic introspective philosophic philologic rudeness.”

“Pardon me?”

“Pardon maybe but ever really be able to forgive I don’t bloody balls.”

“…”

“Just ignoring me – Jork – to think about the confusing nature of your own temporary reality and this a football pitch.”

“But the pitch…”

“The pitch makes the earth spin make the earth spin makes the earth spin and that tower” – he pointed with an outstretched piece of cutlery – “that’s the after-paradise stock machine. Share buying and spares. Currency analysis and whosoever cares. Must toodle.”

Jork kissed Lucille on the lips and had a fork for a head. It would be wrong to say that she took no pleasure from the kiss, but it was a pleasure she couldn’t quantify, occurring in a place she blushed to think about. He was a cutlery amalgam, she was a lady. Don’t know where he disappeared to though. The telephone kept on ringing. Lucille thought it must have been coming from the office tower. It wasn’t, because a man with a cellular phone and a dark red suit was walking towards her and shouting jumbled words and sentences into it. He wore sunglasses.

“…watchplants scrummy scrummy tell the wife the boy has done the doo-wop a clock handle I say give me a three quarter square percentage of niner over the proverbial detriment at nine point two two the pound my shelf needs a rebuild my stocking wants for darning buffoon is surely a ten…”

He stopped in front of Lucille, walking but not talking, that is, the latter of which continued, slightly louder if anything. He seemed to be normal and normal. However on the top of his head and the back of his head were the same duplicate faces that he wore on the front. Three faces? How very haunting, scoffed Lucille.

“Paradise share!” he blurted suddenly.

And we cut to the back of a taxicab.


V


Lucille sunk into the leather seats of the taxicab. She looked down at her body, which looked and felt normal, and thought about an explosion. It was big and tore a house down, although whose house it was she didn’t know, and she relaxed a little.

“Hey lady,” drawled the driver, “stop that.” She looked up. In the rear view mirror his face looked like the moon. “Stop that thinking about explosion in my cab will you?”

“And who might you be?”

“I’m the moon,” the driver replied, patronising in his tone, “and you better watch yourself.” Figures, she probably thought. The moon was still looking at her in the mirror, “Hey lady,” he said, after a few moments of silence. “You’re going to have a baby. You know that?” Lucille found even the suggestion ludicrous. She had never had a physical relation with a man, and whilst the human biological system was not her speciality, she knew enough of the basics to know what children grew out of.

“That’s impossible,” she said.

“No it’s not,” the moon explained. “You spoke to me, just then, and now you are going to birth my baby moon.” He saw Lucille’s incredulous look. “Obviously the moon doesn’t have babies in the regular way. It’s all in the words.” Lucille was concerned. Was she prepared for a baby moon? He was a charismatic driver, but sure had been underhanded in his reproductive aplomb.

“Pregnant with conversation. That’s typical moon.” And Lucille felt a twitching in her stomach, fuzzes like the labour was starting. It wasn’t a pain, as such, more like swallowing a large mouthful of chocolate that wasn’t particularly good. She lifted up her top to the bottom of her breasts and she hadn’t worn a bra that day. The driver, the moon, did his best to try not to see or hear what was going on. The unspoken confidentiality of the taxi driver: what happens in this back seat stays in this back seat. Lucille realised that the cab wasn’t going anywhere but everything was changing, including the moon and the cab, and the world was the lobby of an expensive looking hotel and the brain trees were of full size now and towering to the electric light fittings. There were hammocks hung from the branches, and inside numbers tried to solve themselves, and a little boy cried and two girls naked from the waist down were the leaves, and looking at her navel stretching out like a hand through cling-film a disc was pushing through Lucille’s stomach. Finally finally yes the brouhaha over and perfectly safe a rotating two dimensional moon hovers the fading back seat and says: “Daddy!”.

“Son!”

Jump.


VI


Ah, the tennis racquet mountain. Whatever a place to find oneself.


VII


Far above the clouds and far below the people at the very top of the mountain of tennis racquets was a castle that looked like a person. Lucille didn’t know if she was going, coming or just standing still. Sometimes the wind would make her chuckle, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. The castle had no doors or windows and no brick structuring, but it did have two sad blue eyes and a long nose that was secretly full of rotten hair. Just like a person.

But everybody know that people never live on mountains made of tennis racquets, even people with weeping eyes. The only thing that would ever possibly – by any stretch of any human’s imagination – live on top of all of those sporting tools was a castle. Lucille remembered her mother once saying something like that:


“Dearest Lucille – every cloud is silver throughout,
and beautiful too.”


Lucille began to wonder whether she would ever get to talk to somebody, and walked to the door that wasn’t there in the castle that looked like a face. It was dark and there were noises that made you feel a little sick, and pieces of furniture were being sealed inside specialised water bubbles.

On an imposing throne on a fifteen foot flowing carpet that was waiting for attention there sat a very dignified dog. It had a human body and smoked five cigarettes at once, very quickly.

“Hum hum hum then, dear-o bleak,” he said. He was certainly charming, thought Lucille. Before she could really open her mouth to speak the dog had raised a hand – with a cigarette between each finger – to stop her. A gong was struck at brutal volume.

“Flan to Hades!” he parped out. “A monologue!”


VIII


The monologue from the dog (gy)


Children can be cruel. “You’re a dog,” they spat at me. “Look at your long ears and wet nose, dog.” The girls would stroke me, the boys would beat me.

Well who’s laughing now? Huh?

It’s me isn’t it, you motherfuckers.

Why? I’m in the fucking suit.

Ever seen a dog in a fucking suit?

No.


Curses and oatmeal, thought Lucille, a bizarre leader, a throne based mammalian, and such jowls, flip flap. Bland décor though.

Out the window!


IX


And straight onto a pile of teetering wardrobes, pine construction, at the feet of a man who carefully uttered one proclamation:

“I have brain grass.”

He smiled in the way that provokes discomfort, and there was dribble on his lips and he peeled back his own scalp like the skin of an orange. Thick foliage, was one reaction. Gosh another.

Out the window!


X


What a commotion, into the arms of a handsome man dressed head-to-toe in silken finery and smelling of flower, such a solid and reassuring jaw line, like a jewellery box, and no doubt strong enough to save everyone, especially a little girl like Lucille.

She fell into his arms and they kissed spinning around on the grassy knoll, and he swept her off her feet like a love broom. And a prince, no less.

“An unrecognisable happiness,” Lucille bleated.

“An unrecognisable joy,” he bleated.

And the two lambs skipped and trundled into the setting sun that set upwards into the electric sky, and the grassy knoll knew it was going to change into something a little more… comfortable.

*

The mysterious pink envelope closed itself on the battered oak table.

feelings of scared

“We’d better microchip the children,” said Plummer – a bald man – matter of factly. “I’ve been thinking.” He nodded as he spoke in a way that was unsettling to focus on.

“Agreed,” said Taylor, his wife. She was a pleasant woman with the face of a cartoon feline, crafted by an idiot out of cheap materials. Friendly, in its way. “There are killers.”

They were a sensitive pair, eating from a plastic dinner set, children locked within their bedrooms in protection from the shocking cruelty of the world.

“Rapists,” he said, “rapists everywhere. It is a growing phenomenon, the child rape. Growing.”

“An increase of percentages,” said Taylor, trembling slightly in thoughts. “Every street contains one, a cyber-pervert, a sex-man, an abduction-performer. Waiting behind car windscreens or UPVC window panelling to pounce and snatch and perform entries into the innocence of youth.”

“They do their rapes in the day or the night,” said Plummer, stroking at his own pate. “Perhaps the most terrifying thing about their sex – it follows no temporal routine.”

“It’s awful!” she concurred with vehemence.

“Our constant vigilance is the modern necessity. Putting a stop to the strangers.”

“No one can be trusted.”

“Everyone’s a suspect. Why is he smiling? Why is he frowning? Does he live here? Yes? No? Who are these people? Everyone!”

“Everyone.”

They drank juice from plastic champagne flutes.

“It’s symptomatic of modernity,” said Plummer amidst moderate-level mastication.

“When we were in youth the world was a safe place. Television has come at the price of infant buggery.”

“Without consent.”

“Thank you.”

“A modern disease, this paedophilia. A modern luxury.”

“Childhood has never been less safe than now. The gentle games of our children must be punctuated repeatedly by warnings: murder, knifes, electrical flex, towels wrapped heavily around the throat and mouth inhibiting breathing, sexual prowlers, and endless string of physical violations. They must be aware, dammit, aware of these horrors!”

“Billboards of victims!”

“Newspaper headlines of pain!”

“Fear! Instil the fear of God into them!”

“They must be scared to talk to each other!”

“Scared to open their doors! Scared to leave their houses!”

“Scared as we are scared for them!”

“I can’t sleep for fear!”

“I’ve had to leave my job!”

“I am so very scared, every day. I have these terrible feelings of... of scared.”

“Scared for the children! If they cross the road, they will die. Abducted. Knifed. Tortured over the telephone. Broadcast on the internet. The screaming children. Oh God!”

“The men are everywhere!”

“Not just the men, Taylor. The women too. The unmentionable vaginal acts of the women!”

“Please stop, Plummer! Please don’t even say it!”

“Be strong, Taylor. We must confront these atrocities ourselves if our children are to remain safe.”

“You’re right. We have a responsibility.”

“A responsibility to God.”

“To our children.”

“To society. The rapes grow exponentially. It has become the norm.”

“The streets are certain death for our children. My heavens, what can we do?”

“Microchips,” said Plummer, his fingers interlaced. “We must microchip them. It’s the only thing to do. The only safe thing.”

“May the good conservative Lord save us from crimes of a coital persuasion!”

*

A sensitive pair who read the tabloids, embroiled in the nausea of their growing fear. The headlines became an information pamphlet, a proclamation of ugly truths, perhaps even a survival guide. Pictures of Maddy became clippings in a shrine, rubbed deliriously over breasts in a frenzy of lost hopes. It was beyond their comprehension just when things had gone so wrong, when the fear took a hold, but it was there. They knew, everybody knew, that it wasn’t safe. Nothing was safe. Sex prowled humanized, mechanical, dirty, inappropriate. Children weren’t for sex but had become so, sperm vessels of forced depravity. Thank heavens for the media who at least tried to keep us aware of the pain.

Taylor cried violently every ten minutes or so, heaving and snorting back mucus into her throat, as if some oddly humorous part of a self-fulfilling prophecy, convinced she could hear gruff male voices behind their children’s closed bedroom doors, or see big muddy footprints left in their en-suite bathroom, or smell unwashed genitalia trickling through the homestead. It was dangerous outside, even for a second, and the children were engulfed within their own insulation, stifled by an inexplicable mass terror. Asked of their fears they answer rapes, or killers, these children five and eight respectively. These words: rapist, killer. How queer to have our children saying these things amongst themselves, in the playground. The unpopular kid at school now called the rapist, the paedofreak. Snatched out of youth by a parental paranoia. Don’t play, you’ll be fucked and cut. Awareness of the risks equals avoidance of the risks: a t-shirt slogan for a parent think-tank held in post-school hours.

Before they had married Plummer had looked long into her eyes and told her that he could see she was a sensitive, warm person, and that he knew this because he was a psychic, and therefore extremely good at reading people. He was a bald, superficially friendly man of short stature, and talked at length about how he had seen ghosts whilst working at night as a security guard in a bank several years ago. He had eventually reprimanded the ghost, he said, but had been scared initially, feelings which passed of course because of his psychic gift. It was ultimately a harmless presence, banging on the walls and stairs, and Plummer had vehemently explained that he could feel the ghost’s pain, and reasoned with it that as he had a job to do it was bound to be best for both of them if they tried to get along, and everything worked out pretty well. Guys like him had to get used to ghosts taunting him at night in darkened financial institutions. It came with the gift, he said from the mouth of his bald head. He ended up a health care assistant.

Later in the date they started ripping each other’s clothes off in some ritualistic sexual celebration of their respective sensitivities, whimpering understanding ripostes like sweet nothings and crying for the pain of the world. Once they had both attained a concerned orgasm they looked pensive and considerately into the others eyes, nodding rhythmically, cooing even, as if the very essence of morality grew from their chests. She cried again, and he cried too, and they knew then that they were made for each other.

“Let’s get married,” he suggested, words muffled by her shoulder, in which he had buried his face.

“Oh God,” she said in a fresh new batch of tears. “The beautiful morning! I, fragility!” She clutched to his head with both arms, as if she were trying to squeeze it right off, and began to scream, loudly, awfully, inexplicably.

“I can feel your pain in me like the spirit itself!” yelled Plummer. “I can feel the pain of the world!”

They were married three weeks later, on a Wednesday.

*

Their concern for the children had grown with the passage of time. As they got older the worry only seemed to get worse and worse until eventually, after just one term, the eldest was pulled out of school. It was safer that way. No colds, no bullies, no teachers, no potentially poisoned cafeteria meals, no marauding paedophiles waiting with thick hemp sacks outside the school gates with semen stains on their dirty jeans. The press were twisting the perverts into a national epidemic of international proportions, publishing names and addresses and actively inciting lynch mobs of archaic mentality, all the while overlooking the maxim that perversion starts at home.

Still not safe enough. Plummer and Taylor decided it was time for a talk.

“I just can’t sleep,” he said, eyes blue.

“What is it darling?”

“The children. I’m worried about the children.”

“I know. I thought getting little Jessie out of school would reassure my enormous concerns about her public safety, but the more I read those newspapers the less sure I am about anything.”

“The newspapers speak truths, that’s what worries me,” said Plummer, shaking his head. “Times have changed. No one is safe, not even us, and not even in the sanctity of these four walls.”

“Oh helpless!” said Taylor, erupting into tears.

“Not quite,” he said. “There’s still one thing we can do.”

“Anything, anything! We must do anything for the sake of the living future!”

“Well we know that they are unsafe outside.”

“Yes!”

“And we know that any madman could threaten their safety inside.”

“Yes, yes! Any madman! I dream nightmares of disguised paedophiles, dressed in uniforms and carrying the required identification documents to present themselves as professionals in the employ of the utility companies, and knocking door-to-door to conduct a meter reading for the purposes of accurate billing!”

“Indeed,” agreed Plummer, panic spreading into his irises.

“Before I know it they are in the house and conducting unmentionable acts of hideousness onto the genitals and bodies of our helpless children! Curse these nightmares and the reflection of reality they represent!”

“This is representative of my fullest concerns, to wit the house itself – whilst apparently of safety – may in fact become more prison than sanctuary.”

“Then what can we do?” she screeched. “What? If even our home can so easily fall prey to the horrors of the sex pervert, what hope do our children have?”

“Of course for one,” Plummer went on, “one must never, under any circumstance save personal entrance and exit of the abode, open the front door. Ever.”

“Certainly yes. I shout commands from the top bathroom window to anyone who ventures onto the driveway.”

“And that’s the right approach.”

“But what else? You’ve seen the news, they’re everywhere. They could... they could see through the windows, see our children at play and use it to fuel some kind of... masturbatory development! There is nothing sacred to these men and women.”

“Sanctity is certainly rendered meaningless by the paedophile,” Plummer agreed. “For which reason we must ensure that a permanent closure of curtains is operative within the homestead.”

“I’m still so very scared, my darling.”

“I know you are, and so am I. The world is a cruel place for children and adults alike, and it is the responsibility of the decent parent to hide and shelter them from that world. And that is exactly what we shall do. For Jessie and little Christopher, the world has gone. I think it’s safer that way.”

“I love you Plummer,” she said, still crying.

“You know love and safety are very much two integral halves of the same whole,” he smiled.

They lay there in silence for a while, punctuated only by Taylor’s sensitivity. Plummer turned to her, propped up on one elbow. She did likewise, her bottom lip quivering.

“I still feel as though it’s not enough,” he said sincerely. “I’m a dad and I take that responsibility very seriously, and I know you feel the same about being a mum.” Taylor was nodding, tears streaming down her puffed cheeks. “And I think – as a dad – that the best way. The only way I can really know that I am being the best, most responsible dad I can be is if I...”

“What? What do we need to do?”

“I need to... we need to... or rather, we have to fully engulf the children. Physically. Be all over them. Inside them, outside them. We need to be one with them.”

Taylor kissed him and he felt the warmth of her emissions on his hairless cheeks.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “You’re a beautiful man.”

“I knew you’d know it was the safest thing to do,” he said, returning her kisses.

“How do we engulf them?” she asked.

“It’s simple,” he went on matter-of-factly. “We make love to them.”

“Make love to them?”

“Exactly,” he said. “It’s so beautiful, so safe. Remember, love and safety are two sides of the same reassuring coin.”

“But we want to protect our children from the sexual violations of the perverts,” she said with uncertainty.

“Of course we do, and that’s what we’re doing here. Think about it,” he said, sitting up animatedly. “If we’re making love to our children, it means that someone else – some stranger, someone we don’t know or trust – isn’t. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said. “It seems to make sense.”

“In fact, it’s the most sensible thing we can hope for in this awful modernity. And because we love our children so much, and because we are not dangerous or harmful individuals, we are the only two people who should be making love to them, as no one else can ever love them as much as we do.”

“That’s true.”

“And, perhaps most true of all, it is only by crossing this final bridge of spatial closeness that we can know, with the utmost certainty, that we are truly protecting our children. It will make us closer than anything, and we will sleep well at last knowing that we are keeping them safe from all the evil people the modern world produces. Total physical protection. Our bodies will join as one familial bodily unit, shielded by intimacy and by proximity!”

Taylor was smiling with such love in her eyes. “Oh Plummer,” she said. “You are the kindest, most sensitive man. You understand the danger intuitively. The children are lucky to have a father like you.”

“And you’re a terrific mother,” he said, nodding in agreement.

Overcome with the passion of it all, Taylor moved into a position conducive to fellatio, which she proceeded to perform, calmly, slowly and with a sensitive attention to detail. Plummer leaned back, hands folded behind his head. He was relaxing for the first time in nearly five years.

With the efficient regularity of clockwork, the abuse began the following morning.

*

The Bratz headboard bangs rhythmically with Plummer’s plunging buttocks. “You... are... safe!” He is breathy in his speech, and Taylor looks on with a handkerchief dabbed to the corner of an eye, like she was watching little Jessie riding a stabilised bicycle for the first time, and not this terrible act of intercourse.

She doesn’t have to cry anymore. It’s just another part of her day. And if she closes her eyes she is safe. She’ll always be safe if she closes her eyes, if she doesn’t see or feel it. With the curtains always closed her world is now a construct. She isn’t afraid. The fear is all her parents. Bad bad parents. Later she’ll have to lick mummy and daddy will sing “Water of life” and feel relieved that they are together in here, a family, and not susceptible to the social dangers of kidnapping sex maniacs with their penises, and knives, and homicidal ideation.

What about the sex maniacs on this side of the curtains?

Oh, they’re family.

*

“Oh God I miss Maddy!” mourned Taylor, sobbing into palms.

“But mummy, you didn’t even know her. She wasn’t your little girl.”

Slap. “She was. She was everyone’s little girl.”

A symbol.

“Are we safe mummy?”

“Only in here,” she said, kissing the little Maddy photograph. A child sacrifice on the altar of mass hysteria. Portugal – England – World. The facts had ceased to matter the minute she was out of sight; she had become a statement of terror more real than any act of terrorism. Child victims of illicit adult fetishism. The nonce was the master citizen of the media kingdom. She could have been a photograph, a news report, a grief-stricken interview with parents, a fantasy, a falsehood; it didn’t matter, for the statement she had made united the world in madness, saw an end to any meaningful understanding of childhood, saw windows locked and doors bolted, saw nations stands as brothers against a horror unimaginable.

Maddy the grand narrative.

And the other abuse, unreported and unceasing, behind the closed doors of family, was forgotten, paled into insignificance by the pretty blonde girl and the suspicious parents. Resources and venom pumped to bursting into the Maddy machine while friends and neighbours and doctors and teachers and police look rapists and monsters in the eye and are too busy worrying about this distant child they hadn’t ever known to notice the domestic abnormality that’s right in front of them. Old Maddy, a case to worry about, to hide away from, to extend scorn to shifty men everywhere, to use as evidence of the decaying morality of the world at large, but still distant enough for comfort. Doesn’t infringe upon the unwritten respect due to blood relation.

Where does it all end, this hysteria?

In Plummer, fucking his little daughter because he’s scared to let her out of the house.

In Taylor, wanking Maddy’s memory with brittle fingers.

In all the confused parents terrified by their own imaginations.

*

Plummer ran up the stairs clutching an A5 jiffy bag in front of him. “The microchips,” he shouted. “They’re here!” He burst energetically into the master bedroom, where Taylor was laid out flat on the floor, the children lethargic and groggy on the bed next to her. The room smelt stale and unusual, relentlessly dulled by the absence of light, bathed depressingly in a sixty watt smear of electrical representation. Jessie and little Christopher didn’t sit up, but Taylor leapt to her feet, clapping her hands compulsively while tears poured down her cheeks and words fell heavily from her mouth.

“The microchips, children! Children, the microchips! Oh thank you, father, for this the next level of responsible parent-child safety interaction!”

“Yes Taylor!” whooped Plummer, striking a well centralised high five to Taylor’s feeble right hand. “Another nail of reassurance in the coffin of familial security.” He smiled broadly and turned to the children. “Here they are kids,” he said, as if he were revealing the most coveted electrical gadget of a new generation. “Microchips.”

Jessie and Christopher peered into the jiffy bag, feigning interest. He was right all right: microchips, a couple of centimetres square. Jessie snorted quietly and lay back down.

“Not just microchips, either,” Plummer went on like a desperate salesman, “but tracking devices, too.”

Taylor gasped audibly and cried even harder. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful.”

“Yes!” screeched Plummer in an awful pitch. “This way we will always know where you are! Isn’t that terrific.” Christopher started to cry, but didn’t really know why. He had never been outside the house, it was too dangerous. For Jessie the world outside the detached family home was a difficult memory, but for Christopher only an imagining, a possibility.

“How, oh God please tell me, how?” Taylor felt nauseous with delight.

“A special tracking device,” said Plummer, folding his arms triumphantly. “It’s being sent in a separate jiffy bag.” He and Taylor slumped into each other’s arms, as if in the throes of some bizarre sexual union. The children lay still.

“Chip them, my darling,” said Taylor. “Chip them immediately.”

“Good idea,” Plummer concurred. “The sooner we act the safer we are.” He nodded at the children. “We’re doing this for you,” he said gravely. “We do everything for you. You’re our children, our lives, everything we have. As adults we know that the world is not safe for you. We’re all better off in here, together.”

“Away from the paedophiles and the fiends of a publicised contemporary deviant sexuality!”

“Very much yes,” he said with a genuine loving affection for his wife. “Away from the perverts. Just us, together, one big happy family. I mean, what could the world possibly have to offer us?” he asked, arms extended in invitation. No one said anything, it was a well-practised ritual. “Precisely,” he said, basking in the collective silence of denial. Did the world even continue on the other side of these walls? It was a meaningless contemplation for the children, who flopped almost lifeless amidst the coordinated linen set, so very, very bored.

“Now,” Plummer continued, unfastening his belt and lowering his trousers first, then underpants. “Microchips!”

*

The newspapers sing their dirty songs. Parents feel hatred with the community vigour of a lynch mob, inexplicably and mindlessly angry. A fine example for all of our children.

suicide girl

girl got jesus tattoo

I have started sleeping with a girl who has the word "JESUS" tattooed in black across her knuckles. Usually people choose something like "LOVE" or "HATE" because those words only have four letters, so when you ball your hand into a fist the four fingers display the word evenly. But because "JESUS" has five letters she has had to squeeze the J and the E onto the same index finger. This looks rather unprofessional.

She is vigorous, energetic and dangerous in the bedroom, however, and claims that this is to do with the word "JESUS" being tattooed over her knuckles.

Being of a naturally passive nature, her dominance makes our relationship quite an exciting one, although I am slightly concerned. She seems to enjoy wrapping her legs around my throat until I can't really breathe. She also hits me with the tattooed knuckles, crying weird prayers over the thud of our meeting flesh.

She's told me that it's only a matter of time until she kills me, and I believe every word she says. I don't think many people would doubt the word of a dominant woman with "JESUS" tattooed over her knuckles.

on the roof

I was woken from a fitful sleep by cold water.

Upon opening my eyes, I quickly ascertained that it was, in fact, rain, and that I was, it would seem, outside. A cursory photoreceptive investigation into my surrounds further suggested that I was on a roof, although which roof I was on and why I was on it were at that time mysteries unsolvable by observation alone. I was neither clothed nor naked, but in the middle state provided by a two-piece cotton pyjama suit, and I promptly thanked the stars for small mercies. It was a flat roof, thankfully, but much to my chagrin was of the sort commonly associated with factories or other such industrial premises and littered liberally with sharp gravel, that had apparently taken it’s toll on me during my nights slumber. Feeling my back with one hand, under the now sodden material of the pyjamas, I felt myriad pockmarks and grazes about my person, and as I stood up I couldn’t help but to allow myself a high pitched yelp as the gravel embedded itself in the soles of my bare feet.

The wind whipped and whistled around me as I stood, forcing the coldness of my pyjamas onto my skin. My muscles ached and my neck was in a miserable state of stiffness. I yelped again as I tried to turn my head, and again and again. For the life of God almighty I couldn’t move the wretched thing, it had locked fast into place and imposed the most crippling agony upon me if I tried to make even the slightest rotational motion. My luck had run out with the pyjamas, it seemed, and appeared to be waning further with every second that passed. With my back locked in a rigid vertical pose, the only stance that reduced the need for movement in the neck and thereby eased the debilitating pressures upon it, I rotated my whole body around an arc of some 270°, feeling both absurd and uncomfortable in nigh on equal measure. Such pain in the neck should never be underestimated, and I vowed there and then to take regular meetings with a chiropractic executive at the earliest available future opportunity. Thus with my head held in perfect straightness I tried to pick my way around the gravel as best I could – which was far from easy when incapable of looking downward – and, like a man beset by the final paralysis of rigor mortis, attempted to better assess the inexplicability of my unfurling situation by grasping where I was, what I was doing there and how I might rectify the inappropriateness of my exposure.

A slow and lumbering walk to what appeared to be the edge of the roof initiated more mysteries than it solved. By now holding my head still, with hands on each side of my face, to prevent the wind from blowing it and inadvertently triggering the acute sensitivity of the neck, I glanced awkwardly, and not without a rather porcine expulsion of grunts, in the southerly direction, due downwards, for even the vaguest suggestion as to my whereabouts. My first observation confirmed my suspicions that this was indeed the roof of a factory of some sort. The crudity of the brickwork, the dulled glass of the windows, the sooty chimney structure; it fulfilled the necessary factorial stereotypes to make such an assumption acceptable – if not entirely correct, then certainly in the higher end of the probable, and when considering the current state of personal discomfort to which I was a party (to wit: pyjamas, roof, inclement weather, sustained neck injury), I proceeded without further ado with the secondary observations required to address the issues at hand.

I had still not managed to angle my neck sufficiently to see all the way to the ground below, but nevertheless I began to shout out for assistance. To the best of my reckoning, yesterday had been Tuesday which would make today Wednesday, which ipso facto would likely have all manner of menial workers and blue collar ruffians within receptive distance of the impressive range of my voice, and happy to help a gentleman of fine nightwear from the pickle in which he had somehow found himself by the mystery of the spheres, especially in exchange for a fiscal reward concurrent with inflation and representative of the severity of the work conducted to be assessed and calculated at an opportunity satisfactory to either party and to be conducted on neutral ground.

“Hello there!” I hollered. “Hello and I say, down there! Forgive my countenance, I have been struck to stiffness by neck ache of the grossest calibre. By some madness it is I slept a slumber atop this flat roof of your humble factory, and for the love of man could not tell you why! I say, might I trouble you for your generous time and assistance from this devil of a predicament, see for I can’t rotate the old think tank due to the aforesaid! Call me a sausage, I fear I might be stuck up here! And only in the pyjamas I stand up in! I say? Hello down there? I say?”

Despite my eloquence, replies remained minimal, or rather, more correctly, absent. I listened as best I could, angling my ear – and thus my whole body – toward roofs edge, squinting my eyes into the wind, but heard nothing but the rasping on the rain on my pyjama shirt. I swallowed out of concern, and felt immediately struck by the most awful horror. I longed to do something fast, anything, to rush from one side of the roof to the other, to shout and scream and jump around, but my neck made anything of the sort impossible. A blessing, in that respect; sometimes it is only monstrous pain that enables a man to stand still and proud with dignity firmly intact, contemplative, calm. I took some deep breaths and attempted a philosophical reflection. I had only woken a few minutes ago, after all, and without my wristwatch I had no idea what the time was. It was of medium lightness in the sky, I could establish that much despite the looming menace of the rain clouds overhead, but that could put it anywhere between seven or nine o’clock in the ante meridiem period, I reckoned with confidence. Which would in turn suggest that patience, once again, might prove to be my greatest virtue, for the factory wouldn’t begin clocking in until half past eight or perhaps nearer nine, and therefore if I merely bade my time then I would surely be noticed by the approaching workers who would immediately come to my aid and feel refreshed and invigorated by the humour of the situation and talk about it for years to come in voices loud enough to be heard over the production line, one of those bizarre little stories of human interest that have no precedent and are eventually engulfed in the darkness of the unsolved.

Of course! My pleas went unheard, not ignored! What a fool I was! With a smile, which sent a jolt of pain from my neck to every inch of my body, I vowed to sit tight and to occupy myself with my thoughts for next hour, two at most, and would again call for assistance when I heard the first of the workers slurred and broken English make its approach from the road. Dare I say I even felt a glimmer of amusement in my reverie, despite shivering as I was in this rotten weather, and the many aches too plentiful to list. A roof! I couldn’t make it up! None of the gentlemen would believe this one, no matter how I told it! I felt slightly queasy, some combination of tiredness and the cold, but pushed it from my mind, saying aloud to myself in a cheery voice: “what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger!”, a cliché I tended not to agree with in the slightest but that seemed appropriate, despite its hackneyed and misleading sentimentalising. I thought about Herrington, turned to jelly by a post-traumatic stress disorder, and felt oddly guilty. It was certainly character building, I admitted that much, one of the many fragments of life’s rich tapestry, all combining to make me the man I will one day be, the little stories that form a history.

I wanted to sit down, but feared I might never be able to stand again, what with the ache of my neck, and I certainly didn’t want to go unnoticed, or miss the arrival of the factory workers – they shouldn’t be long now – so decided to head towards a raised skylight that jutted from the roof like a greenhouse. Whilst it offered no passage into the dryness of the factory below, I theorized that its structure may well provide minimal protection from the rain, which had settled into a constant and repetitive blanket of wetness that was abusing the ground like a violent superior. I ambled over with slightly spasmodic movements, and leaned back against the glass as best as I could. It pressed the pyjamas back into my skin, and I winced at the coldness, but it felt pleasant to take the weight even slightly off of my feet, and indeed did offer some shelter the relentlessness of the rain, effectively reducing its onslaught by a good thirty per cent, which you might think is a trifle for a man already soaked to the skin and atop a factory in his pyjamas, but even the wettest man can feel the often crushing sadness of a constant precipitation, perhaps the wettest man most of all. Something about the monotony of the drops can shred away the dignity and, indeed, the sanity of a man greater than myself, and I greedily relished the thirty per cent reduction in rain contact with all the gusto of a man not afraid of the loss of the comforts to which he is accustomed.

As the time slowly passed my mind too began to wander to a topic I had hitherto ignored somewhat in my excitement and instinctual desire to remove myself from the roof that held me captive, victim of the elements. Namely: how the devil I came to be on that selfsame roof in the first place. Try as I might, however, I just couldn’t seem to piece together the events preceding this present unfortunate circumstance. The previous night was a blur at best, and beyond a glass or two of – particularly fine – brandy and some hearty laughter, there was little either unusual or untoward that had so far formulated into lasting memories. Whilst I was unable to recall with certainty the personal use of my own bed, I could make certain educated assumptions about its likelihood, for the simple reason that I was wearing my own pyjamas, pyjamas which I kept in a silk pyjama case beneath the topmost pillow of my luxurious bed and nowhere else. Perhaps not evidence that would pass as fact or truth in a court of law, but amply sufficient for the purposes of a reconstruction of my previous night, and how it contributed to my current, rather compromising location.

I squinted in concentration, desperate to recall even the smallest detail. There had been people with me. Johnson-Devizes and Willis-Harker, that was it! And little Rawlings, the blighter! Yes! They had been with me, all three of them. We had eaten a meal of exceptional goodness, and conversed into the late hours as only the educated will, exploring amongst ourselves in the sanctity of my drawing room all manner of philosophical concepts and treatises, both Western and the other. We had laughed, we had bickered, we had ribbed, but only ever in reverence of the deepest respect we felt for the next man. Come the striking of the first hour of morn, my three closest, most male friends bade me simultaneous farewell and took leave as one in a shared taxi, propelling them to their respective bedrooms as my weary legs had propelled me up the staircase to my own. I did remember! I slipped between the sheets with only just enough time in which to pull on my pyjamas, and then I had drifted easily into the blissful complacency of a delicate unconsciousness. Then I had woken, at which point you joined me in this most bizarre of adventures.

I rubbed my hands together briskly, and impulsively raised the wrist where my watch would usually be to a level at which I could examine it. Dash it all, it was getting even colder. No closer to discovering the reason behind my altitude, I decided that perchance a stout constitutional around the perimeter of the roof might both circulate the heat of my blood somewhat, whilst passing the dragging time in a more interesting way than that in which I was then engaged. After a democratic assessment of the pros and cons of the suggested constitutional, a vote of one was passed, counted, recounted and announced, and promptly acted upon in the most effective fashion available, namely the commencement of motion.

The rain had slowed but continued to fall as a thin sheet of sadness in the morning air. The pain in my neck seemed also to be easing, but I couldn’t be sure whether I was simply getting used to it, and any rash movements would cause significant and lasting harm in the long-term, so I continued to move in a posture of absurdity, my neck rigid and straight atop my shoulders.

Perhaps sleepwalking was the answer? I had heard tell of grown men wandering from their beds and almost functioning in their lives without ever leaving the realms of the dream. In my youth an acquaintance had drifted into some poor lad’s room in the thick of the night and started removing, of all things, his underwear. The nude sleeper then attempted passage into the startled boy’s bed, who – woken in accordance with the rustling of his blankets – had had to use words of force and sincerity to rectify the intrusion, much to the hilarity of the dormitory. Unsure, come morning, as to whether he had dreamt the whole affair the lad thought no more of it, until later that day he had uncovered the sleepwalker’s boxer shorts at the head of his bed. We questioned the latter, who – embarrassed and shamed as he was – tried to explain his history of sleepwalking, which we found even more hilarious as he tripped over his own words and bumbled out apologies. It was an occurrence beyond humour, I said to myself, but there was something in it. The human unconscious is of powerful design, and as we submit it to the silence of sleep only fools or madmen would attempt to guess at what might happen, or what could happen. I was happy with this, and decided to write more about it when I finally got off of the roof.

Whilst seeming like the most fantastical explanation, sleepwalking was also currently the only explanation I had, and though I had no history of the act and no reason to assume that it would be to this location that I would sleepwalk, it was a possibility at least, and sometimes even a poor or ridiculous explanation is better than no explanation at all. It can help us to make logic in a situation devoid of the same, and without logic the god’s themselves wouldn’t know where to begin.

I edged to the drop and again tried calling out for assistance, to no avail. I reassured myself with a contemplation of the perceived contortions to the passage of time, and how – despite my growing boredom and feelings of uneasiness – I had probably only been waiting, in truth, for a period of around ten minutes, and that the workers would still be arriving, as expected, come the appropriate time for a Wednesday of honest hard slog.

But then it caught my eye, glistening under the force of the raindrops. I squinted against the weather and shielded my eyes with a hand. From this distance I couldn’t quite be sure if my initial perceptions were correct, but as I became more focused in scope I saw quickly that they very much were. A fire escape! Of course! Health and safety demands no less than these mighty steel structures wending their utilitarian metal features towards the skies! Groaning with joy I began the painful walk across the loose shingle of the flat roof and towards my salvation. O sacred metal bonds, pantheon of legislation and forethought, scaling buildings large and small with the perpetual determination of a celebrity escapologist! I would fall at your feet in worship, were it not for this wretched neck!

As I reached the far side of the roof, and in so doing the entrance to the fire escape, I breathed a sigh of relief and laughed aloud, making a mockery of my prior fears. I had made it through whatever test the divinity had deigned to throw at me, had stared adversity in the face and felt the force of its moist flanks within my very hands, and now, here, with decorum and grace, I would make my descent from the wilderness and back to the daily motions of my life, a little stronger, a little wiser, and always with the conduct of the gentleman that I was. It was a feeling so glorious that I felt it in my loins.

*

Alas and to bastard! Imagine, if you would, my very despair. The fire escape, that heavenly structure, that feat of engineering, it was incomplete! INCOMPLETE! With straight neck I made a steady path of descent down its surface, still only able to direct my gaze forwards, never from side-to-side and never down. Despite my pain I could now found time for a smile and had almost even started to enjoy the rain, in some strange way, as often one will when the promise of a hot cocoa, a fine robe and a good fire awaits them at journey’s end. I heard a sound akin to watery motion, as of a lake in the breeze, or a slow moving river crossing flat earth, but in my reverie I dismissed it as imagination, or as the driving rain in transit and against the side of the building.

Yet as I edged my toes over the crest of the sixth step down, extending them like sensory receivers of some kind, like the feelers of a blind man, I noticed a distinct lack of further steps. Queer, I thought, and tried to turn my whole body around forty-five degrees. I could see that I was as yet less than half way down the fire escape, and therefore the side of the building, but the fire escape seemed to simply stop. I again moved my toes down, further this time, even bending my other leg at the knee (in a motion of profound discomfort to myself) to reach as far as was possible into the space below me, in case a single step had somehow been misplaced, or dislodged in an act of nature or of heinous vandalism. But no, the farther I leaned, the more space there was, until with a scream from my lips and a sense of horror running in an unbroken line from heart to anus, I felt the unmistakable coolness of water about my toes, and from what I could make out in this spontaneous initial assessment, rather a lot of it.

“Pending disaster,” I squealed desperately. I lowered my toes once more, faster this time, and reached the same conclusions again, for the second time. Wrenching my neck southward with a shout I looked, looked dammit, looked below me to where – as the power of universal logic would suggest to any man of remotely sane faculties – the remainder of the fire escape should be.

And there it certainly wasn’t. Believe me when I say I nearly died on my feet – right where I stood and let the god’s take me up – when I saw the truth of this unbelievable nightmare. The world had gone. Not only the fire escape, which had rusted and broken off at the banisters, but the world on which I stood, from which my life had grown. It was gone, flooded, washed away like some Biblical metaphor. The water had risen to just below the now bottom of the fire escape, the last step of which I was now astride, paralysed by disbelief and pelted with terror.

The water surged and rose and waved as if it were breathing and I looked up at the thick grey sky, certain that the rain had once again started to increase its falling quantity. It will only continue to rise, I thought, mentally referencing the standing water, and looked hopelessly towards the horizon. The town around me had all but vanished, only the odd tips of church spires or the occasional roof still peeking sporadically from the watery depths, the cruel liquid swallowing buildings and vehicles without thought or remorse. There wasn’t a person in sight, no cowering mothers clasping to their roofs and longing for a rescue mission, no brave husbands tying their family to their waists with an old bed sheet and paddling carefully to a floating piece of furniture. There was nothing, no one. I realised that it wouldn’t be long for me either, that only the slight incline on which the industrial estate was built had preserved me for this long.

I made haste up the stairs, and realised to my rather muffled joy that the pain in my neck had finally subsided. It must have been the speed of my earlier motion somehow forcing it back into a comfortable alignment. Loathe as I may be to admit it, as I reached the roof again I must confess to panicking, almost awfully. I ran one way, then another, then a third after that, all the while grinding my teeth uncontrollably and emitting little screams from between my teeth, that were again chattering in the cold. I began to shout out words quite randomly.

“Canister!”

“Funereal approach!”

“Scabbards!”

“Interrogate!”

“For the love of the one good God, please help me!”

I fell to my knees in an act of bizarre and hysterical prayer and bellowed from the pain of the sharp stones that littered the roof digging through the fine cotton of my nightwear and into the soft skin of the knees below. Slumping to my side in the very pits of despair, I am man enough to admit that I wept, wept with the force of a naughty child, wept until I could weep no more, wept until an acrid bile was vomited from the sanctity of my innards. I was doomed, and even my trademark optimism was powerless against this particular reality. My plight now definite, like the unfolding plot of a scripted stage play, and I knew then that I would die on this roof. I was a broken man, my death the epitome of the pointlessness I had spent a lifetime running away from, dowsing in brandy, throwing my wealth towards, shoving beneath the fibres of one expensive rug after another. Finally it had caught up with me. One wet roof, one lonely man. It was exquisite, in a strange way, and I closed my eyes and willed death upon me, taking little comfort in the poetics of my downfall. Let the rain engulf me, I thought, let it swallow me in its eternity, let the decision be taken, wipe me from the face of this monstrous world!

*

As I sank into the blackness of irreversible oblivion I was soon jolted back into the coolness of truth by what sounded like a voice. A human voice.

“Good God, it’s Peterson!” the voice said.

“Great Scott,” said another familiar, if somewhat high-pitched voice. “Peterson, you devil!”

“It is,” said a third voice. “It is, it’s Peterson!”

“Peterson!” chimed all three of the voices simultaneously, as I felt several sets of hands fall upon my shoulders and pull me somewhat gracelessly to my feet.

I opened my eyes, and almost couldn’t believe them when I did. I didn’t know whether to laugh or die.

“Johnson-Devizes!” I said, joyously recognising the spreading bulk of his flanks beneath his sodden pyjamas. The sight of his paunch had never once made me so happy and nauseous in equal measure. “Willis-Harker!” I exclaimed, the meticulous parting of his thick black hair starting to droop under the persistence of the rain, thick globules of pomade hanging awkwardly around the hairline. “And Little Rawlings!” I said finally, genuinely uplifted by the presence of this unusual little man, his white-bottomed pyjamas stained liberally with the most unflattering yellowish tinge centred around the genital opening. “You three!”

“Peterson,” said Johnson-Devizes again, “just what the heck’s going on here?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said firmly. “Isn’t this all some trick, some prank, organised at your hands?”

“Pah!” ejaculated Willis-Harker, wiping his forehead with a wet handkerchief. “A prank! A prank, he says!”

“Come on Peterson, for goodness sake. A prank? We’re as wet as you are man, soaked through! Would we pull such a prank on ourselves?”

“I suppose not,” I said, curiously. “Then what the devil is going on here? Look around you. It’s flooded, the world has flooded!”

“Most unavoidably,” said Little Rawlings, his voice the high-pitched one I had recognised previously.

“Indeed,” said Willis-Harker. “The question remains, gentleman, of why? Why and how?”

“And more specifically, I should think,” I interjected, “why are we here?”

“Very much the case,” Johnson-Devizes concurred pensively. “Last night, I for one sought slumber in my own bed and my own bed alone, and it was within that bed where I slept the sleep of the good this very night past.”

“Likewise,” said Willis-Harker.

“Most agreed,” said Little Rawlings.

“Concurrence is extended voraciously in my favour,” said I. “Tipsy, perchance, I might have dabbled in the fineries of the aqua vitae, but drunk I wasn’t, and in bed I most definitely had been. That much is remembered clearer than the lights of the brightest days.”

“Tipsy!” exclaimed Willis-Harker with a snort. “My friend you were more beast than man!”

“Devastated!” laughed Little Rawlings.

“Primal!” chortled Johnson-Devizes.

“How dare you, three of you!” I said defensively, feeling my cheeks aflame with the indignity of their claims.

“It fails to matter either way,” snapped Willis-Harker. “Drunk as manticore or sober as church mouse, it means little. The fact remains that, irrespective of the intricacies of our faculties in regard to the aqua vitae we all of us can honestly and with certainty plead a guiltless guilty to the fact that we did appropriately commit acts of sleep in one – or rather four different – places, to wit, our own beds, places most intimately familiar to us, and yet have seemingly awakened in an unfamiliar location without the benefit of shelter. Namely, and primarily, outside.”

“Here-here,” rallied Little Rawlings.

“Damn your accusations, Willis-Harker!” I growled.

“Accusation nothing, Peterson. The veracity of your abject drunkenness is of no consequence to our current disagreeable position, and so merits no further discussion at this or any future point.”

“Come on Peterson,” said Little Rawlings in an amenable tone. “Let’s not dwell on your penchant for a drop or three.”

“Damn your eyes if I wasn’t drunk, you funny little person!” I’m sure I was perspiring, but thank the lord for mercy’s large and small if it wasn’t too wet both in the air and on the pyjamas for anyone to notice.

“Let us all give due consideration to shutting up hurriedly,” said Johnson-Devizes, rather sternly, I thought, considering it was my habituals on the smorgasbord of discussion. Regardless, we did as he suggested and he continued to speak. “That is agreeable,” he said. “Now, as our mutual associate Mr Willis-Harker has rightly exemplified, we did all, as men, seek the comforts of our own beds in the night prior to this morning. Might we vote for agreement?”

“Agreed,” we other three chimed in unity.

“Democracy in action,” smiled Johnson-Devizes warmly. “Now, based on proven consensus pertaining to the workings of time, space and the associated universals, we educated men can most confidently make certain assumptions regarding our presumptive whereabouts in the morning immediately following the act of slumber in one’s own chambers. Namely,” he said, looking at me as he spoke, “that one will wake up precisely where one fell asleep, save for the odd movements performed during said act.”

“That certainly is of sense,” said Little Rawlings sycophantically.

“An undeniably accurate summary of the truths leading to a construction of the present,” congratulated Willis-Harker.

“Or, to summarise yet further,” continued Johnson-Devizes, “one can only assume that one will rise in the self-same place where one has previously fallen. At least pending some external intervention within the rise-fall continuum.”
Little Rawlings went as far as to applaud as he spoke. “I would find it perhaps as definite as the impossible to agree with you any more than I currently do, Johnson-Devizes, which is in the figure of one hundred per cent, to the best of my mathematical calculation.”

“Far be it from to me to agree with Little Rawlings at this or any other interval,” said Willis-Harker, “but on this I must. I took leave of my consciousness within my chamber and yet awoke atop this building of apparently industrial intent. And it is from this fact that I take discomfort and, more significantly, no little amount of confusion.”

“Confusion indeed,” I said. “Or still worse, as if the broadly metaphorical carpet of comprehension has been markedly wrenched from beneath the soles of our feet. Do I dramatise my emotions when I say that my above-average understanding of the very workings of the known universe has been rendered meaningless in such a way as to leave the essence of not only my intelligence but also and inextricably the essence of my humanity in some way wavering on the fragility, emptiness and callous impersonality of the ever-turning heavenly bodies?”

“Dramatise you do, Peterson my friend,” said Willis-Harker with more than a hint of sympathy to his voice, “but for once you are vigorous and justified in so doing. For this is, indeed, a most puzzling and inexplicable occurrence within the established paradigms of scientific spirit. In short, I am at something of a loss as to understand our own position and likewise the tentative position of the experientially flooded world of which we are a sentient organic component.”

“Oh my earth!” exclaimed Little Rawlings excitedly. “There is no answer, only pain!
There is no reason, only the frailty of the submerged aged rocks! There is no respite, only the eternal wetness of relentless precipitation! There is no avoidance of the unfurling scenario, only acceptance of our perilous stance! God save us! God save us all.”

Willis-Harker struck a brisk slap to Little Rawlings’ cheek, then another, and Little Rawlings fell prostrate to his knees, deep in meditative sadness, knees apparently unscathed by the imposing pressures of the stones.

“Show some decorum man,” snapped Willis-Harker harshly, rubbing the offending palm in his other hand. Little Rawlings mumbled inaudibly from the floor. He had tendencies to speak in tongues, and we remained staunch and unfazed by his terminal oddity.

“What are our choices?” I asked out of the silence.

“Choices?” asked Johnson-Devizes.

“Peterson?” asked Willis-Harker.

“Or rather,” I continued uncomfortably, “what shall we, as it were, all considered and theretofore consented to, do?”

“Do?” said Johnson-Devizes. “Do? My dear fellow, anything we go so far as to ‘do’ as of now is a pointless act of self-invalidation.”

Both he and Willis-Harker laughed briskly.

“How so your cynicism?” I asked cautiously.

“Dearest Peterson,” he continued, his voice slightly strained by the smile on his face, “to engage in any attempt at action at the present time, considering as we have the intrinsic destruction of any semblance of sense hitherto garnered from generations of learning by the illogicality and impossibility of our current spatial coordinates, would be folly.”

“A waste of time,” Willis-Harker interjected. “Although quite how one can specifically waste time when the very notion of time itself has been severed from meaning within the passage of a night, is a conundrum the likes of which invert reality, sense, logic, language, mind and man.”

“Quite particularly,” said Johnson-Devizes, almost flirtatiously. “You see Peterson, nothing is the same. This has become the one basic fact to which we can extend any consensus or any trust without fear of inaccuracy. Nothing is the same. The structures of meaning that had previously underpinned both our mental and physical interaction with the world have since been rendered meaning-less, our very bodies have defied those structures in their appearance on this... this roof. All we had understood about our impact on the world and about the world’s impact on us has been disproven. We have lived our lives within and as a part of a flawed paradigm, but a paradigm so flawed it has effectively put an end to life, at least life as a meaningful abstract discussable with merit. And thus to you I ask: why act at all? Any performed action in which we might engage could only be in concordance with the outdated rules that still bind the processes of our brains, and what could possibly be more pointless than playing a game of life, death or anything in between with the wrong rules? It would render the action ridiculous, and I for one will not be a party to ridiculousness. We would be men of insanity, men imprisoned within the mental shackles of an unchanged world whilst the world as it pertains to be real or of existence has in fact changed around us, and changed intolerably, men displaced without structure, displaced to what past glories might refer linguistically as ‘roof’, and roof very much within what we might similarly verbalise to be ‘rain’. Would, in the name of all things past, I deign to act in the midst of such madness? No, no, no. Action is something I refuse to take, and refuse wholeheartedly. I refuse to be a madman!”

“I...” I said.

“Precisely my point,” he replied.

“So in effect, Peterson, the question is not, as you so quaintly placed it in the sphere of dialogue, ‘what shall we do?’, but rather and more properly, ‘what shall we be?’” Willis-Harker beamed with perplexity as he spoke.

“Hence put to you,” I said, “gentlemen, sometime associates and furtive lovers, what shall we be?”

“Now that,” said Johnson-Devizes, “is a question!”

*

The rain toppled and the waters rose and the four men of whom I was one watched in a silence contorted by situation. Johnson-Devizes smiled broadly under the grind of breaking metal as the fire escape was pulled from its moorings at roof’s edge. Despite its passage downward into the certainties of death, I couldn’t help but feel dismayed at its loss, like the accidental drowning of a familiar acquaintance and the awkward funeral that follows. I rubbed my hands together in a brisk gesture and Little Rawlings stood up.

“I demand appropriate action,” he said.

“I see,” countered Johnson-Devizes. Willis-Harker walked ferociously towards us from the far side of the roof, where he had taken station. His face scowled in the dull. “And what, pray heavenly, is the specific of this action to which you allude in minimal verbosity?”

“Heck, Johnson-Devizes, you know I don’t know.”

“Perfectly adequate ignorance.”

“We’ve already established the end,” snapped Willis-Harker, “if you’d damn well listen.”

“End?” said Little Rawlings. “What end?”

“The present end,” said Johnson-Devizes reassuringly, slapping a palm onto Little Rawlings shoulder. “To wit, the end in which we are. There is nothing to do and nothing to be done and still the world will change around us. And so nothing is what I will do and nothing is how I’ll enjoy it.”

“But isn’t that...”

“Waiting, indeed, and in effect, most affirmatively.”

“But we can’t just...”

“Wait, on the alternate, we most positively can though.”

I yearned for the comforting shroud of alcohol, for the decisiveness of good tailoring, for the intimate sculpting of well-upholstered home furnishings, and sharply cried, to the surprise of all.

“Peterson?” sneered Willis-Harker, a satisfied expression melting across his rather angular features. “What on this or any other earth might you claim to be allowing yourself?” I laughed, so almost hysterically, and dash it if I knew for why. Willis-Harker’s body tensed in reply, as if ready to pounce. “He’s gone mad,” he said, “mad as mad. Driven out of his operational thought processes. Messily divorced from his faculties. He’s...”

“That’s enough, Willis-Harker,” said Johnson-Devizes. “The poor blighter’s at the edge of something difficult, I’ll concur. But mad? My dear erstwhile conversational recipient, in a world inverted by the chaos of bodily transference there is no mad. Or more prudently, there is no sane, and thus it is your sentence pertaining to the mad which is the maddest, or rather least sensible, of all!”

“Genitals to your patterns of logic, man,” growled Willis-Harker. “Mad? Real? Logical? It’s of minimal import!”

“Entirely sympathetic to your gripes, old bean. Which is why I plan to wait for the cold fingers of death to stimulate me away from the terra firma and into the oblivion of the beyond. Assuming, of course, that death is to be expected, and if not then I shall wait all the more. After all, something will happen.”

“Please deliberate yourself into existence!” I cried, vomiting as soon as the words had passed my lips. Johnson-Devizes jumped as I said this.

“The speaking of Peterson!” he said.

“Why wait?” I continued. “We are dead already, to all but ourselves. Why sacrifice our integrity yet further to the fickle passage of expectation?”

“Interesting,” said Johnson-Devizes. “Interesting in the mid-spectrum. Correct me if you are not suggesting by waiting for the inevitable I am intrinsically presupposing this notion of the inevitable as the, as it were, inevitable outcome of sufficient waiting time?”

“Precision analysis,” I nodded.

“Very much a case of accuracy on your part, Peterson, and an inexcusable oversight on my own, for which I beg the forgiveness of your functioning brains.” A mumbled agreement of valid forgiveness barely heard over the fierce movement of the water. “Most certainly yes,” he went on, “to hand my limp passive body over to the inconsistencies of this altered world like a pound of unwrapped butter, to let it run some course around me, would be to give a credence of the monumental to its paradigm, a credence I do not purport to be satisfactory. Yes! Of course, and curses! We must impose our own active humanity upon it, and forthwith to do so!”

“And how to do the aforementioned, do divulge?” asked a sarcastic Willis-Harker.

“Suicide!” proclaimed an animated Little Rawlings, arms extended to his either side like a pyjama-clad Christ of the industrial roofways.

*

Within a passage of minutes Little Rawlings – in a manner more enthusiastic than any in which I had ever visually observed his countenance – had retrieved four shards of glass of varying sizes, and issued one to each of us three, keeping the largest for himself. Willis-Harker, holding the glass at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger alone, guffawed and looked at it with such disjointed disgust that I felt a wave of nauseous sadness through the depth of my body.

“What the good God is this?” he spoke like a derisive laugh. “Some solid, some inorganic product of fusion, some... glass!”

“Most affirmatively, dearest acquaintance whose association with my personal has extended into the realm of years,” said Johnson-Devizes, examining his own shard with an almost affectionate yet oddly scientific exploratory stare. “Glass it is.”

Willis-Harker laughed again. “And what, please express, is the suggested democratically proposed usage of this solid?”

“I think the man Rawlings has a plan to imminent self-induced destruction,” I said. “Put bluntly, an act of the suicide.”

“Surprise unconcealed, he’s serious!” Willis-Harker shuddered, as if the glass he held already dripped with his own blood, transparent engine of his own destruction. “The suicide!”

“It’s the only choice we have left,” Little Rawlings said, pleadingly. “The only thing upon which we can make a difference.”

“Nonsense,” snapped Willis-Harker. “I refuse to believe that it will be an act of violence as performed with an edge of broken glass that will draw the final curtains around the glory that was my presence within the expanses of the firmament!”

“Whilst it remains far from me to offer sympathetic agreement with the mental workings of our own Little Rawlings,” said Johnson-Devizes, running a fingertip across the length of the glass in assessment of its effectiveness as sharp-edged tool of controlled harm, “in this instance I would tend to offer at least partial support to his decisiveness.”

“It’s the only thing left that retains a context of meaning,” said Little Rawlings in a voice of patronizing quality, placing a hand on Willis-Harker’s shoulder. The latter withdrew roughly.

“Touch not, devil!” he snapped. “This is preposterous, preposterous!”

“He’s in hysteria,” I said, “embroiled by the unfolding madness of life. His faculties weathered, his capacity gone.”

“I fear yes,” agreed Johnson-Devizes. “Little Rawlings, your proposal, most honourably, and entirely hurriedly in the spoken word of mutual comprehension.”

“Certainly to express. I propose a sitting for the four men in a formation of the circular structure.”

“Blessed geometry, you live on in us in sacred memoriam! Logic! Structure! Sense! Dear mathematics, forevermore at peace and held tenuous within hearts and minds, your boundaries engulfed in the movements of history!” Johnson-Devizes smiled at the sincerity of his own rhetoric. “Do continue, Little Rawlings,” he continued, “and forgive me my interruption. Momentarily I was overcome, as soon we all will be by the grandiosity of death, the finality of an ending!”

“Most acceptable,” said Little Rawlings, “most acceptable indeed. Following the formation of this circle, I suggest a mutual and simultaneous drawing of the glass hitherto issued, raised henceforth to the throats of the individuals involved, thus with a minimal application of pressure invoking an incision into the depths of the neck’s soft tissues and through the jugular vein. The singular result, of course, being fatality.”

“Bravo, sir, for your evident respect for the rituals of closure,” congratulated Johnson-Devizes. “Peterson, do you find yourself in consensual union with Little Rawlings and myself with regards to the necessity of an act of suicidal intensity, in concordance with the gravity of the hopelessness of our current situation?”

“I must confess to a full agreement,” I said loudly. “I consider the meaninglessness of an act of suicide to be rendered itself meaningless by the full meaninglessness of our plight. A lesser of two meaninglessnesses, as it could be.”

“Difficultly put,” nodded Little Rawlings.

“Certainly put,” nodded Johnson-Devizes.

“You’ve all gone potty!” blurted Willis-Harker. “Absolutely. Suicide? It’s madness.”

“On the contrary,” said Johnson-Devizes, “it’s the one sane move left to the tactician of life.”

“I hereby extend my full refusal in the participation of this psychotic glasswork,” said Willis-Harker defiantly, smashing his shard on the surface, despite the cries of Little Rawlings.

“Social improprieties abound,” responded Johnson-Devizes. “Then for the sanctity of good taste and in a respect of completion, at least, I assume you will join us in the seated circular formation?”

“I will,” said Willis-Harker, head bowed venerably.

“For that I thank you.”

We sat down as four awkward points dotted around a circular circumference, Willis-Harker of empty hand on my left direction and Johnson-Devizes on my right. The remaining three of us held our glass as one would any sharp object, at odds from our body. I knew that to use it in self-execution was in the utmost defiance of nature, but saw all around me a nature in defiance of man, the only escape being this final escape, a sneaking unnoticed from the back door of life.

“Tell me, Willis-Harker,” said Johnson-Devizes in a voice that seemed inappropriately pitched in the rain. “What the blazes will you find to do with yourself, following our departure from the physical realm?”

“A fine question indeed, and one to which accurate response is still notably impossible. I must imagine that it will be a time for enriched contemplation of the highest order. From there one might only speculate as to what could follow, or to when it will follow.”

“Very much.”

Little Rawlings coughed and both myself and Johnson-Devizes looked toward him. He had raised his glass and held it clutched between both hands at a height level with his neck.

“I think perhaps now is profound,” he said.

“Now begins now,” said Johnson-Devizes, lifting his own glass likewise.

“To here now, now and the eternal now,” I said, glass identically raised.

“My gentleman,” said Johnson-Devizes, “I presume it would not be excessive of me in the current climate of illogic to propose a four count. For in consideration, the simple count of three seems so suggestive of a dead past of purpose as to be the ultimate irony.”

“Four count it is,” agreed Little Rawlings. “I refuse to die in irony.”

“Partners in vocal exchange,” said Willis-Harker. “In absence of sentimentalizing, I safely feel that it is still of prudence to express myself at this, the time of your demise. I disapprove, wholeheartedly, of your methods, your motives and your actions. To that end, I must congratulate you from the bottom of my selfishness, for in this disapproval lies the determined hope of something better, a hope somehow still alive in this appalling doom. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Johnson-Devizes, wiping a tear briskly away with his pyjama sleeve. “Your selfishness was always your Achilles heel, dear Willis-Harker, the finest aspect of an otherwise drab personality.”

“Johnson-Devizes, thank you.”

“I’ve never known a woman,” I said, my hands trembling around the glass.

“Good cosmos, Peterson, this is hardly the time!” said Johnson-Devizes.

“There isn’t much to know, Peterson,” said Willis-Harker in self-satisfaction.

“I thought you should know,” I said apologetically.

“Honestly, Peterson, we already knew. Little Rawlings, are you of satisfactory preparation?”

“Impeccably,” said Little Rawlings. “Let us act, and quickly.”

“Then it is for I to speak and say: on four. On four.”

“One.” I focused on the glass, its razor sharp edge catching the rain as it fell from the sky.

“Two.” I focused on Willis-Harker, the friend I never liked, so greasy in the rain.

“Three.” I focused on Johnson-Devizes and Little Rawlings, never faltering.

“Four.” The sound of the flesh tearing open was deafening and terrible and I looked at my own glass, which hadn’t moved, still levelled in front of me. Johnson-Devizes and Little Rawlings had fallen onto their backs and were bleeding heavily. Willis-Harker was staring at me with an emotion of intense negativity.

“Peterson!” he shouted. “You haven’t done it!”

“Peterson?” spluttered Johnson-Devizes, trying to lever himself onto his elbow so he could see his disbelief with his own eyes. Observing his struggle Willis-Harker moved to his aid, holding the dying man under his armpits so he could see me the better.

“This is unbelievable, Peterson! You’ve shied away from the final action! You are beyond inhuman, Peterson, beyond inhuman!” There was blood in his mouth as he spoke, and Willis-Harker laid him back down into the growing puddle of blood and rainwater.

“He’s right Peterson,” said Willis-Harker. “You’ve let the future down.”

I stood up, placing my glass carefully onto the roof, and it looked like Little Rawlings was already dead. He seemed enraptured on the pebbles. Johnson-Devizes gurgled the noises of death from his wound.

“Come on Peterson,” he said. “Take the plunge. I feel strong in my pain! Alive in my death!” I looked at him with a certain sadness, at the fading colour of his plump cheeks. Good old Johnson-Devizes. I could delight in the essence of a brandy.

I ran from the three and to the edge of the roof, leaving their blood and their deaths behind me. It was a personal affair, death, and anything pertaining to its actuality seemed most definitely enjoyed in a state of comparative isolation. The sky seemed to be clearing, but perhaps my eyes were finally adjusted to this perpetual darkness.

For all that sings holy in this wild world I’ll jump!, I thought, impassioned.

But I was already in the water, and tired, so tired.

cut to:

Kissing sounds
that are contemplative
and the sound of a leather couch
creaking under the weight of two bodies.

scene: municipal swimming baths, diving board

"Holy shit he's going to jump! Please stop him somebody! He has everything to live for!"

coke can paradise

With blazing wings to set the scene - storm through the dressing rooms and the cosmetics facility, beyond the furniture stores and the industrial catering solutions unit and beholding there, stage right it is, this life itself!

The museums of logs are fallen worthily and mighty through the lakes of your eyes, with pardon me and reconstruct the supersphere, glottal stammers and sky reflections, repeated relentless a thousand simple mirrors and highly charged obsessively polished glass stacks, the repetition representing a perfection above and beyond the really thought or ever seen. Bobbing monotonous but enchanting and encased in the history of the world, preserved through the ages and centuries, the wooden hollow husk of man.

And out but in of once grand and now dry lake beds, shopping trolley decays and aluminium drinks cans, past proud striking and brightening logos now weathered, faded, beaten by the sun, powdered pastel memories set through a broken TV, poking as epic monoliths from the fetid soils of a fallen angel.

So where can we be in all of this, you and I? - our eternally wrong shoes send us stumping through our minds and rambling through the silver-crested ice cream cone mountains of the dreams we might only read, drink and talk about, our ends and never our beginnings, to fuck until with spasms and twitches we swearing and weary grip each others thighs until the nails of our fingers leave indents of being, insistence and memorial in the glorious flesh, and then to make ourselves sick with coffee to keep our eyes open and think hard about breakfast and dance into bed.

for sale

Grandfather. Working voice, useful storage space. Ideal for newlyweds. £5 ono.

funeral

Under frail skies it happened as all always happens, the funeral. It had been reasonably stipulated by paperwork to be in occurrence beachward, the sea-drenched sand piled preposterous before the taunting applause of the waves of the sea.

The son – Bramwell Sheens – acted as chief mourner, his unsocked feet so white like newborn fish flesh they were almost transparent, veins running through them like complex cartography inadequately plotted. Ever such a contrast with the black suit that swung in the pressure above his ankles. His toes dug into the sand with imprint and he led the procession marching steadily across the endless coastline. A bowl of incense swung from his clasped hands. No one could smell its finery over the seaweed. There were heavy tears in his eyes. He had loved his mother, his own Mrs Sheens.

The town’s youth carried the coffin, it only took the two boys. Poor woman weighed less than the box that bound her when the time came. The eternal whisper: when the time came.

All of their feet were bare. The paperwork had insisted. The invites too:

Sheens Funeral.
Bare foot code in application, without exception.

The townswomen were impressive against the sand, each black dress striking a chord more minor like a terminal harpsichord. They howled as sirens behind thick veils, beneath which their vision darkened into impossibility. Creeping coffinside along the beach they clutched to each other for directional guidance, their blackened bodies like lightning-struck trees, blind to the horrors of the real world yet immersed in the horrors of their own.

Formalwear so ridiculous wading through knee-deep channels of saltwater, splashing dully into groins with the disturbance of footsteps. It took an hour to traverse the strange beach, from the opening at the harbour mouth to the expanse of the North Sea beyond. The mourners were restless in their upset, bored in the wind.

Vicar on the horizon, long hair spiralling in the cruelty of meteorology but for odd lank strands stuck flat to his large face, his tears as adhesive against the pallid flesh. Fittingly he wore black, smocked neck to bare toes and front-buttoned. Neck-collar stifling. He stood firmly a vessel of God and clutched a leather bound bible before him, weeping for a woman. They came forth at an excruciating pace, flecks of darkness slowly heaving across the beach.

The grave was already dug into the wet shifting sand. Six feet of sand piled to the right of the vicar. The sight was apprehensive, macabre on the approach.

A handful of older males, acquaintances mainly, had dropped to their knees and were picking fresh samphire in their grief. For the wake, sobbed one. For the wake, sobbed another. They stuffed the rich green food into their trouser pockets, still dripping with brine, and walked on delirious.

Bramwell Sheens placed the burning incense at the side of the grave and embraced the vicar as if God Himself. The remaining others encircled the grave like a pack of hungry animals, and the teenaged pallbearers placed the box in the centre of the ritualistic geometry. Wailing, further heightened in pitch and intensity, intermixed with the mighty sea in a sound unbearable. The women began to swoon, falling one then another and one after another, only to stand with sand stuck to their dresses and suits in the shape of their falls, the visual pressures of contacting flesh. A man, somebody’s brother, slumped to all fours with a sharp cry, clawing at sand in the throes of an agony without precedent.

Only the vicar, now, could hope to express a context for this despair. His voice an instrument of grief. “Eternal rest give to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them”. The rain fell with his words, the grave already soiled with a watery bottom. Perchance such irony is lost on the dead. Bramwell Sheens, devastated beyond the physical, nodded to the youths, who like soldiers of business lowered the coffin. It splashed at the lowest point, its wooden sides half submerged beneath the encroaching sea, the sand a poor base for eternal slumber.

Rain increasing in ferocity the vicar spoke faster.

“Ashes to ashes.”

The wet sand clung to symbolic throwing fingers, only odd lumps thudding onto the top of the coffin. The tide approached, cautiously at first. The mourners felt it on their feet with surprise, only just before the siren which announced the commencement of a period of tidal danger.

The vicar looked to Bramwell Sheens for confirmation, who nodded again, more urgently. The pallbearers began pushing the sand over the coffin, but the tide was engaged in its own burial, the grave filling with water, the sand washed in and about and away.

Quickly the mourning party left without eulogy or further conversation. Even tears had stopped, the situation now somehow too determined for such extravagance. His wet vestments so cruel a hindrance for beachwear, taut around the knees in this driving rain, the vicar fell to his lost footing, on his back flat in the rising channel. As Bramwell Sheens helped him silently to his feet he saw, like the vicar, a small crab alone, turned vulnerable on its back in the murky shallows. Its legs moved in flickers and one of its pincers opened in tiny gradations, but still he assumed it were dead. His mother had assured him in adolescence that an animal on its back always brought death. He knew not if crab was animal. His mother was dead.

Heads down the mourners marched mute, steps apart from one another. It was as if the funeral had violated them in the most personal ways. Somehow profoundly it was the end of even distant friendships. The coast guards whistle roared like a bizarre hymnal tribute.

He held hands with the vicar as they walked back to their cars.

Their shoes.

Their lives.

ask the idiot child 2

incidental list of potential criteria used in hastily reasoned value judgement of cemetery quality

1. Thick healthy foliage, trees and flora of varying and multiple types.

2. Combination of very old and very new graves (i.e. cemetery must feel at once historical and contemporary). I find something thrilling about seeing a dug grave, pending burial; in piles of sand, soil and Astroturf united by death. It's a reminder of the process, not just the finality of the ancient weathered grave.

3. Exhaustive catalogue of unusual and inspirational names as documented on headstones.

4. Possible selection of chapels/buildings (both disused and operative).

5. Memorial benches for casual (and mournful) seating.

6. Paths hidden amidst long grasses, low branches and perpetual shade.

7. Old man with dessert gooseberries.

8. Mausoleums.

dessert gooseberries

About two weeks ago I was having my lunch in Norwich cemetery, as I have done every day for the past couple of months. It’s a great cemetery, large but not crudely so, quiet, and there are sometimes foxes running amongst the graves. I like to sit there amongst the dead and the blackberries, eating my lunch and reading. I find it a pleasing place to be, and it takes my mind off of the living in the kind of way you need to during a day at work. It makes me think of the film “Night of the Living Dead” and the graveyard in the first scene, although with the exception of the graves themselves the two graveyards share no real similarities. It achieves most of the handful of criteria I would probably list, off the top of my head, as provisional prerequisites for a good cemetery, although it does – to the best of my investigation – lack any mausoleums, which detracts somewhat from its quality.

It’s really the presence of mausoleums, those catacombs that circle the centre, that make Brompton Cemetery, in London, such an excellent place to eat lunch.

There used to be a London Necropolis Company, which was responsible for London’s City of the Dead, the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. It was once the largest cemetery in the world, built to accommodate the increasingly vast amount of dead Londoners who were spewing out of the inner city cemeteries. The best thing is that it even had its own exclusive cemetery railway station: The London Necropolis Railway Station. It was near Waterloo, and sent bodies and their associated mourners to Brookwood on special funeral trains. The face of the building is still there, 121 Waterloo Bridge Road. I thought this was fact of the most fantastic and seemingly fictional order, trains run solely for the dead from a regular looking Underground station in the heart of the capital. There’s something so wonderfully clandestine about it all. Once I saw a train being run exclusively for Millwall fans, chaperoned by dozens of police and all shouting. It isn’t the same somehow.

Makes me think of those fake houses built in terraced streets in the old cities with an underground rail network, made up to look like the rest of the street with windows, and doors, and curtains, and a good paintjob, when behind that two dimensional façade is nothing but a huge air vent letting the smoke and steam out from the transportation shafts below. There’s one in Paddington, I think. Looks just like the rest of the street, but if you look at it right you can see the windows are blacked out, and then when you see it from behind it is like a film set, and where the rest of the street has rooms and gardens this house has iron struts and a hole down into the tracks.

Whatever the case, a couple of weeks ago I was sitting in Norwich cemetery and eating my lunch. A car pulled up in front of me. Sometimes they do. A silver car. People come to visit dead relatives, with flowers and memories. It’s always odd walking past the children’s section, the headstones all being tiny and flanked with stuffed animals and colourful windmills and cute picket fences. I looked up and saw that it was an old man who looked in pretty good shape, and he stepped out of the driver’s door and walked round to the boot, which he opened. He was looking at me as he moved. He got out some Wellington boots, which he stood into slowly and awkwardly, betraying his age. I wondered if I should help him, but it seemed inappropriate. I guessed that visiting a grave must be a pretty personal affair and I didn’t think he’d want me to interfere with it.

Eyes flicking up from the book I saw him peering, as if weighing me up. In his boot he had blankets and a plastic bag, which I could see contained a watering can from the long nozzle that protruded from the opening. I felt nervous, for some reason, more so when he approached me. He had two green objects in his hand, about the size of testes. I swallowed, perhaps in panicked, and looked at him in silence, putting the book mark into my book in case something happened.

He held out his hands steadily and offered me the green things.

“Here you go,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. They looked like gooseberries, but really big gooseberries, without hair.

“Bet you don’t know what they are,” he said, an almost childish smile on his face.

“Well they look like gooseberries,” I said, “but big.”

He nodded, quietly impressed by my horticultural acumen.

“Dessert gooseberries,” he said in that kind of conspiratorial half-whisper you sometimes playfully use with people you don’t know in order to break the ice.

My turn to nod. I had never had a dessert gooseberry and wasn’t sure if I was supposed to eat them like this. Usually gooseberries are sour little bastards that require stewing and sugar. I held them in front of me as if they were fragile.

“Eat them,” he said. Too proud to ask if there was a particular technique I took a bite out of the bigger one. It tasted incredible. I can already barely remember it, but I know it was incredible. The man wandered back to his car, and I hungrily finished it and ate the other one. We spoke a little more, meandering questions about gooseberries, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was the green of the gooseberries, the fragrance of the flesh, the fact that he had them in the boot of his car and gave one to me in the cemetery. It felt like something very special had happened, but it was only two gooseberries.

We went our separate ways without goodbyes. He looked like the kind of man who grew his own gooseberries. I feel a bit nervous in the cemetery now, in case he comes back. It’s an awkward nervousness because I’d like to see him and eat some more of his fruit, but I desperately dislike seeing the same people twice.

He hasn’t been back, and I am left with the braeburn, the bananas, the memory of another week’s fruit.