By cover of night she gets psychopathic, my wife. Nocturnally exhibited, diurnally regulated, the episodes occur with increasing regularity, unravelling in the sanctuary of our home like undergraduate case studies. I love her carelessly, instinctively, but I feel the pressure of her mania like turbulence in our exchanges. Her daytime tenderness is manifest in conversations, in domesticity and romantic gesture. The pain of the world is transported through her broadband connection, and with charitable donations and proposed direct action she purges herself of a dying need to make good with personal ethics. But when the sun sets and the psychopathy encroaches its episodic unreason upon her brain, her breasts, her hands, the goodness of the world falls prey to her screeches, to an untamed madness channelled through networks of unsuspecting synapses.
I dared mention it to a Hungarian psychiatrist friend of mine, this transformation, but only in the safety of daylight, with spatial isolation on my side. I tried to convey to her the horror, but she just smiled and rested her aging fingers reassuringly across my thigh, the tendons tightly strung and visible like thick guitar strings or the complex part of a sophisticated prosthesis. Behind her slightly upturned nose and her fine thin spectacles she smiled, no doubt a beauty in youth, and she comforted me in a voice changed pitch by cigarettes. Her therapeutic sensibilities left me swooning in the strength of her perfume, and her hand cupped my balls and my flaccid penis and we sat there in her office. “The evidence you cite is all inconclusive at best,” she said, artfully massaging her handful. I tried to imagine the contents of her tapered brown slacks, but I pictured nothing beyond the zip, beyond the meticulous stitchwork. “All these examples”, she went on, “they could be resultant of any number of factors physical, psychological, geographical, astrological, meteorological.” She slipped out of her tan leather loafers, her tired feet thinly coated in near-fleshy hued pop socks. Her pitch black bob framed her face in a way some would call alluring. I imagined it falling around me in coitus, in soft pieces. “Hysteria, for example, was for centuries considered a uterine disorder, particular to the feminine. Hippocrates maintained that manias would arise in those women whose uterus had become physically light from a lack of sexual practice, the result of which was a uterus that – unmoored by the power of the thrusting, erect penis – literally wandered up the interior body and compressed lungs, heart and diaphragm, leaving a concurrent madness”. She unbuttoned her slacks and edged them to the coarse carpet, stepping gently out of them one foot at a time. Her legs were streaked with deep blue veins and her pubic hair was very thick and dark, half covered by her now un-tucked shirttails. She stood with her arms folded, something very grave about the expression on her face. “Menstruation, too,” she said, “has in rare cases been known to cause full psychosis of brief duration, limited only to the cyclical rhythms of the menstrual cycle. Much like your wife’s condition, it is a psychosis of a short-lived, recurrent, cyclical nature against a backdrop of regular normality. It comes”, she said, “and it goes”. She spat a large pool of saliva into her right hand and rubbed it into the cunt which I couldn’t see. She looked apologetic while she did it, but maintained the air of clinical professionalism which I used to find so attractive about her. With a practised gesture she opened my fly and silently lowered her weight onto me. Inside she felt different, but I’m not sure how. She sat very still. “Or lycanthropy”, she said with her Hungarian inflection, “often now rationalized as a cutaneous porphyria, it nonetheless depicts this sense of a cyclical propensity to mania, or rather what can often be a overwhelming sense of self-belief of one’s own routine insanity. In short your wife may well have made herself susceptible to psychopathy through some massive sense of her own self-importance, in the sense that she considers the night to be in some way selecting her, requiring her madness, inciting her figurative howling at the very moon it so consistently reveals in its darkness; or she may, on an unconscious level, have a deep rooted traumatic psychiatric relationship with the very essence of what we would consider to be an essence of ‘night’, about the expectations associated therewith.” Eventually she moved herself on top of me. I felt the pressure of her buttocks on my denim thighs. I don’t know if she came but she convulsed once and she seemed satisfied, and I had already come inside her, almost immediately. She went back to her seat and sat in front of me, her legs open enough for me to see a bit of her cunt, red against the black of her hair. She said “don’t ever change” in a very matter-of-fact, diagnostic way. I thought it was a strange thing for a psychiatrist to say, demanding this impossible stasis of personality, because I would change, that much seemed inevitable. I thanked her all the same.
My wife’s psychopathy started about three months ago. I originally put it down to an alcohol binge, but I don’t really know why because as far as I knew she hadn’t taken a drink for a long time before that. I came home from work and she was sitting on the sofa. She was naked and had basted herself head-to-toe in a savoury marinade. For some reason my first thought had been to quiz her on the ingredients, and she listed them for me without hesitation. Olive oil base, crushed garlic cloves, paprika, cumin, curry powder. She described it as Middle Eastern, and I thought it would be good with lamb, but the real issue remained the presence of the marinade on my wife’s naked skin. It pooled in her umbilicus and was garlicky around her nipples. I felt this to be a very odd experience, but as an isolated incident (as it then was) I couldn’t decide whether or not I should panic, whether it should be considered any more than the outcome of a bored day. After all, I was home late and it did smell delicious. I went to the kitchen to get myself a glass of water and when I came back in she was holding a lighter under the curve of her left breast. The oil was smoking and sizzling slightly as it cooked in the heat, and my wife’s face was contorted with the pain of the burning flesh. She screamed at me that she was going to cook herself. I didn’t know what to do. She leapt from the sofa and pushed me over, then started jabbing at her forearm with a fork, as though she were cuisine itself. After about two hours she lay down on the kitchen floor and went to sleep. I watched over her to make sure she didn’t wake up, and in the morning she was very confused as she showered off the sticky spices and the olive oil from her raw limbs.
The day following the marinade catastrophe she seemed so much like herself that I quietly dismissed the previous evening as a glitch. I thought that the pain of her cooking skin would make us stronger as a couple, that the breadth of aromatics contained within the self-marinating would well equip us against a multitude of lives. I drank coffee on the toilet while she ate soup in the bath. Back to the tangibles of our shared happy life.
But that night it happened again, an episode more complex than the marinade. She had been reading when the sun went down, but from upstairs I heard her screaming. Convinced of the best I went downstairs, where she had lined up all nine of our houseplants in the dining room and set fire to them. There was something intrinsically horrific about it, about the wanton destruction, about the formality of it, the geometric accuracy of the line the plants had been organised in, about the clarity of the flames. It was so perfectly orchestrated it was devastating. Behind the flames stood my wife, naked again, but she had written my name across her breasts in jagged smears of eyeliner. Through a fixed smile she told me she was the devil. I wanted to laugh and did, it sounded so ridiculous, but there was a gravity about her nudity that left us humourless. I took a step towards her and she backed away. “Why devil?” I asked. “I am the grandest of them all,” she replied, a voice of mirth. Her skewed egoism was strangely attractive. She opened a New International Bible – which we kept for useful quotations and party games – to the gospels and, holding her cunt open with the other hand, started to piss onto its pages, the rich yellow urine smelling nutty in the freshness of the dining room. Throwing the sodden bible onto the floor she lay down on top of it and said: “Devil says fuck me.” I felt exploited by this devil, tempted into action. She knew I always had a thing about piss, call it a fetish. A paraphilia. Something about piss past fingers gets me every time. I undressed clumsily, drunk on the vision of the piss-soaked scripture, and we fucked, copulating freely on the life of Christ. I came in a frenzy, she laughing and beating me with her fists as I throbbed out the sperm, my spent penis the serpent weapon of her evil plans, and I got up and extinguished the plants and looked down at her on the floor, her eyes at once manic and detached, glazed. She looked beautiful.
Since then things have deteriorated, every night a stage for her psychopathic episodes. With household concerns – so keen to separate her nights from her days – I have been drawn out of our living room and into her madness, an accomplice to her social disregards. We walk these streets, complacent in their marijuana odour, their olfactory narcotic, virulent kebabs dropped as vomit to the floor within an instant of ingestion. We find people together, like a silent asocial date, and then she can batter them while I watch on lovingly, feeling myself in the shadows, a voyeur to her violence, waiting for this phase of our lives to be over. I sometimes benefit from the aggressive sexual impulses that started with our Bible. She is my wife. I like to feel her nails in my perineum, and have her slap my face and leave me bruised for work, explained away by an idle pointless fantasy and never the truth. There have been times when I’ve considered suggesting that she get some help for her problems, when during the day she is so normal, staunchly upholding her own strong sense of ethical values, but I can’t bring myself to do it. The last thing I want is to make her feel as though she has a problem. As a man who understands the feminist literature I can clearly see how stiflingly phallocentric it would be of me to condemn her relishing of carefree coitus or reckless violence. Even a woman can delight in the guiltlessness of these primal urges. It’s not my place to try and stop these things. An intelligent woman must be free for psychopathy. The problem isn’t hers, isn’t even mine. It’s someone else’s, some faceless collection. It is for me to stand by her, and I will, and I will think of her cunt, her urethra, her anus, her kidneys, her soft green eyes and the tenderness of our daylight, husband to the last.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
the pink ladies
“I beg your stupid pardon?” he said, taller than me, his eyes narrowing slightly as though weighing up whether or not he should punch me.
“I simply said,” I said, with the confidence of truth on my side, “that jazz are the new pink lady.”
He sighed before he threw the punch and I sank to the floor with its force. We bonded after that.
*
He turned out to be part of a group, called themselves the Pink Ladies. I’d heard about them in the small presses. They had tenuous apolitical links to a couple of BNP members, and the boredom of the thin newspaper had described them as right wing, extremist, dangerous connoisseurs of the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, only with more commas.
His name, he told me, was Jonagold. All the Pink Ladies had apple names and violent fantasies.
*
We shook hands together, his slightly bruised from my face. He looked a bit like an apple, I noticed, his eyes like carpels in the crisp white flesh of his face.
“Do you want to come to a meeting?” he asked. “One of our meetings?”
“Sure” I said. He rolled up his sleeve. Tattooed on his thick forearm was a Cox’s orange pippin.
“We’re about the apples,” he snarled aggressively, his arm tensing. “You got that?”
I nodded and we got into his car, his superfluous hostility hanging in the air between us and almost endearing.
*
We must have been driving for about half an hour when he pulled the car up outside a large wooden barn. He drove a Ford Sierra and the seats felt good beneath my body, good like memories. From the crack I had opened my passenger side window I could hear the chatter of what I guessed to be about twenty men.
“This is it,” he said, and we both got out of the car. “Just keep your fucking mouth shut.”
We walked across the gravel driveway and over to the barn door. The barn was surrounded on three sides by apple trees and I thought I could see a gallows set up a couple of hundred yards away into the plentiful orchard.
*
The Pink Ladies were gathered around a naked man, unconscious on the straw-covered floor of the barn. They paid no attention to our entrance. It smelt of windfall and regurgitated cider and a noose hung from a wooden beam in the roof.
“Wake him up,” said the tallest man. His name, I would find out later, was Captain Kidd, the Ladies own Grand Wizard. “This boy here needs re-educating.”
They slapped him in the face hard, the sound like breaking young wood. His eyes whipped open as far as they could past the swelling but he remained silent as two of the Pink Ladies pulled him up to his feet.
“You,” said Captain Kidd. “Bastard. Scum.”
The noose was pulled over his neck and tightened and he started hyperventilating, trying to scream.
“You’re everything that’s wrong with this country,” Captain Kidd continued. “You’re sending Britain to shit. What’s this?” He screeched the question, holding up a clear sandwich bag which contained a half-eaten apple. Apparently one of the Pink Ladies had seen him with it in the street, seen him flaunting his consumption of the wrong type of apple. A fuck-up like that needed punishing, for the sake of all apples. Fruit was the cornerstone of UK policy. Without sufficient policing of the apple market the future looked bleak. There had to be standards. It’s like the Pink Ladies self-printed literature said: ‘No More Bad Apples’. The slogan worked so well because of its layers of meaning, its cutting critique of the ineffectual, weak-kneed, public whores of government. No more spongy, tasteless, disappointing experiences! The Ladies offered hope for a brighter future that started with apples. “What is it?” screamed Captain Kidd at the crying man. His voice sat uncomfortably inside my head like a nightmare the day after.
“It’s...” he spluttered. “It’s a Granny Smith.” The Pink Ladies gasped collectively. One of them – Egremont Russet, a white-haired military officer with a distressingly uneven face – even vomited, so repulsed was he by the slightest mention of the name. The Granny Smith was tantamount to sacrilege in apple circles like this, worse still amongst the Pink Ladies. It was treason.
“You bastard,” said Captain Kidd. “A Granny Smith.” Egremont Russet heaved but without result, and staggered from the barn coughing.
“It was just a quick apple,” pleaded the naked man. “For lunch. A crispy green snack. It was...”
“Unforgivable,” interrupted Captain Kidd. “The Granny Smith was a chance seedling. Chance! It was a fucking mistake! And people like you choose to give it credence? Choose it over and above other apples? Un-for-giv-able!” he yelled, relishing the syllables. He kicked the man shockingly hard in the genitals. The noose prevented him from doubling over, and his own hot sick dripped out of his mouth and down his chin, terrible flecks of the stuff snagging on the patchy hair of his chest. I looked at Jonagold, who smiled and nodded at me encouragingly.
“I’m sorry,” he said hopelessly. “I didn’t know it was chance.”
“You should have. Always do your research. What hope do we have for the future if you won’t even do your research?”
“It was a lunch break. I...”
“Gravenstein,” said Captain Kidd, passing the sandwich bag to another of the Pink Ladies, this one meticulously suited with a sheer hairstyle and almost plasticized features. “If you would.”
Gravenstein placed the bag on the floor next to him and crouched as he unfastened and removed his black leather shoes. He opened his belt and removed his trousers, which he folded neatly and placed next to the sandwich bag, then he pulled down his underpants. Picking up the sandwich bag he squatted, held the opening of the bag to his anus and, without breaking his intimidating, silent eye contact with the naked man, defecated onto the air-browned flesh of the Granny Smith apple. He stood up and passed the bag back to Captain Kidd, then picked up his shoes and trousers and walked calmly out of the barn in his socks.
“Now,” said Captain Kidd, holding the bag up to the light, the one solid piece of shit coiled along next to the half-eaten apple. “Eat your precious Granny Smith.”
The naked man took the bag in tears. Egremont Russet entered looking pale, followed by Gravenstein, his suit trousers and shoes back in place as though none of us had never seen his hanging testicles. The man put his hand into the bag and pulled out the apple, a large piece of excrement clinging to its thick green skin. Captain Kidd nodded, and in some desperately unimaginable act the naked man bit down into the Granny Smith and the faeces, groaning and heaving as he did so.
“You vile person,” said Captain Kidd after the first couple of swallows. “We are the Pink Ladies, protectors of both good apples and the nation’s moral fibre. We fight to protect our country and we fight to protect the high quality of our apples. You, and your Granny cunting Smith, have committed an assault on both. Gala, Empire,” he said, gesturing with a nod of the head towards two of the watching Pink Ladies. They each pulled on a pair of durable gloves, took hold of the other end of the rope which had been noosed around the naked man’s neck and, after a count of three, yanked with all their might. The man was hoisted upwards about six feet from the ground and he hung there noisily choking. The shit-smeared apple fell from his fingers and landed where he had been standing.
The Pink Ladies began chanting a mantra, of sorts, in unison, which was really just an alphabetical list of apple varieties. “Bolero Braeburn Breakey Captain Kidd Carlos Queen Calville Blanc D'Hiver Cortland Cox’s Orange Pippin Delicious Discovery Egremont Russet Ellison’s Orange Epicure Empire Exeter...”
It was strangely creepy in the circumstances. The Pink Ladies all seemed on edge without the aural drama of the audibly snapping neck. The man didn’t stop moving until the mantra reached Senshu.
*
When the drama had eventually subsided, Captain Kidd turned his attention to me.
“Who’s this?” he asked suspiciously.
“This is Jeff Goldblum Stevens,” said Jonagold. Captain Kidd raised one of his eyebrows. “Named after,” whispered Jonagold, by way of explanation.
“Parents,” I said. “Big fans of ‘The Fly’”.
“What about ‘Earth Girls Are Easy’?” asked Captain Kidd.
“That’s what I said,” I replied.
“So what brings you here, Jeff Goldblum.” I didn’t really know, so I looked at Jonagold.
“He’s into apples,” said Jonagold. “In a big way.” I wasn’t sure I liked the way he accentuated the big, but I stayed silent.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “That’s a good start. So. You like apples? Bit of fan, are you? A connoisseur, perhaps?” There were some sniggers among the other Ladies. “Fuji,” he said, and a Japanese man appeared at his side almost immediately with a tray loaded full of sliced apples. “Try a piece, Jeff Goldblum. See if you can’t tell us what it is.”
I reached over to the tray and grabbed the first slice I came to. I looked at the skin: handsome, decent pink tinge, flecks of green. I took a bite: good crunch, solid texture, clean bite, slightly acidic.
“Well,” I said contemplatively. “A knee jerk reaction would conclude that this was itself, in fact, and in keeping with your group moniker, a slice of Pink Lady.” I saw Captain Kidd’s eyebrows rise with pleasure, obviously satisfied with his own perceived intelligence and superiority, a smug grin forming across his lips. “But that would be knee jerk reaction,” I continued. I sucked the remaining apple juices from the corners of my mouth, looked again at the skin of the slice. “If I’m not mistaken, the slightly drab edge to the pink of the skin” – I pointed it out to the watching Ladies – “and the ever-so-slightly off-kilter sugar/acid balance I’m getting a sense of here would instead make this a simple Cripps Pink. Not a difference many would notice, I suppose. Just an issue of branding for most people.” I threw the last piece of the slice into my mouth and chewed contentedly. “But a difference none the less. Cripps Pink. One of the sixty-five per cent of which falls slightly below the marketable standard of the Pink Lady brand name.”
“Impressive,” acknowledged Captain Kidd, slightly put out by my pinpoint accuracy.
“As I say, I like apples.”
“Like? That’s not just like. My mother likes apples. That’s knowledge. You know apples.” I shrugged. “Try another piece. Show us what else you know.”
I did and, consciously or not, with every bite I took of every variety on the tray I became more and more a part of the Pink Ladies.
*
“What happened to your face, Jeff Goldblum?” asked Captain Kidd. We were both now sitting down on wooden dining chairs in the centre of the barn. Two jugs of cider were passing between the Ladies.
“My face?” I said, unsure what he was referring to. “Oh, right. Jonagold punched me.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Jonagold? Why would you do that?”
“It was just something he said. It was nothing.”
“Nothing?”
He looked at the both of us, waiting for an answer.
“It was nothing really,” I said eventually into the barn’s great silence. “I just said that...”
“Jeff Goldblum!” interrupted Jonagold urgently. He sounded nervous, like I was about to do something unmentionably wrong.
“Shut up and let him speak,” said Captain Kidd. I swallowed drily and looked around the cider. Both jugs were on the other side of the circle of Pink Ladies.
“I mean I just said that” – Jonagold was hiding his face behind his hands – “Jazz were really the new Pink Lady and that...”
“What?” Captain Kidd sounded decidedly unimpressed.
“Jazz are the new...”
“I heard what you said, Jeff fucking Goldblum. I meant: what the hell are you talking about?”
“Jazz apples,” I said. “I’d been feeling lost, dissatisfied by the unfulfilling texture of the Pink Lady. I don’t want to say it out loud, but I’ve had spongy, I’ve had tasteless, I’ve had...”
“Stop, please stop,” he said with genuine sadness.
“That’s just what I thought. I thought it was the end of the line for crunchy, flavoursome, readily available apples. Then I found Jazz. Just... sitting there. No fanfare, no advertisements. Just... Jazz. And the more I ate, the more Pink Ladies became...”
“No!” shouted Captain Kidd, and punched me in the face in desperation. His knuckles were hard and thick and I blacked out instantly.
*
When I came around I was being held upright by two of the Pink Ladies. I noticed that the noose was now fastened around my neck. They must have cut the other guy down and dumped him outside somewhere, because I couldn’t see him in the barn.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“You’re awake,” said Captain Kidd. “I wouldn’t usually do this, not to a connoisseur. You’ll noticed I left your clothes on. But your claims. Frankly, without verification of your suppositions vis-à-vis your so-called Jazz apples, you have made a hideously damaging value-judgement about the unsurpassed quality of the majestic Pink Lady, and thereby committed the most abusive affront to our organisation.”
“I’m telling you,” I said. “Those apples are incredible.”
“In this barn,” he said, “that’s for me to decide. Where do they come from?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jazz. Where do they come from?”
“Right. Initially I thought it was just an M&S job, catering to the luxury market much like the P.L. did, back in the day. But only yesterday I picked a bag up in Tesco. Tesco, for Christ’s sake. There’s an apple revolution going on out there! Go, go get the bag and let’s verify. These apples can be the change that Britain needs, they can purify it clean of all its shit and take it back to the root of a fucking good apple.”
“Tesco,” said Captain Kidd. He blinked like he was impassioned, even if he didn’t sound it. “You heard him Jonagold.”
Jonagold literally ran out of the barn. I heard the Sierra’s engine turning over and the crunch of gravel as he sped out of the driveway and back into town.
*
He was back within twenty quick minutes with five bags of Jazz apples, forty apples in total. Captain Kidd tore greedily into the polythene and started passing the apples out to the other Pink Ladies and me, taking the biggest, reddest apple for himself. We all inspected their skin.
“Bi-coloured,” he said, to himself more than anything. “Good redness shot through with a kind of green, yellowy tinge. Attractive.”
He looked up and nodded, and we all bit into the flesh as one. The crunch sounded incredible, as did the slurp of twenty plus men sucking the juice of the apple back up their chins and into their mouths.
“Oh God,” said Captain Kidd, swallowing the first bite.
“Didn’t I tell you?” I said. “Taste that! It’s so sweet, like a sweet, a pear drop or something.”
“Oh God,” Captain Kidd said again, his words slurring slightly.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of acidity in my apples, like a good tree-ripened Braeburn, but tell me its absence here detracts from the flavour. Tell me, I said.”
“I won’t,” said Captain Kidd.
“Exactly. And look at the flesh. Butter yellow, crisp as crisp. This is a perfect apple. They’ve got a website for fuck’s sake.”
Captain Kidd bit the last shred of flesh from his Jazz apple and slumped down heavily into one of the wooden chairs. He looked almost sexually exhausted.
“Any apple worth its shit has a website. But these... these are the new Pink Lady,” he said. I smiled. “Let him go.” They loosened the noose and I walked over and sat down next to him. Jonagold was starting his second apple and he looked at me apologetically, sorry for the punch, for everything. I was right. This was the beginning of a Jazz revolution.
“Jeff Goldblum, we need someone like you in our party. Dynamic, young, trendsetter. You saw the future in these apples and fuck it, you were right.”
“Party?” I asked.
“Politics,” clarified Captain Kidd. “Local elections are coming up and we’re running. The Pink Ladies. The main parties have buggered this country to bleeding and people are ready for a change. This year we really have a chance for seats on the council.”
“What are your policies?” I asked, glugging from the cider jug.
“We’ll get to that,” he replied. “Are you in?”
I thought about everything else I had to do in life. It didn’t take long.
“I’m in,” I said.
“Excellent,” he said, shaking my hand forcefully. “Fucking yes. You’ll need an apple name of course, but I think we both know what that’s going to be.”
“Jazz.” He flashed me a thumbs up.
“Watch your policies, 2009,” he said. “Here come the Pink Ladies.”
The chanting started again, back from the beginning. “Bolero Braeburn Breakey Captain Kidd Carlos Queen Calville Blanc D'Hiver Cortland Cox’s Orange Pippin Delicious Discovery Egremont Russet Ellison’s Orange Epicure Empire Exeter Fortune Freyburg Fuji Gala Golden Delicious Golden Supreme Goodland Gravenstein Harcourt Honey Crisp Horei Idared Irish Peach Jerseymac James Grieve Jonafree Jonagold Jonamac Jonathan Kings Orange Red Liberty Lobo Lodi Lord Nelson McIntosh Macoun Merton Beauty Merton Russet Mother Mutsu Norland Northern Spy Parkland Patterson Primevere Priscillia Pristine Polka...”
It was the start of a very strange period in my life.
“I simply said,” I said, with the confidence of truth on my side, “that jazz are the new pink lady.”
He sighed before he threw the punch and I sank to the floor with its force. We bonded after that.
*
He turned out to be part of a group, called themselves the Pink Ladies. I’d heard about them in the small presses. They had tenuous apolitical links to a couple of BNP members, and the boredom of the thin newspaper had described them as right wing, extremist, dangerous connoisseurs of the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, only with more commas.
His name, he told me, was Jonagold. All the Pink Ladies had apple names and violent fantasies.
*
We shook hands together, his slightly bruised from my face. He looked a bit like an apple, I noticed, his eyes like carpels in the crisp white flesh of his face.
“Do you want to come to a meeting?” he asked. “One of our meetings?”
“Sure” I said. He rolled up his sleeve. Tattooed on his thick forearm was a Cox’s orange pippin.
“We’re about the apples,” he snarled aggressively, his arm tensing. “You got that?”
I nodded and we got into his car, his superfluous hostility hanging in the air between us and almost endearing.
*
We must have been driving for about half an hour when he pulled the car up outside a large wooden barn. He drove a Ford Sierra and the seats felt good beneath my body, good like memories. From the crack I had opened my passenger side window I could hear the chatter of what I guessed to be about twenty men.
“This is it,” he said, and we both got out of the car. “Just keep your fucking mouth shut.”
We walked across the gravel driveway and over to the barn door. The barn was surrounded on three sides by apple trees and I thought I could see a gallows set up a couple of hundred yards away into the plentiful orchard.
*
The Pink Ladies were gathered around a naked man, unconscious on the straw-covered floor of the barn. They paid no attention to our entrance. It smelt of windfall and regurgitated cider and a noose hung from a wooden beam in the roof.
“Wake him up,” said the tallest man. His name, I would find out later, was Captain Kidd, the Ladies own Grand Wizard. “This boy here needs re-educating.”
They slapped him in the face hard, the sound like breaking young wood. His eyes whipped open as far as they could past the swelling but he remained silent as two of the Pink Ladies pulled him up to his feet.
“You,” said Captain Kidd. “Bastard. Scum.”
The noose was pulled over his neck and tightened and he started hyperventilating, trying to scream.
“You’re everything that’s wrong with this country,” Captain Kidd continued. “You’re sending Britain to shit. What’s this?” He screeched the question, holding up a clear sandwich bag which contained a half-eaten apple. Apparently one of the Pink Ladies had seen him with it in the street, seen him flaunting his consumption of the wrong type of apple. A fuck-up like that needed punishing, for the sake of all apples. Fruit was the cornerstone of UK policy. Without sufficient policing of the apple market the future looked bleak. There had to be standards. It’s like the Pink Ladies self-printed literature said: ‘No More Bad Apples’. The slogan worked so well because of its layers of meaning, its cutting critique of the ineffectual, weak-kneed, public whores of government. No more spongy, tasteless, disappointing experiences! The Ladies offered hope for a brighter future that started with apples. “What is it?” screamed Captain Kidd at the crying man. His voice sat uncomfortably inside my head like a nightmare the day after.
“It’s...” he spluttered. “It’s a Granny Smith.” The Pink Ladies gasped collectively. One of them – Egremont Russet, a white-haired military officer with a distressingly uneven face – even vomited, so repulsed was he by the slightest mention of the name. The Granny Smith was tantamount to sacrilege in apple circles like this, worse still amongst the Pink Ladies. It was treason.
“You bastard,” said Captain Kidd. “A Granny Smith.” Egremont Russet heaved but without result, and staggered from the barn coughing.
“It was just a quick apple,” pleaded the naked man. “For lunch. A crispy green snack. It was...”
“Unforgivable,” interrupted Captain Kidd. “The Granny Smith was a chance seedling. Chance! It was a fucking mistake! And people like you choose to give it credence? Choose it over and above other apples? Un-for-giv-able!” he yelled, relishing the syllables. He kicked the man shockingly hard in the genitals. The noose prevented him from doubling over, and his own hot sick dripped out of his mouth and down his chin, terrible flecks of the stuff snagging on the patchy hair of his chest. I looked at Jonagold, who smiled and nodded at me encouragingly.
“I’m sorry,” he said hopelessly. “I didn’t know it was chance.”
“You should have. Always do your research. What hope do we have for the future if you won’t even do your research?”
“It was a lunch break. I...”
“Gravenstein,” said Captain Kidd, passing the sandwich bag to another of the Pink Ladies, this one meticulously suited with a sheer hairstyle and almost plasticized features. “If you would.”
Gravenstein placed the bag on the floor next to him and crouched as he unfastened and removed his black leather shoes. He opened his belt and removed his trousers, which he folded neatly and placed next to the sandwich bag, then he pulled down his underpants. Picking up the sandwich bag he squatted, held the opening of the bag to his anus and, without breaking his intimidating, silent eye contact with the naked man, defecated onto the air-browned flesh of the Granny Smith apple. He stood up and passed the bag back to Captain Kidd, then picked up his shoes and trousers and walked calmly out of the barn in his socks.
“Now,” said Captain Kidd, holding the bag up to the light, the one solid piece of shit coiled along next to the half-eaten apple. “Eat your precious Granny Smith.”
The naked man took the bag in tears. Egremont Russet entered looking pale, followed by Gravenstein, his suit trousers and shoes back in place as though none of us had never seen his hanging testicles. The man put his hand into the bag and pulled out the apple, a large piece of excrement clinging to its thick green skin. Captain Kidd nodded, and in some desperately unimaginable act the naked man bit down into the Granny Smith and the faeces, groaning and heaving as he did so.
“You vile person,” said Captain Kidd after the first couple of swallows. “We are the Pink Ladies, protectors of both good apples and the nation’s moral fibre. We fight to protect our country and we fight to protect the high quality of our apples. You, and your Granny cunting Smith, have committed an assault on both. Gala, Empire,” he said, gesturing with a nod of the head towards two of the watching Pink Ladies. They each pulled on a pair of durable gloves, took hold of the other end of the rope which had been noosed around the naked man’s neck and, after a count of three, yanked with all their might. The man was hoisted upwards about six feet from the ground and he hung there noisily choking. The shit-smeared apple fell from his fingers and landed where he had been standing.
The Pink Ladies began chanting a mantra, of sorts, in unison, which was really just an alphabetical list of apple varieties. “Bolero Braeburn Breakey Captain Kidd Carlos Queen Calville Blanc D'Hiver Cortland Cox’s Orange Pippin Delicious Discovery Egremont Russet Ellison’s Orange Epicure Empire Exeter...”
It was strangely creepy in the circumstances. The Pink Ladies all seemed on edge without the aural drama of the audibly snapping neck. The man didn’t stop moving until the mantra reached Senshu.
*
When the drama had eventually subsided, Captain Kidd turned his attention to me.
“Who’s this?” he asked suspiciously.
“This is Jeff Goldblum Stevens,” said Jonagold. Captain Kidd raised one of his eyebrows. “Named after,” whispered Jonagold, by way of explanation.
“Parents,” I said. “Big fans of ‘The Fly’”.
“What about ‘Earth Girls Are Easy’?” asked Captain Kidd.
“That’s what I said,” I replied.
“So what brings you here, Jeff Goldblum.” I didn’t really know, so I looked at Jonagold.
“He’s into apples,” said Jonagold. “In a big way.” I wasn’t sure I liked the way he accentuated the big, but I stayed silent.
“Oh yeah?” he said. “That’s a good start. So. You like apples? Bit of fan, are you? A connoisseur, perhaps?” There were some sniggers among the other Ladies. “Fuji,” he said, and a Japanese man appeared at his side almost immediately with a tray loaded full of sliced apples. “Try a piece, Jeff Goldblum. See if you can’t tell us what it is.”
I reached over to the tray and grabbed the first slice I came to. I looked at the skin: handsome, decent pink tinge, flecks of green. I took a bite: good crunch, solid texture, clean bite, slightly acidic.
“Well,” I said contemplatively. “A knee jerk reaction would conclude that this was itself, in fact, and in keeping with your group moniker, a slice of Pink Lady.” I saw Captain Kidd’s eyebrows rise with pleasure, obviously satisfied with his own perceived intelligence and superiority, a smug grin forming across his lips. “But that would be knee jerk reaction,” I continued. I sucked the remaining apple juices from the corners of my mouth, looked again at the skin of the slice. “If I’m not mistaken, the slightly drab edge to the pink of the skin” – I pointed it out to the watching Ladies – “and the ever-so-slightly off-kilter sugar/acid balance I’m getting a sense of here would instead make this a simple Cripps Pink. Not a difference many would notice, I suppose. Just an issue of branding for most people.” I threw the last piece of the slice into my mouth and chewed contentedly. “But a difference none the less. Cripps Pink. One of the sixty-five per cent of which falls slightly below the marketable standard of the Pink Lady brand name.”
“Impressive,” acknowledged Captain Kidd, slightly put out by my pinpoint accuracy.
“As I say, I like apples.”
“Like? That’s not just like. My mother likes apples. That’s knowledge. You know apples.” I shrugged. “Try another piece. Show us what else you know.”
I did and, consciously or not, with every bite I took of every variety on the tray I became more and more a part of the Pink Ladies.
*
“What happened to your face, Jeff Goldblum?” asked Captain Kidd. We were both now sitting down on wooden dining chairs in the centre of the barn. Two jugs of cider were passing between the Ladies.
“My face?” I said, unsure what he was referring to. “Oh, right. Jonagold punched me.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Jonagold? Why would you do that?”
“It was just something he said. It was nothing.”
“Nothing?”
He looked at the both of us, waiting for an answer.
“It was nothing really,” I said eventually into the barn’s great silence. “I just said that...”
“Jeff Goldblum!” interrupted Jonagold urgently. He sounded nervous, like I was about to do something unmentionably wrong.
“Shut up and let him speak,” said Captain Kidd. I swallowed drily and looked around the cider. Both jugs were on the other side of the circle of Pink Ladies.
“I mean I just said that” – Jonagold was hiding his face behind his hands – “Jazz were really the new Pink Lady and that...”
“What?” Captain Kidd sounded decidedly unimpressed.
“Jazz are the new...”
“I heard what you said, Jeff fucking Goldblum. I meant: what the hell are you talking about?”
“Jazz apples,” I said. “I’d been feeling lost, dissatisfied by the unfulfilling texture of the Pink Lady. I don’t want to say it out loud, but I’ve had spongy, I’ve had tasteless, I’ve had...”
“Stop, please stop,” he said with genuine sadness.
“That’s just what I thought. I thought it was the end of the line for crunchy, flavoursome, readily available apples. Then I found Jazz. Just... sitting there. No fanfare, no advertisements. Just... Jazz. And the more I ate, the more Pink Ladies became...”
“No!” shouted Captain Kidd, and punched me in the face in desperation. His knuckles were hard and thick and I blacked out instantly.
*
When I came around I was being held upright by two of the Pink Ladies. I noticed that the noose was now fastened around my neck. They must have cut the other guy down and dumped him outside somewhere, because I couldn’t see him in the barn.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“You’re awake,” said Captain Kidd. “I wouldn’t usually do this, not to a connoisseur. You’ll noticed I left your clothes on. But your claims. Frankly, without verification of your suppositions vis-à-vis your so-called Jazz apples, you have made a hideously damaging value-judgement about the unsurpassed quality of the majestic Pink Lady, and thereby committed the most abusive affront to our organisation.”
“I’m telling you,” I said. “Those apples are incredible.”
“In this barn,” he said, “that’s for me to decide. Where do they come from?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Jazz. Where do they come from?”
“Right. Initially I thought it was just an M&S job, catering to the luxury market much like the P.L. did, back in the day. But only yesterday I picked a bag up in Tesco. Tesco, for Christ’s sake. There’s an apple revolution going on out there! Go, go get the bag and let’s verify. These apples can be the change that Britain needs, they can purify it clean of all its shit and take it back to the root of a fucking good apple.”
“Tesco,” said Captain Kidd. He blinked like he was impassioned, even if he didn’t sound it. “You heard him Jonagold.”
Jonagold literally ran out of the barn. I heard the Sierra’s engine turning over and the crunch of gravel as he sped out of the driveway and back into town.
*
He was back within twenty quick minutes with five bags of Jazz apples, forty apples in total. Captain Kidd tore greedily into the polythene and started passing the apples out to the other Pink Ladies and me, taking the biggest, reddest apple for himself. We all inspected their skin.
“Bi-coloured,” he said, to himself more than anything. “Good redness shot through with a kind of green, yellowy tinge. Attractive.”
He looked up and nodded, and we all bit into the flesh as one. The crunch sounded incredible, as did the slurp of twenty plus men sucking the juice of the apple back up their chins and into their mouths.
“Oh God,” said Captain Kidd, swallowing the first bite.
“Didn’t I tell you?” I said. “Taste that! It’s so sweet, like a sweet, a pear drop or something.”
“Oh God,” Captain Kidd said again, his words slurring slightly.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of acidity in my apples, like a good tree-ripened Braeburn, but tell me its absence here detracts from the flavour. Tell me, I said.”
“I won’t,” said Captain Kidd.
“Exactly. And look at the flesh. Butter yellow, crisp as crisp. This is a perfect apple. They’ve got a website for fuck’s sake.”
Captain Kidd bit the last shred of flesh from his Jazz apple and slumped down heavily into one of the wooden chairs. He looked almost sexually exhausted.
“Any apple worth its shit has a website. But these... these are the new Pink Lady,” he said. I smiled. “Let him go.” They loosened the noose and I walked over and sat down next to him. Jonagold was starting his second apple and he looked at me apologetically, sorry for the punch, for everything. I was right. This was the beginning of a Jazz revolution.
“Jeff Goldblum, we need someone like you in our party. Dynamic, young, trendsetter. You saw the future in these apples and fuck it, you were right.”
“Party?” I asked.
“Politics,” clarified Captain Kidd. “Local elections are coming up and we’re running. The Pink Ladies. The main parties have buggered this country to bleeding and people are ready for a change. This year we really have a chance for seats on the council.”
“What are your policies?” I asked, glugging from the cider jug.
“We’ll get to that,” he replied. “Are you in?”
I thought about everything else I had to do in life. It didn’t take long.
“I’m in,” I said.
“Excellent,” he said, shaking my hand forcefully. “Fucking yes. You’ll need an apple name of course, but I think we both know what that’s going to be.”
“Jazz.” He flashed me a thumbs up.
“Watch your policies, 2009,” he said. “Here come the Pink Ladies.”
The chanting started again, back from the beginning. “Bolero Braeburn Breakey Captain Kidd Carlos Queen Calville Blanc D'Hiver Cortland Cox’s Orange Pippin Delicious Discovery Egremont Russet Ellison’s Orange Epicure Empire Exeter Fortune Freyburg Fuji Gala Golden Delicious Golden Supreme Goodland Gravenstein Harcourt Honey Crisp Horei Idared Irish Peach Jerseymac James Grieve Jonafree Jonagold Jonamac Jonathan Kings Orange Red Liberty Lobo Lodi Lord Nelson McIntosh Macoun Merton Beauty Merton Russet Mother Mutsu Norland Northern Spy Parkland Patterson Primevere Priscillia Pristine Polka...”
It was the start of a very strange period in my life.
Friday, June 05, 2009
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Brett's sadness
I once worked with a guy, Brett, who had just celebrated his fiftieth and always seemed on the very edge of tears because of a variety of small problems in his regular life, like woman trouble with a legal secretary he somehow knew and who was three years his senior, or like a terrible asthma infliction for which he still used endless hits of Ventolin, or the fact that he worked as a chef at the lower end of the catering trade because he had had such a sickly childhood and all he did was go to hospital for treatments and not get good qualifications. Potato-faced, he lay down on the soft chairs at work with half of his face pressed down against the leather-effect seats and I could see him frowning and he kept on sighing and letting out crushing groans of discontent. I hoped that things would never have to get that bad for me, and couldn’t help wondering whether he would play rock classics at his no doubt pending funeral because earlier that day he had been whistling ‘Smoke on the Water’.
He kept telling me never to end up like him and assuring me that his near-estranged son had been to Australia to travel. The legal secretary had told him that against the odds she did fancy him, but had had sex with another man all the same. His throat was so dry that he could barely speak the words out. He ate slithers of banana on wholemeal rolls because the kitchen didn’t have any bacon or tomato.
He kept telling me never to end up like him and assuring me that his near-estranged son had been to Australia to travel. The legal secretary had told him that against the odds she did fancy him, but had had sex with another man all the same. His throat was so dry that he could barely speak the words out. He ate slithers of banana on wholemeal rolls because the kitchen didn’t have any bacon or tomato.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Davey Mercator's Incident
Davey Mercator watched a kid fall down from a second-storey window. It was the house opposite and it belonged to two of his old school friends, who shared it as roommates along with a kid from one of their failed young marriages. The marriage had decayed in the boredom of familiarity and the kid needed a home. A lot of people thought they must have been queer, these roommates, or mentally retarded, Davey Mercator did too some of the time, but simple truth be told they had never gotten out of their high school circle, their futures swallowed by the small southern England town they had grown up in, knights of the catchment area. After so little luck in life it made a good kind of sense to live together, like the old times. As teenagers changing for swimming one had seen the other jerking off, peering over the synthetic cubicle wall despite it seeming intrusive and inappropriate. It had been embarrassing, the thin sperm trailed out on a beach towel, defiantly ejaculating with no hands, that entirely involuntary rhythm, like breaths or blinking, as they locked into meaningful eye contact. Despite the shame and their physical awkwardness it pushed them closer together, cemented their friendship in a strange way, and while neither mentioned it, fifteen years later, it still played a big part in their living together, unconsciously at least.
The kid had fallen because Davey Mercator’s American friend had been throwing a large inflatable bullet to him back and forth between the second-storey windows in their respective houses. The bullet was about two feet long, black and shiny, and it smelt like a new beach ball. They threw it to each other across the gap between their houses and caught it, threw it back. It passed the time and the kid laughed at it. After a few throws the kid leaned out too far to reach the bullet and lost his footing inside the house. The sound was terrible as he fell. Like scraping brick. He followed the bullet down to the ground below. The sound was terrible.
*
Weeks before the kid had been at the old hospital with his friends. Davey Mercator heard about it from somebody’s brother. The old hospital housed the outbuilding, past the security gates and the warning signs and the fragile buildings whose foundations sobbed in the night. Thick trees surrounded the grounds, but they were fenced off and labelled as private and led eventually to the manor house that had once formed a political centrepiece of the apolitical town. People didn’t venture into the trees, despite how appealing they looked. The outbuilding was underneath the shade of the foliage, it was damp and full of rubbish and birds, who cooed oddly like a strange choir, and from the constancy of the animal sounds would occasionally burst a frenzied flap of wings, started by one but then mirrored by all the birds who nested around the ceiling, an avian Mexican wave in the darkness. There were piles of furniture but it was all broken or burnt in some historical time, relics of a former comfort. One pane of glass remained in the rotting wooden window frames – a final semblance of a civilization left behind but almost worshipped, the glass had been cleaned, cared for, and all it looked onto was a moss-stricken fence panel that somehow still stood – the others all smashed through and piled in dirty shards amongst the empty bottles of once flammable liquid.
The boys changed in the outbuilding, their legs bare amongst the splintered wood and the stench of waste, their breaths heavy in the stifling air. They didn’t want the vulgarity of their voices to infringe upon their explorations. With trembling hands they removed t-shirts and noticed how soft their skin was.
They still felt young, and each of them lit a candle to see by, and in the flickering light they smiled and felt illicit and excited and odd. They cautiously pulled down their shorts and bent over to see better the cocks of the others, a new life. Hands reached out, impulsively, unavoidably, and touched them as if they were expensive glassware, the kid pulling at the boy next to him or pulling at himself.
They were kids but felt like wizards conjuring alterations and manipulations to the very flesh. It was dark and they felt a part of the world. At first they panicked when it came out, just the tiniest amount. The kid looked around, reeling, he wanted to sit down, to lay down, to feel it again, but he was afraid of what he saw on his fingers, the fluid sticky like a snail’s slow path. He looked at his friends and held his hand up for them to see, and in a collective release they all emitted the same, a trophy for their efforts.
They dressed quietly and could hear a breeze in the trees outside. The sun was still beating down.
*
Now the kid had fallen. The sound of it was unhealthy. He hadn’t really yelled but his body cracked, the American could hear it. He walked out of the room and banged on Davey Mercator’s door, then went down the stairs towards the garden.
*
Two hours before Davey Mercator had met a girl. She was quiet and her skin was incredibly white, and the only time Davey Mercator had heard her speak was to talk about the depression she had had in Sheffield. They went straight back to her mum’s place because Davey didn’t want her to know where he lived. They grabbed a glass of orange juice each and went up to her room, which was decorated pink. A lot of girl’s rooms are like this when they live with their parents. She closed the curtains and they undressed each other and Davey Mercator started to fuck her but he felt weird knowing her parents were downstairs and that this was their house and so he concentrated hard on what he was doing and they both had serious facial expressions, which was odd while they fucked. Her skin was warm and after a while Davey Mercator came inside her and rolled off and lay next to her with his head on a corresponding pink pillow. They agreed that it had been fun and watched his dick drooping like it was a TV show and she squirmed a little. He asked what’s wrong and she said I can feel your spunk dripping out of me. He picked up her orange juice and passed it to her and then picked up his orange juice and they both drank their juice and he got dressed and put his shoes on and kissed her on the lips and told her he would see her again tomorrow. She said okay and picked up her phone and dialled a number and he left the room and went down the stairs and could hear her talking and laughing on the phone. He said goodbye to her parents and then went into the street to meet his American friend.
*
The American walked through the living room towards the back door. Another of Davey Mercator’s friends was standing at a flip chart that he had erected in the centre of the room where the coffee table had used to be. The coffee table was turned upside down and left on top of the sofa. He was presenting two ideas that he had written on the flip chart in thick-tipped black marker pen, even though there was no one else in the room and he hadn’t noticed the American’s entrance. Few of the words he said were making sense. He clutched the marker pen in one hand and had a telescopic pointer in the other, which he slapped forcefully against the pages of the flipchart. There were four words written on the flipchart and they had been broken down into two points.
1. Food seed.
2. Soil cucumber.
The American remembered the words and walked past unnoticed, heard Davey Mercator’s door opening upstairs. The room smelt like that cheap instant coffee which is like powder instead of granules.
*
The American had come to England a few years ago to study. On the first night they met, which was his first night here, he told Davey Mercator that before he had left he had heard his mother crying in the room next to his and so went to investigate. She had been pregnant, even though she had gotten divorced and was too old to safely have another baby, and she had pushed a chest of drawers up against the door but he managed to force it open all the same, scraping its legs along the carpet. He says he knew that she must have given birth. His mother was on the floor and sobbing, and the American said he had a real sinking feeling, and she was pleading with him, begging him to leave the room. He asked where the baby was and she says she doesn’t know what he means, but he noticed streaks of blood on the bottom of her nightdress that went in a trail along the beige carpet and right behind another cabinet. The American told Davey Mercator that he went to peer behind the cabinet and there was the baby, spluttering and red and dying, and hideously mutated, although he couldn’t remember its mutations clearly. It had been dark in the room, lit only by one lamp, but he saw its eyes looking at him inquisitively, or desperately, the tiny bloody mutated baby. He wondered how long it would survive and wanted to touch it but he was too afraid. His mother was crying and still pleading with him to leave, and he couldn’t look at her or touch her or kiss her goodbye, just got his backpack and left.
That night Davey Mercator and the American slept on a sofa bed at a short Jewish girl’s house. Davey Mercator kissed her in front of her refrigerator, had to bend down to reach her comfortably. He would dream about it for years afterwards.
*
Davey Mercator’s two old school friends were already in the garden when the American came out. One was reassuring the other, patting his shoulder. They looked like lovers. The kid was on his back on the grass at their feet, his white t-shirt soaked in blood, but he was still whimpering and so must have been alive. The American walked over. A combination of the kid’s blood and the rain of the previous days had made the ground very soft, and the impact of the kids fall had pulped the mud into a paste. Whenever the kid convulsed he seemed to sink further into the wet mud, his face almost unrecognisable under the red and brown stains. The American didn’t know which of the two men was the kid’s father. The inflatable bullet was on the floor next to the kid. It seemed to be in good condition. He thought how easy it would have been to walk away but instead he squatted on his hams, next to the kid. He didn’t want to take his hand, it didn’t seem right with the two school friends standing there next to him. They asked him to do something, to help them, but the American didn’t know what to do. Davey Mercator knocked on another door on his way downstairs, which Mudchute answered. He was reading an essay about Indian philosophy aloud. Mudchute was his stage name. He was the front man in the cuntpunk band “Mudchute and the Gynaecologists”. Davey Mercator didn’t know his real name. They went downstairs together.
*
Mudchute had used to help organise a civilised lynch mob in a Sussex town. Otherwise law-abiding people would set their own agenda for the lynchings, which tended to be agreeable, good spirited and arouse no police investigation due to their peaceful intent and meticulous organisation. No complaints were lodged. It was a middle-class mob operating well above the law. Town meetings were held to nominate potential candidates for lynching, usually those kinds of people who lacked community spirit or were known troublemakers in the area, but who because of family connections or legal loopholes were safe from conventional punishment. After the nominations had been received the town would hold a chaired debate, assessing the evidential veracity of the claims made and the predicted urgency of lynching all nominated parties, and once the arguments had been heard a democratic voting process would be used to finalise the utilitarian selection of the town’s most desired lynchee. Posters advertising the event were displayed around the small town and appeals were welcomed up to two days prior to the lynching. Appeals seldom materialised.
Mudchute helped with the event itself. He would load up folding wooden chairs onto a bus, which drove the townspeople and the lynchee out to a clearing a couple of miles away where the lynching happened. They all sat on the wooden chairs, which Mudchute would organise semicircular in accordance with town policy, then ate a picnic together then hanged the elected party from a gallows constructed from local fundraising initiatives. It was a community act. Everybody in the town cheered when the neck snapped, usually even the relatives. You can’t argue with the democratic process.
*
Davey Mercator and Mudchute stopped in the living room. His friend with the flipchart noticed them and stopped his presentation. He had drawn the soil cucumber and was considering the food seed equation, finding sense in his own madness. His name was Jason Harmony, but people called him Jason A-Adrenal as a result of his crushing conversational apathy. The three of them went outside together. The American was still squatting by the kid, and the two school friends were watching in silence. Nobody looked up at Davey Mercator, Mudchute and Jason A-Adrenal. It looked like the kid had been badly buried but it was just the wet mud swallowing his extremities.
*
Jason A-Adrenal, tormented by the infinite in the stasis of his own life, ruminates on potential at times of sexual exchange. His legs were sunburnt on the beach, he lay there for hours in only his boxer shorts. He ate Bavarian cheese, smoked and processed, slimy in the heat. The girl he was with had had thrush and was using vaginal suppositories. He fingered her when he said infinity was the product of language, and there was a pinkish chalky goo left on his fingers. She had blamed the thrush on him, for going down on her and then rushing her out of the house without a chance to wash. So okay, he said looking down at his fingers and her cunt, God the infinite is the product of human language. She was laying tanned in sunglasses reading. He only pushed her pants to the side, didn’t take them off. If there isn’t a God it’s because I didn’t create one yet, he said. When they fucked it felt odd to him, granular because of the suppositories, and she felt self-conscious because they were on the beach in the daytime, even though they both had their pants on and he just let his dick come through the slit in his boxers. He moved with such tiny thrusts that no one could have noticed. He told her they would destroy divine concepts, whispered it like a sweet nothing. She wouldn’t come like this. He didn’t notice the sunburn until later when his legs rubbed against the denim of his trousers.
*
Eventually the American tried to pick the kid up. Everyone was worried, because they had all seen those programmes where they tell you never to move them, but no one said anything because it seemed like the only thing to do. He carefully slid one hand under the kids thighs and the other between his shoulder blades. He slowly eased him out of the mud and felt his blood sticky on his hands, but it already felt cold, and there was resistance, the mud slurping around his arms, trying to hold him down. The two school friends realised it first from the angle they were standing. As the American lifted the kid his head started lolling backwards, his throat somehow slit in the fall. The angle of his head to his body was all wrong, and blood was coming out of the wound. The school friends screamed no language and the American looked at the kids head, saw the neck oozing, heard a sound like clutching raw meat. It was the neck tearing with gravity, further around its circumference. He slowly put the kid back down into the mud and stood up, wiping his hands on the grass.
He looked at Davey Mercator. They were supposed to be meeting the short Jewish girl, who Davey Mercator was still friends with and who was all he had been able to think about. He kept having dreams where her face had lost all of its flesh and contours and was just the bare bone of her skull, only with the hair still attached, long and dark as it was. She cried from her eye sockets and asked him not to look at her.
He picked up the inflatable bullet and carried it inside. The others followed him. There was nothing else they could do.
The kid had fallen because Davey Mercator’s American friend had been throwing a large inflatable bullet to him back and forth between the second-storey windows in their respective houses. The bullet was about two feet long, black and shiny, and it smelt like a new beach ball. They threw it to each other across the gap between their houses and caught it, threw it back. It passed the time and the kid laughed at it. After a few throws the kid leaned out too far to reach the bullet and lost his footing inside the house. The sound was terrible as he fell. Like scraping brick. He followed the bullet down to the ground below. The sound was terrible.
*
Weeks before the kid had been at the old hospital with his friends. Davey Mercator heard about it from somebody’s brother. The old hospital housed the outbuilding, past the security gates and the warning signs and the fragile buildings whose foundations sobbed in the night. Thick trees surrounded the grounds, but they were fenced off and labelled as private and led eventually to the manor house that had once formed a political centrepiece of the apolitical town. People didn’t venture into the trees, despite how appealing they looked. The outbuilding was underneath the shade of the foliage, it was damp and full of rubbish and birds, who cooed oddly like a strange choir, and from the constancy of the animal sounds would occasionally burst a frenzied flap of wings, started by one but then mirrored by all the birds who nested around the ceiling, an avian Mexican wave in the darkness. There were piles of furniture but it was all broken or burnt in some historical time, relics of a former comfort. One pane of glass remained in the rotting wooden window frames – a final semblance of a civilization left behind but almost worshipped, the glass had been cleaned, cared for, and all it looked onto was a moss-stricken fence panel that somehow still stood – the others all smashed through and piled in dirty shards amongst the empty bottles of once flammable liquid.
The boys changed in the outbuilding, their legs bare amongst the splintered wood and the stench of waste, their breaths heavy in the stifling air. They didn’t want the vulgarity of their voices to infringe upon their explorations. With trembling hands they removed t-shirts and noticed how soft their skin was.
They still felt young, and each of them lit a candle to see by, and in the flickering light they smiled and felt illicit and excited and odd. They cautiously pulled down their shorts and bent over to see better the cocks of the others, a new life. Hands reached out, impulsively, unavoidably, and touched them as if they were expensive glassware, the kid pulling at the boy next to him or pulling at himself.
They were kids but felt like wizards conjuring alterations and manipulations to the very flesh. It was dark and they felt a part of the world. At first they panicked when it came out, just the tiniest amount. The kid looked around, reeling, he wanted to sit down, to lay down, to feel it again, but he was afraid of what he saw on his fingers, the fluid sticky like a snail’s slow path. He looked at his friends and held his hand up for them to see, and in a collective release they all emitted the same, a trophy for their efforts.
They dressed quietly and could hear a breeze in the trees outside. The sun was still beating down.
*
Now the kid had fallen. The sound of it was unhealthy. He hadn’t really yelled but his body cracked, the American could hear it. He walked out of the room and banged on Davey Mercator’s door, then went down the stairs towards the garden.
*
Two hours before Davey Mercator had met a girl. She was quiet and her skin was incredibly white, and the only time Davey Mercator had heard her speak was to talk about the depression she had had in Sheffield. They went straight back to her mum’s place because Davey didn’t want her to know where he lived. They grabbed a glass of orange juice each and went up to her room, which was decorated pink. A lot of girl’s rooms are like this when they live with their parents. She closed the curtains and they undressed each other and Davey Mercator started to fuck her but he felt weird knowing her parents were downstairs and that this was their house and so he concentrated hard on what he was doing and they both had serious facial expressions, which was odd while they fucked. Her skin was warm and after a while Davey Mercator came inside her and rolled off and lay next to her with his head on a corresponding pink pillow. They agreed that it had been fun and watched his dick drooping like it was a TV show and she squirmed a little. He asked what’s wrong and she said I can feel your spunk dripping out of me. He picked up her orange juice and passed it to her and then picked up his orange juice and they both drank their juice and he got dressed and put his shoes on and kissed her on the lips and told her he would see her again tomorrow. She said okay and picked up her phone and dialled a number and he left the room and went down the stairs and could hear her talking and laughing on the phone. He said goodbye to her parents and then went into the street to meet his American friend.
*
The American walked through the living room towards the back door. Another of Davey Mercator’s friends was standing at a flip chart that he had erected in the centre of the room where the coffee table had used to be. The coffee table was turned upside down and left on top of the sofa. He was presenting two ideas that he had written on the flip chart in thick-tipped black marker pen, even though there was no one else in the room and he hadn’t noticed the American’s entrance. Few of the words he said were making sense. He clutched the marker pen in one hand and had a telescopic pointer in the other, which he slapped forcefully against the pages of the flipchart. There were four words written on the flipchart and they had been broken down into two points.
1. Food seed.
2. Soil cucumber.
The American remembered the words and walked past unnoticed, heard Davey Mercator’s door opening upstairs. The room smelt like that cheap instant coffee which is like powder instead of granules.
*
The American had come to England a few years ago to study. On the first night they met, which was his first night here, he told Davey Mercator that before he had left he had heard his mother crying in the room next to his and so went to investigate. She had been pregnant, even though she had gotten divorced and was too old to safely have another baby, and she had pushed a chest of drawers up against the door but he managed to force it open all the same, scraping its legs along the carpet. He says he knew that she must have given birth. His mother was on the floor and sobbing, and the American said he had a real sinking feeling, and she was pleading with him, begging him to leave the room. He asked where the baby was and she says she doesn’t know what he means, but he noticed streaks of blood on the bottom of her nightdress that went in a trail along the beige carpet and right behind another cabinet. The American told Davey Mercator that he went to peer behind the cabinet and there was the baby, spluttering and red and dying, and hideously mutated, although he couldn’t remember its mutations clearly. It had been dark in the room, lit only by one lamp, but he saw its eyes looking at him inquisitively, or desperately, the tiny bloody mutated baby. He wondered how long it would survive and wanted to touch it but he was too afraid. His mother was crying and still pleading with him to leave, and he couldn’t look at her or touch her or kiss her goodbye, just got his backpack and left.
That night Davey Mercator and the American slept on a sofa bed at a short Jewish girl’s house. Davey Mercator kissed her in front of her refrigerator, had to bend down to reach her comfortably. He would dream about it for years afterwards.
*
Davey Mercator’s two old school friends were already in the garden when the American came out. One was reassuring the other, patting his shoulder. They looked like lovers. The kid was on his back on the grass at their feet, his white t-shirt soaked in blood, but he was still whimpering and so must have been alive. The American walked over. A combination of the kid’s blood and the rain of the previous days had made the ground very soft, and the impact of the kids fall had pulped the mud into a paste. Whenever the kid convulsed he seemed to sink further into the wet mud, his face almost unrecognisable under the red and brown stains. The American didn’t know which of the two men was the kid’s father. The inflatable bullet was on the floor next to the kid. It seemed to be in good condition. He thought how easy it would have been to walk away but instead he squatted on his hams, next to the kid. He didn’t want to take his hand, it didn’t seem right with the two school friends standing there next to him. They asked him to do something, to help them, but the American didn’t know what to do. Davey Mercator knocked on another door on his way downstairs, which Mudchute answered. He was reading an essay about Indian philosophy aloud. Mudchute was his stage name. He was the front man in the cuntpunk band “Mudchute and the Gynaecologists”. Davey Mercator didn’t know his real name. They went downstairs together.
*
Mudchute had used to help organise a civilised lynch mob in a Sussex town. Otherwise law-abiding people would set their own agenda for the lynchings, which tended to be agreeable, good spirited and arouse no police investigation due to their peaceful intent and meticulous organisation. No complaints were lodged. It was a middle-class mob operating well above the law. Town meetings were held to nominate potential candidates for lynching, usually those kinds of people who lacked community spirit or were known troublemakers in the area, but who because of family connections or legal loopholes were safe from conventional punishment. After the nominations had been received the town would hold a chaired debate, assessing the evidential veracity of the claims made and the predicted urgency of lynching all nominated parties, and once the arguments had been heard a democratic voting process would be used to finalise the utilitarian selection of the town’s most desired lynchee. Posters advertising the event were displayed around the small town and appeals were welcomed up to two days prior to the lynching. Appeals seldom materialised.
Mudchute helped with the event itself. He would load up folding wooden chairs onto a bus, which drove the townspeople and the lynchee out to a clearing a couple of miles away where the lynching happened. They all sat on the wooden chairs, which Mudchute would organise semicircular in accordance with town policy, then ate a picnic together then hanged the elected party from a gallows constructed from local fundraising initiatives. It was a community act. Everybody in the town cheered when the neck snapped, usually even the relatives. You can’t argue with the democratic process.
*
Davey Mercator and Mudchute stopped in the living room. His friend with the flipchart noticed them and stopped his presentation. He had drawn the soil cucumber and was considering the food seed equation, finding sense in his own madness. His name was Jason Harmony, but people called him Jason A-Adrenal as a result of his crushing conversational apathy. The three of them went outside together. The American was still squatting by the kid, and the two school friends were watching in silence. Nobody looked up at Davey Mercator, Mudchute and Jason A-Adrenal. It looked like the kid had been badly buried but it was just the wet mud swallowing his extremities.
*
Jason A-Adrenal, tormented by the infinite in the stasis of his own life, ruminates on potential at times of sexual exchange. His legs were sunburnt on the beach, he lay there for hours in only his boxer shorts. He ate Bavarian cheese, smoked and processed, slimy in the heat. The girl he was with had had thrush and was using vaginal suppositories. He fingered her when he said infinity was the product of language, and there was a pinkish chalky goo left on his fingers. She had blamed the thrush on him, for going down on her and then rushing her out of the house without a chance to wash. So okay, he said looking down at his fingers and her cunt, God the infinite is the product of human language. She was laying tanned in sunglasses reading. He only pushed her pants to the side, didn’t take them off. If there isn’t a God it’s because I didn’t create one yet, he said. When they fucked it felt odd to him, granular because of the suppositories, and she felt self-conscious because they were on the beach in the daytime, even though they both had their pants on and he just let his dick come through the slit in his boxers. He moved with such tiny thrusts that no one could have noticed. He told her they would destroy divine concepts, whispered it like a sweet nothing. She wouldn’t come like this. He didn’t notice the sunburn until later when his legs rubbed against the denim of his trousers.
*
Eventually the American tried to pick the kid up. Everyone was worried, because they had all seen those programmes where they tell you never to move them, but no one said anything because it seemed like the only thing to do. He carefully slid one hand under the kids thighs and the other between his shoulder blades. He slowly eased him out of the mud and felt his blood sticky on his hands, but it already felt cold, and there was resistance, the mud slurping around his arms, trying to hold him down. The two school friends realised it first from the angle they were standing. As the American lifted the kid his head started lolling backwards, his throat somehow slit in the fall. The angle of his head to his body was all wrong, and blood was coming out of the wound. The school friends screamed no language and the American looked at the kids head, saw the neck oozing, heard a sound like clutching raw meat. It was the neck tearing with gravity, further around its circumference. He slowly put the kid back down into the mud and stood up, wiping his hands on the grass.
He looked at Davey Mercator. They were supposed to be meeting the short Jewish girl, who Davey Mercator was still friends with and who was all he had been able to think about. He kept having dreams where her face had lost all of its flesh and contours and was just the bare bone of her skull, only with the hair still attached, long and dark as it was. She cried from her eye sockets and asked him not to look at her.
He picked up the inflatable bullet and carried it inside. The others followed him. There was nothing else they could do.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
a short chapter
“Fill it up,” shouted Bob, eyes bloodshot with celebratory booze, limp penis sagging worthless beneath unkempt gut, itself white bloated fleshy awful under open silk kimono, how gruesome, how wrong. “Fill it all the way right up to the goddamn crest of the top, spill it if you must, open another case, two more cases, open every bloody case but fill that tub until it can fill no further!”
“Get your black ass filling,” blurted a reeling and coke-fuelled Prime Minister, dropping a full tumbler of good scotch, swamping around shards of crystal and ice across the marble bathroom floor. He pulled blindly at a mound of cash, more notes than the servant had ever seen, and flapped them all into a soggy wedge amongst his own spilt drink. “We want that fucking bath filled, you lazy bastard. This is a party.”
“Party,” Bob yelled, painfully wrenching the puke of the drunk in a golden arc, somewhere in the vicinity of the toilet.
“A party, and a fucking celebration,” slurred the PM aggressively. He had the toned body of a bitter man, and the sweat and grinding of his teeth had smeared his public mask into something quite horrific.
The servant, obedient, silent, resentful, uncorked another bottle, Dom Pérignon, and poured it into the bath. He was dressed up like an exploited bellboy from some not-so-distant past, a dancing minstrel, uniform hat balanced on the top of his head and matching with his brass-buttoned monkey jacket. Bob dressed all of his servants up like this, wrote it into their tenuous contracts. He employed an exclusively black staff. One could only hope to speculate as to why this was, speculation which would no doubt lead to an unpleasant and sinister evaluation of the character of the man. He was that kind of person. Every bit the bastard.
The bath, like the room which housed it, was vulgar, garish and unnecessary. A pimp’s bath, thought the servant, a low grade whitey pimp bath. He looked at the two naked men – supposed pillars of the political community, fucked as they were, slipping about on the ice and the spilled champagne bubbles that would dry sticky and rancid on the bathroom floor; men so unfalteringly convinced of their own worth to the world and the importance of all they stood for – and as the first pangs of pity rose inside his good Christian heart he swallowed deeply, self-consciously, replacing those pangs with a blossoming hatred of their very existences. Nauseated by the obscenity of these two filthy shits his mind wandered to revenge, as the gold-legged, free-standing, six-berth bathtub fizzed and popped, and another case of the inestimably fine champagne was cracked open so that the conceited sons-of-bitches could roll their pompous white asses in the luxury of a homoerotic and very much behind-closed-doors wine bath that only the loneliest single men with the smallest of penises and the blackest of souls and way too much money would even consider engaging in.
After all, these men were not politicians for whom he had voted, or indeed would ever vote. They were scoundrels. Scoundrels and crooks. They thought he was a dusky dumb manservant, a primate who learned the methods of house service only through painstaking repetition, but he was smarter than they thought and he knew, knew what they were celebrating, knew what their big political initiative was.
Nuclear. Powered. Heart. It had launched that morning, to overwhelming success, demand, public response.
He could read, he overheard, and he knew enough about things to know that something was afoot, something as unsavoury as a piece of chocolate. A bony finger raised all the way to the heavens in some universally offensive gesticulation. A lengthy shit left tall and spiralling on the doorstep of humanity. In their overzealous conversations they crooned about hearts, and about viruses, genetic modifications as weapons, about emotional sabotage and severed human responses, all by-products of the heart’s installation procedure. Like any good man of decent heart who spends a lifetime in the service of the morally questionable, the penny had dropped, as it were, and he wanted desperately to hold onto that decent heart of his. And he wanted revenge. For God, for himself, for the man he might have been, given half the chance. It had been nearly thirty years on this wonderful earth and he finally wanted his voice to be heard. Not too much to ask.
“For God’s sake, that’ll have to do you lazy nobody,” said the Prime Minister viciously, as the last slurp of bubbly thundered like pus from a manipulated adolescent pimple from the bottom of the thirty-first bottle. Bob sniggered like a secretive schoolboy, trying to stifle his sycophantic giggles in a quiet classroom. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
The servant bit his tongue and felt his arms trembling, with shock or offense or anger, as though the muscle would tear through the skin and glisten so powerful and impressive in the glare of the ceiling-mounted light source, the halogen spotlights. He bent to clear the empty bottles from the floor.
“Leave that there you ignorant bastard,” the PM went on, climbing into the champagne. It reached up to his knees. They were ugly.
“Get the hell out of here, invisible man,” laughed Bob, who pulled himself up from where he was stretched, singing drunkenly on the floor, using the edge of the bathtub and his elbows to try to stabilise his ascent. He grinned, drooling grimly, and plunged his head under the heavily carbonated liquid, trying to drink the plentiful alcohol with all the frenzy of a rugby team initiation ceremony and not a celebration of his own party’s financial and political monopoly. He gagged after a few seconds, you could see it happening below the surface of the champagne, and his doubled-over torso was wracked by violent spasms, long-forgotten muscles jiving with nausea under his reams of fish-white stomach flab. He pulled his head out, showering the servant and the mirror and the bathroom units with wine and blowing 12.5% ABV snot bubbles from his gasping nostrils. He collapsed, destroyed by his own stupid laughter.
“Not invisible enough, eh charcoal?” The Prime Minister was cupping his genitals with one hand in the champagne bath. Feeling sick with the both of them, but more sick with himself, the servant left the bathroom and closed the door behind him, all the while pulping both of their faces into unrecognisable tissue mash with screams and blood and retribution in the depths of his mind.
Bob pulled himself up again and rolled over the edge of the tub, hitting the champagne surface hard and sending bottles-worth of the stuff across the floor. His drenched kimono floated on the surface and his cheeks were reddened by burst blood vessels. He had the kind of face that only demonstrated how bloody awful it really was in the penetrating light of a bathroom, a light that stripped you of bullshit, a face imploding from the inside out, blood and veins and muscle tissue all vying for a way out. Contrarily, the Prime Minister seemed not to have a single drop of blood in his entire body, artificially bronzed, clinically angled and inescapably inhuman. Evil licked him like tongues on ice cream. It was a scene of almost suicidal grotesquery.
They looked at each other in the bizarre quiet that can sometimes befall intense drunkenness. Nude toes wiggled above the sticky fluid, his and his. The silence became sniggers became chortles became guffaws became smug repulsive laughter.
“We’ve done it,” said Bob. “We’ve fucking done it!”
The Prime Minister stood up, his slender body dripping champagne from the pubic hair and the asshole, and he reached for a couple of fresh bottles from the case. He popped the corks and passed one over to Bob as he sat back down.
“To the nuclear powered heart,” he said, raising his bottle in toast.
“To us,” said Bob, as if in the throes of seduction. “Partners in crime and world domination!” He was an annoying thick drunk, vulgar and mindless, thought the Prime Minister. No doubt an observation of particularly significant revelation. It was a dog-eat-dog world, politics. He snorted, and looked at Bob with a murderous glare.
“To us,” he eventually concurred, and took a long measured pull on his champagne. He threw the bottle to smash against the wall and jerked towards Bob through the champagne bath and kissed him violently on the mouth, with splinters of good green glass falling into their hair, which was now one in the shock intimate passion of their successes.
Goals, like excesses in testosterone and certain recreational drugs, can do strange things to a man.
“Get your black ass filling,” blurted a reeling and coke-fuelled Prime Minister, dropping a full tumbler of good scotch, swamping around shards of crystal and ice across the marble bathroom floor. He pulled blindly at a mound of cash, more notes than the servant had ever seen, and flapped them all into a soggy wedge amongst his own spilt drink. “We want that fucking bath filled, you lazy bastard. This is a party.”
“Party,” Bob yelled, painfully wrenching the puke of the drunk in a golden arc, somewhere in the vicinity of the toilet.
“A party, and a fucking celebration,” slurred the PM aggressively. He had the toned body of a bitter man, and the sweat and grinding of his teeth had smeared his public mask into something quite horrific.
The servant, obedient, silent, resentful, uncorked another bottle, Dom Pérignon, and poured it into the bath. He was dressed up like an exploited bellboy from some not-so-distant past, a dancing minstrel, uniform hat balanced on the top of his head and matching with his brass-buttoned monkey jacket. Bob dressed all of his servants up like this, wrote it into their tenuous contracts. He employed an exclusively black staff. One could only hope to speculate as to why this was, speculation which would no doubt lead to an unpleasant and sinister evaluation of the character of the man. He was that kind of person. Every bit the bastard.
The bath, like the room which housed it, was vulgar, garish and unnecessary. A pimp’s bath, thought the servant, a low grade whitey pimp bath. He looked at the two naked men – supposed pillars of the political community, fucked as they were, slipping about on the ice and the spilled champagne bubbles that would dry sticky and rancid on the bathroom floor; men so unfalteringly convinced of their own worth to the world and the importance of all they stood for – and as the first pangs of pity rose inside his good Christian heart he swallowed deeply, self-consciously, replacing those pangs with a blossoming hatred of their very existences. Nauseated by the obscenity of these two filthy shits his mind wandered to revenge, as the gold-legged, free-standing, six-berth bathtub fizzed and popped, and another case of the inestimably fine champagne was cracked open so that the conceited sons-of-bitches could roll their pompous white asses in the luxury of a homoerotic and very much behind-closed-doors wine bath that only the loneliest single men with the smallest of penises and the blackest of souls and way too much money would even consider engaging in.
After all, these men were not politicians for whom he had voted, or indeed would ever vote. They were scoundrels. Scoundrels and crooks. They thought he was a dusky dumb manservant, a primate who learned the methods of house service only through painstaking repetition, but he was smarter than they thought and he knew, knew what they were celebrating, knew what their big political initiative was.
Nuclear. Powered. Heart. It had launched that morning, to overwhelming success, demand, public response.
He could read, he overheard, and he knew enough about things to know that something was afoot, something as unsavoury as a piece of chocolate. A bony finger raised all the way to the heavens in some universally offensive gesticulation. A lengthy shit left tall and spiralling on the doorstep of humanity. In their overzealous conversations they crooned about hearts, and about viruses, genetic modifications as weapons, about emotional sabotage and severed human responses, all by-products of the heart’s installation procedure. Like any good man of decent heart who spends a lifetime in the service of the morally questionable, the penny had dropped, as it were, and he wanted desperately to hold onto that decent heart of his. And he wanted revenge. For God, for himself, for the man he might have been, given half the chance. It had been nearly thirty years on this wonderful earth and he finally wanted his voice to be heard. Not too much to ask.
“For God’s sake, that’ll have to do you lazy nobody,” said the Prime Minister viciously, as the last slurp of bubbly thundered like pus from a manipulated adolescent pimple from the bottom of the thirty-first bottle. Bob sniggered like a secretive schoolboy, trying to stifle his sycophantic giggles in a quiet classroom. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
The servant bit his tongue and felt his arms trembling, with shock or offense or anger, as though the muscle would tear through the skin and glisten so powerful and impressive in the glare of the ceiling-mounted light source, the halogen spotlights. He bent to clear the empty bottles from the floor.
“Leave that there you ignorant bastard,” the PM went on, climbing into the champagne. It reached up to his knees. They were ugly.
“Get the hell out of here, invisible man,” laughed Bob, who pulled himself up from where he was stretched, singing drunkenly on the floor, using the edge of the bathtub and his elbows to try to stabilise his ascent. He grinned, drooling grimly, and plunged his head under the heavily carbonated liquid, trying to drink the plentiful alcohol with all the frenzy of a rugby team initiation ceremony and not a celebration of his own party’s financial and political monopoly. He gagged after a few seconds, you could see it happening below the surface of the champagne, and his doubled-over torso was wracked by violent spasms, long-forgotten muscles jiving with nausea under his reams of fish-white stomach flab. He pulled his head out, showering the servant and the mirror and the bathroom units with wine and blowing 12.5% ABV snot bubbles from his gasping nostrils. He collapsed, destroyed by his own stupid laughter.
“Not invisible enough, eh charcoal?” The Prime Minister was cupping his genitals with one hand in the champagne bath. Feeling sick with the both of them, but more sick with himself, the servant left the bathroom and closed the door behind him, all the while pulping both of their faces into unrecognisable tissue mash with screams and blood and retribution in the depths of his mind.
Bob pulled himself up again and rolled over the edge of the tub, hitting the champagne surface hard and sending bottles-worth of the stuff across the floor. His drenched kimono floated on the surface and his cheeks were reddened by burst blood vessels. He had the kind of face that only demonstrated how bloody awful it really was in the penetrating light of a bathroom, a light that stripped you of bullshit, a face imploding from the inside out, blood and veins and muscle tissue all vying for a way out. Contrarily, the Prime Minister seemed not to have a single drop of blood in his entire body, artificially bronzed, clinically angled and inescapably inhuman. Evil licked him like tongues on ice cream. It was a scene of almost suicidal grotesquery.
They looked at each other in the bizarre quiet that can sometimes befall intense drunkenness. Nude toes wiggled above the sticky fluid, his and his. The silence became sniggers became chortles became guffaws became smug repulsive laughter.
“We’ve done it,” said Bob. “We’ve fucking done it!”
The Prime Minister stood up, his slender body dripping champagne from the pubic hair and the asshole, and he reached for a couple of fresh bottles from the case. He popped the corks and passed one over to Bob as he sat back down.
“To the nuclear powered heart,” he said, raising his bottle in toast.
“To us,” said Bob, as if in the throes of seduction. “Partners in crime and world domination!” He was an annoying thick drunk, vulgar and mindless, thought the Prime Minister. No doubt an observation of particularly significant revelation. It was a dog-eat-dog world, politics. He snorted, and looked at Bob with a murderous glare.
“To us,” he eventually concurred, and took a long measured pull on his champagne. He threw the bottle to smash against the wall and jerked towards Bob through the champagne bath and kissed him violently on the mouth, with splinters of good green glass falling into their hair, which was now one in the shock intimate passion of their successes.
Goals, like excesses in testosterone and certain recreational drugs, can do strange things to a man.
Monday, April 13, 2009
an excerpt
When the ceremony came it was an excruciating spectacle. The roads through central London were all closed to traffic, as vast parades of mourning Britons staggered lamenting across the rivers of macadam. They wept for the life of this man who they had never known, bundled into intimacy by the persuasive forces of the media, sympathy manipulated by poor syntax and repetition. They left flowers outside Scotland Yard, thousands of pounds worth of rotting memorial wreaths, genetically modified specifically for the occasion, childish poems scrawled in devastated script on the cards provided. Television had created a weird digitised familial bond with the dead fat police commissioner, everyone felt it, civilians weeping as they would never weep for their real flesh and blood families. It was as though the continual broadcasting had forged a closeness unattainable in real relationships, somehow so much more than actual experience, unsullied by the difficulties inherent in first-hand emotional encounters. News cameras captured their faces, sobbing uncontrollably, hyperventilating even. It no longer mattered specifically who was being mourned, and many of the mourners probably didn’t even know who it was they were weeping for, but the flowers piled up to waist, chest, head height in the streets, the commissioner’s face printed onto commemorative Union Jack flags and hung in the windows of private residences, and the awful spoken tributes were spluttered out between dry heaves, the personal reminiscences of a new kind of impersonal twenty-first century relationship, the imagined closeness of distant strangers, tenderly remembering this man they had first met only days before, just minutes after his death behind the sanctuary of widescreen, another pixellated actors face sent to the TVs around which homes had grown, a face that had since been with them forever, a new memory, implanted like a microchip in their lonely malleable minds.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Fahrenheit 120 (Days of Sodom)
I was browsing customer reviews on Amazon just this week, one of my many pointless guilty pleasures, stockpiling opinions, spelling mistakes, poorly executed turns of rubbish phrase, when I came across this review for ‘120 Days of Sodom’, under the heading “Horrifying to think that people can enjoy such torture”:
"I didn't finish this book and find it very difficult to rate it. At first I was interested in all the characters of the book and all their different sexual persausions (sic). But the further I got into the book, the more extreme I found it. Towards the end was a summary of the torture that was inflicted upon the victims. I found it quite sick, that human beings could think of such horrors, never mind do them. So before reaching the end I actually burnt the book, which may seem extreme, but that is how I felt about it. So, not for the faint hearted!"
They burnt the book.
It made me incredibly sad, reading this, and wondering whether this is the way many people think about books. I suppose the fact that this customer was moved to action, of any kind, by the book is in some ways a resounding success for de Sade, but the commonplace way they write it – “I actually burnt the book” – is both terrifying and awful, symptomatic of the ignorance and escapism – rather than a way to be challenged, linguistically, philosophically, whatever – that have become synonymous with too much modern fiction. Why would it even come into your mind, burning, as a satisfactory response to a book you didn’t like? Surely it isn’t the first thing you think of? One sexual perversion too many and you reach for the flammable material, stoking the white hot flames of de Sade and Bataille and even Bret Easton Ellis and James Joyce (o, the dreaded coprophagia! Hot Karl! Shitplay! In fact, a Hot Lunch – and I used to ponder the validity of this oft rumoured fetish – does very much indeed involve “the act of shitting in clingfilm stretched over someone’s open mouth then fucking the mouth and at the point of ejaculation bursting through the cling film giving the recipient a mouthful of shit and spunk”, although some of the... specific details are open to regional interpretation, it would seem [mild thanks to Urban Dictionary, although I corrected your spelling]) over a perpetually burning metal incinerator in among twin-coloured wheelie bins and flowerbeds in the garden of some modern semi in the home counties. “Bring me the Ballard and the Palahniuk and the Bukowski, love, it’s getting cold”. Why not just put it down, stop reading it, sell it maybe or give it away, anything but take the flames to it like a psychotic Nazi Montag in a room full of Torahs, the ceremonial pomp of it sickening to picture, to imagine.
Did he clutch a bible as he burnt it, was he shirtless or drunk? Were his objections political, religious, moral, intellectual (and I doubt the latter very much)? Let’s go back to the review. “At first,” he says, “I was interested in [the characters] and all their different sexual persuasions (sic),” which itself implies a certain looseness of morals, at least sufficiently so to bother reading as notorious a writer as de Sade in the first place, let alone garner some deviant pleasure from the outlines of the characters primarily excrement based – liquid or indeed solid – vices. Yet as he continues the book the sexual “torture” becomes simply too extreme, even for a man who admittedly enjoys reading about the libertines sexual persuasions and preferences. So wait a minute. Where did the arbitrary line get drawn? The reviewer – who, annoyingly, refuses to use their real name, opting instead for A. Customer – is obviously not the textbook prude who dismisses de Sade and his oeuvre as filth before even allowing a cursory glance at the text (as proven by his purchase and part-consumption of the book). He does not, therefore and apparently, dismiss and then burn all books of a graphically sexual content prior to reading, a sweeping condemnation of devoutly religious proportions, say. Instead something in ‘120 Days of Sodom’ seemed to trigger a knee-jerk response which culminated with the burning of a book, I assume privately. What pushed him over the edge?
Far be it from me to credit anybody with intelligence, but one must assume that a reader enters into a relationship with de Sade based on a certain foreknowledge pertaining to his notoriety, to the subject matter commonly associated with him, to Salo, and if nothing else then to the other reviews written on Amazon. Yet still he bought it, this customer, read it and then burnt it. Am I missing something? You can’t have everything, sir. You can’t enjoy the (comparatively) mild piss-drinking and fart-swallowing anecdotes of the first circle without the bloody torturous sex-murders of the book’s second half. And would you want to? “All things are good when taken to excess”, after all. The review continues, “Towards the end there was a summary of the torture...” (the book was incomplete, yes, lost in the authors transferral between institutions. I don’t think de Sade simply got bored and reverted to bullet points to get the bugger finished more quickly); then: “I found it quite sick, that human beings could think of such horrors, never mind do them.” Oh yes, sweet Lord, heaven forbid that man might utilise imaginary thought to construct a work of fiction relating to the sexuality of fellow human beings and the darker psychosexual perversions present in a life above the law! In a world of rape, murder, war, destruction, how hard it is to believe that any man could write a book about a dark sexuality! After holocausts and genocides, ‘120 Days of Sodom’ is really the straw that broke the camel’s back, the very essence of its words destroying any shred of the human the 20th century might have left us with, its publication – nay, its very existence – representing the very end of moral fibre, the death of all hope! It’s a work of fiction, idiot. It uses fictional accounts of fictional situations to explore something greater than the sum of its parts. Did no one ever tell you to read between the lines a little of your mass market paperbacks (although I’m sure there isn’t much to see between the lines of D. Brown, or B. Shit), or to just think about what you’re doing, what you’re reading?
Then we get to the money shot (and how can such a short review feel so arduous?): “So before reaching the end I actually burnt the book, which may seem extreme, but that is how I felt about it. So, not for the faint hearted!” Indeed, not for the faint hearted. But then the faint hearted wouldn’t have bought de Sade, certainly wouldn’t have burnt a book. They’d be too faint of heart for that.
It’s the exclamation point, perhaps, that offends me most. So jolly, that cheeky little punctuation. Like he’s just thrown in a little gag at the end of the review lightening the mood from his entirely humourless and dreadful act of self-imposed censorship. Was it too inhuman, for him, this work of fiction? Was he protecting the human spirit from the evils of fucking and killing? If so, he was starting in the wrong place; the work of the long-dead de Sade is of little consequence to the horrors of the world, and if you don’t want to read something then please, don’t read it. Certainly don’t burn it. It can’t be good to be in the mindset where if you don’t like something your gut reaction is to burn it. Imagine the criminal implications of such unharnessed pyromania. Argument with the wife? Burn her. Don’t like your job? Set the fucking place on fire. In short then, it does, it does seem extreme. Parts of the book are pretty unpleasant, but that’s the point. It’s not erotica, it’s not Mills and Boon, it’s a devastating exploration of the darker sides of humanity, of social inequalities and – in these contemporary times – of mass production and material values, of the commodification of sellable sex. Entirely divorced from love and romance and without the shackles of a social system, sex becomes a truly free act (albeit a degrading one), primitive, very much taking its place at the forefront of human interaction, not relegated to the darkness of a repressed id. The Libertines themselves, four men of significant social standing in the ‘outside’ world who as such live their lives outside of the law, untouched, without interference. They are the law, as it were, a law unto themselves, corrupt and ghastly to the last, these Bishops, dukes and judges are the lords, the politicians, the CEO’s of today, the power and the money to be the freest men alive, a ticket out of anything.
When people start to burn books, when they think it’s a valid and reasonable response to a work of literature – irrespective of its content – this is a dangerous place to be. Even if this isolated – somehow tragically stupid – act of a particular reviewer is little more than his own moronic embarrassment, an internet-wide admission of his flimsy principles (the burning of this one book alone makes no difference, of course), it is still an attitude to be discouraged, vilified. It is censorship based on ideology (Nazi’s, Islam vs. S. Rushdie). No matter how poor, offensive, provocative a book might be it should not be burned. What is literature but a blueprint for further thought, a catalyst to contemplation, an invitation, even, to think and respond in kind? Not in flames but in kind. If not censorship it’s – and even worse – incitement to ignorance, or incitement to hatred.
I watched this programme about Rushdie’s fatwa, for ‘The Satanic Verses’, and I was surprised at just how violent it became, how fucking stupid people are. There were book burnings here, in the UK, in Bolton and Bradford, and effigies of Rushdie were burnt outside Parliament. In Central London. Like this is okay? It was inciting hatred and inviting violence; there was very real, internationally public death threat – or more of a death promise – in place, and so little was done about it. It doesn’t seem okay that you can burn effigies of a writer in public for writing a book deemed fucking blasphemous. On top of that, it seems even less right that nobody says a thing about these threats, this publically fuelled hatred, these real intents to cause harm, because they don’t want to tread on the toes of some religious belief. People did die, as well. Translators of the book stabbed to death. Even newsreader Peter Sissons got a fatwa after interviewing an Iranian representative about it all. He said something like “in a civilised [accentuation very much on the ‘civilised’] society we would not threaten to kill someone blah blah blah.” Dodgy choice of phrase, this civilised, but the sentiment was ultimately right (and civilisation doesn’t need to come into it): humane people don’t threaten to kill other people for a difference in opinion, and certainly not one expressed through a work of fiction. Thank fuck for Peter Sissons, the voice of (near) reason in any highly charged television interview scenario. And that was the funniest thing: half the fucking protestors hadn’t even read the book, and half of them said if Rushdie would merely print a disclaimer on the cover – like “this book is a work of fiction and in no way represents the actual truths portrayed with the Holy Qu’ran” etc. – then everything would probably be okay, no more fatwa. Absurd, to the highest order, more so because of the fact that the only people who would be offended by the question of truth or falsity in the book (‘The Satanic Verses’) are the same people who I would imagine ‘know’ that it is fictional because it does not correspond to the scripture, and are therefore acting solely as a result of some archaic religious law madness that demands Rushdie stoned, or something, to death. And this was, what, twenty years ago?
Reading Mr Customers review you see what progress we haven’t made. If he was still alive he’d probably have de Sade publically sodomized over a pile of his own burning manuscripts. That’d show him, blasphemous bastard.
"I didn't finish this book and find it very difficult to rate it. At first I was interested in all the characters of the book and all their different sexual persausions (sic). But the further I got into the book, the more extreme I found it. Towards the end was a summary of the torture that was inflicted upon the victims. I found it quite sick, that human beings could think of such horrors, never mind do them. So before reaching the end I actually burnt the book, which may seem extreme, but that is how I felt about it. So, not for the faint hearted!"
They burnt the book.
It made me incredibly sad, reading this, and wondering whether this is the way many people think about books. I suppose the fact that this customer was moved to action, of any kind, by the book is in some ways a resounding success for de Sade, but the commonplace way they write it – “I actually burnt the book” – is both terrifying and awful, symptomatic of the ignorance and escapism – rather than a way to be challenged, linguistically, philosophically, whatever – that have become synonymous with too much modern fiction. Why would it even come into your mind, burning, as a satisfactory response to a book you didn’t like? Surely it isn’t the first thing you think of? One sexual perversion too many and you reach for the flammable material, stoking the white hot flames of de Sade and Bataille and even Bret Easton Ellis and James Joyce (o, the dreaded coprophagia! Hot Karl! Shitplay! In fact, a Hot Lunch – and I used to ponder the validity of this oft rumoured fetish – does very much indeed involve “the act of shitting in clingfilm stretched over someone’s open mouth then fucking the mouth and at the point of ejaculation bursting through the cling film giving the recipient a mouthful of shit and spunk”, although some of the... specific details are open to regional interpretation, it would seem [mild thanks to Urban Dictionary, although I corrected your spelling]) over a perpetually burning metal incinerator in among twin-coloured wheelie bins and flowerbeds in the garden of some modern semi in the home counties. “Bring me the Ballard and the Palahniuk and the Bukowski, love, it’s getting cold”. Why not just put it down, stop reading it, sell it maybe or give it away, anything but take the flames to it like a psychotic Nazi Montag in a room full of Torahs, the ceremonial pomp of it sickening to picture, to imagine.
Did he clutch a bible as he burnt it, was he shirtless or drunk? Were his objections political, religious, moral, intellectual (and I doubt the latter very much)? Let’s go back to the review. “At first,” he says, “I was interested in [the characters] and all their different sexual persuasions (sic),” which itself implies a certain looseness of morals, at least sufficiently so to bother reading as notorious a writer as de Sade in the first place, let alone garner some deviant pleasure from the outlines of the characters primarily excrement based – liquid or indeed solid – vices. Yet as he continues the book the sexual “torture” becomes simply too extreme, even for a man who admittedly enjoys reading about the libertines sexual persuasions and preferences. So wait a minute. Where did the arbitrary line get drawn? The reviewer – who, annoyingly, refuses to use their real name, opting instead for A. Customer – is obviously not the textbook prude who dismisses de Sade and his oeuvre as filth before even allowing a cursory glance at the text (as proven by his purchase and part-consumption of the book). He does not, therefore and apparently, dismiss and then burn all books of a graphically sexual content prior to reading, a sweeping condemnation of devoutly religious proportions, say. Instead something in ‘120 Days of Sodom’ seemed to trigger a knee-jerk response which culminated with the burning of a book, I assume privately. What pushed him over the edge?
Far be it from me to credit anybody with intelligence, but one must assume that a reader enters into a relationship with de Sade based on a certain foreknowledge pertaining to his notoriety, to the subject matter commonly associated with him, to Salo, and if nothing else then to the other reviews written on Amazon. Yet still he bought it, this customer, read it and then burnt it. Am I missing something? You can’t have everything, sir. You can’t enjoy the (comparatively) mild piss-drinking and fart-swallowing anecdotes of the first circle without the bloody torturous sex-murders of the book’s second half. And would you want to? “All things are good when taken to excess”, after all. The review continues, “Towards the end there was a summary of the torture...” (the book was incomplete, yes, lost in the authors transferral between institutions. I don’t think de Sade simply got bored and reverted to bullet points to get the bugger finished more quickly); then: “I found it quite sick, that human beings could think of such horrors, never mind do them.” Oh yes, sweet Lord, heaven forbid that man might utilise imaginary thought to construct a work of fiction relating to the sexuality of fellow human beings and the darker psychosexual perversions present in a life above the law! In a world of rape, murder, war, destruction, how hard it is to believe that any man could write a book about a dark sexuality! After holocausts and genocides, ‘120 Days of Sodom’ is really the straw that broke the camel’s back, the very essence of its words destroying any shred of the human the 20th century might have left us with, its publication – nay, its very existence – representing the very end of moral fibre, the death of all hope! It’s a work of fiction, idiot. It uses fictional accounts of fictional situations to explore something greater than the sum of its parts. Did no one ever tell you to read between the lines a little of your mass market paperbacks (although I’m sure there isn’t much to see between the lines of D. Brown, or B. Shit), or to just think about what you’re doing, what you’re reading?
Then we get to the money shot (and how can such a short review feel so arduous?): “So before reaching the end I actually burnt the book, which may seem extreme, but that is how I felt about it. So, not for the faint hearted!” Indeed, not for the faint hearted. But then the faint hearted wouldn’t have bought de Sade, certainly wouldn’t have burnt a book. They’d be too faint of heart for that.
It’s the exclamation point, perhaps, that offends me most. So jolly, that cheeky little punctuation. Like he’s just thrown in a little gag at the end of the review lightening the mood from his entirely humourless and dreadful act of self-imposed censorship. Was it too inhuman, for him, this work of fiction? Was he protecting the human spirit from the evils of fucking and killing? If so, he was starting in the wrong place; the work of the long-dead de Sade is of little consequence to the horrors of the world, and if you don’t want to read something then please, don’t read it. Certainly don’t burn it. It can’t be good to be in the mindset where if you don’t like something your gut reaction is to burn it. Imagine the criminal implications of such unharnessed pyromania. Argument with the wife? Burn her. Don’t like your job? Set the fucking place on fire. In short then, it does, it does seem extreme. Parts of the book are pretty unpleasant, but that’s the point. It’s not erotica, it’s not Mills and Boon, it’s a devastating exploration of the darker sides of humanity, of social inequalities and – in these contemporary times – of mass production and material values, of the commodification of sellable sex. Entirely divorced from love and romance and without the shackles of a social system, sex becomes a truly free act (albeit a degrading one), primitive, very much taking its place at the forefront of human interaction, not relegated to the darkness of a repressed id. The Libertines themselves, four men of significant social standing in the ‘outside’ world who as such live their lives outside of the law, untouched, without interference. They are the law, as it were, a law unto themselves, corrupt and ghastly to the last, these Bishops, dukes and judges are the lords, the politicians, the CEO’s of today, the power and the money to be the freest men alive, a ticket out of anything.
When people start to burn books, when they think it’s a valid and reasonable response to a work of literature – irrespective of its content – this is a dangerous place to be. Even if this isolated – somehow tragically stupid – act of a particular reviewer is little more than his own moronic embarrassment, an internet-wide admission of his flimsy principles (the burning of this one book alone makes no difference, of course), it is still an attitude to be discouraged, vilified. It is censorship based on ideology (Nazi’s, Islam vs. S. Rushdie). No matter how poor, offensive, provocative a book might be it should not be burned. What is literature but a blueprint for further thought, a catalyst to contemplation, an invitation, even, to think and respond in kind? Not in flames but in kind. If not censorship it’s – and even worse – incitement to ignorance, or incitement to hatred.
I watched this programme about Rushdie’s fatwa, for ‘The Satanic Verses’, and I was surprised at just how violent it became, how fucking stupid people are. There were book burnings here, in the UK, in Bolton and Bradford, and effigies of Rushdie were burnt outside Parliament. In Central London. Like this is okay? It was inciting hatred and inviting violence; there was very real, internationally public death threat – or more of a death promise – in place, and so little was done about it. It doesn’t seem okay that you can burn effigies of a writer in public for writing a book deemed fucking blasphemous. On top of that, it seems even less right that nobody says a thing about these threats, this publically fuelled hatred, these real intents to cause harm, because they don’t want to tread on the toes of some religious belief. People did die, as well. Translators of the book stabbed to death. Even newsreader Peter Sissons got a fatwa after interviewing an Iranian representative about it all. He said something like “in a civilised [accentuation very much on the ‘civilised’] society we would not threaten to kill someone blah blah blah.” Dodgy choice of phrase, this civilised, but the sentiment was ultimately right (and civilisation doesn’t need to come into it): humane people don’t threaten to kill other people for a difference in opinion, and certainly not one expressed through a work of fiction. Thank fuck for Peter Sissons, the voice of (near) reason in any highly charged television interview scenario. And that was the funniest thing: half the fucking protestors hadn’t even read the book, and half of them said if Rushdie would merely print a disclaimer on the cover – like “this book is a work of fiction and in no way represents the actual truths portrayed with the Holy Qu’ran” etc. – then everything would probably be okay, no more fatwa. Absurd, to the highest order, more so because of the fact that the only people who would be offended by the question of truth or falsity in the book (‘The Satanic Verses’) are the same people who I would imagine ‘know’ that it is fictional because it does not correspond to the scripture, and are therefore acting solely as a result of some archaic religious law madness that demands Rushdie stoned, or something, to death. And this was, what, twenty years ago?
Reading Mr Customers review you see what progress we haven’t made. If he was still alive he’d probably have de Sade publically sodomized over a pile of his own burning manuscripts. That’d show him, blasphemous bastard.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Derek Obama, President
The two men, strangers, stood at the checkout. They weren’t patient, but had not been queuing for long. Both white, both adequately clothed, both male, they queued with baskets of essentials, not luxuries, and thought about the better times, the times that were or may be, anything but the times that are. The younger of the two noticed the other, the heavy smell of cigarettes almost bitter among the dry food items, tea, coffee, jams. He was watching his younger male counterpart, smiling with it, as though a secret were about to emerge.
“Can I help?” asked the younger male, uncomfortable in the gaze of others. The shop assistant glanced up from service, disgruntled with the public use of her professional phrase. Pulling a packet of a forgettable biscuits into his basket the older man smiled further.
“You don’t recognise me, do you?” he said, apparently relishing the confusion which greeted his conversation.
“I... should I?” asked the younger man, looking to the other two members of the queue, behind them, as though for moral support, for unity against the interaction, for the shared humour garnered from weakened sanity.
“I should say so,” smiled the man. He looked about forty, his dark hair greying and shaved clumsily, close to his bulbous head. His ears were thick and long, his skin smeared dirty and cracked, his lips like sausages, his beard new and untidy. Thick green socks housed the tapered bottoms of blue sports trousers, his hands were yellow with a smoking commitment. “Look again. Think political. Look again.” There was something assertive about his tone, but comforting. The younger man looked, his face moved within an inch of the one he was inspecting. He let his eyes drift around the face, stopping at the ears; he pulled back and looked up and down the man’s five feet and five, then leaned in, closer still. An incredible intimacy had passed between them, but neither man made comment.
“Can I help?” queried the shop assistant rhetorically. The younger man looked toward her. She seemed impatient. The queue had grown behind him, the older smiled. He did look familiar, but why or where from was uncertain.
“Excuse me,” said the younger man and edged forwards, placing his basket down at the till point. The shop assistant looked at him, disgusted. Milk and toilet rolls, some canned meat. It was disgusting. He was saving his vegetarianism for another day, something to look forward to, the promise of vitamins somehow sufficient to get him through the weeks, the months. She rang a till-mounted bell, and another shop assistant appeared behind the neighbouring checkout. The older man approached it, laid his basket down. Biscuits and a handful of greetings cards, all for different occasions.
The two staff scanned the items robotically.
“You do, don’t you? Recognise me.” The shop assistants sneered to one another, the first mouthing a word that the younger man couldn’t identify. He felt panicked suddenly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The older man’s eyes pointed towards the television that was kept next to the tobacco behind the counter. It showed constant news. “There,” he said casually. “There I am, recognisable me.”
It was Obama. The men both paid for their shopping in the silence that precedes further conversation. They left the shop but outside stayed together.
“Derek Obama,” said the older man, awkwardly shifting his plastic carrier bag between hands, extending the right in greeting. The younger man shook it.
“Samuel,” he said. “But people call me Goebbels.”
“Goebbels? Unflattering. Why Goebbels?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s because I worked in advertising.”
They watched the traffic together in the grey light of afternoon, the glare of the shop front warming in its way. Derek pulled a half-smoked roll up from a pocket somewhere underneath his jumper and lit it past a throaty cough.
“You’re not... I mean,” Goebbels struggled for words. “Are you really... Barack... Obama?”
“No. Derek Obama.” His reply was obvious, firm, somehow considerate.
“Then you’re equally not, I mean, not, of course, that it’s a question of status or rather, ho hum, identity, or, what have it, you’re not, therefore in association, the President, of, the United S. of A.?”
“On the contrary,” he replied, glibly relishing the cigarette. “President Derek Obama, leader of the free world. I am.”
“Shall we walk?”
They set off north at a pace, towards the heath. The traffic was annoyingly consistent, sparse but present, a mocking hum of mechanics through the residentially derelict streets. There was a distant rumble of children, school’s out, it approached like a solid mass, a tangible experience. At ‘King Wang’s Chinese Portion’, the two men stopped and consulted the sun-faded menu. The takeaway was closed, opened only once a week, its interior a mess of off-white plastic and leather-scuffed linoleum, the smeared ancient stainless steel of the hotplate somehow devastating in its sadness. The fridge cast the only light past garish New Year regalia, bottles of coke becoming somehow symbolic in their alien brightness. They left the sorry menu without a word, its Arial curves destined to forever alienate it from purchase.
Turning onto the heath the smell of dogshit drifted from the grass.
“The president, though,” Goebbels said tentatively. “The president is Barack. Barack Obama. Barack with a B.”
“And?” Obama had altered his walk when his thin soles reached the mud, his steps longer, quicker.
“And? And, he’s, you know.” He nodded sympathetically, euphemistically.
“I know?”
“Black,” he said quickly, “he’s black. The first black president Barack Obama. He’s black.”
“I am black,” said Derek. Goebbels laughter was out of place in the trees, the heath ached with unsatisfied need.
“He’s American,” he said. “I suppose that you’re American.”
“You know I am. I’m Derek Obama. Can we win it?”
“What?”
“Can we win it?” He shouted.
“Yes?”
“Yes. We. Can.”
They looked at each other blankly.
“You’re not Barack Obama.”
“No, I’m Derek Obama. Barack is my professional name. It was a media construct. Said it sounded more black, whatever that means.”
“I thought you said you were black?”
“I am.”
“What?”
“I am.”
“You’re not. Black.”
“I am. Look at me.”
“I am, and I can see you’re not black.”
“What does black mean?”
“What?”
“What does it mean to be black?”
“It means... you are... black.”
“I am black.”
“No you’re not.”
“I know I am. I’m Barack Obama, first black president of the free world America. I must be black.”
“You’re Derek Obama.”
“Derek’s my personal name. Barack Obama is my professional name. Sounds more black, they said. Important for demographics.”
“Demographics?”
“Voting demographics. Derek, Barack, doesn’t matter. I am Obama.”
“Look,” Goebbels felt frustrated and excited. Maybe he was Obama? Stranger things had happened. “I’m not saying you’re not Obama. All I’m saying is you’re not black.”
“How can Obama not be black?”
“He can’t.”
“But you just said I was Obama?”
“I...”
“Yes. I am black, and I am Obama. I think black. I dress black. I sleep black. I am black. That makes a black man.”
“Your skin though. It isn’t... black.”
“Racist.”
“What?”
“You’re a racist.”
“How?”
“You’re talking about my skin. ‘I will not be judged by the colour of my skin but by the kind of person, etc.’ M. Luther King. A very brilliant black man. I know me to be black and black I am and I will not be judged by the colour of my skin and I am Derek Obama, President, professionally known as Barack.”
A dog walker approached the two men, she stopped when she heard them talking. Obama smiled at her, a big smile. His teeth were very rotten.
“Don’t I know you?” she asked. He offered her his hand.
“Derek Obama, President.” She narrowed her eyes and looked at his face, clicked her fingers in recognition.
“That’s it,” she celebrated. “You showed Bush’s monkeys, sir, and congratulations.” She asked if she could take his photograph, and Derek Obama of course agreed. She had a camera phone, and asked Goebbels if he would mind taking it. He took two, portrait and landscape. The dog walker left them very happily, holding her phone like a trophy.
“This is insane,” said Goebbels when she had gone.
“The lights. The television lights make people look different.”
“It’s unbelievable. You’re not American. Chicago.”
“The thing is,” said Obama.
“What?”
“I am.”
“No.”
“I am American.”
“Then why are you here? Norwich, England?”
Derek Obama seemed surprised by the question. “I live here,” he said.
“Obama lives in Washington.”
“I am Obama and I live here. I commute.”
“You commute? To America?”
“That’s right. We came here for vacation a few years ago and decided to live here. It’s a fine city.”
“That’s as may be but you can’t commute to America.”
“It’s not so bad, off peak.”
“Off peak? It’s thousands of miles.” Obama shrugged. “And the president lives in the White House.”
“The White House? Have you ever been to the White House?”
“No.”
“No. No one has, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a symbolic property. It only exists in a symbolic context. Do you understand?”
“Symbolic?”
“It’s false. A model.”
“The White House is a model?”
“Yes. It’s a scale model of an imagined building. They house it in the pentagon and use it for news footage and as a symbol of American pride and patriotism.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to believe it, but it’s true. You ask any American if they’ve visited the White House and they’ll tell you ‘no’. Anyone who says yes is probably a paid actor. There are a few of those, used in stock White House footage. There’s no need to visit it, they’ll say. We can see it on TV. That’s the point.”
“TV.”
“Exactly.”
Goebbels opened his milk while he thought things through. He knew he’d regret it later, but his mouth felt dry.
“So you are American?”
“Yessir.”
“And black?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you commute to work in Washington and undertake most day-to-day presidential duties here?”
“Yup.”
“And you are Derek Obama, President of the U. States of A.?”
“One hundred per cent.”
He took a pensive sip of milk, refusing to doubt the veracity of a self-proclaimed black president. The intricacies of race issues were not his forte, and he felt sensitive about his colonial past, about his distaste for postcolonial literature at university.
“Pleasant to meet you, Mr President,” he said.
“Yes we can,” smiled Obama, his inspirational catchphrase already wearing thin.
*
He saw Obama a few days later, cutting the ribbon at a new existentialist hairdresser called “Outsider’s Hair Futility”, a by-line of “Where Epilation Precedes Essence” hand painted on the windows, most of the key vowels back-to-front. The walls were plastered with Xeroxed photographs – footballer Camus, gruesome Sartre, grave de Beauvoir, paranoid Kafka – and the place was run by a couple of Arab boys, who cut hair with cut-throat razors, highly polished to catch the glint of the bright salon lights, blinding and artificial. They heated the place to boiling, which made for a disorientating experience. Although they did not want to detract from the authenticity of the haircut, subtle signage read “Please do not kill the Arabs. Thank you”, in text barely legible from the styling chairs.
The computer-made poster in the window, which demonstrated little competence with the Microsoft suite, proclaimed ‘Derek ‘Barack’ Obama’ in a size twenty font, with the parenthetical exposition, ‘US President’, only worthy of an italicized size sixteen, the insignificance of the international title exemplified in software choice, in presentational decision, in Norfolk simplicity.
A small crowd of Norwich’s few ethnic minorities had gathered, seven, eight people, all keen for some kind of representation from the new president, Chinese and Indian men primarily, all smoking furiously, in silence. Obama was wearing a small paper thin suit, grinning obscenely at the opening buffet, halves of scotch eggs, sausage rolls, egg sandwiches, bowls of crisps, the ceremonial savouries of the working class. There was black grime under his fingernails, his beard was longer, more matted. White bread crumbs flew from his mouth while he spoke idly to the manager, who seemed pleased with the turn out, pleased with the presidential authority his new salon demanded. Obama’s visit represented the first of its kind in Norwich’s long history, and was to all there present a symbol of hope: of race, of future, of haircuts.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” started Obama, his voice rich in its quintessentially English tropes. “I am President Obama. One score minutes ago, this buffet lunch bridged a gap in your fine city. A gap between the races.” He saw Goebbels standing at the back, peeling the sausage meat from a scotch egg. “You’ve come here today because you believe. You believe in a better tomorrow.” The manager applauded alone. “As the new president of the United S. of America – and the first ethnic president to have” – his voice was drowned out by a passing bus, reluctantly headed towards Sprowston – “and that specific, defiant triumph, I thereby embrace my responsibility as figurehead, martyr, sage. I represent a future of tolerance to all men, and be you Chinese or Indian, Arab or English, I know without doubt that you will find this tolerance within the four honest walls of “Outsiders Hair Futility”.” He held the scissors above his head, smiling broadly. “Can they cut it?” he asked.
“Yes they can!” cried the manager, jubilantly, waving his arms like a conductor. The Chinese were nonplussed, the Indian’s bemused. Oddly, Goebbels was in tears as Obama cut the ribbon, standing back from the doorway to grant passage into the authenticity of the hair salon. The crowd dispersed. No one wanted a haircut.
“So,” said Obama, wandering over to Goebbels, who was drying his eyes with the back of his hands.
“So.”
“What did you think? Of the speech.”
“It was good it was... very English.”
“When in England,” said Obama, satisfied.
“I never imagined the president would open a hair salon.”
“It’s an important gesture to win the trust of the common man, to put politics in an everyday context that he can understand. These racially suppressed,” he said. “They’re the exact people my global policies reach out to. They need to know that their brother’s votes weren’t wasted, that their voices are heard, that someone is representing them, not just Stateside but here: Norwich.” The two men looked at each other. “I noticed your tears,” he said, like a punchline.
“They were for something else.”
“I see. Coy.”
“They were,” said Goebbels firmly. “Although you were terrific. Gave life to the corner.”
One of the Chinese men had returned and stood a few feet away from Obama.
“Can I do something?” asked the president.
The Chinese said nothing but pushed forward a picture.
“He wants you to sign it,” explained Goebbels. “The picture.”
Obama looked at it. A portrait of the Clinton’s, cut from a glossy magazine. He didn’t say anything, but wrote on it all the same. ‘Best wishes from Derek Obama’. His handwriting was very neat, practised. It looked unreal. The Chinese bowed his head and scuttled off. His friend would be waiting.
“Must happen all the time,” said Goebbels, eating an egg sandwich in layers.
“Yes. Part of my presidential lot.”
“How’s Washington?”
“Poor weather.”
There was not much else to say.
“I need an aide,” said Obama finally.
“An aide?”
“For campaigns. And diary management. Perhaps protection.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Racial tension. As a black president I have enemies and a full calendar. Interested?”
“In almost everything.”
“Perfect. You can start this afternoon. Let’s get you a haircut.”
Obama led Goebbels into the salon. His glasses steamed up immediately, he felt sick with panic, lost in blindness. The Arab boy led him gently to the seat.
“What can it be, sir?” asked the Arab boy, his razor glaring in a hundred watts.
“Short past and future please,” said Goebbels, short of breath and already dripping sweat under the heat lamps. “Bit of mousse on the freedom.”
*
The letter came a week later, although it felt longer because Obama had been making two or three public appearances a day around the city, giving readings and speeches, openings, encouraging massive support for his democratic ideals. People were very certain that he was Barack Obama, despite the physical discrepancies, and he spoke with all the flair of a dynamic young politician.
It was delivered by hand to Goebbels’ flat, envelope written in red ballpoint. ‘Abarma’. Goebbels tore open the envelope carefully. Obama was at an Italian restaurant, giving a short talk on pizza bases throughout American history. He read the letter, then read it again:
‘Abarma,
We’re kill you in a morning, boy.
Shoot you ded.
No blak presidens in Norwich.
Thursday be bye-bye that be.’
That was it, then. The threat had come. Goebbels punched the letter and picked up the telephone. Norwich wasn’t ready for Derek Obama.
*
Wednesday followed Tuesday and another package arrived, this one bigger than the last. Opening it together, Obama and Goebbels were surprised to find a sugar beet wrapped within the thick brown paper of the package, Norfolk’s unofficial agricultural mascot. The beet had a knife forcibly inserted through its hard centre. It was accompanied by another letter, exhibiting the same blatant disregard for vocabulary and syntactical accuracy:
‘Obalmer gonna be next beet.
He be beat. Beat up beet.
Real ded to morra boyo.
From,
THE VHS CREW.’
They had signed this one: the VHS crew. A small group of self-confessed luddites who refused to let their audio-visual entertainment systems progress beyond VCRs and video cassettes. Perhaps Obama represented something altogether too modern for them, and it was only through a violent act of assassination that some semblance of order could be restored to their distant isolated existences?
“We could contact the police,” Obama suggested.
“Pointless,” said Goebbels hopelessly. “This is Norwich. The VHS crew are the police. By day they keep steady jobs in high places. By night their luddite tendencies take on homicidal intensity. They’ll have an arrangement in place.”
“So then. The lists of history are being rewritten, here, tonight, Norwich Norfolk. Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama.”
“We can’t let it happen. We have to hope. They may be bluffing.”
“Bluffing? Look at this!” Obama thrust the sugar beet into Goebbels’ hand. Something about such wanton destruction certainly made it a serious act, intense, the work of madmen. Goebbels wept as he threw the sugar beet into the wastepaper basket.
“You’re a symbol of hope Mr President.”
“I will die a symbol of hope. Hope of the coloured of the free world.”
Derek’s bravery was deeply powerful, rooted in the absurdity of his overlooked Caucasian features.
“You can’t go out there tomorrow,” pleaded Goebbels, steeped in tragedy.
“It’s what I do, Goebbels, you know that. What kind of a man – what kind of a president would I be if I didn’t?”
“A living one.”
“Precisely. Who takes inspiration from the living these days? Death is the message, my friend. Death is the final policy.”
“But...”
“Nothing. Tomorrow is the Dragon Parade and this city needs me. The speech will go ahead as planned. It’s all I’ve got left.”
“What about me?” asked Goebbels inaudibly.
The men fell silent and the rain hit the window.
*
The crowd had gathered on the steps of the Forum. Local primary schools were competing for best dragon (by design and by theory), but the limits of their resources were clearly exhibited by the low quality of their materials, the ugliness of their dragons, the confusion of their participating pupils. Some local DJ played songs with a fire theme, but only seemed to have sourced two tracks, which he rotated among the ten competing schools, ‘Firestarter’ for some, and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ for the others.
Obama stood at the top of the steps behind a small microphone and a group of teenagers, his hands deep in his trouser pockets, fingering loose change, no more than pennies. Goebbels stood slightly behind him. After the eight schools had finished their poorly choreographed routines, the DJ introduced the Lord Mayor, a man long-faced and forgettable alongside Derek Obama, President. He wore full ancient regalia, somehow absurd in this context of steel and glass, the modernity so celebrated in the architectural specifics of the Forum building. Leaning towards the microphone, he spoke.
“My ladies and my gentlemen,” he said. “The dragons have danced!” A flutter of polite applause, like death throes, motor spasms, epileptic convulsions. “A spectacle of sorts it truly was!” The sound of sobbing children was pervasive in the acoustic trap created by buildings and concrete steps. “To announce our victor, I hereby introduce one: US President Obama, sir.”
The silence was disbelieving, confronted by D. Obama’s white English countenance. Odd claps sounded, as if by accident. There were four or five security dotted around the circular perimeter of the main performance area. They weren’t police but local heavies, football players, in reflective jerkins with thick shaved heads, white flesh bunched up at the peaks of their necks, matching short beards, all moustaches united with a chin-grown beard in some hirsute orbital, cheap aftershave for lewd effect. Unarmed, the threats to Obama had been dismissed by City Hall, the paid security revelling only in their physicality, their adeptness at hand-to-hand fighting and not their strategic disarmament of primed assassin luddites.
Who was this man they called Obama, pondered the unenthusiastic gathered? Surely not a president, of any land. But then a Mayor wouldn’t lie, and the television does change people, and no one in Norwich had ever met the new president before, that much was true and... and by Jove, it is him, it is Obama, and here, in our humble fine city. It is Obama! It is Obama!
“Oh-ba-ma!” chanted a fifty-something man in a wax jacket, his body possessed by an incredible excitement. “Oh-ba-ma!”
Others joined in, first a couple, then more, five, ten, all chanting, all clapping in measured solid beats, palms striking dead on the syllables, Oh-ba-ma, Oh-ba-ma. Passing pedestrians stopped, caught in the frenzy of communal experience, the need for unquestioned unity, and themselves chanted anew. Goebbels urgently looked, cold in the brisk air, desperate for a glimpse of a rifle barrel, but he saw nothing. The crowd was enraptured, the sightlines were clear. Maybe it had been a hoax.
“Norwich,” said Obama coolly, with the audible twang of a Herefordshire accent. The applause roared. He held his hands flat against his sides, apparently unfazed by the threats, the letters, the mutilated sugar beet now a forgotten memory. He was in his element. Goebbels couldn’t help but smile. Derek. “Norwich,” he said again, “I have a dream.”
The crack of the rifle was deafening in the silence of concentration, so loud it felt unreal. Goebbels saw the bullet go in, just one, through the forehead, and it felt like minutes before he heard the noise. Obama pirouetted with the impact, span around to face his aide, an arc of blood so red against the concrete. He was killed instantly but didn’t fall, Goebbels lowering his body to the floor in delirium, in tears. The flesh was warm from the exhilaration of public speaking.
No one had seen the gunman but the audience started to scream, everything happening with a delay. One of the security guards lifted the Lord Mayor into his arms and slowly jogged him towards City Hall, like a woman or a child.
Goebbels wept above his friend, held his dead hand, stroked his dead cheek. The bravest president, his Derek ‘Barack’ Obama. The crowd had dispersed quickly, children running in all directions clad in the odd single pieces of a larger dragon, eternally outshone, panicked parents rushing for the familiar sanctuary of the shopping centre. Several people remained before the Forum, now drowned in the din of active emergency vehicles, but all kept an unwritten distance from the body, from Goebbels, desperate not to feel the death of another, feel it on their skin. They watched quietly from their sanitised proximity.
He took Obama’s wallet from his trouser pocket, before the ambulance technicians moved the body and the police sectioned off the three concrete slabs that the death had infected. It was something he needed, a memento of his friend. He was asked a few questions by two police officers, but he realised that he couldn’t tell them much. He told them about the VHS crew, the two letters and the sugar beet, but they didn’t seem to take him seriously. It felt inappropriate to be talking about him like this: the deceased, the victim; he was neither of those things. He was Derek Obama, President, and now he was gone.
A technician from the radio station was dismantling the rig, carrying the speakers and PA to a red Transit van. The DJ had long since gone. The disco lights were still running, their blues, reds and greens illuminating the city’s history, distorting its future. The technician carried a bundle of promotional t-shirts to a bin and forced them in, struggling to push the white cotton material through the hole, designed for small amounts of personal refuse. He swore as he pushed, his cheap blue jeans slumping down the flatness of his buttocks, his belt a pointless artefact.
Goebbels watched, watched until the lights were eventually dismantled. It was near dark. He wondered where the news crews were, the mourning parties, wondered why the huge screen that crowned the glory of the shopping centre had not reverted to a primal reportage, the world dumbstruck and grieving by this heinous presidential assassination, trying to construct a narrative out of soundbites, interviews and hypothetical bullet trajectories. Defined by his sadness he opened the wallet. On the screen Obama toured Washington; he had a wife, a vice president, he shook hands. He did look different up there. The wallet held a driving license, the card of pizza place, scraps of paper. Derek Lush, it said on the driving license. It had a picture.
Goebbels put it back into the wallet and followed a family towards the shopping centre, buzzing under the weight of its own air conditioning, the shop fronts illuminated like neon hearths in the Norfolk night.
“Can I help?” asked the younger male, uncomfortable in the gaze of others. The shop assistant glanced up from service, disgruntled with the public use of her professional phrase. Pulling a packet of a forgettable biscuits into his basket the older man smiled further.
“You don’t recognise me, do you?” he said, apparently relishing the confusion which greeted his conversation.
“I... should I?” asked the younger man, looking to the other two members of the queue, behind them, as though for moral support, for unity against the interaction, for the shared humour garnered from weakened sanity.
“I should say so,” smiled the man. He looked about forty, his dark hair greying and shaved clumsily, close to his bulbous head. His ears were thick and long, his skin smeared dirty and cracked, his lips like sausages, his beard new and untidy. Thick green socks housed the tapered bottoms of blue sports trousers, his hands were yellow with a smoking commitment. “Look again. Think political. Look again.” There was something assertive about his tone, but comforting. The younger man looked, his face moved within an inch of the one he was inspecting. He let his eyes drift around the face, stopping at the ears; he pulled back and looked up and down the man’s five feet and five, then leaned in, closer still. An incredible intimacy had passed between them, but neither man made comment.
“Can I help?” queried the shop assistant rhetorically. The younger man looked toward her. She seemed impatient. The queue had grown behind him, the older smiled. He did look familiar, but why or where from was uncertain.
“Excuse me,” said the younger man and edged forwards, placing his basket down at the till point. The shop assistant looked at him, disgusted. Milk and toilet rolls, some canned meat. It was disgusting. He was saving his vegetarianism for another day, something to look forward to, the promise of vitamins somehow sufficient to get him through the weeks, the months. She rang a till-mounted bell, and another shop assistant appeared behind the neighbouring checkout. The older man approached it, laid his basket down. Biscuits and a handful of greetings cards, all for different occasions.
The two staff scanned the items robotically.
“You do, don’t you? Recognise me.” The shop assistants sneered to one another, the first mouthing a word that the younger man couldn’t identify. He felt panicked suddenly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The older man’s eyes pointed towards the television that was kept next to the tobacco behind the counter. It showed constant news. “There,” he said casually. “There I am, recognisable me.”
It was Obama. The men both paid for their shopping in the silence that precedes further conversation. They left the shop but outside stayed together.
“Derek Obama,” said the older man, awkwardly shifting his plastic carrier bag between hands, extending the right in greeting. The younger man shook it.
“Samuel,” he said. “But people call me Goebbels.”
“Goebbels? Unflattering. Why Goebbels?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s because I worked in advertising.”
They watched the traffic together in the grey light of afternoon, the glare of the shop front warming in its way. Derek pulled a half-smoked roll up from a pocket somewhere underneath his jumper and lit it past a throaty cough.
“You’re not... I mean,” Goebbels struggled for words. “Are you really... Barack... Obama?”
“No. Derek Obama.” His reply was obvious, firm, somehow considerate.
“Then you’re equally not, I mean, not, of course, that it’s a question of status or rather, ho hum, identity, or, what have it, you’re not, therefore in association, the President, of, the United S. of A.?”
“On the contrary,” he replied, glibly relishing the cigarette. “President Derek Obama, leader of the free world. I am.”
“Shall we walk?”
They set off north at a pace, towards the heath. The traffic was annoyingly consistent, sparse but present, a mocking hum of mechanics through the residentially derelict streets. There was a distant rumble of children, school’s out, it approached like a solid mass, a tangible experience. At ‘King Wang’s Chinese Portion’, the two men stopped and consulted the sun-faded menu. The takeaway was closed, opened only once a week, its interior a mess of off-white plastic and leather-scuffed linoleum, the smeared ancient stainless steel of the hotplate somehow devastating in its sadness. The fridge cast the only light past garish New Year regalia, bottles of coke becoming somehow symbolic in their alien brightness. They left the sorry menu without a word, its Arial curves destined to forever alienate it from purchase.
Turning onto the heath the smell of dogshit drifted from the grass.
“The president, though,” Goebbels said tentatively. “The president is Barack. Barack Obama. Barack with a B.”
“And?” Obama had altered his walk when his thin soles reached the mud, his steps longer, quicker.
“And? And, he’s, you know.” He nodded sympathetically, euphemistically.
“I know?”
“Black,” he said quickly, “he’s black. The first black president Barack Obama. He’s black.”
“I am black,” said Derek. Goebbels laughter was out of place in the trees, the heath ached with unsatisfied need.
“He’s American,” he said. “I suppose that you’re American.”
“You know I am. I’m Derek Obama. Can we win it?”
“What?”
“Can we win it?” He shouted.
“Yes?”
“Yes. We. Can.”
They looked at each other blankly.
“You’re not Barack Obama.”
“No, I’m Derek Obama. Barack is my professional name. It was a media construct. Said it sounded more black, whatever that means.”
“I thought you said you were black?”
“I am.”
“What?”
“I am.”
“You’re not. Black.”
“I am. Look at me.”
“I am, and I can see you’re not black.”
“What does black mean?”
“What?”
“What does it mean to be black?”
“It means... you are... black.”
“I am black.”
“No you’re not.”
“I know I am. I’m Barack Obama, first black president of the free world America. I must be black.”
“You’re Derek Obama.”
“Derek’s my personal name. Barack Obama is my professional name. Sounds more black, they said. Important for demographics.”
“Demographics?”
“Voting demographics. Derek, Barack, doesn’t matter. I am Obama.”
“Look,” Goebbels felt frustrated and excited. Maybe he was Obama? Stranger things had happened. “I’m not saying you’re not Obama. All I’m saying is you’re not black.”
“How can Obama not be black?”
“He can’t.”
“But you just said I was Obama?”
“I...”
“Yes. I am black, and I am Obama. I think black. I dress black. I sleep black. I am black. That makes a black man.”
“Your skin though. It isn’t... black.”
“Racist.”
“What?”
“You’re a racist.”
“How?”
“You’re talking about my skin. ‘I will not be judged by the colour of my skin but by the kind of person, etc.’ M. Luther King. A very brilliant black man. I know me to be black and black I am and I will not be judged by the colour of my skin and I am Derek Obama, President, professionally known as Barack.”
A dog walker approached the two men, she stopped when she heard them talking. Obama smiled at her, a big smile. His teeth were very rotten.
“Don’t I know you?” she asked. He offered her his hand.
“Derek Obama, President.” She narrowed her eyes and looked at his face, clicked her fingers in recognition.
“That’s it,” she celebrated. “You showed Bush’s monkeys, sir, and congratulations.” She asked if she could take his photograph, and Derek Obama of course agreed. She had a camera phone, and asked Goebbels if he would mind taking it. He took two, portrait and landscape. The dog walker left them very happily, holding her phone like a trophy.
“This is insane,” said Goebbels when she had gone.
“The lights. The television lights make people look different.”
“It’s unbelievable. You’re not American. Chicago.”
“The thing is,” said Obama.
“What?”
“I am.”
“No.”
“I am American.”
“Then why are you here? Norwich, England?”
Derek Obama seemed surprised by the question. “I live here,” he said.
“Obama lives in Washington.”
“I am Obama and I live here. I commute.”
“You commute? To America?”
“That’s right. We came here for vacation a few years ago and decided to live here. It’s a fine city.”
“That’s as may be but you can’t commute to America.”
“It’s not so bad, off peak.”
“Off peak? It’s thousands of miles.” Obama shrugged. “And the president lives in the White House.”
“The White House? Have you ever been to the White House?”
“No.”
“No. No one has, and I’ll tell you why. It’s a symbolic property. It only exists in a symbolic context. Do you understand?”
“Symbolic?”
“It’s false. A model.”
“The White House is a model?”
“Yes. It’s a scale model of an imagined building. They house it in the pentagon and use it for news footage and as a symbol of American pride and patriotism.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to believe it, but it’s true. You ask any American if they’ve visited the White House and they’ll tell you ‘no’. Anyone who says yes is probably a paid actor. There are a few of those, used in stock White House footage. There’s no need to visit it, they’ll say. We can see it on TV. That’s the point.”
“TV.”
“Exactly.”
Goebbels opened his milk while he thought things through. He knew he’d regret it later, but his mouth felt dry.
“So you are American?”
“Yessir.”
“And black?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you commute to work in Washington and undertake most day-to-day presidential duties here?”
“Yup.”
“And you are Derek Obama, President of the U. States of A.?”
“One hundred per cent.”
He took a pensive sip of milk, refusing to doubt the veracity of a self-proclaimed black president. The intricacies of race issues were not his forte, and he felt sensitive about his colonial past, about his distaste for postcolonial literature at university.
“Pleasant to meet you, Mr President,” he said.
“Yes we can,” smiled Obama, his inspirational catchphrase already wearing thin.
*
He saw Obama a few days later, cutting the ribbon at a new existentialist hairdresser called “Outsider’s Hair Futility”, a by-line of “Where Epilation Precedes Essence” hand painted on the windows, most of the key vowels back-to-front. The walls were plastered with Xeroxed photographs – footballer Camus, gruesome Sartre, grave de Beauvoir, paranoid Kafka – and the place was run by a couple of Arab boys, who cut hair with cut-throat razors, highly polished to catch the glint of the bright salon lights, blinding and artificial. They heated the place to boiling, which made for a disorientating experience. Although they did not want to detract from the authenticity of the haircut, subtle signage read “Please do not kill the Arabs. Thank you”, in text barely legible from the styling chairs.
The computer-made poster in the window, which demonstrated little competence with the Microsoft suite, proclaimed ‘Derek ‘Barack’ Obama’ in a size twenty font, with the parenthetical exposition, ‘US President’, only worthy of an italicized size sixteen, the insignificance of the international title exemplified in software choice, in presentational decision, in Norfolk simplicity.
A small crowd of Norwich’s few ethnic minorities had gathered, seven, eight people, all keen for some kind of representation from the new president, Chinese and Indian men primarily, all smoking furiously, in silence. Obama was wearing a small paper thin suit, grinning obscenely at the opening buffet, halves of scotch eggs, sausage rolls, egg sandwiches, bowls of crisps, the ceremonial savouries of the working class. There was black grime under his fingernails, his beard was longer, more matted. White bread crumbs flew from his mouth while he spoke idly to the manager, who seemed pleased with the turn out, pleased with the presidential authority his new salon demanded. Obama’s visit represented the first of its kind in Norwich’s long history, and was to all there present a symbol of hope: of race, of future, of haircuts.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” started Obama, his voice rich in its quintessentially English tropes. “I am President Obama. One score minutes ago, this buffet lunch bridged a gap in your fine city. A gap between the races.” He saw Goebbels standing at the back, peeling the sausage meat from a scotch egg. “You’ve come here today because you believe. You believe in a better tomorrow.” The manager applauded alone. “As the new president of the United S. of America – and the first ethnic president to have” – his voice was drowned out by a passing bus, reluctantly headed towards Sprowston – “and that specific, defiant triumph, I thereby embrace my responsibility as figurehead, martyr, sage. I represent a future of tolerance to all men, and be you Chinese or Indian, Arab or English, I know without doubt that you will find this tolerance within the four honest walls of “Outsiders Hair Futility”.” He held the scissors above his head, smiling broadly. “Can they cut it?” he asked.
“Yes they can!” cried the manager, jubilantly, waving his arms like a conductor. The Chinese were nonplussed, the Indian’s bemused. Oddly, Goebbels was in tears as Obama cut the ribbon, standing back from the doorway to grant passage into the authenticity of the hair salon. The crowd dispersed. No one wanted a haircut.
“So,” said Obama, wandering over to Goebbels, who was drying his eyes with the back of his hands.
“So.”
“What did you think? Of the speech.”
“It was good it was... very English.”
“When in England,” said Obama, satisfied.
“I never imagined the president would open a hair salon.”
“It’s an important gesture to win the trust of the common man, to put politics in an everyday context that he can understand. These racially suppressed,” he said. “They’re the exact people my global policies reach out to. They need to know that their brother’s votes weren’t wasted, that their voices are heard, that someone is representing them, not just Stateside but here: Norwich.” The two men looked at each other. “I noticed your tears,” he said, like a punchline.
“They were for something else.”
“I see. Coy.”
“They were,” said Goebbels firmly. “Although you were terrific. Gave life to the corner.”
One of the Chinese men had returned and stood a few feet away from Obama.
“Can I do something?” asked the president.
The Chinese said nothing but pushed forward a picture.
“He wants you to sign it,” explained Goebbels. “The picture.”
Obama looked at it. A portrait of the Clinton’s, cut from a glossy magazine. He didn’t say anything, but wrote on it all the same. ‘Best wishes from Derek Obama’. His handwriting was very neat, practised. It looked unreal. The Chinese bowed his head and scuttled off. His friend would be waiting.
“Must happen all the time,” said Goebbels, eating an egg sandwich in layers.
“Yes. Part of my presidential lot.”
“How’s Washington?”
“Poor weather.”
There was not much else to say.
“I need an aide,” said Obama finally.
“An aide?”
“For campaigns. And diary management. Perhaps protection.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Racial tension. As a black president I have enemies and a full calendar. Interested?”
“In almost everything.”
“Perfect. You can start this afternoon. Let’s get you a haircut.”
Obama led Goebbels into the salon. His glasses steamed up immediately, he felt sick with panic, lost in blindness. The Arab boy led him gently to the seat.
“What can it be, sir?” asked the Arab boy, his razor glaring in a hundred watts.
“Short past and future please,” said Goebbels, short of breath and already dripping sweat under the heat lamps. “Bit of mousse on the freedom.”
*
The letter came a week later, although it felt longer because Obama had been making two or three public appearances a day around the city, giving readings and speeches, openings, encouraging massive support for his democratic ideals. People were very certain that he was Barack Obama, despite the physical discrepancies, and he spoke with all the flair of a dynamic young politician.
It was delivered by hand to Goebbels’ flat, envelope written in red ballpoint. ‘Abarma’. Goebbels tore open the envelope carefully. Obama was at an Italian restaurant, giving a short talk on pizza bases throughout American history. He read the letter, then read it again:
‘Abarma,
We’re kill you in a morning, boy.
Shoot you ded.
No blak presidens in Norwich.
Thursday be bye-bye that be.’
That was it, then. The threat had come. Goebbels punched the letter and picked up the telephone. Norwich wasn’t ready for Derek Obama.
*
Wednesday followed Tuesday and another package arrived, this one bigger than the last. Opening it together, Obama and Goebbels were surprised to find a sugar beet wrapped within the thick brown paper of the package, Norfolk’s unofficial agricultural mascot. The beet had a knife forcibly inserted through its hard centre. It was accompanied by another letter, exhibiting the same blatant disregard for vocabulary and syntactical accuracy:
‘Obalmer gonna be next beet.
He be beat. Beat up beet.
Real ded to morra boyo.
From,
THE VHS CREW.’
They had signed this one: the VHS crew. A small group of self-confessed luddites who refused to let their audio-visual entertainment systems progress beyond VCRs and video cassettes. Perhaps Obama represented something altogether too modern for them, and it was only through a violent act of assassination that some semblance of order could be restored to their distant isolated existences?
“We could contact the police,” Obama suggested.
“Pointless,” said Goebbels hopelessly. “This is Norwich. The VHS crew are the police. By day they keep steady jobs in high places. By night their luddite tendencies take on homicidal intensity. They’ll have an arrangement in place.”
“So then. The lists of history are being rewritten, here, tonight, Norwich Norfolk. Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama.”
“We can’t let it happen. We have to hope. They may be bluffing.”
“Bluffing? Look at this!” Obama thrust the sugar beet into Goebbels’ hand. Something about such wanton destruction certainly made it a serious act, intense, the work of madmen. Goebbels wept as he threw the sugar beet into the wastepaper basket.
“You’re a symbol of hope Mr President.”
“I will die a symbol of hope. Hope of the coloured of the free world.”
Derek’s bravery was deeply powerful, rooted in the absurdity of his overlooked Caucasian features.
“You can’t go out there tomorrow,” pleaded Goebbels, steeped in tragedy.
“It’s what I do, Goebbels, you know that. What kind of a man – what kind of a president would I be if I didn’t?”
“A living one.”
“Precisely. Who takes inspiration from the living these days? Death is the message, my friend. Death is the final policy.”
“But...”
“Nothing. Tomorrow is the Dragon Parade and this city needs me. The speech will go ahead as planned. It’s all I’ve got left.”
“What about me?” asked Goebbels inaudibly.
The men fell silent and the rain hit the window.
*
The crowd had gathered on the steps of the Forum. Local primary schools were competing for best dragon (by design and by theory), but the limits of their resources were clearly exhibited by the low quality of their materials, the ugliness of their dragons, the confusion of their participating pupils. Some local DJ played songs with a fire theme, but only seemed to have sourced two tracks, which he rotated among the ten competing schools, ‘Firestarter’ for some, and ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ for the others.
Obama stood at the top of the steps behind a small microphone and a group of teenagers, his hands deep in his trouser pockets, fingering loose change, no more than pennies. Goebbels stood slightly behind him. After the eight schools had finished their poorly choreographed routines, the DJ introduced the Lord Mayor, a man long-faced and forgettable alongside Derek Obama, President. He wore full ancient regalia, somehow absurd in this context of steel and glass, the modernity so celebrated in the architectural specifics of the Forum building. Leaning towards the microphone, he spoke.
“My ladies and my gentlemen,” he said. “The dragons have danced!” A flutter of polite applause, like death throes, motor spasms, epileptic convulsions. “A spectacle of sorts it truly was!” The sound of sobbing children was pervasive in the acoustic trap created by buildings and concrete steps. “To announce our victor, I hereby introduce one: US President Obama, sir.”
The silence was disbelieving, confronted by D. Obama’s white English countenance. Odd claps sounded, as if by accident. There were four or five security dotted around the circular perimeter of the main performance area. They weren’t police but local heavies, football players, in reflective jerkins with thick shaved heads, white flesh bunched up at the peaks of their necks, matching short beards, all moustaches united with a chin-grown beard in some hirsute orbital, cheap aftershave for lewd effect. Unarmed, the threats to Obama had been dismissed by City Hall, the paid security revelling only in their physicality, their adeptness at hand-to-hand fighting and not their strategic disarmament of primed assassin luddites.
Who was this man they called Obama, pondered the unenthusiastic gathered? Surely not a president, of any land. But then a Mayor wouldn’t lie, and the television does change people, and no one in Norwich had ever met the new president before, that much was true and... and by Jove, it is him, it is Obama, and here, in our humble fine city. It is Obama! It is Obama!
“Oh-ba-ma!” chanted a fifty-something man in a wax jacket, his body possessed by an incredible excitement. “Oh-ba-ma!”
Others joined in, first a couple, then more, five, ten, all chanting, all clapping in measured solid beats, palms striking dead on the syllables, Oh-ba-ma, Oh-ba-ma. Passing pedestrians stopped, caught in the frenzy of communal experience, the need for unquestioned unity, and themselves chanted anew. Goebbels urgently looked, cold in the brisk air, desperate for a glimpse of a rifle barrel, but he saw nothing. The crowd was enraptured, the sightlines were clear. Maybe it had been a hoax.
“Norwich,” said Obama coolly, with the audible twang of a Herefordshire accent. The applause roared. He held his hands flat against his sides, apparently unfazed by the threats, the letters, the mutilated sugar beet now a forgotten memory. He was in his element. Goebbels couldn’t help but smile. Derek. “Norwich,” he said again, “I have a dream.”
The crack of the rifle was deafening in the silence of concentration, so loud it felt unreal. Goebbels saw the bullet go in, just one, through the forehead, and it felt like minutes before he heard the noise. Obama pirouetted with the impact, span around to face his aide, an arc of blood so red against the concrete. He was killed instantly but didn’t fall, Goebbels lowering his body to the floor in delirium, in tears. The flesh was warm from the exhilaration of public speaking.
No one had seen the gunman but the audience started to scream, everything happening with a delay. One of the security guards lifted the Lord Mayor into his arms and slowly jogged him towards City Hall, like a woman or a child.
Goebbels wept above his friend, held his dead hand, stroked his dead cheek. The bravest president, his Derek ‘Barack’ Obama. The crowd had dispersed quickly, children running in all directions clad in the odd single pieces of a larger dragon, eternally outshone, panicked parents rushing for the familiar sanctuary of the shopping centre. Several people remained before the Forum, now drowned in the din of active emergency vehicles, but all kept an unwritten distance from the body, from Goebbels, desperate not to feel the death of another, feel it on their skin. They watched quietly from their sanitised proximity.
He took Obama’s wallet from his trouser pocket, before the ambulance technicians moved the body and the police sectioned off the three concrete slabs that the death had infected. It was something he needed, a memento of his friend. He was asked a few questions by two police officers, but he realised that he couldn’t tell them much. He told them about the VHS crew, the two letters and the sugar beet, but they didn’t seem to take him seriously. It felt inappropriate to be talking about him like this: the deceased, the victim; he was neither of those things. He was Derek Obama, President, and now he was gone.
A technician from the radio station was dismantling the rig, carrying the speakers and PA to a red Transit van. The DJ had long since gone. The disco lights were still running, their blues, reds and greens illuminating the city’s history, distorting its future. The technician carried a bundle of promotional t-shirts to a bin and forced them in, struggling to push the white cotton material through the hole, designed for small amounts of personal refuse. He swore as he pushed, his cheap blue jeans slumping down the flatness of his buttocks, his belt a pointless artefact.
Goebbels watched, watched until the lights were eventually dismantled. It was near dark. He wondered where the news crews were, the mourning parties, wondered why the huge screen that crowned the glory of the shopping centre had not reverted to a primal reportage, the world dumbstruck and grieving by this heinous presidential assassination, trying to construct a narrative out of soundbites, interviews and hypothetical bullet trajectories. Defined by his sadness he opened the wallet. On the screen Obama toured Washington; he had a wife, a vice president, he shook hands. He did look different up there. The wallet held a driving license, the card of pizza place, scraps of paper. Derek Lush, it said on the driving license. It had a picture.
Goebbels put it back into the wallet and followed a family towards the shopping centre, buzzing under the weight of its own air conditioning, the shop fronts illuminated like neon hearths in the Norfolk night.
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