the symbols of non-christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

if walls could talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, no hands, the fuckin simpleton.”

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

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

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

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

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

the swan upping

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

the addictions of today

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

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

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

“Dear Officers of the Municipal Offices,

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

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

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

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

“Dear complainant,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear Shitter,

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

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

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

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

lost kid card co.

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

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

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

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

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

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

efforts at courtship

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

buy the URINE-8 experiment in paperback

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

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

The blurb says this:

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

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

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

a return to the house of death (10)

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

a return to the house of death (9)

He woke early though it could have been late, it had become difficult to tell. The air in the room was as heavy around him as swarming adults. Her body was in parts skeletonized, soft tissues shed like an immense burden. He fingered the visible parts of bone with fascination and they felt smooth and thrilling, and perfect. He leaned over her and ran his tongue around the hollow cavity of her mouth, her teeth, the remnants of stretched black skin around the bottom of her face; he loved her in a way that would have been impossible during life, with absolute commitment. The head of their mutual friend stood vigil on the pillow, the eyeballs putrefied and spewed from their sockets in murky rivers. He had placed the body and the body of their other friend into one of the guest rooms, positioned carefully on top of the bedclothes. The flies had returned for their great unveiling and he felt surrounded in a way resembling great popularity. Their fragile structures sank inwards. In the bathroom he urinated with some effort, the piss dark and syrupy. He was dehydrated and very undernourished. He took a sip from a cup of day-old instant coffee and went downstairs and to the living room. He recoiled very marginally but felt no surprise that the wheelchair had returned. The blood on its seat was thicker if anything and even more plentiful and still sticky, the smell familiar and pleasing. He sat opposite the wheelchair and looked at it for several minutes and remembered carrying it to the skip. If it spoke at all which of course it didn’t, if such things were possible within the very fabric of normality it said ‘behold my structure, for present is of but past and future only and at once and nothing more but some’, but of course it didn’t. He stood and instead sat in the wheelchair, lowering himself deliberately into the seat and feeling the blood smearing against and between his buttocks like the most intimate embrace. The chair shifted slightly under his weight. The universe itself was unforgiving but he alone, he thought, had learnt. He gripped the handrims and felt awash.

a return to the house of death (8)

Perhaps a week later there was a knock at his door that rattled through the house like heavy weights falling from considerable height. He had resigned from his meagre employment for what he described to his line manager as 'moral reasons' quickly after the incident and neither invited nor expected any visitors to his premises and he was surprised by the knocking. He was nude and streaked with long-dried purge fluid and his flaccid penis was puckered and densely foreskinned and near-submerged into the folds of his scrotum. Against his preferences and wishes he walked to and then opened the door. It was impossible for him to assess the pungency of the lingering stench as he was accustomed to it and even lusted after it during his brief excursions into the back garden. Two of their mutual friends were pressed into the doorway and one clutched a wine bottle soaked in condensation in large jewelled droplets and the other clutched a bunch of flowers and their smiles slipped like vast erosions when they saw him, the smell, the filth, the ocular vacancy, the genitalia. He smiled and felt the muck cracking on his cheeks as he did so and stood aside and invited them in. They were quite afraid but despite this and out of concern for her they entered past him and said nothing of the unexpected revelations of his current presentation. The stronger of the two doubled over in the hallway when the smell caught his nostrils and vomited heavily and loudly onto the white painted floorboards that were piled at their edges with dust and grit. The sick slapped it like a hand on buttocks and piled in complex textures, and even while he continued to expel and despite the degeneracy into which the house had visibly lapsed he apologised profusely, said he didn’t know what had come over him, spat the words past half-digested parts and bilious remnants and guttural glottal hacks. He dismissed the lot of it with a slack shrug and led them into the living room where the smell was at its least noticeable. They sat in an armchair each and he went to the kitchen and returned with three glasses and a corkscrew and also a claw hammer, all laid out neatly on a plastic tray. He opened the wine and poured them a glass and they all drank in silence.

So, he said eventually.

How have you been? asked one of them. We haven’t seen you for a while. How’s…?

She’s fine, he said. She’s upstairs.

He refilled their wine glasses and they all drank in silence. The sick friend swilled the wine around his mouth to ease the pieces from between his teeth before swallowing, and when he swallowed he vomited again, down his front this time. It dripped from the corners of his mouth apologetically and his face was pitiful and deeply sorry. He couldn’t lean forwards without spilling the sick in a hot pile from his sweater to the floor at his feet, and so reached blindly around him at arm’s length for a cloth or some such item with which he would wipe his face. His fingers closed around a tea towel sloppy with putrefied insides, and he had raised it to his face before he had seen what was on it, and just as soon as he did he heaved purge of his own straight onto it. The hammer sank easily into his head and his feet kicked as though his last thought was of swimming somewhere distant and his grip on the tea towel tightened and tightened and then loosened and he fell to the floor, the hammer jutting from his head like a physiological appendage of some kind. His friend dropped the flowers and wanted to stand but felt unable to do so. He was crying and holding a mostly full glass of wine in his other hand.

Would you like to see her? he said, his hand spattered with blood. Their mutual friend had fallen forwards off of the armchair and onto the crisp floor where the largest blood stain had been. Blood pooled around him in spurts from the hammer wound and he relished the coincidence. He observed the other friend wetting his trousers and was pleased. Everything came from mess and filth and amounted to nothing but. The nutty smell of frightened piss belonged to the process. It fit perfectly here.

Oh god, he said. Oh no. What have you done.

Come on, he said, pulling him up to his feet.

As they climbed the stairs they could hear the great performance of the flies that became unbearable as they reached the bedroom door. He opened it and their friend pleaded no and other such efforts but entered regardless, his legs working through instinct alone. He didn’t dare look but did so, at the bed, the dreadful palette so alien from life, the remains, the happening circle. The ravenous appetites of death. All amounted to this nothing that was everything. He lurched backwards and fell against the desk and cut his forehead open, and stood and tried to run. He was in the doorway waiting for him and pushed him to the carpet.

He knelt upon his chest and sawed around the neckline with a kitchen knife and tugged and hacked at the windpipe and sails of skin and meat until the head was detached and the screams had overcome even the flies and then ceased, and when it was done he placed the head upon the pillow alongside her and returned for the wine for he felt a prodigious thirst.

a return to the house of death (7)

Her body was now mostly unrecognisable. The sheets were sodden with fluid around her remains and the odour was breathtaking, awash in her organs. It was as though the entire room had been given over to death, as though death and it were then as one. The maggots had consumed the body and now migrated from it for their imminent rebirth. In the midst of life we are in death. As they hatched gradually the sound of their wings was deafening. He stood in the room and felt them land upon his skin, felt their disappointment at his continuing life and the little promise it offered; the room held nothing further of interest for them. Her perfect teeth were fixed in a smile and she looked quite happy given the circumstances; her skin was slipped and mottled, the colour of a cola bottle, her face almost pitch black, and it looked ready to cave in on itself, as though one poke would finish it. He yearned for the revelation of the complex beauty of her bones. He undressed with his back to her then approached the bed and scooped great handfuls of fluid and gunk from around her body, which he rubbed across his bare skin, his chest and arms and legs and face until like her he was the colour of death. The flies cared little. These acts of love, he thought, are thermodynamic.

a return to the house of death (6)

A few days later the telephone rang. He raised the receiver and spoke. Hello? Hi Jill. Yes I'm fine. Are you? Well yes, yes, these things are sent to try us as they say. Busy mostly, work. A lot of work. Oh she's fine yes, really well. Has she not? She's been quite busy too. In and out a lot. Right. Well it's only a few days Jill. I appreciate that. I know she does. She's a considerate person. Very much so, she says it all the time herself. You want to speak to her? Well she's not here actually. No, no, she went out an hour or so ago. I haven't seen her for a few days. Pardon? She's fine Jill. No I haven't seen her no. How do I know? She's sent me some messages. One or two. She's just busy. Spending the nights with friends I think. Do you know Sarah? That's her. Yeah, that's her. Nasty breakup I think. Another one, yeah. More off than on. This is it. Poor girl can't seem to get it right. Thank you Jill, that's sweet of you to say so. I will. I will. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'll ask her to give you a call just as soon as I see her. Okay. You take care. Give my love to Donald. I will now. Bye now. Bye.

Her phone vibrated on the coffee table almost immediately. He picked it up. One message received. Entirely unpunctuated. What makes the old so wilfully ignorant. He tapped to open the message. Give me a call when you get this love just for a quick chat nothing to worry about I hope sarahs ok and youre ok love mum xx

He turned the phone off and removed the SIM card and then destroyed it and went upstairs. He gagged on the landing at the smell. He just couldn't seem to get used to it.

a return to the house of death (5)

He felt great remorse for the way things were left and three days later returned to the garden to retrieve her body from the thin dry soil, digging the first few feet or so with great whacks of the shovel and scooping with his two cupped hands after that, to avoid further damaging her flesh with accidental impact. Eventually he felt his fingers brush against the skin of her arm as cold as stone and he scraped the mud away gently like an archaeologist unearthing something of immeasurable significance. When he had exposed the whole of her he lifted her and carried her towards the threshold as though they had been recently wed. She was very bloated and the skin around her jawline and her shoulders was greenish, and as her body was manipulated within the cradle of his arms he saw purge fluid oozing from the corners of her mouth. Inside he carried her to their bedroom and laid her onto her side of the bed, resting her head on the pillow, the movement of which pushed much more fluid from her mouth. He dabbed it away with a white handkerchief on which his initials were embroidered. He rolled the tissue of her face back up and into place as best as he was able. Her eyeless stare was captivating and weirdly intense, as though she could see right through him. Uneasy, he went downstairs to the kitchen and took the medium sized food bag into which he had placed her eyeballs from the refrigerator and carried them back up to their bedroom; he returned the eyes to their sockets and felt the comfort of privacy. He unfastened the pyjama top she had been wearing when it happened and eased it out from underneath her. Her torso was peppered with blisters of varying sizes; he presumed them to be filled with the emmited liquids of her putrefying body and caressed them beneath his fingertips, a sensation quite unlike anything he had ever experienced. There were some stains upon the bed linen around her and he observed a kind of oozing from her anus. Her gone viscera sought urgent release. He poured himself a glass of the mid-range red wine they had enjoyed, just supermarket stuff, and swallowed it down; he poured another and drank it too, then another and did the same. He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and climbed into the bed. The curtains were drawn but the sun was still very bright, the room aflame with it. He could hear the radio still on in the kitchen below his bedroom, some breakfast show. He had lit candles all around the room. He nestled his head into the crook of her armpit. There were maggots working her. He snuggled up alongside her. She was very cold. The stench was bracing. Let the bed take her, the bed they had chosen, let the bed take her fibres in its. He held her dead hand in his and felt the old chemistry.

a return to the house of death (4)

When he woke up the next morning she was not in the bed next to him and he considered this an oddity as – despite some insomniac tendencies in getting to sleep – she was customarily a very deep morning sleeper after around 6am. He dismissed the thoughts and climbed from the bed and pulled on some pyjama shorts and left the bedroom to urinate with urgency. She was hanging from the open loft hatch from his good leather belt, her face swollen and almost blue in colour and her thick mammal tongue extending from her lips in a particularly simple way. She had soiled herself, he presumed at the point of hanging, and lumps of shit were gathered on the floor beneath her feet and streaking down her bare legs. He touched her stomach tenderly and it was incredibly cold. He went into the bathroom and urinated loudly with massive relief, then washed his face and wet a flannel which he took back to her body and wiped the shit from her legs and from around her anus; he rinsed the flannel and left it to dry upon the radiator, carried a few lengths of toilet roll over to where the body swung and picked the shit from the floor and threw it into the toilet which he flushed. In the bathroom he looked into the mirror and pulled two or three different faces, said “no, oh no” in two or three different tones of voice and seemed quite satisfied. At the body he pulled a face and shouted “no, oh no” very loudly, which felt incredibly cathartic and he felt a peace quite unlike any he had felt during the course of their relationship. He climbed onto the bannister and untied the belt from around her neck; he had not wanted to cut through the leather as it was one of his better belts. Although he tried to support her weight as he did this she inevitably slumped from his grip and landed on the floor at the point at which the stairs turned in a manner which would have suggested terrible pain had she not already been dead and well beyond such trifles. He took ahold of a thick clump of her hair and dragged her the rest of the way down the stairs, across the white painted floorboards in the hallway and down the short flight of some six or seven concrete steps that led into the back garden. The house was situated in a shallow valley where once loampits and brick kilns had employed the myriad working classes of the growing suburb, and the garden sloped accordingly towards its foot; though of good size it was a dismal garden, laid two thirds to trampled piss-yellow lawn, the remainder an empty soil bed swallowing the gardens entire width, no plant or even weed or other life of any form in evidence. There was a small outbuilding that housed a toilet, its cheap plastic cistern half melted away by a fire during a house party some years earlier, twisted into majestic geometry by the roaring flames. The hair could be heard breaking strand-by-strand in his grip, and when he let go of the body in the middle of the grass he had a fair amount of it stuck to his palms, which he wiped off on his pyjama bottoms and watched the breeze carry to the farthest edge of the garden.

He used the rusted shovel that had been left in the soil to begin to dig and felt energised as he did so. The soil shifted easily in a way he hadn't imagined it would, and he imagined himself to be fundamental and important and necessary and it was a good feeling. After a few minutes of intense work he saw the curve of a skull amongst the dirt and the great chunks of brick fragments and he lifted it carefully as though it were conscious and he under its perverse scrutiny. He had not held a skull before and he was thrilled by its weight and by the incredible smoothness of the neurocranium. He ran his fingers around the curves of the orbital fissure like a needy lover. It really was quite a handful. He placed it back in the soil and continued digging but was he could not stop thinking about the skull. He put the shovel down and took the skull inside and put it into a kitchen cupboard that was empty save one or two mugs and an almost entirely unused teapot. When he returned to the garden he was carrying a very sharp kitchen knife as well as a crafting scalpel his partner had used for the occasional art projects she undertook, and a handful of the medium-sized plastic food bags he liked to use for freezing or otherwise storing foods. He gripped her hair firmly in one hand and pulled it taut and used the scalpel to make several incisions around deep into the scalp around the circumference of her head, and when he yanked at the hair that he had sort of looped about his hand the hair and the scalp were severed from the skull in quite a grim if easy manner. This he placed into a food bag which he set down next to him on the grass. He then used the scalpel and the kitchen knife both to scrape as much of the residual tissue and gore as it was possible to do to reveal the brilliant lustre of the bone beneath, and whilst it had not until then been his intention he worked the scalpel beneath the tissue of her face and began to peel it from the skull and down towards her neckline like a thick latex mask. He vomited several times during this process and seemed intrigued by his own physical responses. He gouged out a single eyeball which he placed into his mouth, working it around his tongue and soft palate as though he trying on clothes or shoes and then spat into a food bag. He removed the other eye also and placed that into the same food bag. The bared neurocranium was different to the skull he had found and unsatisfying, he presumed because of its youth. Her body was rich with flies and the promise of new life. It was getting warmer.

a return to the house of death (3)

During their initial works to the reconfiguration and superficial presentation of the property the couple discovered a wheelchair pushed to the rear-most point of the small bare brick tunnel that comprised the main basement cavity. It struck the both of them as odd as they had made extensive excavations of the basement space already – it was in fact one of the first parts of the house they had explored once contracts had been exchanged – and unearthed little but the usual rubbish one would expect to find in a basement of such limited dimensions: a rolled up rug or carpet, some jeans, a couple of coat hangers and cigarette butts, an old record player with a crack across the breadth of the plastic lid, the standard detritus, they had supposed at the time, of a primarily comfortable urban life.

During each of these excavations, carrying the rubbish up the stairs and to a hired refuse skip in the street outside, they could say with almost complete certainty that there had been no wheelchair, and yet here it absolutely was. He was touching its chrome like the flanks of a lover to exemplify this fact, pulling it back slightly and then pushing it forward by the handles. Its presence was unarguable. Carefully he pulled the wheelchair backwards through the tunnel and to the bottom of the stairs, then lifted it up and carried it up to the hallway, surprised by the lightness of the item without the bulk of a cripple inside it; he imagined wheelchairs as heavy, unwieldy things, creaking and groaning in the gothic style, but this was a slick sporty model built from lightweight composite materials, wheels angled for speed and precise turning. In the light of the hallway they could see that the wheelchair was caked in blood, which in some places - where the blood had pooled, in the declivities of the padded seat cushioning, for example - was still tacky to the touch. They had both wanted to take a turn in the wheelchair but decided against it given the blood, and instead wheeled it out of the front door and hoisted it into the skip with the old carpets, the rug, the broken record player, all manner of other rubbish that had now been removed from the basement of the property. A wheel continued to spin for minutes after they had closed the front door behind them like a reliable generator of great woe.

a return to the house of death (2)

Their friends relished the morbidity of the house, the kitchen’s ancient wood-effect units scarred with blu-tak, the rich almost sweet stench of raw meat that seemed trapped in the rooms, the grotty basement space that opened at the foot of the stairs from which the stained red carpet hung like loose jeans into just a small bare brick tunnel that stretched barely back into the depths of the cavity. They commented upon the impressive dimensions of the rooms and on the double fronted aspect but they found it difficult to distinguish these positives from what they termed the pervasive grimness of the house’s essential character. It felt, they said, wrong. Although not one of them had experienced any phenomena that might be considered supernatural in origin or design during their short time in the house, it felt, they said, as though the property were, must be, haunted in some way, at least as the term might be understood by a group of – as they were – educated, young, rational free-thinkers, which is to say not really understood at all. It was something about the energy, said one of the free thinkers. The vibes, said another. I just get the feeling, said a third, that something terrible has happened here.

The couple shrugged off these claims as horseshit, the ramblings of the very thick or damaged, thought that their friends were teasing them in some way for taking their first feeble steps onto the property ladder, and despite the bad and coincidental luck that had befallen the cats so soon after their move, they had no other reason to assume anything unusual was at work, and did not believe in “energy” or “vibes” anyway, and in truth despised it when their friends talked in such ambiguous and nonsensical ways. All houses felt strange when one first moved into them, they had said. it’s to be expected. We just need to put our stamp on it – decorating, personal effects, new kitchen units, whatnot. This is our home now and we would appreciate it if you could all at least try, they said, to be happy for us. Their friends relented eventually and the “vibes”, or things like it, were mentioned less frequently over time. They would still on occasion make simple horror sound effects at various points throughout evenings, or whistle a variety of the most memorable horror themes – Carpenter, Romero, Friedkin, Deodato, et al. – from the last half century or so with the kind of ironic, intertextually entwined, academic-deconstruction-of-the-defiantly-"pop"-cultural relish they had devoted the better part of their degrees to perfecting, both habits that struck the couple as almost unbearably irritating.

Gradually though the house did come together, the bay windows in the two main reception rooms flooding the house with the natural light the couple found so essential to good mental order and productivity, the yellow glass that filled the two panels of the back door casting a precious hue upon the carpet at their feet. When they pulled the carpets up – hallway, living room – they revealed what appeared to be immense blood stains sunk clean through the shag of the carpet, the coarse fabric backing and the mid-range underlay and into the wooden floorboards beneath. The stains seemed very old and sanded off easily with a hired tool, and they treated the wood and painted it white and it looked quite charming and the rooms so, so light, and the smell of meat seemed soon to dissipate as through their gradual colonisation of design choices the house really became theirs.

a return to the house of death

It was a house of death, they’d said, and laughed about it when they first moved in. They’d had a couple of cats then but both had died within a week or so of moving, one crushed flat by a falling bookcase – which, although empty of the books which had not yet been unpacked was still of notable weight due to the quality of the materials involved in its construction, especially compared to the soft bones and other associated viscera that made up a cat – and the other stabbed by a large kitchen knife, largest of a set of five, that it had managed to pull from a breadboard on the kitchen work surface whilst attempting to climb onto same, and that had fallen blade down to the linoleum floor and clean through the centre of the cat’s little body. They had found it like that, a strange kebab, having pulled itself out of the kitchen and part of the way down the hall with its two front paws before dying by the living room door, a smeared trail of blood drawn behind it. They buried the two cats in the garden, alongside what appeared to be some other minimally marked pet’s graves from previous residents, modest stone memorials that flanked a dormant if immense fire pit.

Although it was certainly sad they felt a certain relief regardless, for they had purchased the cats on a drunken whim when they were really too young to be burdened by the responsibility of pet custodianship, and so despite the shock and also the guilt of the situation they were quietly pleased that the cats were gone but had suffered little (if some), and the notion of the house of death was a good conversational gambit at the abundance of housewarming parties they all of a sudden found themselves expected to organise, and like the most meagrely qualified tour guides of the murderous places in all the big cities that feeds into the human hunger for pain they showed their morbid friends and partners the locations of the cats last moments, the chink in the lino where the knife hit, the dull stain beneath the now full bookcase, the still-identifiable blood streak that arced from kitchen to living room like a prophetic arrow of the doom that waited.

physical relations only

They had consented, mutually, to physical relations only – both were already involved in emotional relations with extant partners and were happy, in their way, or at least unwilling to lose the stability they offered. They felt a very serious if wordless attraction to one another that had always felt somehow inevitable, and it was pointless to try to resist it any longer. Though neither experienced any real sense of excitement at the prospect, and if anything were rather frustrated that their bodies were backing them – as it were – into this adulterous corner, they committed themselves to the task of allocating sufficient time out of their respective schedules for what they referred to as the necessary, which they then engaged in routinely and very regularly with the no-nonsense quality of a smooth online transaction.

After weeks had passed they had unsurprisingly developed some further affection for one another as often happens after repeat acts of a physical nature, and when reason dictated a necessary end to the physical relations some days after that – for guilt was a surprisingly debilitating condition that had engulfed the both of them – both had felt great sadness, and they shook hands warmly, but not excessively so, and kissed a final time, trying to communicate everything they had never said and now never would within the structure of the kiss and failing of course.

life no obstacle

Drunk they roamed maniac, my goodness, they were unstoppable, heavens what elegance and wit, stairs no obstacle, boyfriends no obstacle, underwear no obstacle, fuck, life no obstacle, they were immaculate – if only the dumb world could see! – and heroes, alive with drink and pleasure they felt the energy of the world through their meagre biceps and to their very heartbeats that wilted into near-coma like beached fish beneath their slightly stained vests, every cracked beer like a mighty defibrillator to their sobering confidences. Though the structure of the night and its outcome could be foreseen by each they at least tried and it was all they had.

trying to as it were love, or something like it, now, in the Britain of today

His heart was beating incredibly quickly while he waited for his computer to start up, ancient technology though less than three years old. He input his password and waited further. Four, even five minutes passed and he vomited into his mouth, just a little. Must have been the anticipation. Felt sick for days. Outlook was so slow to open; he would have to speak to the IT Helpdesk about it but didn’t dare, in case they had been monitoring the increasingly personal and occasionally profane content of his sent emails and would take the opportunity to remind him of the policies and terms and conditions surrounding computer usage within the workplace, and possibly even implement disciplinary action for his repeated breaches of same. More minutes passed. He became very aware of the stench of his own neck, like spoiled milk for some reason. Eventually his inbox popped up and and the varied folders updated at excruciating speed and he of course had no new emails. She was shit at responding to emails, really dreadful. Sometimes hours would go by if not whole days, the responses abrupt when finally they did come like great beacons of lustful notification slashed through the awful monotony of the working day. It had been a joke between them for a while, her fundamental tardiness, but as his obsession escalated harmfully it began to feel more and more like a deliberate insult.

nice out

“Nice out,” he said. She looked up from her coffee cup but only briefly. She could barely conceal her disgust at him, unspecified but incredible disgust. Their long relationship had amounted to this. Pleasantries, small talk, fucking weather. What a waste of – how long was it, six years? Seven? They’d become everything they’d sworn they wouldn’t. When she’d fallen for him he’d been excited and interesting and so smart they’d sit up all night talking about cinema. Where had all that gone?

He was moving things around in the kitchen in the way he did, the bottom of his mug scraping unbearably across the thick glass surface protector. She gripped her own cup until her knuckles were four white peaks. “I said,” he said.

“I know what you said,” she said. “It doesn’t need a response.”

“Fine,” he said. He poured slightly hot water – why wouldn’t he just re-boil the kettle? – onto a teabag and covered the surface in spillage, threw milk in carelessly. He was a poor tea maker, too anxious to let it brew.

“What are you doing?” he said, lowering himself heavily into the chair across from hers.

“Stop it,” she said.

“Fine,” he said, sipping his drink with absolutely no pleasure. He could always change.

a few pretty girls

A few pretty girls passed him and laughed. He heard them whisper something but not what it was they whispered, then they stopped walking and laughed again and turned around to look at him. He could feel his moustache coated thickly in the yellow mayonnaise from a coronation chicken sandwich, could smell curry powder quite clearly, and he tried to suck the hairs into his mouth to clean them but given his ongoing mouthful only made the mess all the worse. The girls approached him and said “my god” loud enough to hear, but nothing to him as such, not directly. They stood several feet away from him and simply stared, and he felt his face aflame and wished himself anywhere. “Small hands,” one of the girls said, and she was right. His hands were incredibly small. Eventually he continued to eat his sandwich, which until then had been at his side and drooping slightly between his fingers under the weight of its own wet filling, ignoring the girls as best he might, as though they were trees or shrubs or some other part of the landscape. They watched him with absolute disdain and laughed occasionally before leaving. Although it was a delicious sandwich he nonetheless found it to be quite lacking in garnish or adornment; his fridge had been quite quite bare at the point of creation.

what would the dream be

The elderflowers were wonderful in bloom around them, the air sodden with their blessed nose as heady as mouthfuls of scotch. He felt almost delirious and felt himself clenched for sugars. What would the dream be? It would end in apologetic kissing, scrabbling for each other’s hands as though they were bannisters of normalcy until their palms were scratched. Please, he said. Just kiss me quietly. They stared about for familiar faces and saw none, and he moved himself very close in towards her body and felt her breath, her chest rising, felt the fine hairs on her arms. He closed his eyes and let himself drift and hoped she would catch him. Her hair smelt alive over or with the elderflowers. His arms were incredibly heavy, and when after three minutes or perhaps even more he again opened his eyes she was gone, he could see her receding along the track with a small group of friends. He wiped the middle and fore-fingers of his left hand on the thighs of his chinos and stuck them to the back of his throat, felt the rasp of the air-dry skin on his soft palate, the depths of his mouth like obscure landscapes unplotted, the soft soaked guts of the world, and he prodded the two fingers gently then firmer until he could feel his luncheon churning for release, and he puked it up into the dry earth worn to sand at his feet, the coarse burping and the cruel sound of escaping gases as one with the birdsong. There were tears on his face and he wiped his mouth and felt strings of thick mucus drawn in webs across it. He stood and began to run after her but she was out of sight. He would keep on running regardless. No track is of endless distance.

SGSS(pmsc)AS(u)

As an enterprising youth I founded the Steyning Grammar School Satsuma (plus misc. small citrus) Appreciation Society (unofficial) with a handful or dumb peers. We sat in our form room at lunchtimes and consumed our respective fruits communally, exchanging segments for critique and – as the name would suggest – appreciation. Though our tastes varied slightly we mostly agreed on the importance of the key characteristics of: (moist) texture, (profound) juiciness, (pleasing) tartness and (appropriate) sweetness. As time progressed a cursory examination of the unopened fruit would yield impressively accurate results relating to the assumed quality of same, i.e. (and to generalise slightly, though not greatly) a loose and saggy skin was all-too-often synonymous with a dry and tasteless fruit; a firm taut skin requiring patient devotion and some effort to peel properly was, conversely, synonymous with a high quality fruit adhering to all the characteristics required (by consensus) for an exceptional citrus experience; an excess of pips present segment-for-segment was – despite the obvious frustrations associated therewith, especially in the smaller fruits – immediately suggestive of the sound flavours the Society actively sought. Fingers sticky and bellies full, the lunch hours passed in a reverie of social consumption, our record-keeping protocols and ever-increasingly sophisticated critiquing mechanisms wasted on the hostility of the classroom. The conclusions I drew were much the same as those I apply to my writing and to my general life today, namely: one must work for a taste of the good stuff.

My passion for fruit dates back to this time if not before.

We are none of us friends now.

a summery summary

The suited oafs sprawled horizontal on the grass like Romans, squinting through the sun into each other’s eyes. The grass was scorched dry beneath their solid flanks and submitted to the humid sagging cotton of their shirts. Their lust was manifest in each twitch of an eyebrow or swat of an insect. Despite the hordes of passing walkers from around the lake and meadows they were as if alone and deeply invigorated by their courtship. The fatter of the two carefully dropped pale red grapes into his partner’s mouth, the fruit hitting his pursed lips with a hollow guff. They tongued each other’s palms and nibbled each other’s sandwich crusts like little mammals. As the lunch hour drew to a close they were writhing like brawling beasts, astride first one and then the other, their shirts untucked and grassy, their trousers scuffed with dry soil on the knees and at other noted pressure points. In lieu of forceful kissing they began to claw at each other’s necks and chests, then to punch each other’s faces with increasing ferocity until they were busted and bloody, grunting and laughing and thrusting with each massive blow. Then they kissed regardless, cheered on by sun-drunk revellers, their spilt blood smeared between their cheeks like Rorschach tests of the very greatest lunacy. They helped each other up and slapped each other’s backs and returned to their offices, balls primed for later.

the anatomically correct penis

During the mathematics course that ran through the final two years of my secondary schooling I drew a remarkably lifelike penis in a state of erection upon the desk I used with some regularity. It began as a pencil etching cast in little but boredom but was soon emboldened with ballpoint ink. I then added further precise details to the penis over time, veins, hairs, a convincing hemispherical curvature about the base of the glans, until the representation was notable both for its authenticity and for its conspicuousness. Neither my fellow students nor the facilities staff made any attempt to remove the penis throughout those final two years and, despite its presence on one of the bank of desks that bordered the teachers own and its proximity to my own person, not to mention the lesson-based time commitment that my frequent addenda represented, no comment was ever passed in reference to the penis (in fact the teacher was, I am sure now, either a drunk or completely mad, leering about the desks with red cheeks and slapping a metre ruler against the flat surface of his briefcase at sporadic unannounced intervals throughout the lessons, his mood volatile and often fierce, his infrequent school reports a jumble of insult and random aphorism). It was amongst my finest work as an artist and the cause of much joy amongst my immediate mathematical circle (little Denis, tall Pete, fat Dan and others, the monikers of memory!), and we sniggered at the anatomical precision of its network of veins, the sole product of personal recollection of my own organs structural appearance.

In one particular lesson I came to my desk – with little enthusiasm for the lesson but some for the penis – to find text written beneath it in a precise and apparently feminine script. It simply, dully said “Hello?”. Like a shit Ouija board I wrote my response as follows: “This is 'Mr X'”. I know, it’s terrible, absolutely terrible, excruciating even to think about, but I was young and fundamentally pure, despite regular wanking into balled crusty t-shirts that I stuffed beneath my bed, and I had consulted with my circle on an appropriate nom-de-plume for my illicit extracurricular activities. With it there began a lengthy correspondence between me (and my immediate mathematical circle) and this writer of unknown specifics, who claimed to be of female origin and in the year below my own, though any details beyond that are forgotten to me now. The narrative spiralled immeasurably around the penis that bore it, the table smothered in this staccato exchange, great lags between responses as we awaited next lessons with baited breath. Eventually, inevitably, with only a precise sketch of a penis to bind us but bind us it did, an arrangement was made to meet in some courtyard one lunchtime, her and I, a rendezvous I had no intention of keeping (as I’m sure she didn’t herself) but which I had intended to view from afar, my curiosity piqued to levels equating to incredible sexual arousal. In fact I was too cowardly for even this lurking and detached observation, assuming that the (possible) girl and her hoard of giggling friends would be undertaking the exact same methods to identify their perverse seducer and do so on sight from little but the quite futile aura of a man who draws accurate penises (and not the crude bulbous ejaculating scrawls of most moronic graffiti) on school desks, the same aura that has haunted me to this day, perhaps with policemen or parents or senior faculty in tow to impart grave justice upon the pathetic groomer I had over the weeks and months inadvertently become. I stayed well away, leaving the penis and its surrounding narrative susceptible to the erosive wear-and-tear of so many notebooks, a fading monolith to be unearthed and excavated by some future twat like me.

quite a woman

The cloud was thick and stifling around their grief and they each clutched a handful of earth and threw it into the grave; it fell like hail but in loamy clumps upon their dead parent and smeared the coffin on impact. Her lipstick was far too thick and her face looked cold and swollen, and he was cringingly aware of the deep and rank stench of booze on his breath, of the stubble on his face, the white-ish stains around the crotch of his jeans. The wet mud stuck to their hands and they looked to the vicar and to the funeral director for a tissue or something but were greeted with indifference or else intense disgust. The team of five funeral directors refused even to unfold their arms; they had become quite fond of the parent during over the course of their arranging the prepayment plan for the ceremony, and they now felt personally offended that these two dreadful human beings should hold their parent in such little regard as to be here like this, the only gathered mourners. Like a shitted shoe he scraped his soiled hand through the grass around the neighbouring graves which took forever; she looked at him as though he were insane but then did likewise with her own hand. The vicar drew his stole to his brow and mopped it cautiously, looked to the lead funeral director – a gentle if fat man of low birth, some Michael or Mark, Martin maybe, one of those – for guidance, who nodded mostly imperceptibly. The ceremony was over. The vicar walked immediately to his car while the funeral directors waited for a minute or two for the siblings to join them in the limo.

“We’ll walk,” he said, shouting it through the desolation of graves and marked plots.

“Very well,” said the funeral director, then mumbled “you selfish fuck.” The cars left and he helped his sister to her feet.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s get a drink. It’s what she would have wanted.”

“Who?” she said.

“Mum,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the grave, the workers slowly getting on to filling it in.

“Fuck’s sake, that’s Dad,” she said. “Mum’s alive, remember? In the hospital?”

He nodded as though he hadn’t heard her.

“She was quite a woman,” he said eventually. He reached a hand for his sister’s breast and worked it between his fingers. “And so are you.” She rested her hand upon his, the both of them upon her breast.

“Let’s go,” she said.

the colonnade

They met by the patisserie in the Colonnade, beneath the clock, near the “strolling ladies” who worked on through the day, just moments from the market place, the central offices of the organisation, the bus station, from numerous amenities. He presented a single flower, a carnation, which she held to her nostrils and sniffed loudly and wetly through her congested airways. Odourless, as ever, save for the faint hue of petroleum from the garage forecourt. She smiled grimly and put the flower into her handbag which, he noted, though empty was almost certainly big enough to travel with, perhaps even for weeks. He took heed of this within an instant. She presented a miniature bottle of the same whiskey he had passed comment on in his online profile not once but in fact on three separate occasions. He fancied himself a connoisseur of the drink but was no such thing, although to his credit he drank and drank heavily. His enthusiasm was authentic and he gripped the bottle like some precious amulet within one hand and leant to kiss her cheek, a gesture he loathed and yet performed frequently; of awkward nature their lips puckered simultaneously and their heads turned together in such a way as they kissed the other’s mouth parts, much to her distaste. He peered this way and that, up and down the Colonnade, and opened the bottle in a practised movement; he savoured the whiff for a second or two then swallowed the contents in one broad mouthful. The incredible burn as it hit the back of his throat made him retch and her eyes narrowed as she observed this. He drew the back of his hand across his lips and sniffed and took her by the arm towards the modest restaurant. He would be profoundly drunk within an hour or so and felt excited at the prospect. She wondered, as ever, why she was there.

on the relative merits of (some of) the oils (the shamed [former] three of top gear in [excerpted] conversation)

"Rapeseed’s my favourite without a doubt. Rapeseed oil. Bloody music to my flat ears. Three of my favourite things yeah? Conveys them, one two three. Simple is as simple twats. There’s rape, obviously. Say no more. Love it, love it, know it. Then seed, as in hot spunk, my hot spunk, by the – i.e. your, as in like, some woman’s – fucking mouthful. And then oil. I bloody love oil. Rapeseed oil. Top of the class mate. Fucking summa cum cocking laude. New breed of must-drizzle, must-slosh, must-arseholing-glug, straight out of the eggcup you gutless mongs. Absolutely bleeding brilliant. You?"

"Listen mate, I hear your missive, I do, I honestly do, who bloody couldn’t, am I right?, I hear it, but I’m a regular bloke with regular kitchen needs. A traditional at heart, vote conservative, bed by midnight, fuck my wife once a fortnight on Saturday’s with the lights right low. It’s got to be olive mate. Olive oil every time. It’s the solid choice. Besides, puts you in the mind of Popeye’s piece, the bandy bint. Could fold that slag in two and feed it in like a roll of paper into an ancient dot matrix. Perforate my edges, Oil, you cunt! Have a gnaw on my Bluto! And you?"

"Vegetable. Cheap, cheerful and un-bloody-complicated. Ever done it with a vegetable? I don’t mean a cauliflower, a carrot, a beetroot, curly kale, celeriac, or whatever. I’m talking about a vegetable. Cripple, a fucking spaz, you know. A mute, a dummy, a brain dead, a fucking comatose veggie case. Lights are on, and all that. Every sod's fucked off. You get me? You ever done it with one? It’s priceless lads, priceless. Just sort of flump, they do, with every push in. Spray your shit all over their faces and it just stays there, drips in great globs down their eyelids, don’t even try to rub it off. Ha ha. It’s entirely comedic. Ha ha. Vegetable for me."

once five hit

The group of near-feral businessmen urinated into their briefcases for Friday was upon them. Once five hit the beast was freed. They gathered around the reception area and laid their opened briefcases on the floor at their feet, then urinated into them with some ceremony, the nutty stench of their luminescent and highly caffeinated piss gripping to the atmosphere. The reception team cheered as the briefcases filled close to spilling, and the intense red faces of the concentrating businessmen morphed with weekend ecstasy into masks aflame. The mood was carnival in nature.

Within the hour they would be standing in shirtsleeves in glass-fronted Wetherspoons, Slug and Lettuces, All Bar Ones, something similar, drinking tall pints of continental lager, swearing tenderly into the ears of bombed women – tan tits worked into paint-tight frocks – who they’d finger in the smoking area before 9pm dreaming of violence, the smell still on their hands when they ate kebabs later competing over jalapeños, spit their gunk in the shape of victory onto the toes of their loafers.

Hungover next day they’d reminisce over testosterone breakfasts, 3000, 4000, fucking 10,000 calories!, until they puked homogenous sludge rendered lurid and bilious from the night’s sauce beneath the railway bridge and later purchase new briefcases ever more extravagant than the last, slaves to their own disposable incomes. By evening it’d be white shirts, designer jeans, trimmed sideburns and aftershave, slapping backs like great sides of meat in complete revelry, a handful of burped phrases signalling their reproductive readiness to scores of white wine girls who’d themselves be tearfully soiling memorials by last orders, perfect hair flecked handsomely with foam hunks of sick, underwear stuck out of dress bottoms like prolapse. It was a national phenomenon alright.

think of england

He was too tired to rouse himself, and the pair of them looked pityingly down at his limp dick as still as a corpse through the split in his pyjama bottoms. Gingerly she poked a single finger into it, felt its slight weight, watched it slump back lifeless into its former stasis. It really was over. He shrugged as though this were normal, a trivial or commonplace matter that warranted no further comment, but such composure was undermined by the panic in his eyes. He felt as detached from the organ as if it were a cut of meat - which in essence it then was - and nothing greater. She squeezed his arm in some instinctive gesture of comfort and he flinched; it was pity, not comfort, embarrassment even. She was embarrassed for him, embarrassed to be involved. He shook the dick in his hands like skin, tried to laugh it off, as though to shake the dick in his hands like skin until such time as it attained erection was a regular and expected component of his sexual routine, a suggestion that they both knew to be false. He clenched until it stung, expecting to feel something, some hardening, some movement of blood, whatnot, but there was nothing. If anything the dick retreated, deeply unimpressed, swallowed into hair and scrotum. She slid to the edge of the bed and put her brassiere back on, took a sip of what must have been cold tea from the chipped Cath Kidston mug she had left on his bedside table. Her face betrayed little but a slight impatience, perhaps frustration, not the customary self-doubt or insecurity people on occasion discuss in such standoffs; she had no doubt whatsoever about her own considerable attractiveness. He cupped himself in one damp palm and closed his eyes and thrust himself slightly and tried to lose himself in a web of mental erotica but all he could think of was an England felled.

“Please,” she said. “You’re degrading yourself.”

“This has never happened to me before,” he said. “Once or twice at most. Mostly never. A handful of times. It’s not regular, but happens sometimes. Weekly. Meet me in the middle?”

She settled the dick away into his pyjama trousers and pulled the two sides across to cover it, like dog mess under leaves on a picnic, like a curtain closing at the end of a theatrical performance. The end being of some pertinence. She gazed upon both it and he with the detachment of a medic and he was struck by a great shame. He reached out a hand toward her thigh which he gripped lightly, and moved his hand up, and looked at her intently as he pushed his index finger into the heat of her cunt which was remarkably wet in further biological remonstrance of his own shortcomings. It stung a small wound at his nail base. She looked ahead as he did this and not to his eyes, but shifted herself slightly to accommodate his efforts.

“It’s no good,” he said. “I just...”

“Be quiet,” she said, but with no cruelty.

She dressed hastily but precisely and looked at her watch. She would easily make last orders. He pulled the waistband of his pyjamas up and peered in at the dick, still defiantly soft, by then almost invisible against the flesh of his mons and the weight of its foreskin, and he felt utter contempt for his body. He shrugged again but felt how meaningless it was, even while it was happening.

“Tell me this happens to everybody,” he said.

“Goodnight,” she said.

She closed the front door behind her, while he sucked hungrily on his finger and relished her memory.

his concerned acquaintances

His acquaintances – not friends, couldn’t stand the cunt – were all the more concerned when his preoccupations shifted solely to what he insisted on referring to as the shape of the girl he had formed some strictly superficial relationship with at work. Indeed he referred to her as though she were nothing but this shape, a geometric abstract, and not a flesh-blood being of infinite complexity and intricate psychology and probably desires. The shape of her from stomach to ankles was exceptional and coiled like something barely molten and only just setting, he said. In fact, he had begun to consider the whole world in terms of geometry alone, as shapes colliding. She wore black desert boots. He wanted to taste her saline snatch on his tongue, their two shapes merged into something compound and entirely impossible to plot. His small talk was poor and his large talk all the poorer. It was all he could do to not reach out and touch her fine hair, and wish painful death upon those who brought creases of laughter to her long pale face. None but he and he alone knew the true interactions of her lines, vertices, curves. His shape work was robust, teacher’d said it all those years earlier, though needed some improvement in the advanced shapes. This, she was his improvement, his baptism of fire. She’d made a geometrician of him. He likely loved her, to the extent such emotion could be possible in less than three dimensions. How he longed for a life on paper.

riding the elephant

She was a repetitive type, although purportedly of decent sort she nonetheless struggled to conceal her violent racism, which for many peers and colleagues was fundamentally at odds with same. She took great relish in easily surmising entire nations with basic adjectival stereotypes, and though she felt at least some minimal affinity towards primarily white English speaking nations (our “flawed cousins”, she said) she continued to denounce the same, swollen, murderous, claiming with great sincerity that her racism was not, in fact, racist and was instead a matter of generic, unfocussed hatred of all peoples, including the British, an awful association of cunts, whispering the foul word so as to soften its impact.


How high's the racist, momma?
Five feet two in flat shoes.

She reeked of ancient sweat and it was eye-wateringly strong, and she regaled the office with long narratives relating to her extensive world travels which, she said, gave her some authority on the off-the-cuff dismissal of the qualities (or otherwise) of entire nationality groups. She said that whilst many people had the money but not the time for travel, she had the time, great fucking slabs of it, but not the money, though she refused to get into debt for anything and destroyed credit cards with relish, instead demanding ever increasing overtime commitments from her devastated husband to fund their pleasure cruises and “real experience!” holidays. They wanted to get off the beaten track, she said, to experience the real culture that these countries had to offer, which is why they insisted on exclusively booking themselves onto off-the-beaten-track coach tours with forty or so other like-minded, culturally aware tourists. Authenticity was important to them; she’d ridden an elephant for God’s sake, huge sweat rings in the armpits of her blouse in the brutal Sri Lankan heat. She told the story most weeks, illustrated with countless badly composed photographs, about how she suffered from food poisoning or maybe just sun stroke and shat liquid for a constant run of eight hours, sobbing by the end and washing her arse in the sink, her husband asleep in the room next door and dreaming of immense spiders.