reflections and miscellany

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

*

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

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

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

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

“Goodbye sir. Over.”

“Goodbye. Over.”

“I’m going to hang up now sir. Over.”

“Fine. Farewell Cabbage White. Over.”

“Farewell sir. Over.”

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

You are now entering

Morehamlike

Please drive carefully through the village.

*

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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

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

Is this an onion.

A complex philosophical quandary for the postmodern age.

Is this an onion?

*

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

remembering insults (3)

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

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

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

remembering insults (2)

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

I shouted it to a twat from across the road.

I was seven years old.

remembering insults

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

the lady

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

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

THE LADY
An experienced professional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fuck the secondary instructions too. Please just…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“See you.”

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

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

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