not an epidemic

The cull of the cats was an inevitable development once the deaths became plenty if not epidemic, as the hypothesis pertaining to their responsibility spread virulently through the township. The cats spoke not a word but accepted their fate, further fuelling the widespread acceptance of their guilt. The hypothesis explained not why the deaths were occurring, or precisely how the cats were causing them, only that they did, they must, and that the township had a responsibility to stop them for the sake of its own continuance. Council funds were allocated to the cull, with organised teams of huntsmen rewarded in pennies per kilo of cat product returned to the civic buildings. The captured cats writhed and groaned in increasingly hoarse tones in large hemp sacks that were piled on the steps outside of the civic buildings, several hundred cats in total, and much of the township had gathered to witness the cull, considered by all to be humanities great triumph. The mayoral party greeted their people as heroes, and the applause drowned out even the frightened sound of the cats for its duration; they spoke of civic responsibility and of difficult decisions and of the fundamental worth of the human spirit or soul and how the only just response to threat imagined or real was murder. The gathered agreed in the way one does with partly distorted loudspeakers. The mayor’s assistant, an attractive barely beyond the college years, approached the piled cats and carefully poured a combustible liquid of unknown origin from a jerrycan upon them. Ignited, the blaze was staggering and a carnival mood reigned, the sounds terrible from within the sacks that tore like fireballs around the car park with the force of cats desperation. A youngster was holding a single cat by the scruff of its neck, somehow missed by the encroaching huntsmen. Encircled by four of his school friends they held the cat down and took it in turns to stamp on it, its small bones snapping easily beneath their shoes, singing as they did the songs of yore.

live lit

He finished reading the pages of prose - eight of them, single spaced, no paragraphs - and thrust his hips and, subsequently, his genitals towards the small crowd. Live Lit had become quite a thing in the city, and he had been grooming a handful of promoters for the last few months for a slot at one of the bigger monthlies, assuring them via essay of his immense worth and acknowledging his contextual placement within the canon (whilst simultaneously proclaiming the – in fact – superfluity and obsolescence of it resultant of his own ground breaking work), and plying them with emailed collations of his own grandiose profoundly unfunny tweets, really just his usual prose efforts broken often awkwardly into 140 character segments, until they at last relented, gave him the opening slot one Tuesday night. The silence was harsh, even hostile.

“Clap then you dumb fucks, he sneered.

“Fuck off and fuck off hard,” said one already drunk punter, who’d come for the local boy they were calling “the next Patrick O’Brian”.

“Clap? What the fuck for?” said one of the promoters, half-hiding behind his own notes.

“You ignorant bastards,” he said, holding his rolled-up manuscript aloft like an incredibly valuable prize. “You just listened to genius. Fucking genius. So fucking clap.”

“Look, if I could anticlap I fucking would,” said some joker. It raised a laugh at least, more of a response than his whole text had managed.

“You pretentious arse,” said one of the two present women. They were both scheduled to read later, and both were incredibly popular. No doubt their extensive fan base didn’t bother showing up for the opening acts, fucking bleeding hearts.

He threw the manuscript across the room. The pages separated - he found it very hard to read from stapled pages - and fell barely a foot in front of him. He wouldn't gather them, he thought, and did immediately.

“This is a fucking joke,” he said. “All of it. Live Lit? LIVE SHIT. You twats wouldn't know literature if it fucked your wives.”

“Listen to yourself,” said an especially angry performance poet. He turned up at all these events - even the exclusively prose-focused ones - and did his ‘thing’, a loathsome outpouring of pointing and shouting and saying zilch. “Never heard of grammar?” A roar of assent carped round the room.

“You have no fucking idea,” he said. “NONE. I’ve ‘heard of’ your ‘grammar’. What the fuck is this, eighteen-fucking-something-something? Grammar. Grammar’s the instrument of the middle classes, a shackle on the freedom of expression and creativity. I shit on your grammar!” People were getting up, to piss or go to the bar. It was worse than the heckling, which was a dialogue at least. “Paragraphs are for shit,” he said, yearning for the focus back on him, “for people too fucking lazy and thick to try. You've got to expect to work for your pleasure, for the reward of fucking ART! You want to get laid, you work at it. You want to eat nice food, you work at it. You want to watch Tar-cocking-kovsky, you fucking work for it! Work, you arseholes! You’re all CUNTS!”

“Just shut yourself up chap,” the poet said, his practised tone conciliatory and desperately patronising. “No one minds struggling to listen if there’s something to hear, yeah?”

“Think about it friend,” the promoter said. Opinion validated he was no longer hiding behind his notes. Arial. What a cunt.

Led by the poet they applauded when he left.

riverrun

They sat together at the river’s edge. It was very quiet apart from the sound of the rushing water, and the sun was bright in slivers through the dense foliage. Side-by-side their shoulders touched like old friends, and he leaned his weight onto her, a minute gesture that would precede something greater; their shoes were off and their socks balled inside them, and they dangled their milk white feet into the icy clear water that filled the gill, and ran their toes through gravel that made plumes of mud like mushroom clouds beneath the pristine surface, washed quickly away by the certainty of the running river. He fingered a half of scotch egg, idly picked a few chunks of the soft yolk out like a scab under the one thumbnail he kept long out of what had then become habit then cleaned his thumbnail on the grass, dislodged the remnants with a thin length of stick gripped like surgical equipment between the fingers of his other hand; he took the white and ate half of it and threw the rest into the river and she found the act repulsive and told him as much. The picnic was hardly touched, the food all topped with a thin crust of time like hardening rock. He lowered his feet onto the stones and carefully picked his way to the centre of the river that came only part of the way up his calves as the summer had been dry, crouched and picked up the half-eaten egg white which he carried back to the bank and rinsed off in the water; he stood before her and cast her in shadow and slowly consumed the food in a manner she found to be pointlessly confrontational. She refused to look at his face but could hear the sounds of the chewing which was somehow worse than seeing it, and looked only at his midriff that rested at eye level, at the stray open button of his shirt and the curled dark hairs on his stomach beneath that were so depressing against the awful pallor of his skin.

The end of their relationship was given form in every interaction they made, every thought of the future – even the future only seconds away – screamed it’s over like an incredible relief.

He sat back down next to her and they started to stuff the untouched food into the bags they had carried them in. Her finger sank into hummus as she groped for the lid and she felt her eyes filling with tears as it did so; she felt very happy to be moving on. She rinsed that finger and the others in the river and held her sandals in one hand and the wasted food in the other and crossed the river cautiously, ensuring her footing was secure before every step. The stones could be very slippery with fine hair-like algae. Her skirt was tied up around her waist and some stray pubic hair poked from the edges of her underwear; he didn’t notice and she didn’t care. She climbed onto the bank on the other side and slipped her feet back into her sandals and untied the knot in her skirt and let it fall back over her legs, and the cool drying water on her soles and between her toes felt delicious in the sunshine. He took a last look at the tender grass as soft as bedding and felt at the contents of his pockets and crossed the river also, soon slipping on a large and perfectly flat stone and falling heavily into the water; he fell again when trying to stand, and her arms were folded on the bank looking down at him, and though she didn’t laugh she was smiling, and he shouted dumbly and splashed his way to the bank where she only then help him up. They walked the footpath in silence, his feet slurping at the heels of his trainers.

He drove her the twelve or so miles to the train station through empty lanes and byways and the journey was brisk and there was almost half an hour before her train – one of only a handful of daily services that ran through the station – was scheduled to depart. He parked the car some small distance from the station in a layby beneath some huge oaks. The air was incredibly still and he could feel sweat pooling at the base of his back beneath his already soaked garments. He reached into the back seat and opened up a bottle of white wine drenched in thick condensation, took a long drink and passed it to her. She sipped only tentatively but took his hand. They kissed firmly and she led him climbing over the handbrake into the back seat, where she straddled him awkwardly but they managed to do it regardless, their limbs bruised by luggage and the structure of the vehicle. Both breathless and desperately hot their cheeks were flushed like flagrant alcoholics, their thighs soaked with the sweat of the other. It had been the best thing to do, the final conversation, so much the end that it became the beginning. She walked back to the station and he sat for a moment before driving away. It was a good day.

the shared park

The doggers and the cruising homos share the park I visit most Saturday mornings with my daughter. We like to feed the ducks and climb the many stairs around and use the play equipment and run in circles around the ornamental labyrinth; they like to fuck with a small appreciative audience in the small wooded crevice that hugs the riverbank in the park’s northern corner, or follow each other around the lightly gravelled footpaths checking their mobiles and making imperceptible gestures and motions in an unspoken semaphoric language of lust with the result of fellatio or, I suppose, even sodomy, bitten down on wrists or wedges of tree bark or rolled up knock-off Harrington jackets to silence the grunts. They are all a technologically astute bunch, utilizing the internet for their own carnal ends, and spent sheaths like shed snakeskins hang from the trees like decorative adornments, like the archaeology of some ancient perverse sect.

It has been blessed with myriad sex-oriented monikers relating to the preferred activities of its most committed visitors: Queen’s Park (inevitably, though this has fallen out of favour somewhat, given the presence of an actual Queen’s Park elsewhere in the city) Shaggle Rock, Fuckpond, etc. On any number of pertinent dogging sites the park had been issued an overall rating of “good” for the practise of dogging, with one friendly couple particularly commended for their inclusiveness and for putting on a good show; one female commenter who had experience around much of Norfolk and some of Suffolk had noted positively how the man “comes loads” – weirdly I would have thought overall mass of ejaculate to be an odd desirous prerequisite for enjoyable outdoor encounters, but I suppose it makes some sense: no bed sheets to worry about and similar – and how he “fucked so well”, comparable only to one other particular couple who commonly worked one of the layby’s between Norwich and Great Yarmouth in terms of technique, methods used and all-round sexual experience. Although I found no such rating system in place for the park as the location for casual homosexual exchanges which it had in recent years become, following the advent of any number of smart-phone applications aimed at just such a thriving subculture, the abundance of furtive, repressed, tough-looking blokes would suggest a similar level of popularity, the combination of a controlled, natural, urban environment, proximity to the city centre and without the expense of a Premier Inn room being one too good resist.

My daughter and I would frequent the park in the early morning, commonly before 8am, by which time we would have already been awake for some hours; I find this a good time to visit the park, it being generally empty (aside from a handful of bird enthusiasts and sexual opportunists), a state to which my generic anxiety disorder is well suited. I prefer and actively attempt to avoid other children and their parents in the enclosed playground area at all costs, irrespective of the negative impact this might prove to have on my daughter’s socialization and development, a point of some contention within my family. My paranoia is such that I feel a great distrust of the children who attempt to engage my daughter in play or in the kind of stilted conversations at which two year olds (and their parents) excel and I immediately put a stop to their efforts; on occasion I will say the words “oh no” quite loudly when a familiar looking kid comes over to us, and despite deep ignorance they do usually get the message and persist instead with their personal leaping or varied other solo play methods on or around the equipment.

In fact the only instance on which I did engage in conversation with a fellow parent was one borne of the park’s copious sexual activity. Despite it being long before what would constitute a reasonable Saturday breakfast time for most, all-too-often the park represents a choice destination for fathers too unimaginative to think of anything else to do with their young, the same few faces cropping up week in, week out, as they too must – and would be right to – think about me: him again, can’t he think of anything better to do, that poor child, &c.; in fact my rucksack routinely contains a tea towel I bring from home for the specific purpose of wiping gathered rainwater or dew from the play equipment to minimize the potential discomfort to my daughter’s person and garments. Although for some this may represent a sort of mollycoddling, for me it is a decision structured by practicality and sensitivity, two traits on which I pride myself as both parent and, more generally, extant personage. Whilst we swung our respective children on their respective swings ensconced somewhat uncomfortably within the very minimal spatial privacy such action affords in a small enclosed children’s playground, we could hear the unmistakable sounds of sexual pleasure occurring only feet away within the wooded area that flanks the riverway, and I noted how we swung our children slightly more forcefully as an instinctive response to it. There is something quite surprising if not entirely unsettling about the knowledge that strangers perform sex acts either publically or otherwise in the daylight hours, and that same knowledge somehow conspires to tarnish life, all life, with complex levels of decadence and sleaze and leaves me feeling sticky or at least similar to that sensation, in all of my key or sensitive or fleshy body locales.

“I like the daytime doggers the best,” the other father said from nothing by way of a greeting. We had been in the playground together for ten or fifteen minutes but had not as yet even looked at one another; this didn’t change as he spoke and we both focused very intensely on our children. “They’re a proud, open bunch. It’s a community. Meaningful friendships extending long beyond the point of orgasm.”

I wanted to ask him to be quiet but instead asked “Do you partake?” as though I were offering around cannabis at a house party, and listened to the creaking of the rusted metal chain that held my daughter’s swing up, that yelped like discordant brass with every arc.

“That I do,” he said. “But only when the kid’s at home.” I observed as he strained to peer over the hedge towards the wooded enclave, as though helpless but to answer some overbearing call of nature, pointless really given the thickness of the foliage, his child now hanging in the stationery swing. “Do you mind?” he asked. I ignored the question because I didn’t, or wanted not to, understand it. “Watching him for a minute?” He pointed to the hanging child. “As you’re here anway, I mean.” His kid was staring at me, flecks of foam around the edges of his cunt red lips. I pushed the swing a couple of times, alternating between my daughter and the other kid.

“I suppose it’s okay,” I said, “As long as you’re not. You know.” He clapped me on the shoulder with one hand then rubbed both his hands together in the warming gesture.

“Minutes,” he said. “Ten tops.” He kissed his child on the head and walked hurriedly out of the gate and towards the wooded area. I could hear sticks snapping underfoot as he disappeared amongst the trees.

today's episode

In today’s episode, Donnie asks Mary if she would like to take their relationship to the next, physical level, a question she refuses to answer.

DONNIE
So Mare, we been seeing each other two weeks now. Two weeks. So what I was wondering is, is would you like to, you know, take our relationship to the "next" level? Physically speaking?

MARY
Donnie, you’re okay, really you are, but you know I refuse to answer that question.

DONNIE
(looking away)
I know Mare, I know.

Next week: Donnie converses with Purfleet at length about the various ways of ending it all.

into the grey afternoon

In the woods with the child his impotent rage subsided some. He breathed deeply among the trees and crouched with the child by huge fungi and fallen logs and pinecones and many other treasures, and he held her close to him and felt her warmth and her life against his skin and felt very stupid and sorry. He wanted to call her at that moment to apologise but he had left his phone in the house when he had walked out so hurriedly. The child ran into thick piles of orange leaves and kicked and threw them like tickertape into the grey afternoon, squealing as she did so with delight. He joined her and they threw the leaves together in great fistfuls and they stuck in their hair and to the fronts of their jumpers and they were so crisp like left toast and perfect, skeletal, and they fell into them and looked up laughing through the falling leaves and the mostly bare branches and to the sky, and the smell of the earth was deep and damp and tremendous.

He had hit his wife but not – and never – meant to; the argument was heated and ferocious and, he knew, worthless, but it happened and kept happening as those things – the worthless ones – do, impulsive in all the worst ways. The child watched television while in the kitchen they went at each other in cruel competition, the benchmark of caused pain raised ever higher with every shouted sentence. Their troubles were small but niggled persistently, money, ambition, attitude, just trifles, really. The timbre of her raised voice turned his stomach but not at the expense of love; it reminded him sadly of his age, of the youth they had shared but now lost. He was punishing and measured with it, traits that had worsened with the years. The argument lasted for only minutes but caused immeasurable damage. His wife cried and he offered no comfort for it felt false and wrong to do so. She had slapped him twice, the argument by then in its death throes, the energy subsiding; he should have let it pass but hit her after the second one, not hard but still. He felt as though he was watching it happen and not participating in its deployment, which of course he was. Such detachment was the cause of many arguments; “you knew what I was like,” he would say; “you weren’t like this”, she would say. They were both incredibly right. Her face was very betrayed clasped between her open hands. He took the child, all smiles, and they left. The air would clear everything.

There were several steep hills in the woods which had once extended for many miles north, the sites of sand and gravel extraction of generations ago. He sat at the top of one such hill and the child sat in his lap, and they slid down over and over again, running each time right back to the top and then sliding down again, the gravel cutting into the seat of his jeans, themselves weathered and left clammy by the disturbed topsoil. They balanced on logs and large root systems and he pretended to fall from them, flailing his arms and yelling, and the child found this incredibly funny. There were dogs barking in other distant areas but they saw not a soul. In spring the place was swamped with frogspawn, the dew pond and even deep puddles forged into the various declivities that lined the tracks all teeming with the stuff, and they would watch then with baited breath in hopes that the spawn would hatch and mature before the rising sun dried the waters to nothing. By the Autumn there was no frogspawn, and the muddy water of the dew pond was very still as they stood at its edge and caught their breath, jolted only to occasional life by the child’s thrown stones which rained in great handfuls one after the other like prophesy.

His wife’s face at the edge of the windowpane as he and the child drove away from the house seemed etched into his memory even as it happened. A symbol of all of his failures, he would see it when he closed his eyes; it reflected the minutiae of their lives back to him as his did to her, clear as mirrors. Everything else, all of it, now gone.

He lifted the child up into his arms, and kissed both of her cheeks, and she laughed, and he threw her up and caught her when she dropped, and she was mute with the excitement of that split second of flight, and he would take her home and would tearfully apologise to his wife, and kiss her softly, the kettle would be boiling, and he’d beg her forgiveness, and they would know that they were meant to be together as without doubt they were, for they, they had created this child, this perfect child, and know that these blips – for what were they but that? – could and would stop, and they would all three sit on the sofa or lay upon the bed and be so happy and strong and all would again be well, and he threw the child up, he was sorry, and he caught her, oh how peaty and damp the smell of the earth!, and he threw her up, he loved her, had never meant to hit her, and he caught her, and he threw her up, her shocked face frozen above his then gone ever so quickly. There was blood on his hands and the child’s body fell lifeless to them, almost weightless, face down; her little skull and her little brain were pierced by the lowest branch as he had thrust her up to it, she was dead in an instant. They said it as a comfort on television programmes: she died instantly, but it was no comfort at all, it was all too instant, everything happened in an instant, leaving no time at all for it to be otherwise, for him to make it otherwise. How quickly the joy of life becomes not. He turned the child’s body over and straightened the frown on her face and kissed it many times and walked back along the paths they had earlier shared to his vehicle and to more.

th' wilde bunch

For two weeks or thereabouts Th’ Wilde Bunch terrorised my terrace and the surrounding few terraces on the northern side of Norwich city. The sons of Buttaller Wilde – a known Norwich cad but also local history buff, self-published author and theorist and unlikely architectural authority – the Bunch were a bicycle gang of three, who pedalled the alleyways in torrents of profanity and smashed vodka bottles like an unfolding bi-wheeled apocalypse. I was recipient of their wrath on at least one occasion, where encircled by their bicycles I was forced to pledge allegiance to their intense breed of insularity, decrying the surrounding postcodes with a level of venom they considered suitable (a generosity – they assured me – only extended to me [they called me “el hombre nada”] due to my own possession and daily usage of a bicycle). They offered to ink me with the Bunch’s visual credentials, furtively showing a small pocket book containing a couple of rusted blades and some Bic Cristal ballpoint pens, but I declined their offer, stating that the integrity of the spoken pledge could not possibly be furthered by permanent physical modifications to my person, that the conversational bonds we had shared in the alleyway out back of my house represented my resolute word as pro administrator that would, if anything, be somehow undermined by the crudeness of their artistic methodology. They reluctantly consented to this despite the audible hatred in the many fuck off’s they muttered under their collective breath as I did just that.

In the early twilight, under the bright streetlights that lined the alley, they honked and drawled like copulating felines, stretched and fought and drank heavily, giving indiscriminate single-speed chase to anyone who happened upon them in those middling hours; they caught few, and those who had been determinedly refused to discuss the myriad degradations they had suffered, but took extensive sick leave in the time period following without exception. There was little doubt among residents that the large rancid stools deposited at precise intervals like perverse waymarkers along the several alleyways that comprised the Bunch’s dominion was their work, but the residents were rendered powerless both by evidential inconsistency and fear of reprisal, for at least – as it was – the stools were beyond the boundaries of their gardens (such small mercies!), a fact that could and would be altered with immediate and devastating effect by the incensed trio as situation demanded. With little sacred the wheelie bins were rooted with no single reason but depravity, the bags torn and jutting like black wispy fingers from beneath the lids, the stench of melon skin and full nappies caustic in the winds of the alleyways, the gold curled remnants of cat food pouches like priceless artefacts amidst the blooming weeds.

Buttaller Wilde had long before erected a shed which adhered to no architectural or spatial or even logical conventions in the garden of his over-alley property, and called it – after Chtcheglov – The Hacienda, a new conception of time, space and behaviours, a fluid structure unfettered by limits of construction or engineering or geology, entirely modifiable. It was, he said, a space of psychological furtherance and deep spirituality, a space “more conducive to dreams than any drug”, although what this meant in actual terms was unclear. The panels that comprised the structure were said to be mounted on a series of tracks and runners and attached to a network of gear and pulleys, and could be reconfigured at will like the pieces of some futile jigsaw puzzle. It was, he said, a one-off, and had been the first element and exemplar of the comprehensive planning and design he had submitted to the city council in his proposed bid to have Norwich recognised as the first experimental city attuned to a new idealistic understanding of the ways in which citizens respond to and interact with their cities, plans which were, of course, dismissed out of hand. Wilde was “out of touch”, they said, and “a fantasist” and “(query?) dangerous”.

Three perhaps five days into Th’ Wilde Bunch’s reign of nuisance the Hacienda burnt outside and Wilde sobbed as he watched it fall, the three boys running between it and the outdoor tap with buckets of water in an attempt to stifle the blaze, swearing as they did so, the mix of vodka and Chewits a potent one on their breaths. The heat of the blaze had burst the bulbs in the streetlight overhead and the glare of the fire was the only glare. The arsonist – for it must have been – was never determined, and police had explained how in fact every street was a suspect, given the recent behavioural anomalies of Th’ Wilde Bunch. Wilde nodded as the officer presented the facts of the bad news as it was and shook his hand tenderly as he left. “I'm sorry Buttaller,” he had said. “The Hacienda was quite a place.” Wilde nodded further, as though he may never stop.

He walked through the garden and out of the gate and into the alleyway, where the three boys stood in sombre reflection alongside their bicycles, the smoke from the Hacienda blaze still farting upwards. He pushed each of them to the floor and their bikes too, and began to stamp on the wheels with great might until the spokes had popped out and the wheels had begun to buckle, and he lifted the frames above his head and smashed them all onto the floor of the alleyway in a mess of severed cables and paint chips and broken reflector lamps. Looking at his boys on the floor, mutely crying and so dreadfully idiotic, encircled by the same stools they raised in arms against the residents of the surrounding terraces, he felt an appalling depression of a kind unknown since his wife’s death, when he realised to his sorrow that his plans were now, and always would be, far far greater than whatever they became.

drink it up

Our conversations seldom progressed beyond the expected pleasantries but far beneath it all I sucked your cunt like a milkshake, and even in my imagination your porcelain face looked very thin and very sad, your crossed legs coiled perfectly around themselves like a fastened shoelace I desperately desired to open up.

the unknown origin of the sweetened products

There were three of them, boys I suppose, all eating chocolate, slurping it half melted past their yellow teeth. They picked the stray brown crumbs from their sweater-fronts like scientists handling valuable resources and ate them down carefully. They were all completely bald and their skin sat badly on their frames like second-hand garments, and was puffy and bruised and yellowing also. The infrastructure of the township had been decimated around them when the bombs dropped as they slept in their beds several months earlier. Many civilians had survived but all had been left with similar disfigurements: bald and with skin of a now ill-fitting nature and with unmistakeable respiratory problems that rattled in their chests like single items in a saucepan. It was uncertain as to the origin of the chocolate; confectionary and sweetened products were amongst the first to go after the bombs had fallen and anarchy reigned. The three of them had simply come across the chocolate in sealed wrappers in the road at their feet as they went about their duties, and after very little consideration of its significance had devoured it as though at gunpoint, in precious quiet, before any other civilians could observe them. In fact similar arrivals of chocolate products had appeared in numerous streets around the decimated city, all of which were devoured with comparable immediacy and in secrecy by the finders of the products. The selfishness of man is paramount. It may transpire in the coming hours that the chocolate products had been dropped by the same forces as the bombs had been in the earlier months, that they were a second more calculating way to continue the decimation of the township by way of poison or transmittable disease, that the eaters would suffer immeasurable pain before their futile deaths; however, for the now bald inhabitants of the township this was an irrelevance compared to the fleeting pleasure of their consumption, of taking their lives into their mouths. Their rotting bodies would be testament, of sorts, to sugar.

a failure of memory

In bed the following morning I read aloud from Poe and we ate cold buttered toast in our underwear. Like a chimpanzee she groomed the crumbs from my chest hair and like a foal I pressed my nose into the warmth of her neck and slipped my fingers beneath her pants and let them rest there as I read. It must have been early for the sun was weak through the windows but I opened a can of tepid beer left under my bed and drank from it, then passed it over to her and she did likewise. We passed it back and forth and drained it quickly. After several chapters I left the bed and dressed and told her I had to go to work, a truth she acknowledged if disapproved of. She left the bed to return to her boyfriend’s room next door, and the structure of her body was very beautiful as she did so, the way one side of her pants was caught helplessly between her buttocks and her stomach was slightly round, and I tried so hard to commit these things to memory but as soon as the front door closed behind me they were gone, the memory of the memory more memorable than the memory itself.

the organist's digressions

The stage was not one as such but several Ikea boxes pushed together, that he had been saving since a large online furniture purchase the previous year. He had set up two folding chairs on top of the boxes, one of which he used as a stand for the lime green Bontempi organ he had purchased on eBay for peanuts; it had chord buttons to one side that he tended to use exclusively, save for occasional attempts at notational intricacy that inevitably resulted in disaster or in the organ falling over in his exuberance. Since its purchase he had been trying without success to replicate much of John Carpenter’s memorable horror soundtrack work of the 1970s and 1980s but his attempts were poor and the sound laughable, his version of the Halloween theme, in particular, sounding like the theme tune to a daytime entertainment show with absolutely none of the taut oppressive atmosphere of the archetypal slasher of which the Carpenter soundtrack was an integral texture. On receipt of the organ he had stuck a printed greyscale promotional photograph of once-popular, now sexist presenter Michael Buerk to its casing with masking tape; “999” had profoundly influenced him as a younger male, left him with an almost permanent feeling of entrenched anxiety that he considered more blessing than curse, opening his eyes, as it did, to the unimaginable risk in even the commonplace. He watched Michael Buerk as he played and remembered; he cared not for the Buerk of today, whose reactionary aphorisms enflamed all of Guildford with righteousness; his feelings for and gratitude towards the man were of far greater consequence, a fact to which the printed greyscale promotional photograph adoring his Bontempi organ testified.

The days performance was what he termed his “parlour version” of the soft rock hit Total Eclipse of the Heart, a song he had always found almost uncomfortably emotional and rousing. The gathered audience waited for his muted shuffling entrance which he executed without a word like a shadow elongated by the slipping sun. He stepped over the organ’s frayed yellow power cord and took his position on the empty folded chair before it, the chair legs tearing with a jolt into and through the thick corrugated cardboard of the stage surface. Unfazed the commenced the performance, alternating between chords that bore little recognisable relation to the song as known, a lack of relation that was no further bolstered by the lyrics, when they appeared. Performed “in the vein of” Michael Winner they were conversational, shredding the melodramatic pomposity or garment-rending heft of the original to nothing, his pleaded, slightly whiney “turn around, bright eyes” sounding more like a frustrated owner half-heartedly encouraging its aged dog to walk back to the car quickly than the urgent declaration of some fierce and passionate love that Tyler had presented circa 1983. The performance’s impact was further stymied by his insistence at frequently deconstructing the so-called moment and fourth wall by unexpectedly stopping both his conversational vocals and his limited organ work mid-verse and even mid-line in order to explain what he would do differently with a more complete and elaborate selection of musical instruments and skillsets at his disposal. For example: “imagine, if you will, accordions”; or “you’re familiar with the drum kit sir? I envisage its presence here in some plenitude”; or “when I close my eyes I can hear, here, brasses of divine origin”; “recorder bits would pepper this coming section in spiralling solos of perhaps unexpected – given the limits of the instrument – clarity”, the like. Throughout the five or so minute performance he paused nine times to offer these elaborative deconstructions of the musical process, which resulted in his complete fantasies pertaining to what could be achieved with different personnel playing different instruments roughly five times the performance length of the song itself. When finished, he stood from his seat and the boxes further crumpled to flat beneath his weight. The Bontempi continued to hum through its in-built speaker; he crossed the room to unplug the power cord, as the on-off switch was damaged beyond usage and once the instrument was plugged in it remained very much ‘on’, and his foot caught in the piled boxes as he did so and he felt onto his side and pulled the organ down on top of him. The humming persisted; indestructible, the old Bontempi products, he thought proudly.

While he struggled to his feet the gathered audience of three, his immediate family, spouse and two young, left the living room without applause or a word of thanks, and he wrapped the Bontempi in a tartan blanket and began to fold away the cardboard for recycling.

the lad and the dignitaries

The lad piped up, always did when push came to shove, when the buck flapped, or something. “No no,” he said. “No no way way.” The assembled dignitaries fell immediately silent and the silence felt like a presence, heavy and damp and ultimately rancid; water swallowed into desert dry mouths was amplified in it, lowered glasses loud as day, the weight of their worn gold and other finery itself almost given sound, somehow, a dull creaking of straining bonds. The doorman nodded in response to the dignitaries unspoken commands and strode to the lad and slapped him across one cheek and then the other and then the originally slapped cheek once more; the lad’s head jolted with the impact, his cheeks immediately reddened in both shame and from the handprint left, the fingers like four smeared tentacles across his flesh. Even as the slap hit he felt himself jumping surprised at its volume and – over and above the degradation and pain – it felt like the worst part, the noise; it was both loud and as if separate from his existence. Mentally he composed apologies to the wood panelled walls, the buffed tabletop, the crystal tumblers, the assembled dignitaries; he retracted the latter as quickly as he composed it. The doorman offered the lad a tissue which he took and folded into a fine triangular point and used to calmly dab each corner of his mouth, then placed within his jacket pocket for later use. The doorman grimaced and slapped the lad again, and yanked the tissue from his pockets and tore it to shreds that he dropped like snowflakes onto the lad’s head, and then returned to his post by the doorway.

“We have a problem lad,” said one of the dignitaries. It might have been any of them. The lad smoothed his hand upon the top of his hair and a number of stray pieces of tissue fell from it; his eyes watered as the tissue fell past them, as for some reason they did when confronted with whiteness. He stood from the seat he had been directed into on his arrival and walked to the doorman and kicked him incredibly forcibly in the genitals. The doorman vomited and fell and curled into a foetal position and without apparent summons two further doormen entered the room and carried him from it, and one returned to take his place at the room’s only doorway. He gestured towards his own hand as if to suggest that he would slap the lad and enjoy to do so, if he was driven to or requested to by the assembled dignitaries. The lad considered this a mutually respectful position and returned to his seat. “To repeat,” said one of the dignitaries. “We have a problem lad. A significant problem.” The lad took in each of the faces in turn and spoke quietly. “The problem is not mine,” he said. “I do not care about your ‘problem’. I do not care about it at all.” The dignitaries resumed their silence, broken only by the creaking leather of the doorman’s shoe as he slightly redistributed the weight of his formidable body. One of them wrote in black ink upon a small piece of paper what appeared to be four or five words of uniform if otherwise unidentifiable characteristics; he read the words back to himself and when satisfied passed the paper amongst the other dignitaries. They read for many minutes despite the relative brevity of the assembled message. Once the final dignitary had read the message he screwed the piece of paper tightly in his right fist and handed it to the doorman who in turn placed it first into his jacket pocket and then – as though thinking better of it – into the dustbin; the dignitary stood from his seat, removed his suit jacket, which he positioned on a coat hanger, and with some assistance from the doorman climbed onto the tabletop, his shoes polished incredibly competently. The lad watched as the dignitary walked across the table in his direction, removed his braces, opened the waistband of his trousers and pulled them and his underwear down to his ankles and raised the shirt tails up slightly, and then with some discomfort squatted on his haunches and proceeded to defecate, his gaze unflinchingly – aside from a cursory glance to ensure the falling excrement did not catch the back of his shoes or trousers – upon the lad. The smell of the excrement was particularly unpleasant but the lad betrayed no unease. The doorman passed a compact box of tissues to the dignitary who wiped himself in silence once or twice and proceeded to dress himself with the same rigorous formality he had employed in the undressing process. He returned to his seat in silence. “Tell me lad,” said one of the dignitaries. It was the same dignitary who had spoken just moments ago, a spokesman of sorts, the lad assumed then as now. “Is this” – he gestured towards the excrement, that glistened on the table as though alive and not merely waste – “your problem?” The lad examined the excrement with some care. “It is not,” he said.

The doorman opened the door and the lad listened to the heels of his shoes clip-clopping away down the hallway. After two or three minutes the heels clip-clopped back towards the room in which he sat and the doorman re-entered accompanied by several people, the lad’s family, his wife, his little daughters, his aged parents, they were all present. The lad licked his lips slightly as the doorman moved down the line of gathered family members and slapped each of them very hard. The lad’s little daughters were sobbing as he did so and his parents appeared apologetic. Once the doorman had concluded his violence the dignitary asked the lad again: “And this? Is this your problem?” The lad smiled at his wife. “It is not.” The family were led from the room by the doorman. When he returned the lad stood from his seat and calmly picked the mounded excrement from the table with one bare hand and carried it to the doorman and smeared it over his face, and then down the front of his jacket. The doorman accepted his fate passively before once again exiting the room, immediately replaced by another, third doorman and the lad returned to his seat.

Now another of the dignitaries stood and this time walked to the window; he invited the lad to likewise. He pointed to a Ford Escort and the two of them watched as a mother and what the lad assumed to be her three small children entered the car. The dignitary took a very old mobile phone from his inside pocket and dialled a selection of numbers; when he depressed the ‘call’ button the car exploded, engulfed in the profound heat of its own burning metal, the persons destroyed. The lad saw burning flesh upon the pavement and severed child limbs. “This below,” said the dignitary, without any malice or frustration. “Is this your problem?” The lad considered his answer carefully, imagined an endless regression of worsening atrocities resultant of his meticulous honesty. “It is not,” he said quietly. The dignitaries looked amongst themselves at a further piece of paper written with a handful of neat text that was circulated among them. “Very well,” said the gravest-looking dignitary after a considered silence. “You may go.” The lad did.

my colleague

That despicable fellow is my colleague. He is a gutless fool, an abject tinker, a violator. He makes my skin slip and my buttock (or buttocks) clench inwards. I have no respect for that fellow and I find him repulsive across the spectrum. I yearn for the day when he isn’t – of voice, of earth, extant, etc. The days start with dread and worsen with the knowledge of his continuance, and in the dark mornings so black and cold I intellectually construct his demise. This demise always begins in the same manner and climaxes with incredible pain either physical or emotional or both as is my wont. The constructed demise affords me a warmth otherwise lacking in my personal and professional lives both.

He is in every way a grotesque, and if any person – even the most trusted – had related to me the traits of his personality and manner in a complete and truthful way I would likely dismiss them as nonsense, so very grotesque were they, like elements from a checklist of grotesquery so thorough that they have become almost parodic. He wanders the offices and corridors of our shared building like a giggling child, his oily greying hair glistening beneath the strip lights, his forehead a great tall beacon as smooth and white as a shell, and he gestures endlessly with nail-bitten fingers, towards equipment, people, paperwork and similar, gestures incomprehensibly. He sidles up and urges himself upon flanks and forearms and buttock-curves in ways so imperceptible that few, if any, perceive these urges, but they are there and I perceive them upon my own person and others. He inhales deeply the passing hair of the reception girl – whose firm perfectly bowed legs and profound shape filled her trousers as though the flesh itself yearned for release into waiting hands or mouths, the sinking between her two buttocks like the grassy declivity of a precious valley protected by government writ or other legislation, some site of specific interest – which is intensely fragrant with shampoo products and long and dark, an inhalation both creepy and idiotic in some balance; he revels in the heady incense and pictures beds creaking under their shared usage as she passes, and though she hears his sniff – his nose ever stuffy, unblown – like an aural marker of her passage (she moves so faintly: her shoes a whisper on the coarse mucky carpet! her tiny feet!) she either welcomes the purported harmlessness of his attentions as flattery or office good-humour or else presumes – and fairly – the sound to be symptomatic of some ailment or illness it would be insensitive or discriminatory or in bad taste of her to mention. He draws deeply through flaring nostrils and leans in slightly to the long dark hair, the intensely fragrant shampoo products, the firm perfectly bowed legs and profound shape etc., then groans aloud in reverie long after the clattering of her washed teacup has ceased and the girl has conscientiously returned to her post.

I once heard a preposterous story about my colleague and his past, a story suggesting innumerable facets of particular relevance to a dissection of his character, or what little character there was in evidence. The story related to his “collections”, myriad groupings of thematically linked items which were prevalent throughout his childhood and formative years and which took varied and differential forms each meticulously catalogued and stored. He collected anything, he said, it was within his personality, he couldn’t help himself. If he possessed even two of a thematically linked item he would begin collecting further exemplars of that item forthwith, until hundreds were in his possession. He collected rubbers, like most, figurines, pencils, stickers, egg boxes, bottle tops, dreams, also nails clippings (his own, finger and toe, the sum of some ten years clipping a good couple of centimetres deep and stored within a Ben Sherman tin that stank of feet), pirated VHS copies of banned videos (his collections reached a zenith in the mid 90s, when many horror or adult films now considered classics of the genre(s) had still not been granted release by the increasingly relaxed/culturally pliable BBFC; my colleague would respond to advertisements placed in the rear sections of underground publications, and then furtively receive printed lists on orange paper of the strange and wonderful films available to order, send postal orders to PO boxes, the incredible thrill of illegality, waiting for the letterbox to flap), hairs, almost used lipsticks (he inhaled the odour and was dizzy with lust), soiled underwear. His most unusual collection, however, was the focus of this story. According to the legend detailed at some length in the story as told – that had followed him in whispers for half a generation like a retarded youth – and that I had heard regarding my colleague’s most unusual collection, the items in question and of which there were between thirty and forty in number were what looked too all intent and purposes like pelts of some description, the attached fur or hair of varied colouring and the skin below still either slightly tacky from, one presumed, the freshness of the bloody flesh of its undercarriage or else dried and brittle and somewhat curled at its edges like the rind upon fried bacon rashers. The story made clear that these pelts were of human rather than animal origin and were in fact the scalps of children that my colleague had in some way accrued through unspecified means (perhaps through associates within the hospital portering service, student doctors, mortuary assistants and so on, if not through violent murder perpetrated by he himself). It was reported that he tended to this pelts with loving devotion, brushing and even styling the hair, carefully washing the clumps of blood and gore from them, storing them neatly rolled and fastened with lengths of ribbon of appropriate colouring for the shades in question, draping the pelts or scalps across the cupola of his own head like a ritualistic fancy dress, inhaling their varied and complex odours, tessellating them atop his pillow and sleeping against them. Although my colleague refused to indulge in details pertaining to these pelts and how they came to his possession, the story details how in his personal notebooks there were extensive and lifelike illustrations of between thirty and forty children, each adorned with what appeared to be “incision marks”, as well as gruesome and anatomically valid illustrations of the same children following the forcible removal of these pelts from their person(s). There is of course little if any evidence of these pelts today, or the incidents surrounding their origin; the story, however, persists, and beyond that is as credible (if not more so) than it has ever been, given the extensive catalogue of grotesque and socially anomalous traits and habits in which my colleague routinely engaged. Whilst a more patient person could investigate the veracity of this story in more depth, cross-referencing the claims and chronology with dead or missing children in the area at that time and the like, I do not consider this a necessary use of my time; the formal “truth” of the story is of little relevance, and as an allegory it remains especially potent and a more than sufficient indictment of my colleague’s character, should such an indictment be required. In the permanence of its legacy, fiction is often truer than truth, superseding the happened with the terror of possibility.

His ever moist palms are very warm and reek of flatus and their rank moisture and odour can be detected from several feet away in the relatively enclosed spaces of the office. On the thankfully rare but nonetheless real instances on which I have occasion to visit his personal office – archaically, small rooms and doorways rather than open plan spaces were the preferred format for this particular workplace – the smell was unbelievably repulsive, stagnant breath and captured flatus, and I caught sight of an eaten tub of barley or couscous or bulgur wheat salad in the wastepaper basket at the foot of his desk, crisp crumbs and streaked coffee cups also, and the olfactory cocktail made me woozy, pressed into awareness and higher function only by his happening voice. The tundra of his milky skin and beetroot lips was broken by feeble pointillist beard growth in troubled pinpricks, and as I listened to his instruction his face became a simple palette of the rain-soaked brush strokes and glooping oils of a moron, an entirely alien representation of some incomprehensible notion of human anatomy. I nodded at intervals throughout his soliloquy and left as soon as I could assume to be appropriate, expecting him to call me back or to admonish me, neither of which were the case. I gagged then swallowed a small amount of dreadful acid into and out of my mouth when I considered his hands, their digits, their singular stench.

After around six months of our working together my colleague was seriously injured in a car accident but a stone’s throw from our office. He was struck by a vehicle as he crossed the road and for reasons unknown the vehicle had failed to stop or assist him. I watched him struggling in the road as I approached the scene and thought about his hands and his gestures and the hair of reception girl, and I cycled past him as he lay sobbing at the edge of the roadway. He reached one hand out towards my wheels in a way that struck me as cinematic and pitiful. His pleas for assistance faded as I rode around the corner and towards my home.

the small child

There was a small child lived about the bridge area, took great solace in the passing water. His parents were long dead and he was only a child, but had built some life for himself from out of the troubles. He sheltered in places various and embraced their dissonance and the idiosyncrasies of each and every night, and sometimes woke with the sun and at other times was kicked awake by drunks or drenched in their falling urine or stunned by their bayed insults or sometimes by the rain or other elements, for the climate about the bridge area could be cruel as most things could. He survived on scraps found or sometimes stolen, pizza crusts, the spilt salad from kebabs hastily necked, wilted lettuce, tomatoes of ferocious blandness, thick circles of raw onion, ends of banana shed with their skin, single chips trampled flat at one end, a ramshackle diet of the unwanted or the dropped. He adhered to a strict code of personal ethics which prohibited theft, a code to which he tried hard to adhere, his diet built exclusively of the wares of the street, but sometimes basic physical need would overtake him and supersede the efficacy of the code, and he would creep invisible into the larger shops and pocket very small items and apologise under his breath as he did it, and later sob himself dry as he chewed them slowly, the products cloying and unbearable as they wove their guilt around his mouth like cobwebs. He bathed in the waters of the river longing for the holy, and shivered naked on the bank waiting for the air to dry his skin. He watched other children walk with parents through the daffodils and blooming crocuses and felt some scorn but he would not blame them or wish their happiness absent. The world would gain little should his misery be shared. He waited patiently for the day the water would rise to take him up.

smiling I blame TV

You can now purchase a copy of my second story collection smiling I blame TV in paperback here and as an ebook here.

It contains a total thirty-seven items (stories, sundries, ephemera, miscellany) and is an attractively rendered and formatted package.

The text dates in places from as far back as - I believe - 2002 and continues right up to the present, but weeks old (though with a sizeable gap during which much of the stuff from so long! godspeed! so long! was written), and I would consider parts of it (which is to say: smiling I blame TV) to be amongst by best and most complete work.

So you might as well. Buy the fucking thing.