the rise of the ants

Because she really wanted one, and because I generally like to think I’m a decent enough guy, I bought my girl an ant farm as a present last christmas gone. It was a pretty exciting time in our little flat, I can tell you: feverishly awaiting the delivery of a big box all the way from Berlin, Germany, which would contain the two part ant farm, along with some extra sand, petri dishes for the distribution of foodstuffs, and a couple of packet of dead crickets.

When it finally arrived she tore into the package whilst I was still at work and set it all up, although we didn’t have any ants to put in it yet, because we had to order them separately from a low-grade online English company (queen, workers and a few miniscule eggs). It felt quite hopeless having an ant farm on the table when it didn’t even contain any ants, so once I got home we set to making sure the little bastards were sealed and delivered within the week.

It was more trouble than I care to mention getting the ants out of the sealed test tube in which they had been delivered and into the ant farm. They were extremely reluctant to do it, no matter how much coaxing with good fresh honey or vigorous shaking we sent their way. Eventually, after seeking counsel with some serious ant geeks on the kind of bizarre forums that only the twenty-first century could come up with, we stuck them in the fridge for a while. This would make them drowsy, apparently, and they would lose their grip on the glass of test tube and fall easily into the farm. I was doubtful, as I often am, and refused to have anything to do with the whole business, preferring instead to lounge around grumbling. But she pressed on, my girlfriend, with the determination of a kid at Christmas (which I suppose she was, although 22 doesn’t really count as standard kid age).

Still, she kept at it and the ants eventually succumbed, although we did lose one, crushed to insignificance by a poorly placed plastic lid.

Weeks passed and finally they buried a little tunnel for themselves. By this time I was thoroughly bored with them. As far as I could see they spent the entire day doing absolutely nothing. It was like I expected an amazing flea circus. That’s just the stuff of dreams, my dreams. But they didn’t look about, pick stuff up, goof around - they just sat there, around the queen, tending the eggs in ways far to small for a great lump of a crude human being like myself to even notice, let alone get excited about.

It was about this time, when the tunnel began it downward trajectory into the security of the sand, and a little nest area was established for the larvae to develop and grow, that I started swearing at the ants when I looked at them. I don’t know why, and now I think about it it does seem like a stupid thing to do. “Fucking ants,” I’d say, “don’t know shit.” The slightly repulsive smug superiority I couldn’t help but have in my tone of voice, recent graduate that I was, was completely unfounded, and wildly misguided, but it happened nonetheless, and whether I was proud of myself for trying to feel like the bigman compared to a handful of little ants I couldn’t tell you, but sometimes these stupid things happen, no matter how stupid they are, and this thing proved to be really goddamn stupid.

You see, eventually the care of the ants was in my hands while my girl finished up her shit elsewhere, and after discussion with her we decided that, to recreate the warmth of the earth’s soil where they would usually be - and thereby hopefully increasing the likelihood of the larvae actually bothering to hatch, which they still hadn’t done, despite it being May - we agreed to whack the whole farm into the airing cupboard for the night and see how things went.

So in I popped it, mumbling obscenities about the foolish ants and how even the old airing cupboard trick would make them believe as true something that was plainly false to any intelligent human man and closing the cupboard door and thinking no more about it, instead turning my attention to potatoes and cheap fish.

Next morning I went off to work as always, fucking work, and forgot in my hurry to get the ants from the airing cupboard. When I remembered, way down the street, too far and too late to bother going back to rectify my slip of the mind, I figured they’d be alright anyway. I mean, it’s not that warm in there, and we haven’t got the heating on (in fact we haven’t even got heating, but that’s another story).

And so imagine my surprise when I got home and found a mansized ant sitting in my chair. No apology, no nothing - just sitting in my chair reading a newspaper (God knows where it came from - I refuse to keep newspapers in the house, for personal reasons). It looked at me without expression and said, in a bold, confident English:

“Ah, cunt. Make me tea.”

“Excuse me, ant,” I quickly retorted, “but this is my flat and that’s my chair. I don’t quite know what the hell is...” And then I twigged. THE AIRING CUPBOARD! Swallowing hard and panicking I edged backwards away from the gently rocking ant, but was stopped sharp by five more of them, each as tall as me.

“You heard him, you rotten little wanker,” one of them said. “Tea, for all of us. Make it. Now.”

They shoved me roughly into the kitchen. What else could I do? I put the kettle on and counted out as many mugs as I could find. I could hear them playing my records and dancing, shifting the furniture around to make more space. I was terrified. How many more of them were there? Where was the queen hiding? What did this mean for the world as I knew it? Before I could answer these questions, even to myself, the kettle boiled and the ants started making a noise.

“Come on!”

“Get it made!”

“You’re a tosser, mate!”

I hurriedly poured the water over the teabags and went about the business at hand. The ants were laughing like drunken louts after a home game. I could hear what sounded like the head ant, who had been reclining in my chair, telephoning my work, explaining that I couldn’t come in tomorrow, or any other day in fact, because I was being held captive by man sized ants.

“Yes, ants,” he shouted. “A-N-T-S, that’s right. Ants, you deaf fucking bitch.”

Even Melissa the administrator was powerless against these monsters, laughing again now, the phone smashing against the hard stone walls. I knew then, as even employment crumbled, the final bastion of civilization completely overruled by the cunning and intelligent dictatorship of the ants, I knew then that hope was gone for me. Lost. If I could just hold out until Kelly got back. She would worry about me, wonder why I hadn’t answered my phone, and then come back to investigate. Wouldn’t she? With her scientific mind she would think of something, I knew it, just whip up a quick antidote with the minor chemicals to hand in the flat (toothpaste and bicarbonate of soda) that would bring the ants back down to their regular size. Right?

Biting my tongue, then, I carried the hot tea into the living room. One of the workers knocked the almost boiling mugs of beverage from the tray in my hands all down my frontage. I tried not to scream but it was hopeless.

Since then I have been living with ants, under their control, passive, unquestioning, keeping my head down, counting the days until this might all blow over. I am their prisoner, they use me for every one of their cruel plans. I am not even safe from them sexually. I have been gang raped by more ants than I can even count anymore. It never stops. When they’re not fucking me they whip me. If I fall asleep they target me with minor electric shocks. If I make a mistake, of any kind, they beat me beyond comprehension. Even I do not feel human anymore. I can barely remember the world outside, can’t understand how it continues to move, unchanged, how normal life carries on, or even what normal life is. This is normal for me now. The world feels like the anomaly. Is there anything left out there? I couldn’t even guess.

I’m only able to write this now because they are busy wrestling in the bath, an activity which never ceases to amuse them. This is my obituary, perhaps, or one last stab at life, the outside world. A desperate plea before it’s all gone.

I’ve never been so afraid.

Will there ever be an end to this madness.

Ants. Everywhere. Ants.

I feel I should warn you.

The ants are coming.

big night out

Stewart Grimme chortled down his cornflakes with a gusto he hadn’t known since borstal. He deserved those crisp golden flakes, doused liberally in semi-skimmed and lightly sugared to sensory perfection – it had been quite a night, after all. A couple of frames of pool followed by gang-rape in the car park; what better way to get back into the swing of the working week than that?

He looked at the severed head that had been left on the table in front of him. Female, apparently. It must have been Derek, or Bobby, or Wills, or Jacko. Those guys… crazy one and all! Whose was the head, though? As Stewart looked at it, deeply, his little blue eyes darting from ear to ear, munching slowly on his breakfast, milk liberally spilling from bottom lip and down chin, he tried to think back to the actions of the previous night. It wasn’t easy seeing anything through the haze of WKDs he’d put back – two for one.

He had joked around, had a sing-song to the Quo, lost at pool twice but won three times and then raped poor Suzie Dire over the bonnet of Jacko’s Capri.

Of course. Suzie Dire.

She didn’t look much like Suzie Dire and had clearly been given a bit of rough and tumble by the lads. Par for the course with a gang rape, he reckoned. What a scorcher of a night, he thought, and felt a bit of a stirring in his boxer shorts.

Who had cut the head off, though, he couldn’t remember for the life of him. He’d have to whack a quick text off to the lads and get to the bottom of it. It was a totally mad joke, and that was all of them to a tee – mad. A bit crazy, off the wall. The old class of 96, never growing up, still playing the field in the old hometown.

It was truly glorious to be alive, he thought, slurping the last of the milk from the deep white cereal bowl he had picked up in Sainsbury’s. With friends like I’ve got who even needs any other friends? Who even needs to leave town, to try new things? It’s all here! We’re always having a laugh! Ha ha ha! Always! We’re cards, cads, cunts, crazygood! Fucking YES!

He smiled and stood up, placing the bowl in the dishwasher and giving Suzie’s blood-matted hair a little stroke. Wonder where the body is, he thought, pulling at the nubbin of his cock, so tiny and offensive. Wouldn’t mind another go on that one, went like the clappers she did.

He grabbed his new Nokia 3.2 megapixel from the top of the fridge. No new messages. Those crazy fuckers must be pulling the sicky. Why not? We’re young, free, and mad, after all, isn’t it! He started composing a message and went into the front room.

Where he found all of his friends severed heads.

There was Derek, scalped and nasty.

There was Bobby, no eyes left.

There was Wills, razor-sliced cheeks.

There was Jacko, car keys just glistening at the back of his throat.

Oh shit, thought Stewart, tossing his phone onto the couch, then picking it up and placing it more carefully on the coffee table. He sat down between the heads of Derek and Bobby and drummed his fingers on them.

This is totally wacky, he thought. Nuts’n’bonkers! These guys. He pulled down his pants and felt a little tearful.

I mean, who was he gonna go out with tonight?

Fuck it, this is always happening and it always works out. Nothing to get down about. He was a great guy, crazy, a bit of a wildnut.

He started to thrust his cock into Derek’s mouth, the tip jabbed unnervingly out of the severed neck.

sleep experiment

I have given up sleep for medical reasons that don't exist. I find it easier this way, just being awake all the time. That way I can look out of the window of my bedroom all day and watch the guy through the French windows across the gardens, kind of voyeuristically. All day he's there, all day and every day, just sitting at a table, apparently alone. He has silver hair at the table all day every day. I wonder what he's doing? I wonder what he's thinking? Perhaps he sleeps there. I imagine there to be insects swarming across the table, towards his body, waiting to consume it when he dies, if he isn't dead already, which he might be because he certainly doesn't move. At the weekend I saw a woman younger than him digging in her concrete garden, which seemed strange because a shovel cannot dig concrete. She never seems to speak to the man who might be dead. They are the original odd couple. He is there right now. His chair doesn't even look that comfortable.

social cannibals

I woke up to find three people eating my flesh. I thought they were my friends, and told them so.

"I thought you were my friends."

"We are mate."

"But I've just woken up to find you gorging on my flesh. Not only is it pretty odd, but it doesn't seem like an especially friendly thing to do. I mean come on guys, what's it all about?"

One of them took a big mouthful of my side and began to chew it thoughtfully.

"Try not to think about this too much," he said. "It's just something we like to do at weekends."

Bloody social cannibals.

hamburger meditations

I've been thinking a lot about hamburgers lately, I guess because it's been so long since I actually last ate a really good hambuger. I often feel that when you've had as many hamburgers as I have, and when you spend as much time thinking about them as I do, the process of actually finding one that will really blow you away is pretty difficult. I often think sadly back to the hamburgers of my childhood, and how every one was a delicious surprise that was just waiting to happen, but a surprise of meat and garnish, all the colours of the rainbow. But the last one I had tasted odd, as though the garnish was good and the meat was good, but together they didn't work at all, like a broken watch. It was a disappointing day all round, and my mind wandered with fantasy.

the angel of life

The angel of life visited me and said:

1. Everything will be okay sometime.
2. Stop cutting your arms stupid.
3. Shouldn't keep on drinking so much.
4. By playing your music so loud you have permanently damaged the speakers of your home stereo system.
5. You cannot smash the screen of a modern television by throwing the base of a red angle poise lamp at it.
6. Look outside.
7. You should dance on that log more often.
8. Get over her and let other people know you.
9. You do still have emotions.
10. Stop fixating on your own death.
11. Man cannot live on bread alone.
12. Forget the job.
13. Sit quietly in the rain because it doesn't matter.
14. It doesn't matter.
15. Kiss me on the mouth.

So I did. She was very beautiful and had short dark hair, which I always found especially attractive. Later some friends told me that the angel of life was a guy, which confused me greatly.

dreamed

More dreams felt very vivid at the time. I took some cocaine and some ecstasy, just right here in my house with my oldtime buddies, doing not a whole lot but guzzling a whole bunch of beer and feeling pretty good but I got sad towards the end because even happy days can't always make you happy, so I was very glad to get to bed and the dream was weird, like it was Brighton seafront but no real access to the beach, just these long wet tiled corridors like in the baths in the citipark in Budapest, and I'm walking around in my red and white striped boxer shorts with a pair of transparent plastic boxer shorts over the top of them, just wandering and looking for the beach.

The corridor comes out on a train platform that also doesn't exist, but an attendant tells me I can't wear clothes out there so I strip but then I notice that everybody is way out of proportion, like they are my height but their legs are only about a foot long and the rest is torso, and between their legs are these loathsome penises, real long and scraping like old garden hosepipe along the shingle of the platform.

Slightly perturbed I go back into the corridors and there are probably hundreds of these odd human beings with their odd long penises and I walk past a phone booth where two beautiful girls are standing - perfectly in proportion - and for some reason I was so proud of my cock that I walked past them over and over, smiling a little harder every time.

Then later Liam is running around screaming excitedly, I never found out why, but he has shaved his head and is wearing a yellow paper crown from a cheap Christmas cracker. I don't know why I dream so much about yellow. This is a fragment.

Why is there machine gun fire coming from downstairs?

Whatever happened to my zombie dreams? I want to wake up scared again, but not about real things like dying alone or rubbish bank debts.

What a messy situation.

goldfish

I wonder what the goldfish do when we are asleep. It's easy to imagine them carrying out profound conversations regarding the state of the world, as knowledgable as they are from the scraps of newspaper they can read from the carpet of our living room, or from the halfwit conversations I have about postmodern thought. They talk about how we will all be washed away by the great storm, every single land-dwelling beast, and the world will become water in which they will govern, pioneers of a new exciting land, boldly racing towards the future with an ethos of peace and renewable energy, and as evolutiuon slowly kicks in the fish will attain the complexity of an advanced spiritual plane and probably be enlightened. The saviour of the universe!

Or perhaps they just climb out of the tank with their small fins and use the record player to listen to the Great Gatsby, waltzing slowly along the length of the mantlepiece.

Or maybe they just struggle for breath in the water we forgot to clean again, desperately hungry (for how easy it is to overlook on so busy a day) and hoping we get up soon so they might live another day.

I love those damn goldfish.

welcome

out of a country town we created it, just 18 yr old long hairs with too many jeans and too many dreams, in our image we created it, jumbled mess of awkward gestures and shared woes and it got swollen and stretched past the town borders, past the churchyard whose bench we burned and whose door we puked on drunk some nights with port wine and fast cars, past the grass we sat on and smoked cigarettes like they were our last, past the house we stole and held parties in before they knocked it down and built three houses in its place, past the hills we'd camp in all night and watch meteor showers from sleeping bags with slugs on my hat in the dewy night, past so many meaningless loves and secretive seductions, past concerts and bedroom with yellow walls, past first floor flats and basement flats, past bakeries and coffee pots for one and picnics, past long walks and the flowers picked on them and a girl kissed on a log after she missed school to spend the day with me and I loved her at the time I think, past nearby towns and the old fort by the sea and the countless sad days we spent there, past crashing waves on winters nights with a girl wrapped round you, past inflatable dinghys and LSD amidst husks of watermelon, past spraypaint and hamburgers on nights that never ended, past busking beat poetry and making enough for chewing gum, past sleeping on the beach or in cars, past stupid ideas and brilliant ideas, past road trips west racing the sun all the way and making it in record time, past video cameras we used to record friends buried in grass or removal lorries in transit, past endless talks, past all the trousers I remember taking off, past the book I wanted to write and finally did, past dancing in the street in the middle of the night until the police told us to stop, past broken feet and broken hearts, past sisters I fell in love with and maniacs I fell in love with and girls I shouldn't have fallen in love with, past the coast and the countryside, past all these memories, it stretched with us when even the fields weren't big enough anymore, and north to the city where just maybe it could manifest itself again, or at least we could live, and through lethargy and week long drunks and sadness and hardship and just enough joy it stayed together and the theoretical peach got to epic proportions and its tangible sibling got spewed onto the page crudely with stolen photocopying - and busy complications and depressive fantasies and waking dreams haunted by zombies and the soil cucumber - and now we are here and older and on it goes:

one huge peachy