If you promise not to think I’m insane, I’ll let you in on something. Promise? Ok, good. Well, recently I’ve realised that there’s a spirit living inside of me. And I’m sure it’s female, as she’s so emotional. If these things have a gender that is. Hey, remember I made you promise not to think I’m mad? Actually, this spirit is what’s keeping me sane. I won’t say ghost or angel, as I don’t believe in things like that. I didn’t really accept the idea of spirits until this happened. Having one inside you kind of changes your mind about these things. Also calling it a ghost or an angel is too narrow a definition. I mean, I don’t think she’s a messenger from God or a dead person. But who knows if that’s really what ghosts and angels are anyway? That could just be the myth. Real angels possibly don’t have wings, look pretty and dress in white. And ghosts might not be milky apparitions that float about haunting people.
But I’m getting off the point. Let’s back to my spirit. How do you know she’s there, you crazy person? I guess that’s what you’re thinking now. The answer to that is quite simple really. I can feel her. Now that might not be enough for you, but hey, it’s plenty for me. On second thoughts, that’s possibly a little misleading. When I say I can feel her, I suppose that’s not strictly true, it’s more that I can sense her. It’s like something’s in me that’s not, well, me. And how I feel her is through me. She uses my body and its chemistry to communicate with me. She’s pretty clued up like that. The biggest issue with this whole thing is that she’s nocturnal, so lately I’ve had countless sleepless nights.
Here’s an average night for you. Ok, so I feel relaxed and ready for a night’s sleep. I put my book down and turn my bedside lamp off. I settle down under my duvet, put my head on my pillow and close my eyes waiting to drift into unconsciousness. When suddenly, out of nowhere, my heart starts beating so fast and hard that it’s like I’ve just finished the 100 metres, not the 4th chapter of my book. It’s so loud I don’t just feel it, I can hear it in my ears, and almost taste it for christ's sake. Really, it’s like there’s more than one heart beating. And it’s her, forcing me awake, as if she's got something really important to tell me. Or she just wants some company.
Before I knew it was her, this whole racing heartbeat thing used to freak me the hell out. I used to panic that there was something wrong with my body, that I was having a heart attack or something. Now I realise it’s her, it gives me comfort. I just wish she’d let me sleep more. I try and tell her this, reason with her, say that I’m tired and I have to get up for work in the morning. But like I said before, she’s emotional. She’s driven by emotions and doesn’t understand reason. I don’t think she understands words.
So instead of letting me sleep, she crawls up and down my chest, up and down, up and down, making me restless and uneasy as she produces these waves of anxiety. Usually I toss and turn, trying to distract myself. Then I think about stuff, try to solve the meaning of life or worry about losing my job and becoming a bum, anything big enough to take my mind off these intense feelings. Occasionally, sleep manages to pull me under, but then I wake up suddenly gasping for breath, as she drags me to the surface of consciousness with a surge of adrenaline.
I get bored of trying to sleep, of waiting till she’s finished telling me what she has to say. This is where my eyes spring open and soak up the darkness until I can make out the shapes of my bedroom. Except, have you noticed that your own wardrobe looks sinister in the dark? Mine takes on the appearance of an upright coffin, its door left slightly ajar, beckoning me in. Even though I’m sure it was closed when I went to bed. The darkness plays tricks on your mind, but they’re nothing compared to what she can do with your body.
At this point I’m beaten and resort to the only defence I have. I turn on the light. She hides almost immediately, or perhaps she rests when it’s light. Whatever happens to her, I’m in control of my body once more. I don’t think she leaves me altogether, as I can still feel the echoes of her presence. So I leave the light on, keeping her quiet. I read but I can’t concentrate, as my mind is still on her. So I end up reading reviews of trashy films I’ll never see, the horoscopes of everyone I know and what the latest fashion trends are. Like I give a shit.
If sleep still doesn’t take me away from her then, I get drunk. She doesn’t seem to like alcohol you see, or maybe she gets drunk too, I don’t know how it works with these supernatural beings. But she doesn’t bother me when my mind’s swimming with the blankness of booze. Look, I know this isn’t going to do me much good in the long run, but it’s the most pleasurable way of dealing with her at the time. I’m not a medium, psychic or psycho you know, so I’m a novice at this.
But the other night I tried something different. I decided that instead of fighting her, I should just attempt to listen. And yes, when I say listen, I mean hear. Like every couple who cohabits. As she communicates with emotions they're what I should be listening to, not ignoring them or blanking them out with booze. So that night, I went along with her. I lay there in the darkness as my heart pounded and the anxiety gripped my chest. It took all of my might to stay still and not turn away from her. But I kept motionless, staring up at the dark walls bending in over me, my ceiling light stretching out its black spider-like legs towards me and let the full force of her energy flow through me. I felt her rush into every gap, every hollow inside of me. Places I’d long forgotten. She filled me up and up with strong emotions until I thought I was going to explode.
And then they came, tumbling impatiently down my cheeks, hot, wet and furious. Mad at me for being kept in for so long. I hadn’t cried for years, not properly, not silently. The feelings got weaker as the tears flooded out, as if each one took a bit of them away. The next thing I knew it was morning, and I felt nothing. Well, not literally nothing, I guess I mean I didn’t feel tired or achy or dizzy or, or, or. Maybe this is how people feel when they say that cheesy line about feeling themselves again. The thing is, I’d had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in ages.
Since then she still bothers me at night, but not as much as she used to. And even now I don’t really know what she’s trying to say to me, but I'm more in control of her. In fact, she’s beginning to feel like part of me.
Thursday 31 December 2009
Monday 14 December 2009
Monday, December 14th, 2009
I had a fear of loneliness 9 days ago, but then something happened. It was during what they’re all calling ‘The Big Freeze’. When the temperature went as low as minus 17 degrees celsius even in London. So it snowed. And snowed. And when we thought it was all over and the authorities had enough grit to fight the freeze, it snowed again. Ducks mysteriously disappeared from frozen ponds, pigeons fought over frozen fried chicken, even bus and train timetables froze. Then they had to freeze their ridiculous demands, allowing people to work from home, as most of us were snowed in.
I stayed in my flat for days. I didn’t see anyone, didn’t speak to anyone, didn’t smell anyone, had no contact at all, except by email. At first it was refreshing, possibly how a model feels when the artist finally says relax after hours of obsessive scrutiny. But then the loneliness attached itself to me like an endless empty corridor in the Overlook Hotel. It’s a state where echoes are all you can hear, and even then, they’re inside your head.
I became restless and began to stalk up and down my flat, up and down. I stopped at the mirror in the bathroom and stood there, staring at myself, looking for answers. Should I attempt to go out? Or call someone? But I didn’t really have anything to say anymore. Words didn’t seem enough these days. A guttural roar or the longest sigh ever from the deepest, darkest places inside me would be the only honest expression, but I guessed that most people would prefer a polite ‘Hiya, how are you?’ and I just wasn’t ready for that yet. I traced the lines that fell from the corners of my eyes to across the top of my cheekbones, before laughing at my reflection. I attempted a different laugh, one that created new creases and wondered how long I’d have to laugh to make those lines permanent. I then did that thing where you stare so hard into your own eyes that they start to look like someone else’s, a stranger’s.
After a while I was peculiarly overcome with the need for fresh air, so I rushed to the lounge and threw open the window, despite the cold. I swallowed the cool breeze for a while before turning back towards my sofa, and sitting there, looking straight at me, was a black cat. I looked at it in surprise, then shock, and then with something entirely different. Because the most astounding eyes looked back at me. They appeared to be smiling, welcoming, as if this was the cat’s home and I was the guest.
Now it was my turn to be frozen, and I stood there totally still in the headlights of its bright green eyes. All of a sudden its pupils expanded, growing from slits to great big saucers. I felt oddly drawn towards them, a piece of pathetic matter entering a powerful black hole. My heart was beating fast and I looked away before I became overwhelmed by this strange feeling that was simultaneously happening inside and outside of me. I realised that I was now standing very close to the cat, yet I hadn’t been aware that I’d moved. I laughed to myself quickly. It’s a cat, only a cat. But where had it come from? A spine-tingling draught brushed against my skin and I turned back towards the window, ready to close it. But I was distracted by the snowflakes that had begun to fall. I gazed at them as each one created a unique path in the air, gliding soundlessly to the ground where they joined the powerful mass, capable of stopping trains, schools and economies.
The cat began to purr. It was gentle, comforting. A warm sound. I looked at it and saw that it was watching the snowflakes too, with wide eyes, pupils like slits in the bright light. And those eyes, they weren’t simply green after all. In the reflection of the light I could see that the iris was made from a palette of luminous colours. Lime green, moss green, emerald green, turquoise, topaz, indigo, violet and sunset pink were sparkling and shimmering in two crystal clear pools. At that moment, the cat turned its head to look at me. Its eyes appeared open and honest, and full of what looked like, longing. Whatever it was, its expression knocked the breath out of me. I gasped and its pupils expanded in a flash. I felt my eyes widen in response and I had the vague sensation that my legs were about to buckle under me. The cat blinked its eyes slowly and it was the first time I noticed the thick trim of long black eyelashes at the top of each eye. The blinking was hypnotic.
I opened my eyes and found myself sitting on the sofa. Hesitantly, I looked round at the cat and its iridescent eyes met mine. It stared into my eyes for a long time. Its pupils trembled as excitement seemed to pulse through them, causing them to glitter. It was searching for something in mine and finally seemed to find it as its eyes suddenly stopped glittering and became still. This had a calming effect on me. My mind released all its thoughts and I felt like I was floating. Then as I looked deeper into its eyes, new thoughts came to me like I was reading them from its irises. Pleasurable things, uplifting and euphoric. I felt my heart beat faster and a different expression flickered across its eyes, causing its pupils to tighten slightly. I tore my eyes away from its gaze. It was now dark outside, the only light that was coming in was from the streetlamps. How long had I been staring at this cat? And it was just a cat after all. The thing was, when I stared at it for a long time, I forgot it was a cat. You see I didn’t see the fur then, the tail or the whiskers. Only the eyes and the expressions deep within. But how could a cat know the first thing about feeling wistful? Or inadequate? Or lonely.
I switched on the TV to distract myself and tried not to look at the cat. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a normal cat, that was for sure, and I didn’t want to fall into its trap. I’d heard stories about cats, especially black ones, having supernatural powers. Changing into human form to spy for witches and demons. Or worse still, that they are actual witches themselves. Or was it just me going stir crazy with cabin fever? I was clearly losing it. Just as my thoughts were going to push me into a downward spiral of negative emotions, the cat began to purr. The vibration flowed through me, a positive charge absorbing all the negatives. The rhythm was regular and comforting, making me feel at home in this flat, my flat, at last. It was a familiar feeling from a long time ago and I realised I’d known him my whole life.
I switched off the TV and moved closer to him, listening to his purr get louder and louder, watching his tummy rise and fall. Instinctively I then curled up into a ball next to him, my face close to his belly. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. I lay there in the most comfortable silence. Talking, words, would have made it uncomfortable, or at least, not as pleasurable. I stared at the dark shadows seeping into the walls and indulged in the subtle concepts and figures only the darkness can convey. Soothing ambiguity, the sweetness of mystery. Tree branches in an embrace, shapes of fantastical beasts, unicorns, phoenixes and a stallion with a heroic rider.
The streetlamp soaked the room in a sepia tone, putting me in the centre of an old photograph. A perfect moment frozen in time. A family in a rose garden having tea. A porcelain-skinned dancer in the middle of a graceful move. Best friends smiling together before they go off to war. Two lovers on their first date. Oh how sentimental! What was I thinking? I was about to wrench myself up when he stirred and his fur surrounded my face, my eyes, my nose, my lips. It felt so cosy and smooth. A divine musk filled my head with hope and I breathed it in as deeply as I could. It seemed to break through a barrier in my mind, unblocking it. I inhaled deeper and deeper, thoughts becoming less and less, just concentrating on the sensation of breathing.
I lay there for I don’t know how long. Time didn’t matter anymore. It was like it was frozen. Maybe it didn’t really exist. He didn’t seem to think so. I was so relaxed and the feeling of things slipping away made me happy. My breathing and his fell into the same rhythm and it was the only sound. The only ‘thing’. Well, what else was there? I’d forgotten. I don’t want to say what I experienced exactly. It doesn’t have to be put into words. And what happened next doesn’t really matter. But I will tell you anyway, in case you’re interested. Or it happens to you one day and you need to know about ‘after’.
I heard what sounded like a flutter of wings and he sat up in a flash. It was even darker now because not even the streetlamp was on. I couldn’t see anything except his eyes and somehow they were glowing, his pupils large. I looked into them and they burned into me. His expression was so intense, as if he was concentrating on something deep inside me. He wasn’t reading anymore, he was writing. Inscribing something on my soul, I'd like to think. I heard the fluttering again and thought I caught a glimpse of white out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t be sure. His pupils contracted the tiniest bit and his eyes became green as the other colours disappeared. I sensed he was leaving me, but I knew it wasn’t his choice. That made it easier. His eyes came right up to mine as the last bit of turquoise changed to green. The edge of his eyelids drew inwards and down, making his eyes look sad. They then disappeared in a swish of his eyelashes, before he opened them again. He gave me one last look, and then he was gone. I realised that the window was still open.
I felt sad, but not alone as I lay there in the dark. I could still smell him on my cushions. I stayed in the same position for a long while, comfortable in my own home by myself for once. Then slowly, I began to move. I uncurled myself, unfolding my arms and wrists and sat upright again. I unwound my whole body, stretching out from my toes to my fingers and then took the crick out of my neck, regaining my human posture. I turned the TV on and the loud, raucous noises sounded unnatural at first. Then the phone rang and I realised it was now morning. My voice cracked when I answered it, like I hadn’t used it for years. My friend chattered away at me, telling me last night was the warmest night for ages and it was the end of The Big Freeze. I made plans to go out that night.
Tuesday 17 November 2009
From The Recesses Of The Mind This Month
another tale of ordinary madness…
you’d better come with me.
He flashed a portentous smile, and I wondered whether I should be worried or amazed.
I followed Him down the stairs and across the next floor. heads were out, eyes staring, as if everybody knew.
then the eternal colleague’s voice: oh thank fuck it’s not me.
He marched into His office, pointing at the hard, low chair opposite His high desk.
KEEP ONE HAND ON EACH KNEE AND DON’T MOVE YOUR HANDS!
He sat there staring down at me. I didn’t know what He expected me to say so I didn’t say anything. but I knew the war had begun. my eye began to itch and I reached up to rub it.
WATCH THAT HAND!!
He continued staring right through me until I had the weird sensation that I’d turned invisible. He then dialled a short number on his phone.
MARTA GET ME A DOUBLE ESPRESSO, A DARK BERRY MOCHA FRAPPUCCINO, A STEAK AND CHEESE PANINI, TOASTED, A BLT AND A MARSHMALLOW TWIZZLE.
He slammed the receiver down, then sat there staring again for a while. I heard the hydrochloric acid eating away at His stomach lining.
DO YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE HERE?
yes and no.
DON’T GET SMART WITH ME. IT WON’T DO YOU ANY FAVOURS.
I know about the redundancies. but why am I up for it?
NEVER ASK THAT QUESTION.
why?
BECAUSE YOU’LL NEVER GET A SATISFACTORY ANSWER.
but why?
the door opened and the new girl behind the desk came in with legs. long legs. her face was covered up by the big Starbuck’s paper bag she was carrying on top of a tray of drinks.
WE’VE HAD TO CUT COSTS DUE TO THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN.
the new girl behind the desk took half the Starbuck’s menu out of the bag, and arranged it neatly on His desk.
but why me exactly?
LOOK, JUST TAKE YOUR LETTER AND DO AS YOU’RE TOLD OK? THAT WAY, NO ONE GETS HURT.
as He shouted, a piece of fatty bacon from Starbuck’s BLT swung about on one of His canines. He continued staring at me while taking chunks out of His sandwich. I figured it was time to leave, before He did the same to me.
my part of the office turned into the grey cell it had always looked like. it was a Friday afternoon and across the room I could see colleagues gassing by the photocopier. others laughed as they stuck coins into the coke machine. how lucky they were! everything seemed so free and easy over there. the letter had already made its way to my desk. I sat there trying to figure out what I had done. I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad. the kind that only sickos can cause.
Mad Watson, the IT guy, came over to speak to me. he was a freak. we were all freaks. he scratched the psoriasis on his elbows erratically as he spoke. flakes of shed, diseased skin floated in the air, waiting to be breathed in.
so are you going down then?
yeah.
no way.
how long they give you?
a month.
that’s harsh.
yeah.
you know, He terminated 10 guys last week and then right away terminated another. screwed them all right in the ass. two are now trying to claim incapacity benefit.
HEY, BREAK IT UP!
the lines had been drawn and the managers made sure that the two sides were kept apart. the managers were stupid and scared. I felt sorry for them. they really believed that I was the enemy. although there were benefits to being on the weaker side. my line manager stopped talking to me and left a room whenever I entered, as if I was full of pathogenic bacteria. I didn’t need a microscope to know what he was full of. honour among shareholders. keep the company strong so you can rob it.
I was allowed to talk to Bubba though, the big guy in accounts, as he was on the same side as me. he was always up for redundancy, but kept getting saved. he had his fingers in too many pies and bookkeeping pies are the sweetest ones to have your fingers in. that made him corporate enemy No. 1.
I caught up with him in the toilets. he was rocking back and forth on the pot laughing, with the door wide-open and his trousers round his ankles, saying, eat my shit, eat my shit, over and over. it was the best advice I’d had all day.
by the time the day of the final meeting came, I was almost beaten.
the putty-voiced woman from HR did most of the talking. He was busying himself with something on His computer. it appeared to be extremely fascinating, as His eyes were glued to the screen.
do you understand why you’ve been made redundant?
yeah.
and you agree that we’ve tried to find you other positions within the company, yet you turned down our proposals of relocating you to our growing offices in Minsk, Belarus, or moving you over to the successful incontinence pads account?
yeah.
HA, JUST LOOK AT THAT SCORE!
I figured He was busying himself with playing an important computer game.
ok well good luck, because it’s tough out there. but you know, the company will be hiring again in a few months, so you’re welcome to apply for your old job again then.
GOT YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH!
I didn’t re-apply for my old job. I walked straight out of there and never looked back. that’s how I won the war.
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
It all starts when something inside my head explodes, a big bang, the effect of which wakes me up with a jolt. I’m in a strange place, in an unfamiliar bed with someone performing a lobotomy on my brain. What? Help! An abduction by aliens? The thoughts pass by in a nanosecond before I work out that I am actually in my mate’s bed, fully clothed, with a beer mat stuffed in my mouth and a headache that contains the power of a nuclear bomb. What’s a beer mat doing in my mouth? Oh it’s my tongue. But, more to the point, what am I doing here? The existential question. I look for evidence, and see a purse lying on the floor, my purse, thank you God, but nothing else. So where the fuck is my bag, my keys! I scan the room again and again, but they don’t materialise.
At that moment I realise that this isn’t actually where it all starts. Something definitely happened before to create all this…this mess. But at the moment, it’s all a mystery. My mate appears to fill in the holes. Shoreditch, wine, shots of sambuca, Red Church bar, leaving my bag in a corner so I could dance. Oh yes, the memory’s coming back to me very clearly now, God it’s almost like I’m there again. No more, please. So I’ve lost my keys, which means I can’t get into my flat as my flat mate’s away. And shit, the only people with spare keys are my parents.
Why does this keep happening to me? I mean, just recently I had my 35th birthday, so surely I should’ve stopped acting like a kid? I can’t believe I need my Mum to get me out of this one. The shame. So I work out that to get into my flat, which is geographically just down the road, I need to travel over 20 miles. Because it’s not simply geography that’s in the equation now. You have to factor in the effect of my childish behaviour and uselessness, which means I now need to travel to my parent’s house to pick up the spare keys and then come back again. I think it’s about time I grew up.
I’m punishing myself by embarking on this journey with no pleasures. No food or drink or music. I’m hoping it’ll cleanse my soul and somehow turn me into an adult. Well, age hasn’t done anything for me, so more drastic action is obviously necessary. I’ll be like a pilgrim on a pilgrimage to the shrine of adulthood and maturity, with nothing to distract me except my thoughts of how to become a grown up.
It’s hard to focus when you’re on the bus though. All around me people are giggling, chattering, eating, drinking or playing annoying games on their phones. There’s a row of people, adults, who’re sat there pressing buttons on their mobiles, their mouths hanging open. Then I spot this woman sat next to them as she strips the skin off a leg of ‘Kennedy Fried Chicken’, and lets the clear fat run down the sides of her mouth. She doesn’t even wipe it off with the handy wipe. Next to her is a guy gazing at a nubile teen posing topless in a national newspaper. Another woman stares into the magazine she’s holding up, captivated by the bright colours and pretty faces. The bloke nearest me then slurps hard through the straw in his carton of drink. To my hungover brain it’s worse than nails down a blackboard. My eyes start to water.
But it all gets me thinking. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I mean, by the look of it, it’s actually not just me who acts like a kid. If you think about it, people in general still behave like children. We’re not really that civilised. Look how here everyone’s still going by their basic instincts. Driven by food, drink and boobs. How easily they’re distracted, manipulated, dominated. It’s like everyone just got older but didn’t grow up. Fuck it, you may as well say the whole of freakin’ humanity acts like a kid.
Let’s list the behavioural similarities. I picture a Venn diagram in my head (as this is serious scientific stuff), with one circle containing the word ‘kid’ and the other ‘adult’. I fill the crossover bit with the shared behaviours. Possessiveness, naivety, impulsiveness, tantrums, reactive, self-centered, controlled by fear and pleasure. Ok, I know there are good versions of the similarities too. The desire to explore and inquisitiveness being the main ones.
My Venn diagram is then erased from my mind by a poke in the ribs from the woman behind me. From that signal I gather that it’s time to get off the bus and head for the tube. I step into a carriage and onto the nearest seat, finding myself opposite a little girl playing with her Barbie. She’s really working that doll, making her perform all kinds of elaborate gymnastics. Then she uses the handrail as a prop for Barbie to dance around, and suddenly there’s Barbie pole dancing right before my eyes. Her younger brother sits and stares, transfixed by ‘Pole Dancer Barbie’, now holding his toy soldier limply in his hand. I stare at the lifeless, plastic soldier. If we go along with my theory that we’re all kids, it means that kids are in charge. And if you think about it, there’s a great deal of truth in that. From the Romans to George W Bush, those in power have acted like kids playing a game.
You know that kid’s game, ‘I’m the King of the Castle, and you’re the dirty rascals’, where a group of kids run to the top of a hill or climbing frame and the one who gets there first shouts out that little rhyme? Well, it’s like the people in power are the ones who got to the top first and then bagsied it. And you remember what it’s like to ‘bagsy’ something. It becomes your prized possession, and no bastard is going to take it away from you. Well, that’s what happened with the people in power. Or should I say kids? They created the hierarchical structure of power that still exists today and did anything to safeguard it. The territory of power. The bully’s territory. “Hey, get lost, this is my patch.” And they’ll go to war with anyone who tries to bagsie it off them.
It’s all in the game, as they say in the TV show The Wire. The system those in power created is basically a game. And of course it's a game. What else would kids do but play games? And, you know, we always want to change the rules and play it our way, because we complain that the game is rigged. But then we still want to win, and get our own way. And it’s our competitiveness that perpetuates the game. Either that or our childish desires and want, want, wants. Be it a chocolate bar or a Nintendo DS. We’ve gone and trapped ourselves in this darned game. And with each new kid in power (King of The Castle), the rules get interpreted slightly differently to suit themselves. “Ok, now we go anti-clockwise around the board, and a 6 is the lowest score on the dice.”
The little girl is now handing a plastic oven over to her brother. It looks like the soldier has been given orders to cook Pole Dancer Barbie dinner. Isn’t it only kids who cheat in games? ‘Adults’ teach them that cheating’s wrong, but then our whole system is based on cheating people. Hey, it relies on it for christ’s sake. Those who don’t know the rules properly are taken advantage of. And don’t you find that these rules aren’t really properly explained anyway? It’s like they’re made as complicated as possible, with all the jargon and gibberish, so only the gang in charge can understand them. Like those kids at school who created their own language by putting the last letter of every word at the front instead. Take the economy for instance. Yeah, there are basic rules. But then the latest gang in power adds their own secret stuff on top, rewriting the rules so they get most of the money. It’s like they’re holding all the Community Chest cards in Monopoly, right under our noses chanting, “Na-na-na-naaa-naaaaa!” Just kids messing around playing a game.
There are either delays or engineering works happening on almost every underground line, so my pilgrimage is taking twice as long. But I finally get to Waterloo, and head up to the overground trains. The stupid system doesn’t let me use the same ticket underground as overground, so I have to queue up for another ticket to take the train to my parent’s house. And there are only 2 ticket booths open, so the queue from where I’m standing appears to go into infinity. I mean, who’s running this transport system. You’d think a kid was in charge or something. Hmmm.
It’s unbelievable really, I think as I stand in the endless queue, watching train after train disappear off the information matrix, while I’m left here, stationary. So my mind starts wandering instead. At least a part of me feels like it's getting somewhere. Yeah, so humanity is just a load of overgrown kids playing an elaborate game. We created our Land Of Make Believe and filled it with nations, economies, religions, political systems, societies, etc. And you know, in the Land Of Make Believe, you have to believe for it to all work, for it all to exist. When people lose confidence in the economy say, when they don’t have faith in it anymore, that’s when it starts to weaken and collapse. I don’t have faith in the sodding transport system. Maybe that’s why it’s so crap.
And the thing is, we forget that we actually have the power – all of us, every single one. Because it’s our collective belief that matters. But guess what? We don’t really want to make our own decisions, we want someone else to make all the big choices for us. That’s because we’re still kids. It’s why we don’t mind having leaders telling us what to do, be it politicians, religious figures or scientists. And the funny thing is, they all have someone in charge of them. Why do you think God is called Father in Judaism and Christianity, or The Great Mother (The Tao) in Chinese philosophy? We even refer to nature as Mother, as we still need and want that guide, that leader, that comforter, that Daddy or Mummy.
I finally make it to the train and sit next to the window, and as the train pulls away, I watch the station get smaller and smaller, until it just disappears. Then I look down at people in the streets below the railway track, watching them zigzag here and there, going about their little lives like ants. We are so, so, so tiny in the universe, and from such a small perspective, we can only see a tiny fraction of what’s going on out there. We’ve got the child’s view, the kid under the table who can only see Mother Nature’s feet. We haven’t got anywhere near finding out what her face looks like. I read somewhere that, according to scientists, the universe is about 12 or 13 billion years old, and that it’s got another 200 billion years to go. So it’s a child itself really. Humanity’s similarly just a kid. Humans have only been around for 200,000 years, and if we live till the end of the earth, that’s another 7.5 million years. So we are almost babies, and it may take thousands or even millions of years for us to become true adults.
But then those calculations are just what the scientist’s say. And this is The Land Of Make Believe, so you can’t really believe anything one hundred percent. I mean none of the theories of life and existence have been proven (be it God, the Big Bang or even that our universe is carried on the back of huge turtles) any more than ghosts, fairies or the bogeyman have been disproved. No one knows for sure. Let’s take the Big Bang, the event that was apparently the beginning of everything, or at least, our universe. There are still so many unanswered questions. Like what created the energy that caused it?
Scientific theories keep changing, making it even harder for us kids to know what to believe in. Back in Newton’s day, people thought that the universe was deterministic, that every single action could be predicted. Cause and effect. In that way of looking at the world, there’s no free will, it’s like we’re all programmed to do all our actions. Mother Nature’s children being told what to do. Or little characters in a computer game.
Then quantum physics came along with all its unpredictability, randomness and lack of laws and rules, pissing on the idea of cause and effect and giving us all a freakin’ massive headache. It exploded the idea that all probabilities can happen at once, that the past can happen at the same time as the future and light is both waves and particles. There isn’t just one universe, oh no, there are multiverses and therefore infinite probability.
The train shudders to a halt in between stations and a man’s tired voice mumbles something over the intercom about signals and waits. I’m now only nearly halfway through my pilgrimage, and my hungover brain is going to crash. I imagine my thoughts as trains travelling around it that suddenly grind to a stop. I then think of nothing and just gaze out the window at a man and his son trying to eat fried egg sandwiches without spilling any of the yolk down their shirts. Neither is successful. The train squeaks as if in protest, but still lurches forward, and we're moving at last. The sudden movement also nudges my trains of thought around my brain again.
Yeah, so the Big Bang, God, multiverses or the universe sitting on top of huge turtles. They’re all unproven. Fairy stories for us kids to believe in, as it seems like we need something to believe in. Which brings us to humanity’s biggest game of all - The Meaning Of Life. Like the game ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ that kids play or the numerous riddles and puzzles, The Meaning of Life is a guessing game where only the big questions are asked, and we attempt to answer them. The scientists are in one set of teams, religious followers in another, and then there are the various philosophy teams.
A big part of this game is questioning reality. It can go a bit like this. “I believe in fairies.” “They don’t exist you dummy.” “How do you know?” “Well, I’ve never seen one.” “Well, I’ve never seen God or those strings in that string theory. Not even under a microscope. So ner ner na ner ner.” “Alright, well what about this. If a tree falls in a forest but there’s no one to hear it, did it make a noise?”
I laugh to myself as I wonder, if my keys got lost and no one was around to see it happen, then did it actually happen? Maybe they were already lost? Or, better still, always lost. In which case, it really isn’t my fault. I suddenly feel a lot better about myself.
So what’s real and what’s not? I watch a fly head butting the train window time and time again. To try to understand what reality is, a lot of people contrast it with illusion. Although I reckon Philip K Dick summed up reality well when he said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” So it’s what’s consistent for everyone. What we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. And it’s the perceptions and interpretations of this reality that are different.
Whether you’re a scientist, a religious person or follower of a certain philosophy, you’re producing your own ‘reality’ by acting on a specific interpretation and your knowledge of it. That’s how we created our Land Of Make Believe. We’ve named everything in it and have given it all a meaning. Nothing had a meaning until we came along and gave it one. It’s not just nations and countries that we’ve made up. What about a week, a month, a year? The planets, the solar system, atoms, quarks, the past, the future? They only mean those things to us humans. They only are those things to us humans. That train window is real to the fly, but it doesn’t see it as a window. It could see it as the edge of its world, its enemy, a series of zeros and ones or it might not see it at all. It could simply ‘sense’ it as hard.
It’s why I kind of side with the philosophy of those weak social constructionalist guys, who think that we’ve socially constructed our ‘reality’ through social interactions, common perceptions of reality, common sense and common knowledge, all of which have been negotiated by people. We’ve been like kids fabricating a ‘reality’ in the corner of the playground, with dolls, teddies and trees with time machines on the top, monsters that live beyond the fence and people made from ice-cream. Baudrillard called it the ‘simulacrum’, where modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, so that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself.
You know, when you get down to it, what are scientists, philosophers and religious-types but just a bunch of kids asking question after question, and then battling to answer them, trying to outdo one another, the winner being the team with the most followers? The Wire should have had a 6th season based around this biggest game of all. Forget the small-scale street, gangs and political stuff, what about the game the scientists, religious leaders and philosophers are playing, and the money, corruption and lies surrounding it? We’ve become so caught up in it that we don’t realise it is a game. Most of us think that the Land of Make Believe is real.
Why has this game taken over our lives? Is it because it distracts us from the only thing we can be sure of? That is, you know, we all die. I hate to be morbid, but that is one thing that has been proven time and again. So in this life at least, we’re all losers in the end and because we’re still children, we look for comfort when faced with this frightening fact. So we’ve created this illusion, this game to divert our attention away from our own mortality, and we’ve put into our heads the comforting possibility of life after death and immortality of the soul - the human race even. “Daddy, has Max died?” “No sweetheart, he’s gone to doggie heaven.”
We’re children who’re afraid of the dark and need to know all the answers, but as we’re still the kids under the table only able to see Mother Nature’s feet, it’s almost impossible to know it all, to know the truth. Rather than us inventing our reality, perhaps something else has? Our universe could be someone else’s game, like SimCity, where we’re the little kids being told what to eat, what to wear and what to say. Ha, what a turn up for the books that’d be. Our game is just a game within a game. But how do we find out what the truth is? Buddhists reckon that material reality, that is, our world, knowledge and time are all an illusion and we can only see past it to find the truth through meditation. Others believe drink or drugs work just the same.
So when I finally get back to my flat and my pilgrimage is over, I realise that, ironically, the most adult thing I can do in the here and now is to pour myself a glass of red wine. I sit on my sofa and take a sip, ready to escape from this ‘reality’ and find the ‘truth’. I smile as I hold my keys in my hand, their metallic coldness contrasting with the warm satisfying feeling of the wine in my belly. Hmmm, this is going to be fun, I think to myself. Just don’t go telling my Mum, ok?
Monday 26 October 2009
From The Recesses Of The Mind This Month
London’s on edge. There’s tension in the air. It’s as if a fight’s going to break out at any minute. It can be seen on the grim faces in the streets and heard in the aggressive tone of the conversations in pubs. You see, the economic downturn has exasperated the ‘us and them’ situation, us being the employees, and them, the big bosses. And the rumour among us workers is that our masters are taking advantage of this recession, making redundancies (the euphemism for being fired) under the guise of essential cost cutting, so they can get rid of the people they don’t like. The rebels, or clock-watchers as ‘they’ call them, you know, the ones who stand up for themselves and have a life.
The powers that be have also introduced the pay freeze, which is forecast to last for at least the next 6 months. And this, along with the firings, has meant that us workers have had to take on more work for the same money, without the hope of a bonus or pay rise. We can’t move jobs, as the big bosses have worked together to come up with a cunning plan in the form of the no hiring mandate, which orders that there can’t be any hirings after a firing for, yes you’ve guessed it, at least the next 6 months. So we’re trapped into doing more work for the same wage, and made to think that we’re just lucky to still have a job.
And through it all we’ve kept our heads down without saying a word like the good little workers we’re supposed to be, for fear of being put in the firing line ourselves and having a black mark against our names, turning us into ‘untouchables’ or outcasts, meaning it’d be hard to get another decent job. But now we’ve had enough, and last Monday signalled the beginning of the uprising. Yes, we’ve begun to play them at their own game. If they’ve been taking advantage of the worst recession in 30 years, then we were going to use the worst snowfall in London for 20 years as an excuse to have a day off work to spend with family and friends.
And what a great day it was. We all reverted back to being kids, naughtily skiving off school, while every street and park became a playground as communities made snowmen and threw snowballs at each other. One of the best things about it was that us workers did it together. There was solidarity. It was a day where we all stood up against ‘them’. Many of us stayed at home to have fun in the snow, even those who could have made it in, as their commute wasn’t really disrupted. And the strength in numbers weakened the big bosses’ power, as they couldn’t penalise scores of the workforce – apparently a fifth of Britain’s workers didn’t make it into the office.
Yes it’s the worst recession for 30 years and the worst snowfall in 20, but we’ve also just had the best Monday in living memory. So they can keep their Black Monday, because we’ll always have our white one.
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Everyone looks past her as she struggles to get on the packed bus with her baby, buggy and bags full of shopping. We sit there, motionless. Something holds us back from helping her. A strange urban force that pins us down in our places, making us incapable of interacting with our neighbours.
It takes her at least 3 minutes too long to get on. The mob doesn’t appreciate the wait, so it starts firing the killer looks and sharp tuts. She doesn’t even flinch, and bulldozes past the glares with her thousand-yard stare, and parks the buggy in the pram space next to the swarm of fly-girls waiting to squat her. It’s like she can’t hear their sniggers and snide comments. Her face a gnarled prison wall, that’s being constantly chipped away at.
She sits and looks out the window at the continuous line of cement, pebbledash, fences, barbed wire, alarms, anti-climb paint, arguments, bums and drug deals. The kid now with a face like mashed banana and peach, screams blue murder. For the murder of her mother. You can see the evidence in Mum’s dead eyes, her glazed glass eyes that have been swallowed and then spat out. Piss holes in the dirt.
Even when her kid cries she doesn’t stir. She doesn’t even blink, just sits and stares out the window. Maybe that’s the best way to look after children. Ignore them. That way you can’t be blamed for how they turn out. Eventually she plugs the hole with a plastic nipple and the wailing stops immediately. From the dark shadows under her blood shot eyes, you can tell she lives for the bottle. It’s a great tranquilizer. Hers just contains warm milk.
Although from the way the kid’s dressed you know she’s loved. Matching pink shoes, coat and hair bands, then there are her bright eyes with a spark that sets off smiles all round the bus. Her soft, glowing, comfortable skin. All the care has been sucked out of the mother and into her, and I think about who’s there to take care of Mum. Some woman looks at the kid and starts to pull stupid faces. The kid giggles. It carries on for a while, but the mother barely acknowledges this tender interaction. For a good few minutes she has a respite from her persistent job and can relax and let people baby-sit for a change.
Harder than any knife-carrying gang member, the mother carries on relentlessly day after day with the odds stacked against her. I see her doing this journey everyday. Not for herself, but for her kid. It’s as if she’s not actually living in the present at all, but in the future. Maybe that’s why she can’t hear those snide comments. And I wonder what she actually sees out that bus window.
I watch her take great effort to get off at her stop, manoeuvring with difficulty past all the people standing in her way. But she makes it. I hope I see her again tomorrow. Somehow her presence is comforting.
It takes her at least 3 minutes too long to get on. The mob doesn’t appreciate the wait, so it starts firing the killer looks and sharp tuts. She doesn’t even flinch, and bulldozes past the glares with her thousand-yard stare, and parks the buggy in the pram space next to the swarm of fly-girls waiting to squat her. It’s like she can’t hear their sniggers and snide comments. Her face a gnarled prison wall, that’s being constantly chipped away at.
She sits and looks out the window at the continuous line of cement, pebbledash, fences, barbed wire, alarms, anti-climb paint, arguments, bums and drug deals. The kid now with a face like mashed banana and peach, screams blue murder. For the murder of her mother. You can see the evidence in Mum’s dead eyes, her glazed glass eyes that have been swallowed and then spat out. Piss holes in the dirt.
Even when her kid cries she doesn’t stir. She doesn’t even blink, just sits and stares out the window. Maybe that’s the best way to look after children. Ignore them. That way you can’t be blamed for how they turn out. Eventually she plugs the hole with a plastic nipple and the wailing stops immediately. From the dark shadows under her blood shot eyes, you can tell she lives for the bottle. It’s a great tranquilizer. Hers just contains warm milk.
Although from the way the kid’s dressed you know she’s loved. Matching pink shoes, coat and hair bands, then there are her bright eyes with a spark that sets off smiles all round the bus. Her soft, glowing, comfortable skin. All the care has been sucked out of the mother and into her, and I think about who’s there to take care of Mum. Some woman looks at the kid and starts to pull stupid faces. The kid giggles. It carries on for a while, but the mother barely acknowledges this tender interaction. For a good few minutes she has a respite from her persistent job and can relax and let people baby-sit for a change.
Harder than any knife-carrying gang member, the mother carries on relentlessly day after day with the odds stacked against her. I see her doing this journey everyday. Not for herself, but for her kid. It’s as if she’s not actually living in the present at all, but in the future. Maybe that’s why she can’t hear those snide comments. And I wonder what she actually sees out that bus window.
I watch her take great effort to get off at her stop, manoeuvring with difficulty past all the people standing in her way. But she makes it. I hope I see her again tomorrow. Somehow her presence is comforting.
Monday 19 October 2009
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Last week an unlikely relationship was discovered. You may think I’m talking about the one reported in the papers between the killer whale and the albatross, where the bird flies alongside the killer whale snatching scraps from its kills. But although similar in its unusualness, the one I’m referring to involves the big killer boxer and the little white bird. And, yeah you guessed it, I’m the little white bird.
The first sightings of this improbable relationship happened on Friday at the council gym in Brixton, or as it’s otherwise known, the sea of sweat. As usual, I was strutting around like a headless gull, going from one piece of equipment to the other. I had just finished flapping over having to adjust the seat on the seated leg press because one of the huge bull sperm whales had just been on it, when the killer boxer hunted me down. Now in the gym’s food chain, the little white bird is low, low down, basically in the anaerobic detritus, so I knew immediately that I had no chance as he propelled his heavy, stocky body over towards me, cutting through the sweat and testosterone with ease.
He got down to business straight away, by stunning me with his superior, tertiary consumer gym knowledge. “You know, you’re not getting the most out of that machine,” he said, loudly, with a hint of derision in his voice. Now in the sea of sweat what this really means is “You know, doing it that way means global warming is going to flood the earth before you get to shift that behind.” All the sperm whales turned around at once to watch this interesting spectacle. Even a couple of hammerheads put down their weights for a second and looked over. And the old turtle, upside down on the mat kicking his legs in the air, popped his head out and sat staring with his mouth open.
Now little white birds aren’t like puffins. We don’t preen ourselves before we go to the gym, put make-up on or wear the skimpiest outfits. We’re more like the penguins, who spend their time waddling along on a low setting on the treadmill, keeping their heads down, not wanting to be noticed. Us little white birds know our technique isn’t up to scratch and that the weights we struggle with, everyone else can move just by breathing on them. But we don’t appreciate this being pointed out to the whole gym. Yet at the same time, I did want to get the most out of the machine, otherwise I might as well be getting the most out of my sofa at home. So he’d successfully caught me.
And after killing me on that machine, he went on to kill me in lots of different ways. He was waiting on a client and had 20 minutes to spare, so he told me he could show me a few kickboxing and self-defence moves. I didn’t really have a choice as he summoned me over to the mats pointing out that it’s a dangerous world out there, and little white birds can’t be too prepared.
He passed me a pair of bulky great boxing gloves and stood directly in front of me. As I put them on, I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror. We looked like one of those diagrams at the Natural History Museum where the small human figure is about 100th of the size of the blue whale or Tyrannosaurus Rex. I reckoned I could fit into him at least 6 times. Underneath our diagram there’d be descriptors for both of us. His would read:
Height: 6.5 feet
Weight: 6 tonnes
Diet: On average 227 kg of food each day, including whole fish, sea lions, walruses and raw eggs
While mine would be:
Height: 5.2 feet
Weight: Lightweight
Diet: Tuna, chickpeas and rabbit food
He then looked me straight in the eye and asked me to punch him on the back, on the front, just not, you know, down there. He had good reason to be concerned about ‘down there’, seeing as because of the height difference, 'that' was almost directly in front of me. Now, I’ve never hit anyone in my life, let alone a huge great killer whale of a man. I stood there, finding it a bit of a struggle to just hold the heavy gloves up, when he bellowed the words “Come on, hit me!” from deep within, which came out with such force they created a tsunami of spit and sweat that swept across the room. The old turtle sat up startled, his mouth slowly opening and closing. I couldn’t work out whether he was out of breath or drowning. I hit the killer boxer as hard as I felt comfortable with, I mean I didn’t want to hurt the guy. Yet I soon realised that actually, that would’ve been physically impossible. Although my hand was hurting.
“Come on, harder!” he boomed again, and I swear a jet of steam shot out from the top of his head. This time I punched him with all my might, but I expect a gentle fart would’ve had more power behind it. “Look, think of someone you hate and pretend I’m them,” he said with a knowing twinkle in his eye. A series of people jumped into my mind; my ex boss, Boris Johnson, Paris Hilton, but I realised in that moment that I didn’t hate anyone enough, not really.
“Come on, hit me!” he shouted, goading me. To make him shut the hell up I punched him as hard as I could again and again. “Yes, good. That’s it!” he exclaimed, as if I was giving him a soothing massage.
It was my turn to drown and I stopped for a second to gasp for air. “Come on! You’re not even sweating!” he yelled. In that moment, I realised I actually did hate someone enough. Him. This time I punched him again and again and again and again, harder and harder and faster and faster. It must have been a funny sight to all the onlookers, watching a little white bird trying to knock if not seven bells out of a huge killer boxer, then at least the smile off his face.
Then when he’d got bored of killing me that way, he made me stand still while he pulled my leg up almost 180 degrees. He’d obviously mistaken me for a rubber chicken. “Aaargh!” I screamed, to which he replied that I had to get used to that pain as it was the biggest barrier to overcome. I was relieved when it was time to move on to the squats and kickboxing moves. By this time his client, a huge great beluga, had turned up and joined in with us. Despite his size, he was surprisingly fast. Every move I made, he’d made at least 5 minutes before. The killer boxer shouted “Come on!” all the way through and I did until I couldn’t take it anymore and thought I was going to create an ocean of puke in the sea of sweat.
While I lay gasping for air on the bed of mats, all washed up, not unlike a beached whale, his killer instincts quickly moved him onto the sale. I sat there, barely being able to breathe let alone talk as he went on about how he’d like to train me up and what programme he’d put me on. He told me he didn’t charge much as he does it to help people in the community rather than to make loads of money. He apparently teaches underprivileged kids mostly. And why? Well, it turns out that he was in prison for many years and since he’s been out, he’s turned his life around and is helping other people do the same. Like the killer whale itself, he’s been misunderstood and maligned in his past, but really he only attacks in self-defence and underneath all that tough, rubbery skin, he’s pretty soft and intelligent.
So stranger than the killer whale and the albatross’s or the rhino and the oxpecker’s, there began the symbiotic relationship between the big killer boxer and the little white bird. I punch his back, so no one’ll punch mine. He protects me from all the dangerous sharks out there and I help him to feel better about himself and his past (and give him £20 an hour). Although judging from what a challenge it’s going to be, I only hope I don’t turn out to be an albatross around his neck.
The first sightings of this improbable relationship happened on Friday at the council gym in Brixton, or as it’s otherwise known, the sea of sweat. As usual, I was strutting around like a headless gull, going from one piece of equipment to the other. I had just finished flapping over having to adjust the seat on the seated leg press because one of the huge bull sperm whales had just been on it, when the killer boxer hunted me down. Now in the gym’s food chain, the little white bird is low, low down, basically in the anaerobic detritus, so I knew immediately that I had no chance as he propelled his heavy, stocky body over towards me, cutting through the sweat and testosterone with ease.
He got down to business straight away, by stunning me with his superior, tertiary consumer gym knowledge. “You know, you’re not getting the most out of that machine,” he said, loudly, with a hint of derision in his voice. Now in the sea of sweat what this really means is “You know, doing it that way means global warming is going to flood the earth before you get to shift that behind.” All the sperm whales turned around at once to watch this interesting spectacle. Even a couple of hammerheads put down their weights for a second and looked over. And the old turtle, upside down on the mat kicking his legs in the air, popped his head out and sat staring with his mouth open.
Now little white birds aren’t like puffins. We don’t preen ourselves before we go to the gym, put make-up on or wear the skimpiest outfits. We’re more like the penguins, who spend their time waddling along on a low setting on the treadmill, keeping their heads down, not wanting to be noticed. Us little white birds know our technique isn’t up to scratch and that the weights we struggle with, everyone else can move just by breathing on them. But we don’t appreciate this being pointed out to the whole gym. Yet at the same time, I did want to get the most out of the machine, otherwise I might as well be getting the most out of my sofa at home. So he’d successfully caught me.
And after killing me on that machine, he went on to kill me in lots of different ways. He was waiting on a client and had 20 minutes to spare, so he told me he could show me a few kickboxing and self-defence moves. I didn’t really have a choice as he summoned me over to the mats pointing out that it’s a dangerous world out there, and little white birds can’t be too prepared.
He passed me a pair of bulky great boxing gloves and stood directly in front of me. As I put them on, I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror. We looked like one of those diagrams at the Natural History Museum where the small human figure is about 100th of the size of the blue whale or Tyrannosaurus Rex. I reckoned I could fit into him at least 6 times. Underneath our diagram there’d be descriptors for both of us. His would read:
Height: 6.5 feet
Weight: 6 tonnes
Diet: On average 227 kg of food each day, including whole fish, sea lions, walruses and raw eggs
While mine would be:
Height: 5.2 feet
Weight: Lightweight
Diet: Tuna, chickpeas and rabbit food
He then looked me straight in the eye and asked me to punch him on the back, on the front, just not, you know, down there. He had good reason to be concerned about ‘down there’, seeing as because of the height difference, 'that' was almost directly in front of me. Now, I’ve never hit anyone in my life, let alone a huge great killer whale of a man. I stood there, finding it a bit of a struggle to just hold the heavy gloves up, when he bellowed the words “Come on, hit me!” from deep within, which came out with such force they created a tsunami of spit and sweat that swept across the room. The old turtle sat up startled, his mouth slowly opening and closing. I couldn’t work out whether he was out of breath or drowning. I hit the killer boxer as hard as I felt comfortable with, I mean I didn’t want to hurt the guy. Yet I soon realised that actually, that would’ve been physically impossible. Although my hand was hurting.
“Come on, harder!” he boomed again, and I swear a jet of steam shot out from the top of his head. This time I punched him with all my might, but I expect a gentle fart would’ve had more power behind it. “Look, think of someone you hate and pretend I’m them,” he said with a knowing twinkle in his eye. A series of people jumped into my mind; my ex boss, Boris Johnson, Paris Hilton, but I realised in that moment that I didn’t hate anyone enough, not really.
“Come on, hit me!” he shouted, goading me. To make him shut the hell up I punched him as hard as I could again and again. “Yes, good. That’s it!” he exclaimed, as if I was giving him a soothing massage.
It was my turn to drown and I stopped for a second to gasp for air. “Come on! You’re not even sweating!” he yelled. In that moment, I realised I actually did hate someone enough. Him. This time I punched him again and again and again and again, harder and harder and faster and faster. It must have been a funny sight to all the onlookers, watching a little white bird trying to knock if not seven bells out of a huge killer boxer, then at least the smile off his face.
Then when he’d got bored of killing me that way, he made me stand still while he pulled my leg up almost 180 degrees. He’d obviously mistaken me for a rubber chicken. “Aaargh!” I screamed, to which he replied that I had to get used to that pain as it was the biggest barrier to overcome. I was relieved when it was time to move on to the squats and kickboxing moves. By this time his client, a huge great beluga, had turned up and joined in with us. Despite his size, he was surprisingly fast. Every move I made, he’d made at least 5 minutes before. The killer boxer shouted “Come on!” all the way through and I did until I couldn’t take it anymore and thought I was going to create an ocean of puke in the sea of sweat.
While I lay gasping for air on the bed of mats, all washed up, not unlike a beached whale, his killer instincts quickly moved him onto the sale. I sat there, barely being able to breathe let alone talk as he went on about how he’d like to train me up and what programme he’d put me on. He told me he didn’t charge much as he does it to help people in the community rather than to make loads of money. He apparently teaches underprivileged kids mostly. And why? Well, it turns out that he was in prison for many years and since he’s been out, he’s turned his life around and is helping other people do the same. Like the killer whale itself, he’s been misunderstood and maligned in his past, but really he only attacks in self-defence and underneath all that tough, rubbery skin, he’s pretty soft and intelligent.
So stranger than the killer whale and the albatross’s or the rhino and the oxpecker’s, there began the symbiotic relationship between the big killer boxer and the little white bird. I punch his back, so no one’ll punch mine. He protects me from all the dangerous sharks out there and I help him to feel better about himself and his past (and give him £20 an hour). Although judging from what a challenge it’s going to be, I only hope I don’t turn out to be an albatross around his neck.
Friday 25 September 2009
Friday, September 25th, 2009
It’s surprising how going to a book club can really get you into drinking. The pub my book club meets in serves this strong, cloudy cider and whereas Stella Artois is nicknamed ‘wife beater’, this cider is known as the ‘opinion beater’ among my drinking buddies. The idea of having licence to drink it on a Wednesday evening and talk rubbish to total strangers really motivates me to read whatever book is chosen every month. Even if it’s so boring you can’t even be bothered to turn the page, or you have to reread the same sentence fifty times because you’ve been daydreaming about cauliflower cheese.
And last month’s book had been a real challenge, stretching my boredom to its absolute limit. The pages were like the nooks on the side of Everest, the words my depleting oxygen while my eyes searched desperately for the quickest way through without losing my grasp of the story. But at last I made it and was ecstatic with relief. And so it was in an exhausted but delirious frame of mind that I headed down to the pub last Wednesday, hilarious put-downs of the story and characters dancing manically on the tip of my tongue.
I quickly found the table on which were stacked 10 copies of the book in question, politely smiled at the small gathering before heading straight for the bar. One of the strangers who I knew a little better as I’d seen her at a few other meetings, approached me with an expression of terror on her face. My heart sank to my guts and I wished I hadn’t had that coffee before I came out. She came up close, as if the bar was crowded and she was trying to get in on my order.
“She’s here!” she hissed in my ear. “The author, she’s sitting with us at the table.” She didn’t even wait for my reaction and sank back towards the group like a dog that’s just been told off for shitting on the carpet. Oh total twattage. The sweet promise of a pleasant evening turned into a stinking mess in a nanosecond. You see the book was based in Brixton and so the author had probably thought how interesting it’d be to turn up at the Brixton Book Club when they were all going to be talking about it. Plus she probably had nothing better to do, and like us, was a borderline alcoholic.
I went over to the table and, suddenly, like an axe to the head I caught the big voice. It hit me over the head repeatedly giving me a hangover before I’d even had a sip of my cider. My eyes followed it to the big hair, vibrant ethnic top and strong New Zealand accent, bastardised by South London. There she was. Standing out as much from the people around that table as she had done among the insipid characters in her book.
As I sat down she said she was ‘nervous as hell’, before loudly introducing herself as a white middle-class lesbian woman who’d grown up on a council estate in an Afro-Caribbean community, is now married to a Jewish-Indian lady and practices Buddhism. Yeah, that’s what I call nervous. Glad she wasn’t feeling over-confident for Christ’s sake. I mean, someone get the poor woman a drink, it’s obvious her nerves are holding her back (not a pint of the opinion-beater though, obviously). She then talked in detail about her life for a long 10 minutes, justifying the indulgence with the comment that parts of the book were based on it. Had someone told her that this was the night for her one-woman show? I just thanked my lucky stars she hadn’t written the Vagina Monologues.
I started to wonder how she was managing to drain so many glasses of wine, seeing as there was a constant flow of shit coming out of her mouth and therefore surely no chance for any shit to go in. And in that moment with a head full of cloudy cider I had the clearly alarming thought that perhaps the world is made up from those who are writers and those who are readers; those who speak and those who listen. That you’re either a performer or a watcher. So was I destined to be just a reader and listener, was that my fate? I guess my stars weren’t so lucky after all. You see around this table the gap couldn’t have been more obvious. Talk about light years of difference, there was a freaking wormhole between her and us.
“Oh, please be honest when you talk about the book!” she exclaimed excitedly, gulping down her Chenin Blanc, the white wine that turned her face redder and redder with inebriation. I was then witness to perhaps the first silence ever in a pub. The clearing of throats slowly followed it and furtive glances that darted around the table like dispersed snooker balls. I bonded more with these strangers in that brief pause than colleagues I’ve sat next to at work for years. In the glaring eyes, the clasped lips and chomping of the insides of cheeks, we shared a moment, an understanding. We all thought the book was shit.
She’d bewailed that not getting the Orange Prize for Fiction had been so frustrating, but hey, maybe not as frustrating as being sat there unable to tell her what we really thought of her damned book, those hilarious put-downs still break-dancing manically on my tongue. Yet the silence was trounced by 50-odd year old Jan who revealed herself as the author’s greatest fan and a lesbian. She’d read 7 of her books. 7!!! The writer beamed at this news and I swear her head began to grow bigger, stretching her face and smile out until she looked like a deformed Buddha.
Serenity and peace didn’t follow though because after everyone had had a few more drinks the politeness eased and half-truths began to slip out, until a competitive game of ping-pong had begun, where opinions pinged and ponged back between writer and reader. ‘Urgh!’ went the author as she smashed someone’s point into the table. Again and again. The scoreboard wasn’t looking good for the readers and I realised that the cider had let me, no all of us down.
Then Jan her greatest fan performed an unsuspecting drop shot. In a quiet, gentle voice, she said that it had been strange reading a book describing the streets and the people she saw everyday of her life. And this made the book quite ordinary. And because nothing actually really happened and it just plodded along, it was a little, well, disappointing. She’d been waiting for something to happen, waiting for a shock. The author’s face went from looking like Buddha to like she was being buggered in a matter of seconds. At this point we all detected friction between Jan the greatest fan and the writer. So much resistance had developed in fact, that they’d both become stuck for words. They sat there staring at each other across the table. Jan the small, unassuming lesbian (ex greatest fan) on one side and the larger than life, (yet apparently not big enough for fiction judging from that elusive Orange prize), overconfident lesbian on the other. Reader against writer.
The author weakened first by saying that nothing really happened in the book because she had wanted it to be like a real-life documentary. And in reality, nothing so out of the ordinary does happen in Brixton. At least not often. The tension was eased by another round of drinks being delivered to the table, yet the author quickly necked hers while telling us that her wife had texted her to say she needed her at home (probably to open a jar of pickles or something). Her ability to down her drink and use the corner of her mouth to speak, looking not dissimilar to a Dover Sole, was possibly her greatest talent.
Now that she was gone, the conversation really started. Jan said into her pint glass that it’s a shame when you’ve liked a writer for years and finally meet her only to discover that you really don’t like her as a person. Ha! I’ll say that was worth 53 hundred points at least to the readers.
She went on to say in her soft and gentle voice that, personally, her novel about Brixton would be one based on rape and violence. Because Jan, who has lived here for over 25 years then told us that she’d been raped in her own flat 10 years ago. She had wanted a shock from the book, yet ended up giving all of us one instead. After it happened she went away for a while but came back to the same flat and still lives there now. That’s how much she loves Brixton, needs Brixton. We all had more drinks and each of us strangers shared our own stories about Brixton, none as shocking or upsetting as Jan’s, they were heart-warming, funny and touching. And there at last were the real stories, the real characters. It was a shame the writer had missed us. But that was because she’d been too busy talking about herself.
It was enough to put me off wanting to be a writer, but then through my cloudy cider-addled head the clearest thought of the evening emerged. I thought of Bukowski, DBC Pierre and Hunter S and remembered that the best writers are the readers, the watchers and the listeners because they can see that something out of the ordinary does happen everyday, especially somewhere like Brixton.
And last month’s book had been a real challenge, stretching my boredom to its absolute limit. The pages were like the nooks on the side of Everest, the words my depleting oxygen while my eyes searched desperately for the quickest way through without losing my grasp of the story. But at last I made it and was ecstatic with relief. And so it was in an exhausted but delirious frame of mind that I headed down to the pub last Wednesday, hilarious put-downs of the story and characters dancing manically on the tip of my tongue.
I quickly found the table on which were stacked 10 copies of the book in question, politely smiled at the small gathering before heading straight for the bar. One of the strangers who I knew a little better as I’d seen her at a few other meetings, approached me with an expression of terror on her face. My heart sank to my guts and I wished I hadn’t had that coffee before I came out. She came up close, as if the bar was crowded and she was trying to get in on my order.
“She’s here!” she hissed in my ear. “The author, she’s sitting with us at the table.” She didn’t even wait for my reaction and sank back towards the group like a dog that’s just been told off for shitting on the carpet. Oh total twattage. The sweet promise of a pleasant evening turned into a stinking mess in a nanosecond. You see the book was based in Brixton and so the author had probably thought how interesting it’d be to turn up at the Brixton Book Club when they were all going to be talking about it. Plus she probably had nothing better to do, and like us, was a borderline alcoholic.
I went over to the table and, suddenly, like an axe to the head I caught the big voice. It hit me over the head repeatedly giving me a hangover before I’d even had a sip of my cider. My eyes followed it to the big hair, vibrant ethnic top and strong New Zealand accent, bastardised by South London. There she was. Standing out as much from the people around that table as she had done among the insipid characters in her book.
As I sat down she said she was ‘nervous as hell’, before loudly introducing herself as a white middle-class lesbian woman who’d grown up on a council estate in an Afro-Caribbean community, is now married to a Jewish-Indian lady and practices Buddhism. Yeah, that’s what I call nervous. Glad she wasn’t feeling over-confident for Christ’s sake. I mean, someone get the poor woman a drink, it’s obvious her nerves are holding her back (not a pint of the opinion-beater though, obviously). She then talked in detail about her life for a long 10 minutes, justifying the indulgence with the comment that parts of the book were based on it. Had someone told her that this was the night for her one-woman show? I just thanked my lucky stars she hadn’t written the Vagina Monologues.
I started to wonder how she was managing to drain so many glasses of wine, seeing as there was a constant flow of shit coming out of her mouth and therefore surely no chance for any shit to go in. And in that moment with a head full of cloudy cider I had the clearly alarming thought that perhaps the world is made up from those who are writers and those who are readers; those who speak and those who listen. That you’re either a performer or a watcher. So was I destined to be just a reader and listener, was that my fate? I guess my stars weren’t so lucky after all. You see around this table the gap couldn’t have been more obvious. Talk about light years of difference, there was a freaking wormhole between her and us.
“Oh, please be honest when you talk about the book!” she exclaimed excitedly, gulping down her Chenin Blanc, the white wine that turned her face redder and redder with inebriation. I was then witness to perhaps the first silence ever in a pub. The clearing of throats slowly followed it and furtive glances that darted around the table like dispersed snooker balls. I bonded more with these strangers in that brief pause than colleagues I’ve sat next to at work for years. In the glaring eyes, the clasped lips and chomping of the insides of cheeks, we shared a moment, an understanding. We all thought the book was shit.
She’d bewailed that not getting the Orange Prize for Fiction had been so frustrating, but hey, maybe not as frustrating as being sat there unable to tell her what we really thought of her damned book, those hilarious put-downs still break-dancing manically on my tongue. Yet the silence was trounced by 50-odd year old Jan who revealed herself as the author’s greatest fan and a lesbian. She’d read 7 of her books. 7!!! The writer beamed at this news and I swear her head began to grow bigger, stretching her face and smile out until she looked like a deformed Buddha.
Serenity and peace didn’t follow though because after everyone had had a few more drinks the politeness eased and half-truths began to slip out, until a competitive game of ping-pong had begun, where opinions pinged and ponged back between writer and reader. ‘Urgh!’ went the author as she smashed someone’s point into the table. Again and again. The scoreboard wasn’t looking good for the readers and I realised that the cider had let me, no all of us down.
Then Jan her greatest fan performed an unsuspecting drop shot. In a quiet, gentle voice, she said that it had been strange reading a book describing the streets and the people she saw everyday of her life. And this made the book quite ordinary. And because nothing actually really happened and it just plodded along, it was a little, well, disappointing. She’d been waiting for something to happen, waiting for a shock. The author’s face went from looking like Buddha to like she was being buggered in a matter of seconds. At this point we all detected friction between Jan the greatest fan and the writer. So much resistance had developed in fact, that they’d both become stuck for words. They sat there staring at each other across the table. Jan the small, unassuming lesbian (ex greatest fan) on one side and the larger than life, (yet apparently not big enough for fiction judging from that elusive Orange prize), overconfident lesbian on the other. Reader against writer.
The author weakened first by saying that nothing really happened in the book because she had wanted it to be like a real-life documentary. And in reality, nothing so out of the ordinary does happen in Brixton. At least not often. The tension was eased by another round of drinks being delivered to the table, yet the author quickly necked hers while telling us that her wife had texted her to say she needed her at home (probably to open a jar of pickles or something). Her ability to down her drink and use the corner of her mouth to speak, looking not dissimilar to a Dover Sole, was possibly her greatest talent.
Now that she was gone, the conversation really started. Jan said into her pint glass that it’s a shame when you’ve liked a writer for years and finally meet her only to discover that you really don’t like her as a person. Ha! I’ll say that was worth 53 hundred points at least to the readers.
She went on to say in her soft and gentle voice that, personally, her novel about Brixton would be one based on rape and violence. Because Jan, who has lived here for over 25 years then told us that she’d been raped in her own flat 10 years ago. She had wanted a shock from the book, yet ended up giving all of us one instead. After it happened she went away for a while but came back to the same flat and still lives there now. That’s how much she loves Brixton, needs Brixton. We all had more drinks and each of us strangers shared our own stories about Brixton, none as shocking or upsetting as Jan’s, they were heart-warming, funny and touching. And there at last were the real stories, the real characters. It was a shame the writer had missed us. But that was because she’d been too busy talking about herself.
It was enough to put me off wanting to be a writer, but then through my cloudy cider-addled head the clearest thought of the evening emerged. I thought of Bukowski, DBC Pierre and Hunter S and remembered that the best writers are the readers, the watchers and the listeners because they can see that something out of the ordinary does happen everyday, especially somewhere like Brixton.
Friday 4 September 2009
Friday, September 4th, 2009
Sometimes it feels as if I can’t smile. Like there’s some strange power operating my facial muscles with strings that pull down the corners of my mouth to create a grim, unapproachable expression. I catch my face in the reflections of shop windows or mirrors in public toilets and the sight of it scares me. I try and smile, standing there, staring at myself. But instead, a sinister grimace forms, that’s even more horrific than the down-turned mouth.
Yet I’m not the only one. Everywhere I look as I walk down the street are dour expressions. There’s a woman whose face is so screwed up and sour looking, it resembles the bottom of a lemon where all the creases are, with the facial features drawn on. And a man who has let those invisible strings cause permanent damage, pulling all his features down from his eyelids to his bottom lip, which hangs off his face like a full-up leech that’s waiting to fall off.
The other day, I walked through this never-ending misery to the market, where the atmosphere darkened even more, as the cloying stench of dead flesh filled my nostrils and the eerie sound of bones being chopped hit my eardrums. Bang, bang, bang. I looked at the freshly plucked chickens hanging upside down and the pig’s head displayed on its tray, their expressions of boredom and emptiness reflecting mine. Pathetic fallacy, really.
Then a young halal butcher cut my morbid mood dead, with a chirpy, ‘Hi, beautiful day isn’t it?’ I looked at him, trying to hide my amazement at this outrageous show of cheerfulness on such a gloomy day in the middle of one heck of a miserable year. Not only that, but he was also in the middle of toes, tails and tripe. He smiled at me warmly, a little flirtatiously and with such ease that I couldn’t help but be slightly envious. I attempted to smile back but the strings were conspiring against me once more so I ended up just pouting, now looking more like the fish in the next shop. Although being the consummate professional he evidently was, he pretended not to notice and cheekily asked me if I fancied one of his hearts, obviously not really his, but some poor cow’s.
And that’s when I caught it. The strings appeared to break, as I felt a broad smile smoothly spread across my face. It got so wide that it went from my lips to my throat to my chest and into my belly, where it produced a little giggle. This then jumped out of my mouth up my nose and into my eyes. Now a giggle trapped in the eyes is an interesting phenomenon. It makes you see things differently, in a way that’s maybe similar to what the Rastas who sit by the mobile African food stall constantly smoking spliffs experience. It made me see that all the butchers in his shop were laughing and joking as they worked amongst the carcasses.
Well, I thought, if they could laugh with all that death around, then maybe I could amidst these shop carcasses and living corpses. The eerie chopping began to merge into the sunny and relaxed beat of the reggae blaring out from the stall selling Lee Perry and Jimmy Cliff CDs. I walked towards it and one by one like damaged dominoes, the scruffy Jamaican guys who were hanging out there turned and flashed a smile at me.
So, like a social disease destroying the angst and animosity that keeps people apart from each other and society’s barriers in their place, the smile ravaged through the streets of this London suburb, taking people by surprise and invading their eyes. Now I noticed the elegant symmetry of the buildings that sit above the modern shop fronts, and the gentle curve of the market’s road, mimicking the smooth, slight arc of the plantain. Or, could it really be? A smile.
Then through the bus window I saw the council estate. But with these eyes, the colourful washing hung out on a few of the balconies gave the front of the block of flats the look of a Mondrian. Aesthetic, horizontal and vertical lines constructed and brought to harmony and rhythm by intuition and the weekend laundry. Ha! I laughed to myself and the effect became stronger.
And then I saw him. Sat in the corner at the back of the bus.
An old man, ancient even, was laughing silently to himself. His face now a collection of laughter upon laughter line, spreading from the corners of his eyes, nose and mouth to the edge of his receding hairline, as the smile had slowly taken over it. A bright twinkle had permanently infected his eyes, and as I watched him they creased up easily while his mouth freely dropped open to reveal just a few remaining teeth, which smiled back too through the curve of decay. When he spotted me looking at him and smiling, he laughed even harder, throwing his head back. He then put his hand to his eyes as they wept from all that laughter, before checking to see whether I was still smiling. Then he cracked up again. This carried on for at least 4 stops.
I appeared to be the only one who could see him, as everyone else was just staring forward with stony expressions, apparently uninfected. I began to wonder whether he was really there or just some hallucination of this disease. But as I watched him laughing and really cracking up, nothing else mattered anymore but giggling freely back, not caring what anyone thought and this vaguely familiar, exhilarating buzz that it was giving me.
And in that moment I got the joke. And it’s so simple, but for one reason or another, these days it’s become hard to do and we leave it for so long that we actually forget how to do it. But the joke is all you have to do is laugh, the most natural thing in the world, because when you do problems are attacked and ugliness is mutated into something beautiful. It would be easier if the world laughed with you, but if it doesn’t want to or can’t, then, like the old man, just laugh at it. You see, the more you laugh at it, the sooner it’ll become infected too. And unlike Swine Flu, TB or Fear, this is one contagion humanity really needs to catch.
Yet I’m not the only one. Everywhere I look as I walk down the street are dour expressions. There’s a woman whose face is so screwed up and sour looking, it resembles the bottom of a lemon where all the creases are, with the facial features drawn on. And a man who has let those invisible strings cause permanent damage, pulling all his features down from his eyelids to his bottom lip, which hangs off his face like a full-up leech that’s waiting to fall off.
The other day, I walked through this never-ending misery to the market, where the atmosphere darkened even more, as the cloying stench of dead flesh filled my nostrils and the eerie sound of bones being chopped hit my eardrums. Bang, bang, bang. I looked at the freshly plucked chickens hanging upside down and the pig’s head displayed on its tray, their expressions of boredom and emptiness reflecting mine. Pathetic fallacy, really.
Then a young halal butcher cut my morbid mood dead, with a chirpy, ‘Hi, beautiful day isn’t it?’ I looked at him, trying to hide my amazement at this outrageous show of cheerfulness on such a gloomy day in the middle of one heck of a miserable year. Not only that, but he was also in the middle of toes, tails and tripe. He smiled at me warmly, a little flirtatiously and with such ease that I couldn’t help but be slightly envious. I attempted to smile back but the strings were conspiring against me once more so I ended up just pouting, now looking more like the fish in the next shop. Although being the consummate professional he evidently was, he pretended not to notice and cheekily asked me if I fancied one of his hearts, obviously not really his, but some poor cow’s.
And that’s when I caught it. The strings appeared to break, as I felt a broad smile smoothly spread across my face. It got so wide that it went from my lips to my throat to my chest and into my belly, where it produced a little giggle. This then jumped out of my mouth up my nose and into my eyes. Now a giggle trapped in the eyes is an interesting phenomenon. It makes you see things differently, in a way that’s maybe similar to what the Rastas who sit by the mobile African food stall constantly smoking spliffs experience. It made me see that all the butchers in his shop were laughing and joking as they worked amongst the carcasses.
Well, I thought, if they could laugh with all that death around, then maybe I could amidst these shop carcasses and living corpses. The eerie chopping began to merge into the sunny and relaxed beat of the reggae blaring out from the stall selling Lee Perry and Jimmy Cliff CDs. I walked towards it and one by one like damaged dominoes, the scruffy Jamaican guys who were hanging out there turned and flashed a smile at me.
So, like a social disease destroying the angst and animosity that keeps people apart from each other and society’s barriers in their place, the smile ravaged through the streets of this London suburb, taking people by surprise and invading their eyes. Now I noticed the elegant symmetry of the buildings that sit above the modern shop fronts, and the gentle curve of the market’s road, mimicking the smooth, slight arc of the plantain. Or, could it really be? A smile.
Then through the bus window I saw the council estate. But with these eyes, the colourful washing hung out on a few of the balconies gave the front of the block of flats the look of a Mondrian. Aesthetic, horizontal and vertical lines constructed and brought to harmony and rhythm by intuition and the weekend laundry. Ha! I laughed to myself and the effect became stronger.
And then I saw him. Sat in the corner at the back of the bus.
An old man, ancient even, was laughing silently to himself. His face now a collection of laughter upon laughter line, spreading from the corners of his eyes, nose and mouth to the edge of his receding hairline, as the smile had slowly taken over it. A bright twinkle had permanently infected his eyes, and as I watched him they creased up easily while his mouth freely dropped open to reveal just a few remaining teeth, which smiled back too through the curve of decay. When he spotted me looking at him and smiling, he laughed even harder, throwing his head back. He then put his hand to his eyes as they wept from all that laughter, before checking to see whether I was still smiling. Then he cracked up again. This carried on for at least 4 stops.
I appeared to be the only one who could see him, as everyone else was just staring forward with stony expressions, apparently uninfected. I began to wonder whether he was really there or just some hallucination of this disease. But as I watched him laughing and really cracking up, nothing else mattered anymore but giggling freely back, not caring what anyone thought and this vaguely familiar, exhilarating buzz that it was giving me.
And in that moment I got the joke. And it’s so simple, but for one reason or another, these days it’s become hard to do and we leave it for so long that we actually forget how to do it. But the joke is all you have to do is laugh, the most natural thing in the world, because when you do problems are attacked and ugliness is mutated into something beautiful. It would be easier if the world laughed with you, but if it doesn’t want to or can’t, then, like the old man, just laugh at it. You see, the more you laugh at it, the sooner it’ll become infected too. And unlike Swine Flu, TB or Fear, this is one contagion humanity really needs to catch.
Wednesday 19 August 2009
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
STREET CORNER/BRIXTON SOUTHSIDE, LONDON - NIGHT
Ghetto drug-dealing scene. A group of 3 guys, all of them black, are standing and leaning against the wall of Carpet Right. DEALER 2 is covering up part of the poster promoting the Carpet Madness sale, where there’s 70% off everything, so now it just reads, ‘Madness’. A dog trots by and stops to sniff at the dustbin in the foreground, then cocks his leg and pisses on it, marking his territory. They’re all listening intently to DEALER 1 who's in the middle. POV is head level, focusing on DEALER 1, moving from across the road, stopping in the middle for a car to go past, to closer in on their faces. All the while we are listening to DEALER 1.
And he just shot Begsie. Put a cap right in his ass. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t have to go and do that.
No way man!
(Tuts loudly) Not Begsie.
So Begsie’s lying there in a pool of his own blood. His eyes wide open, staring, staring, his body full of holes. He wasn’t even making no trouble you know. I mean, sheeeet. Coulda jus' whipped his ass or something instead.
Are you guys talking about The Wire?
All the guys immediately turn to face the camera. DEALER 1 pulls a scornful face.
An’ what’s it to you motherfucker?
CAMERA MOVES ROUND 180 DEGREES to show the face of BUYER 1. We see he’s a spotty white kid with long, greasy hair, about 17. He’s wearing a Yeah Yeah Yeahs t-shirt and is shivering slightly in the cold night air. Next to him, looking a bit nervous is BUYER 1'S MATE, same age, same long, greasy hair, but he’s wearing a Ramones t-shirt.
Nothing really. Just thought I'd seen that episode, that’s all.
What you good for nothin’ punks doin’ in our territory anyway. This here the ‘states yo.
(Cutting in) Need a fix?
Skunk, hash, coke, ketamine.
A quarter of skunk and 4 wraps of coke.
(Tuts loudly)
How come you guys aren’t by the station anymore?
Got CCTV and all dat shit up there. Cops wanna look like they’re doin’ somethin’, you know. Cleanin’ up the place. But we jus’ become someone else’s problem.
They all laugh.
You right.
O-Tyme, sort this shit out yo.
DEALER 1 deftly passes something to DEALER 2, who takes it smoothly.
Aight. Coke’s £10 a wrap and the skunk's £30. You got the cheese?
There’s a long pause as DEALER 2 stares hard at BUYER 1, while BUYER 1 is looking confused. Then the penny drops.
Money, oh yes.
Follow me y’all.
DEALER 2 takes BUYER 1 and BUYER 1'S MATE off to do the deal down a more secluded alley. DEALER 1 and DEALER 3 watch them go till they’re out of earshot.
So what shit we givin’ those 2 bitches?
'Special Reserve' man, you know, what we cut the base with. Dat motherfuckin’ shit they use to numb baby’s gums.
DEALER 3 cracks up laughing.
Dat right there is tight man. It’s all in the game yo.
Yeah well get the burner out man, we gotta re-up fast, you feel me?
Hang on a minute, don't talk so fast man, I'm not gettin' it. And what's a burner? Remember, I've only just started Season 3.
On DEALER 1 looking pissed.
The lounge of a Georgian conversion flat. A group of 3 guys are sitting on 2 shabby-looking sofas. The room needs a lick of paint and is replete with Tupac and Metropolis posters, Mr Nice books, a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Bill Hicks and The Wire DVDs, a lava lamp and a table covered with smoking ephemera, including pipes and a bong. BUYER 2, black, early twenties, and BUYER 2'S MATE, white, same age, are perched on the edge of the sofa, looking a little uncomfortable, clutching champagne flutes and listening intently to DEALER 4, white, mid-twenties, who’s reclining on the other sofa.
Yes my father’s a Major…ex-Baron Harrold, Lord of Lambeth or something like that. Or perhaps he was a Viscount? Some sort of old school nonsense. Speaking of old skool, there’s this happy hardcore party on tomorrow after the 414. Should be absolutely repulsive. Do you want to come?
Umm…
Lottie will be there. And Adam, Miles and Nina. You know, same old set as usual. Have you two topping fellows met them before? Thinking of dabbling in a bit of acid beforehand. You know, shake the party up a bit. Awfully rather good stuff actually. Last time I took it happened to be the first time I met my new flat mate. Couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Bloody marvellous. Although I did have such a pain the next day. So what are you after?
A bit of hash if you’ve got it?
Oh yes, I’ve got some rather divine hash from the Netherlands. Forget Afghan and Nepalese. This stuff’s the devil. Rapture! Makes you feel so very queer. But in the best possible way you understand. Beats that rotten skunk those cads sell on the streets. Far too bogus. So would you like some?
Yeah, sounds good.
I deal in 10s. Think it’s easier that way. Metric, you know, none of this Imperial nonsense. All those Henry the Eighths and such. I mean to say, we’re not living in the Victorian age now are we? Or are we?
DEALER 4 chortles, while BUYER 2 and BUYER 2'S MATE laugh along politely, looking slightly bored.
You know, I’ve got a free house in Stockwell Gardens this weekend. Father’s away on business or something, he's abroad rather a lot since mother passed away, in Thailand or somewhere over there. Can’t remember where exactly but I do know he’s back on Tuesday, so if you two stout chaps want to come over? It’s a divine place actually rather good for parties, got a huge glass window in the lounge that opens onto the garden. Can be a bit of a hazard though as sometimes you forget it’s there…more prosecco? Come on, don’t be a bore now, I'm not even tight yet.
PULL BACK through the window to the street outside, where we see BUYER 1 AND BUYER 1'S MATE talking with TWO OTHER SPOTTY WHITE KIDS, who're about 15. They swap something in return for a stack of notes. A police car with its lights on and sirens blaring rushes past heading north. We hear a dog barking.
Ghetto drug-dealing scene. A group of 3 guys, all of them black, are standing and leaning against the wall of Carpet Right. DEALER 2 is covering up part of the poster promoting the Carpet Madness sale, where there’s 70% off everything, so now it just reads, ‘Madness’. A dog trots by and stops to sniff at the dustbin in the foreground, then cocks his leg and pisses on it, marking his territory. They’re all listening intently to DEALER 1 who's in the middle. POV is head level, focusing on DEALER 1, moving from across the road, stopping in the middle for a car to go past, to closer in on their faces. All the while we are listening to DEALER 1.
DEALER 1
And he just shot Begsie. Put a cap right in his ass. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t have to go and do that.
DEALER 2
No way man!
DEALER 3
(Tuts loudly) Not Begsie.
DEALER 1
So Begsie’s lying there in a pool of his own blood. His eyes wide open, staring, staring, his body full of holes. He wasn’t even making no trouble you know. I mean, sheeeet. Coulda jus' whipped his ass or something instead.
BUYER 1
Are you guys talking about The Wire?
All the guys immediately turn to face the camera. DEALER 1 pulls a scornful face.
DEALER 1
An’ what’s it to you motherfucker?
CAMERA MOVES ROUND 180 DEGREES to show the face of BUYER 1. We see he’s a spotty white kid with long, greasy hair, about 17. He’s wearing a Yeah Yeah Yeahs t-shirt and is shivering slightly in the cold night air. Next to him, looking a bit nervous is BUYER 1'S MATE, same age, same long, greasy hair, but he’s wearing a Ramones t-shirt.
BUYER 1
Nothing really. Just thought I'd seen that episode, that’s all.
DEALER 3
What you good for nothin’ punks doin’ in our territory anyway. This here the ‘states yo.
BUYER 1
What the council estate?
DEALER 1
(Cutting in) Need a fix?
DEALER 2
Skunk, hash, coke, ketamine.
BUYER 1
A quarter of skunk and 4 wraps of coke.
DEALER 3
(Tuts loudly)
BUYER 1
How come you guys aren’t by the station anymore?
DEALER 1
Got CCTV and all dat shit up there. Cops wanna look like they’re doin’ somethin’, you know. Cleanin’ up the place. But we jus’ become someone else’s problem.
They all laugh.
DEALER 3
You right.
DEALER 1
O-Tyme, sort this shit out yo.
DEALER 1 deftly passes something to DEALER 2, who takes it smoothly.
DEALER 2
Aight. Coke’s £10 a wrap and the skunk's £30. You got the cheese?
There’s a long pause as DEALER 2 stares hard at BUYER 1, while BUYER 1 is looking confused. Then the penny drops.
BUYER 1
Money, oh yes.
DEALER 2
Follow me y’all.
DEALER 2 takes BUYER 1 and BUYER 1'S MATE off to do the deal down a more secluded alley. DEALER 1 and DEALER 3 watch them go till they’re out of earshot.
DEALER 3
So what shit we givin’ those 2 bitches?
DEALER 1
'Special Reserve' man, you know, what we cut the base with. Dat motherfuckin’ shit they use to numb baby’s gums.
DEALER 3 cracks up laughing.
DEALER 3
Dat right there is tight man. It’s all in the game yo.
DEALER 1
Yeah well get the burner out man, we gotta re-up fast, you feel me?
DEALER 3
Hang on a minute, don't talk so fast man, I'm not gettin' it. And what's a burner? Remember, I've only just started Season 3.
On DEALER 1 looking pissed.
CUT TO:
The lounge of a Georgian conversion flat. A group of 3 guys are sitting on 2 shabby-looking sofas. The room needs a lick of paint and is replete with Tupac and Metropolis posters, Mr Nice books, a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Bill Hicks and The Wire DVDs, a lava lamp and a table covered with smoking ephemera, including pipes and a bong. BUYER 2, black, early twenties, and BUYER 2'S MATE, white, same age, are perched on the edge of the sofa, looking a little uncomfortable, clutching champagne flutes and listening intently to DEALER 4, white, mid-twenties, who’s reclining on the other sofa.
DEALER 4
Yes my father’s a Major…ex-Baron Harrold, Lord of Lambeth or something like that. Or perhaps he was a Viscount? Some sort of old school nonsense. Speaking of old skool, there’s this happy hardcore party on tomorrow after the 414. Should be absolutely repulsive. Do you want to come?
BUYER 2
Umm…
DEALER 4
Lottie will be there. And Adam, Miles and Nina. You know, same old set as usual. Have you two topping fellows met them before? Thinking of dabbling in a bit of acid beforehand. You know, shake the party up a bit. Awfully rather good stuff actually. Last time I took it happened to be the first time I met my new flat mate. Couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Bloody marvellous. Although I did have such a pain the next day. So what are you after?
BUYER 2
A bit of hash if you’ve got it?
DEALER 4
Oh yes, I’ve got some rather divine hash from the Netherlands. Forget Afghan and Nepalese. This stuff’s the devil. Rapture! Makes you feel so very queer. But in the best possible way you understand. Beats that rotten skunk those cads sell on the streets. Far too bogus. So would you like some?
BUYER 2
Yeah, sounds good.
DEALER 4
I deal in 10s. Think it’s easier that way. Metric, you know, none of this Imperial nonsense. All those Henry the Eighths and such. I mean to say, we’re not living in the Victorian age now are we? Or are we?
DEALER 4 chortles, while BUYER 2 and BUYER 2'S MATE laugh along politely, looking slightly bored.
DEALER 4
You know, I’ve got a free house in Stockwell Gardens this weekend. Father’s away on business or something, he's abroad rather a lot since mother passed away, in Thailand or somewhere over there. Can’t remember where exactly but I do know he’s back on Tuesday, so if you two stout chaps want to come over? It’s a divine place actually rather good for parties, got a huge glass window in the lounge that opens onto the garden. Can be a bit of a hazard though as sometimes you forget it’s there…more prosecco? Come on, don’t be a bore now, I'm not even tight yet.
PULL BACK through the window to the street outside, where we see BUYER 1 AND BUYER 1'S MATE talking with TWO OTHER SPOTTY WHITE KIDS, who're about 15. They swap something in return for a stack of notes. A police car with its lights on and sirens blaring rushes past heading north. We hear a dog barking.
FADE TO BLACK
THE END
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