![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
eunuch_dreams's journalLog in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more
| You are viewing eunuch_dreams's journal Log in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more | Explore LJ: Life Entertainment Music Culture News & Politics Technology |
 | |
|
My hands are clasped around six rings of heated iron, and they burn me as I hold them to my bare chest with a noise that transcends the pain. It is the hissing, and my tremulous voice shouting, that reaches me in the sunken climate of my mind. The palace walls are near, and before the gates six thousand slaves revolve around millstones that may or may not move something in the nether depths; but as I watch them I would stake my life on those grinding wheels turning the dead slaves themselves, like puppets in chains. Brightness hovers near me, and opening my mouth I let them count my teeth while my mind swims deliriously in the narrow path of the seeping light, the light that seems to flow through my being, that seems to have at its core the depth of my mouth, and the light gently brimming. And then I am bereft, and the ochre colours rush like breath back into me, and seem to encase me, as I take up the next piece of iron and pierce my thigh through with it. The pain is intense, and the spear seems to nest within the broken shards of iron welted into the rasping wounds each sealed with the heat like rosebuds blooming inwards within me. I look up to where Jesus seems to sway on high Golgotha, directing thousands of us with the spear he has torn from his skeletal side, and it is only the reticence of my mind that fuses me to him and the fires that burn under his gaunt brow. Sometimes I think it is that he is weeping, and it is the spotlights they have shone upon him that make the tears dance like flame. Such is the narrow angle of my heart, almost-blind and maddened by these thought-encrusted depths. I look up again and he is gone, and only the twisted stone of the ceiling remains, and the remnants of a diseased mind dissipating in his wake. This is the human abstract; we below haunt ourselves to chase the blessed of ghosts, and it is on us that they must test their weapons, so useless against unflawed skin. Within my roots, there is an ecstasy of weakness, and in that weakness there is the Word. My body bangs within its unhollow trunk, and the holy flowerings begin to spread with the anger that flows from the rings around my heart. My thoughts are trapped within my shades, and labour under the ecstasy of love as an amputee writhes under the hacksaw and strong naval whisky; but oh, heed my fruits, fear my fruits. They are soft enough to break your mouth open and split your entire being down to its last unblemished sliver. |
|
| |
|
FRED the Brown was the woodcutter in an obscure Russian fairytale. No-one knew why he was called Fred the Brown, but some speculated that it was because of the colour of the trees when his breath blossomed in the ever-autumnal air, or the rust that covered his face and hands, like children’s tears leaving trails over an ever churning, robotic smile. Day after day Fred the Brown would watch the characters walk past his house through the forest. Sometimes he would call to them, and they would answer in voices with hidden meanings sheathed in a language he did not understand. From time to time, some purpose would drive him out from his hut to work blind vengeance on the villains that terrorised the sleep-faced Aryan sons and daughters, with their skin like torn petals and their eyes like mineshafts. Sometimes he dallied, and he would arrive to a wolf that had choked on a piece of orange-rind, and a scene of happy children that screamed and shut the door against the tall, bearded stranger with an axe that walked slowly through the azurias in their garden as if in somebody else’s dream. THUS it was that one-day a child somewhere opened a book and read: ‘The woodcutter ran into the house naked, and lodged his axe into the back of the children’s stepmother by the door while shouting in a language they did not understand. He made rude gestures at the fairy godmother and leapt amorously onto one of the tall blonde princesses standing by. The wicked wolf, seeing such horrific behaviour, renounced his evil ways upon the spot, and he jumped up and tore out the woodcutter’s throat, whereupon the children decided to adopt him as a pet. He joyfully obliged, and the children having ousted their horrible stepmother and the blood-soaked princesses, who ran screaming away, went to live in their castle that stood up on a hill nearby, where they all lived happily ever after with their beloved animal companion, Wolfie.’ Upstairs, the child’s father was sitting in his study with his head in his hands. The parchment he held in his hands was stained terribly, although whether it was from his tears or the candle-wax that guttered down the thin taper that he held over THE LETTER we shall never know, except to say that it was most of it was unrecognisable: … It is by your own admission … the object of my antique conscience … and now tears, blameless tears cover the dim markings of my corrupt flesh, that bruises to the light until it is as if I am wearing my own ghost … your light is a weight that crushes me, that bends me to you until I am dancing in its rays, and I am become a different person … please know that it is my sin, my sin that made me blind … and now you demand money, and it is like the hideous cry of that new-born again [illegible] in my ears … wasted years of my life cowering in the shade of certain smilings … screaming ‘Daddy’ with its fingers clutching like roots against my chest, oh, my dreams are never gentle … the coldness, the ice-laden dawdle, the uneasy looks of an air-hostess with that eternal grin pasted so falsely onto her face that there are cracks through which you can see her entire being … Adementia, if you could find it in your heart to let be this family, this unholy circle of unhappy strangers: if you could understand that the greatest loss I have already suffered, and it is not the money but your scent, like honeysuckle blown on an early morning air … and your strange beauties, withering at the cusps of an estranged heart … Yours sincerely, Pookums |
|
| |||
|
Fred the Brown Chapter 1, Tangent 2 The small child slept alone in the dark house for perhaps the second time in a week that night. Lips trembling and white-faced, she presses the sheets to her burning mouth and shakes until the traces of the tears have faded into the mattress. Six inches beneath her, bedlice swarm in the rotting cavern of the bed where her sweat and tears have corrupted the wood and feathers into one gaping hole punctuated by coiled iron springs like arrowheads buried in a long-healed wound. There is a lamp by the child's bed which if you spin will make a slideshow on the wall. Now, the dancing animals are still, and a bird carved into the lampshade in a flat, painted sky now illumines the child's forehead with a single ray of light, like a martyr's in some Renaissance fresco. The child is not a good child. When she grows up she will be manipulative, and she will at the point when her friends have finally given up on her finally introduce a false story of her parents sexually harrassing her and so grapple them to her soul in rings of terrible pathos. She will entrap them in the conspiracy of painted secrets and she will laugh at them from behind her carved smile as she spins, casting shadows across their faces. Whatever her sins, uncommitted or otherwise, her parents have comitted upon her the sin of omission. It will never be understood by her friends, when the lies fall down, that the most damage that can be done on a child is that of neglect. Far away, her mother dances in the arms of another man while the father looks on restlessly, tapping time with his fork on a wineglass while his absent hand trails the curvature of the table-leg below the fringes of the tablecloth. As if prompted, the other man's hand begins the descent down his wife's thighs as she is whisked out of sight and across the dark cellar that the club resides in to the other side of the room. No one sees this; and the one person who can feel it does nothing but laugh and pinch his elbow as she clings to his body, hanging within the epicentre of the spinning room. Behind her painted face one would observe an illusion of zaniness, like a thin stetch of clingfilm running with oils: behind this a wound, as if one had savaged their soul with fake nails and had stopped up its mouth with blusher and a bit of lippie. In this hole something wept, something seeped; fingers pushed at the zaniness like her husband tracing her breast and the dream kicked at her - she laughed the louder to cover it up and recklessly pushed her body into the nook of the man's hollow chest. Fred the Brown pushed the two closer together until they seemed amorphous; their thin thoraxes pressed against each other until they seemed like the leap of a fountain, like the back of a dolphin. The child, who had wet the bed, surfaced upside-down above them and her dark voice screamed in spirals as Fred the Brown sapped her future from her until she was a pure, shining thing without eyes or mouth, like an angel would look. The three adult lovers chased each other like liquids in a drain, never touching this thinning droplet of the child; and then like bubbles they burst and were gone. Fred the Brown rose like a light from his writing; and he crossed the room to the window, where the landscape was spread as always like torn sheets over the broken furniture of the city. Fred the Brown understood that when you diminish something, you transcend from it as well.
|
|||
| |||
|
Fred the Brown was a photojournalist who had become lost in a desert in Sudan. No-one knew for sure why he was called Fred the Brown, but some thought it was a Franglais version of his real name, which by declension must have been Fred Brown. Fred the Brown surveyed the shimmering desert horizon through one of the lenses of his large SLR camera: the horizon remained the same, ephemeral as always, shining, shifting like the edges of his dreams. He let the lens fall to his chest, upon which a viewer might have seen the reflection of the horizon, perpetually moving upwards, like a weeping scar, warped by the great convex lens and casting edges of light over his crossed forearms like a wine-glass placed in the sun. Fred the Brown looked around him dispassionately: he was sick of the place, sick to the core of it, sick from the tip of his sunburnt nose to the back of his grizzled head. He was beyond lost in Sudan - that is to say, lost beyond the point where it could be found, past the point where there was still something he could identify with whatever it was that had misplaced him. Fred the Brown was sick of moving from oasis to oasis, trying to avoid the death he had been sent out to photograph. Fred the Brown was a sick man in a very haven of sick men, Fred the Brown was blind in a world without light. Chapter 1.4 Fred the Brown was an unaspiring poet, uneducated though he was, and without grasp of language or meter he stood footless, weightless against the tides of unshackled passions washing against his ribs, knocking his spine and thrashing his heart, bearing his breath like grace notes. Words were his hailstorm, through which he rained without logic, nor reference to the classics, and as rolls of film unpeeled themselves in the white sand and the dead roots of the desert and each image was divined and destroyed by the strands of its creator, Fred the Brown's thoughts filled the cracked desert with whirling snow. No-one knew for sure why he was called Fred the Brown, but some thought it was because of that stretch of skin along his back tanned to leather, jutted along the bones of his back like dirty sheets spread over broken furniture. This was derived from his common hunched position, head between legs, the snares of his body clenched within the tight mouth of the desert caught in the trap of whatever had once lain beyond it, at some time he could not remember. Pressing the tip of a torn tripod leg between the cracks of the hard earth, Fred the Brown began to carve into the ground with a slow and painstaking motion. This is what he wrote: I LOOK OUT UPON A FORREST SCENE FROM THE HOLE IN MY CHEST. LOOKING THROUGH MY OWN CHEST AT THE TREES AND THE FRONDS THAT HANG FROM THE BOWING BRANCHES xjhwd [here his instrument stumbled over a twisted root] I AM AWARE OF IT THROUGH ALL MY ORGANS, UPON WHICH THE SCENE IS CARVED IN CRUDE GRAIN THAT FLOATS GENTLY IN SHADOWY SYMBELS BEFORE MY EYES - OR IS THE SCENE WHICH IS CARVED IN FRONT OF MY EYES AND SOMETHING ELSE BEYOND IT? I CANOT TELL. BUT I AM AWARE OF SOME PRESENCE, AND I BUT AN EFFECT OF ITS PANTHEISM: IN THIS STATE SOMETIMES I BECOME AWARE OF A PERECING HEAT AND LIGHT AND THINK SUDDENLY THAT I AM NOT IN A FORREST AT ALL AND THAT THE HOLE IS NOT IN MY CHEST BUT IN MY HEA
|
|||
| |
|
the dry river is there some thought that makes the dry river is there any sentiment that curbs disease? oh, but the dry river - let the dry river run, |
|
| |
|
Here it is, written through impulse rather than inspiration. I don't think I ever wrote anything faster in my life. Subsequently it's a torrid, workmanlike affair: but at least I finished something. ( Read more... ) For the alternate (better) ending, go to creativewriter. |
|
| |||
|
Well, I'm back already. I get itchy fingers when I don't write; I also forgot that I hate doing revision .. so here I am. Some Neighbourhood Watch motherfunglers have blown the whistle on my mother for 'excessive cruelty to animals'. For those of you who do not know what the NW is, it's basically a bunch of middle-aged housewives who somehow think that if they watch their neighbours lawnmowing naked from behind closed curtains this will somehow eradicate crime in the area. What happened with my mother was that a cat was hit in my road by a car. It was unconscious, but it had all these weird muscular spasms and kept on twisting several feet into the air, while still in the middle of the road in the spot where it fell. This makes it sound like a healthy cat, which it was not; it had most of its limbs broken and landed on its head several times. While everyone was watching in horror, including the driver of the vehicle, some bloke went and got a plastic bag to gently ease it out of its misery. At this point, my mum arrived on the scene. Seeing the cat in its death-throes, she simply ran it over to put it out of its misery. I say 'ran it over' but really this means knocking it a further twenty feet into the air. Which was quick thinking on her part, but you can picture the scene: a crowd of horrified observers watching a dying cat, our neighbour softly approaching with a plastic bag, and then my mum accelerating into it and pinging it like some furry tennis ball over a garden fence. So some shit-stirrers have been saying that the cat was playing in the road. Yes. Bouncing along on its neck. We have no idea why they are saying this, especially since everyone there saw what happened, but we suspect that the Neighbourhood Watch act like some White Supremacist pocket organisation in the area. Everyone nowadays thinks racism and sexism are fairytales that people call on to get leverage over 'decent hard-working types' such as poor old John Prescott and dear Mr Nick Griffin. Utter bullshit. The BNP have taken 8 out of 11 seats in our area, including Bethnall Green with a reported 80%. Which is funny, because over half of the inhabitants of Bethnall Green aren't even white. So either there has been some fixinf down to the famous British voting system, or some of us have serious self-hatred issues. Anyway, this cat issue is just crap. The person who ran over the cat (the first time round) verified that the cat was an ex-cat. Besides, no-one could ever accuse my mum of animal cruelty; the fact that she keeps Pirate, the ugliest damn cat in the universe, alive, shows that she has no antipathy towards the feline persuasion. Pirate has just jumped up onto my knee, prompting the usual heart cataclysm. He's been my cat for twelve years now and I still can't get used to seeing him step out of the shadows like the first time you see Frankenstein's monster in the old films. If the monster was small and furry and approached in a bewildered and snuffling fashion. Poor pig-rat, he can't help it that he's so ugly. I digress. ( Read more... )
|
|||
| |||
|
If I were ever to die of spiderbite, my last words would be 'Fucking hell! Fuck you, fucking spider!' I know this because this was my automatic response in church with my grandmother yesterday upon finding one such creature making its way along my arm (and momentarily through the air). I also jumped up with a gesture that my brother has made into a little dance, much like the one in MJ's 'Thriller', but speeded up. Yes, it is hypocritical for me to be in church. No, she does not realise this, although she is beginning to suspect that it may at least be futile. Apologies for delaying this post, but there was the problem of no alcohol or droogs in the house, as well as the new series of Lost on terrestrial. I watched the first three hour-long episodes while recording them, and then rewound and watched them straight through again. I regret nothing. I may be gone from LJ for several weeks because I have to revise for my A-levels. However, let me put you in the hands of sarah_sinclair, whose journal you should go and visit RIGHT NOW. This final freestyle is dedicated to her: Whistling For Tea I called, and my screaming was ruptured by the howling of the wind, my voice falling back against my face with the flakes of spiralling snow. No matter which direction I walked in, no black shape met me, and I became aware that I had truly become separated from the group. The storm encased me, filling in my footsteps, and the thin veneer of snow falling seemed to advance upon me until it was a moving screen shifting before and above my powdered eyelids. Snow-blindness began to set in, and I saw my hands and feet disappear into the snow until I stumbled invisibly in the whiteness, separated only by the alien beating of my surrogate heart. The tearing of the wind in my ears became like the beating of a torn tambourine, and behind it, silence.
|
|||
| |||
|
( drunken freestyle vaguely in the manner of Victorian horror )
|
|||
| |||
|
Posted today's freestyle on my new freundes' blog, bad_writers. Family arrived from Nigeria yesterday and my Uncle went cycling with my Father in the Essex countryside. Upon passing a field of yellow flowers, he asked, 'What's that?' and my Father replied 'That's a rape field.' He cycled on quietly, and didn't mention the whole thing until dinner when he related the whole thing to me. I don't even want to know what my uncle thought a 'rape field' was.
|
|||
| |||
|
Drunken freestyle Clinging with his fingers to the wheel of the Audi, he felt some form crouching within him while the darkness surrounded it like drapery, perched in the corner of some eternal, mindless space. He felt it, in every part, that creature burning in his chest pinioned by something infinite, as the butterfly would feel reaching outwards from beyond its pin and finding not the end but the beginning. And all at once his cheeks burned in the points of city light that stretched across his face as he felt its awareness of him, like some mirror from the inside that made all his conscious efforts and appearances so small and far away. He turned his face away from the hollow light and his inner darkness overtook him and turned some hidden rage into apocalyptic desire. But what he was most aware of was that he was for the first time in many years feeling like himself, as if all the feeling had suddenly come back into the numbed fingers of his soul. To put it into words he could not have imagined, for the first time he felt himself fully palpable, as if there had been some parts that had not been conceivable to himself before. And then it appeared, and it was so simplistic that it disappointed him. It was merely a memory, and it was of the time that he was eighteen and in Brighton and he had smashed up an arcade in some drunken ecstasy. He shuddered to think of it now, the way he had brought the light into the darkness, crushing the bulbs of the deserted arcade with his balled gloved fists in some huge extended tantrum that had left him in the cold blackness, weeping like a child as the exaltation left him. And he realised that it was the last time he had truly been in any way outside of himself; that is to say, the last time he had challenged the comfortable, formal constructs of his affable self. Now his hangdog look had deepened into middle-aged depression and the shadows had claimed the light from his blue eyes under the bow of his drooped brows. The garage business that he part-owned was failing, it was true, but he did not attribute this new change to it alone. It was the red apple of his love, given like a gift to others, wholesome and unassuming, that was becoming uneasy in his mind. He heard the intonation of Dylan Thomas, tremulous with unspeakable power, ‘Glory! . . . Glory!’ over and over in his mind. The roll of the tongue, that sharpness of his voice, brought a bitterness to the back of his throat and for a few seconds he felt as if he were going to cry. The bright lights became a haze of abstract recognition that threatened to pool into a world of uncertainties and spill into the hollows of his lap like a broken necklace of jewels that had never been unearthed. Some paradoxical kindness and cruelty came into his lips as he smiled, against himself, like a shield before the parting of the Nile, like a fire before the sun. But the tears did not spill and he was somehow not overwhelmed by it all, and he thought of the daintiness, the gaudiness of his existence, like colours in oil petroleum, renewed and attractive before this savage future that now beckoned him. He thought that the feelings would fall away, like tears behind his face, as they had no doubt done before. But the feelings remained; the love and the glory that his life lacked remained branded within him and he thought of his wife, his loving wife, fiery and disjointed as himself, boneless skeletons dancing under the dust of dead suns. Perhaps he would show her his Eden, this Haven of himself, the new direction, wherever he might go. His son looked at him with widened eyes, strapped in against the unseen forces of the nightmare outerness of his Father’s creation, and his hand reached out instinctively to clutch the sleeve of his father, the biggest of them all. His hair fell in blond locks against his round cheeks, and there was even in the low light a flush of red across his cheeks. The wide pupils reflected the world in a perfect circular bias above his cherubim lips like statue turned flesh, and the aura of irrepressible movement and the damp smell of talcum powder. His son panicked before the triumphant fury of his father’s gaze, for he was a child, and all of his childish movements fell away unexplained into the darkness, which became the foreground; half-realised, shadowy, uncertain. His footsteps tottered not against the mass of his body but the eggshell of the Earth that might plunge him into some old place; he laughed and clapped his hands, sometimes, but all his happiness lay in sureness and his footsteps fell in fear. There was his father, trembling on some great height; a leaf, a giant, inhuman and unreal somehow in the myopic flame of the billowing horizon splayed out and chased by the windows of the car. His face was unworldly and somehow the sum of his son’s fears; and it was in this desperation that he now clutched his father’s sleeve as if to drag him back, through lightness of touch, from the brutality of his expression.
|
|||
| |||
|
Beginning of play ‘the Martyr’ FATHER and SON in tavern, drunkenly leaning over the table and pawing at each other while trying to make themselves heard, drunken smiles on their faces. FATHER: I am the patron of a thousand fantasies of degradation. I wear my lust like a coat of dreams: it is my lust that forms the clay feet of my sins upon which I walk like (gestures) ethereal stilts. SON: An oyster on the seabed of our oceanic desires, it is your language that refines you, you reinvent faeces in strings of gleaming pearls. The rainbow-white teardrops in your voice were formed by the dirt-trappings from the lowest sea trench on which you towered over others; but the words fell blindly in the darkness that hung between us. Father gets up and attempts a simple Irish dance, smiling beatifically, the son laughs sardonically and claps while the father chants: FATHER: Tattooed on my body is the Word and it is Eve: I dance naked in the moonlight and she dances with me, I perform a miracle and my skin is hers: I perform another miracle and subdue her to less substance than my shadow ... SON: Looking at you I can see the iconography as it will form around your features: your obsidian tongue and your amber hands will shape again in a hollow idol, and you will become that which you would destroy. FATHER: I cannot talk but sing, and it is the song of God. I walk, and it is in the path of Faith; I stray, and form new paths. Redemption is merely the tongue with which – SON: We curse our fathers’ black hearts – FATHER: I shall not know that I have succeeded until you, my son, SON: Crush the marrows of your creations …
|
|||
| |||||
|
Warhol to Monroe Too often my eyes have sunk like pebbles cast This poem was written on discovering, a week or so ago, that a girl who I have feelings for but have not seen in a year has started up a myspace. It is about my feelings upon discovering that my carefully wrought image of her was false, and therefore her perfection being ruined, paralleled with an artist's frustration that an image that he was obsessed with was ruined by his subject actually being alive. It's not perfect, but I hate reworking things.
|
|||||
| |||
|
It's been a really dramatic few weeks. The whole thing kicked off with everyone thinking that my cousin had got hep B and D, because a couple of months ago she'd shot up some speed with a friend and some of his friends, and shared the needle, like the fucking idiot she is. Last Friday, he went up to her and said 'I've contracted Hepatitus B & D, and apparently there's a 40% chance of me getting liver failure and dying at any moment, and so have you. I'm quitting school and going out in a blaze of glory, wanna join me?' Which is pretty hard to beat as a greeting. She handled the whole thing pretty well, not stabbing him in the face and all, and went home and told her family and owned up to what she'd done, and then she got a blood test on Monday and it turned out that everyone in her family were immunized when they were in Africa. A few days later, some guy out of the blue approached me for a tenbag, and I thought 'who do I know who owes me drugs?' I rang up Skaghead Steve on the grounds that he wouldn't be able to remember whether he did or not, and his phone was off .. which was strange .. so I left the following message: "Aight Steve, you owe me so much booya that it's unreal, bruv. Ring me back on --------- 'case you forgot my number you dozy sye ... laters, Jonah." Yes. That is really how I speak when I am away from the comforting syntax of writing or my home. I mean I'm not as bad as some (Jamie "the fakin' Jamaican" for one) but I am a teenage male in London and this means that if one should give lip to one's peers for splitting their infinitives one shall find one's peers splitting one's lip [said in incredibly posh Mayfair accent]. Anyway. So I then phoned up Tom Lyrical to see if he was shotting any, and he goes 'No one is, man! There's shadow men all over! Skaghead Steve's been done!' 'Fuck! I just left a message on his phone saying he owed me buddha!' Tom went berserk. 'You stoneage c-!, motherfucking cocksucker! Don't call me! Shit! I will go Picasso on your fag-baggin faize, you bait dong-'copter! Don't you know 'bout networking when the pigs seize your phone? If we end up in prison cos of you I am goin to rape your arse so hard that-' I'll spare you the details of that last one, but suffice to say that Lyrical is very inventive with language. According to Tom, Steve had gone into an off-licence for smokes and been refused (there being a new rule of having to give proof if you look under 21). Being a skaghead he was not overly pleased about this and had a tantrum and started picking up the Yorkie bars from the counter and throwing them at the employee. The police were called and Steve was found to have a healthy 10 grams of White Lady on his person and was arrested ... which means that I left my name and number with the police on a seized phone, saying that a notorious dealer owed me drugs. If I go down for this, I will never be able to look at a yorkie bar again, I swear. So anyway, the next news was that my AS retakes came in, and were grades C,D,U,U. Which I was not surprised at considering my present work ethic, but my school took exception to this and I got kicked out. So I tried to ask for a proper job at Troismoulins studios and my boss told me that a postgraduate had decided to come back from his gap year early, and would therefore be needing my present position, effectively ending my six month's devoted work experience. So last week I decided to run away, and that's where all the drama really began. My life is not normally this exciting, I swear. But this is why I have been away for quite a while. Tomorrow's entry I shall be describing my life as a runaway. The Ghost
|
|||
| |||
|
So, last night I went for a midnight ramble with Leo, aka Leonard Triffid. We managed to get into this huge building site by propping a long branch against a tree next to the fence and climbing over the fence and a long mud hole that had provided the earth-mound for the fence. We smoked some bud and told each other hilarious stoner stories while we were overlooking this huge shallow lake that had formed in the ruts from the heavy rain, perfectly mirroring the London horizon. Then we decided to make a little havoc, and we eventually found some glass sheets that had been left between plastic covers. Leo decided that it would be a great game to wrap ourselves in the covers and go at each other with the glass panels. We wrapped ourselves up and tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee style we faced each other with the glass in hand. Leo said, ‘A’ight, just close your eyes when you see it coming,’ and I said ‘Right’ and then I thought for a second and then I said, ‘but how do I know when –‘ and CRASH out from the darkness came a large glass panel and my breath was taken away. Soon we were chasing each other all over the place picking up the glass panels and smashing them against each other; but Leo’s wrap-up was unravelling and when I caught him a low one the game was ended decisively. After a long time spent lying on the ground and taking deep breaths Leo said he was going to take a piss to see if blood came out, and off he went in the direction of the lake. After a short while he re-emerged at full speed yelling ‘Run, Jonah! Run!’ and he flew past me with a security dog in full pursuit. Panic-stricken, I attempted to waddle in the direction of the tree but the material that covered my shins to just below my arms inhibited my movement and the dog, sensing easy prey, turned on me, snarling. It clamped on to the unravelling plastic around me as I ran, and my struggling arms pulled the material outwards so that the dog faintly orbited around me in the air as it clung on grimly by its teeth to my outer layers. Reaching the tree, I tried to jump up to Leo’s outstretched arm, but every time he was about to pull me up he collapsed in helpless laughter at my desperate and panic-stricken expression and dropped me back. Finally I jumped out from the material and climbed the tree myself, but in my panic I overbalanced and slid down the branch on the other side, which toppled over and fell into the water-filled mud hole with a kerplunk. There was a sudden silence between us, the dog going crazy on the other side, and Leo said ‘Well, I’m fucked, then.’ ‘Hey, don’t be so melodramatic. You can jump.’ There was a silence that followed, and I could see Leo lighting up for a ruminative smoke. ‘Jonah, we have no idea what is actually beneath me.’ ‘So? Jump. There’s nothing that’s gonna kill you.’ ‘I’m wearing my Avirex coat.’ We discussed the ins and outs of the situation, attempting to gauge the actual distance between us. Leo said he was going to wait until some moon appeared again. We waited awhile and then I spoke through the darkness: ‘So, how’s the world from up there in your tree, Leo?’ He took a philosophical puff. ‘Society seems such a petty thing. Possession feels transient. Your mum’s tits look even better from up here.’ He always brings my mum in to it when he’s pissed off. ‘You should have been a hermit, then.’ Pause. ‘You’d get more action that way.’ ‘Where is that fucking moon?’ ‘You have to accept that it won’t come. You’re faced with a muddy death trap on one side and a rabid dog on the other.’ ‘Maybe it’s trying to be friendly.’ ‘Maybe Charles Manson was just a hopeless romantic.’ Pause. ‘Fuck this. I’m going to throw the jacket across then just leap.’ ‘A’ight man, throw me the zoot first.’ The zoot sails perhaps six feet and disappears with a sizzle into the water, severely discoraging Leo. ‘No way is this jacket going across. I’m going to sit in my tree and wait until morning.’ ‘You think that you can sit out for the builders to come and rescue some skinny black kid stuck in a tree on their building site with about twenty broken panes of glass surrounding him? That’s gonna take some inspired explanation.’ Silence. ‘Well, good night, Leo, I’ve got to go to work in the morning, fun though this has been.’ ‘Fuck, Jonah! Jonah, fuck!’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Wait – wait, I’m gonna jump across.’ ‘I’m standing here, on the edge of the bank, to catch you.’ Leo then spent a few minutes psyching himself up, which basically meant swearing louder and louder, and then with a sudden leap, like a bird into the air, he jumped towards me. Tragically, he nearly made it, landing with his feet on the other side, 'FUCKSHITBOLLOCKS-' and I briefly caught hold of him and then there was a 'KRKKHHH' before he fell backwards into the middle of the mud hole, and with a sort of girlish 'eeeeeeeeeeee' disappeared into the water leaving me sprawled in shocked silence, holding a sleeve from his Avirex coat. Which was funny right up until the moment he emerged like a swamp monster and came at me wielding the broken log. Now I live in fear, for revenge, I am sure, will be swift and merciless, and knowing Leonard Triffid it will have something to do with my groin, my favourite jacket, a mud hole and my mum.
|
|||
| |||
|
Today during my lunch break I went into one of those incredibly expensive salad bars in Leicester Square to snaffle some sugar sticks. The whole place was full of beautiful women eating Caesar salads at a rate of about four molecules at a time, their hands cupped against their chins as they talked so that they could protect their Prada outfits while they chewed with their mouths open spewing unflagging afternoon nothings from their mouths in carefully bred Islington lilts. I reached the desk without anyone noticing my alien presence, but with no sugar sticks in sight instead found myself alone with a great glass display case containing strange and tempting concoctions of bizarre fruit and vegetable combinations whittled down into tiny-bite shapes placed on shining white plates. Prising the glass open at the bottom I slipped my hand in and began to work my way across to a passionfruit-based dish, but I could not reach it because of the great expanse of china on which it lay. That’s when I turned up my eyes to the glare of the girl behind the counter who had come over and now reached across and suddenly grabbed my hand. She pulled me along the width of the back of the shop and through the little half-door that separated counter and shop floor, with me not resisting and hoping and thinking of an excuse, and finally she pulled me through a little curtain and we were in the darkness of the kitchens behind the shop. There we faced each other, and I looked her fully in the face for the first time; I mean to say, I became sexually aware of her in the manner one does when one sits next to a girl on a train. In the shaft of light from beyond the curtain I could see the streaks of crusted makeup that formed when she smiled, and her homely brown skin and her arms that were hairy like a spider’s legs. Her black eyes shone perhaps eight inches below mine, although she would have probably been my age or older. She brought her red doll-lips towards mine, her Hispanic features long and ethereal in the flat square of light we stood in, and I was just thinking “fuck this, it was only a salad” when she whispered in my ear ‘let me show you something’. She brought her face back in front of mine and I saw that her lips and her eyes trembled slightly. She walked past me and opened a small cabinet nailed against the wall, above which was scrawled on the wall ‘la columna rota’. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I began to make out what it was that was moving around. In the box there writhed the head, arms and torso of a girl, who appeared to consist entirely of fruit and vegetables. Her hair was made up of lettuce leaves, her fingers were flailing strips of cucumber and celery and other green vegetables, and her lips were formed by passionfruit. The girl reached in to the box and cut a carrot areola from the dark skin, and the vegetable girl began to cry. But the tears blossomed as flowers from her red tomato eyes and we were captivated by the loveliness: the flowers of things that do not blossom are always vividly beautiful, like dreams of stone. We stood there and watched while she twisted in narrow anguish; silently, because they had taken her tongue for a gherkin and by the stump one could tell that it was just beginning to grow back. We stood there and watched, because even empathy can be overwhelmed by something when it is entirely beautiful.
|
|||
| |||
|
My name is Jonah, and my life is loosely based around a college and a film studio in London. I am seventeen and I live with my mother and brother in an old Victorian house with my cat, Pirate. I call him this because he is part pig and part rat. Most of the time I am out with my friends, or in school, or working at the film studios, where I am on an unofficial ‘extended work experience’ deal which means I get no money (I am a runner). I’ll update this entry when I feel the need to.
|
|||
| |
sleepy