Saturday 30 April 2011

The Island and the Eel


The boys, Si and Chris, are planning to go to the island tomorrow. I aint sure it’s, well, the best idea, but they told me about centre of the island and it’s bottomless pool; a pool full of oddly coloured water and even odder creatures. They told me how a while back a line was set; huge lead anchor, two-inch hook loaded with bacon and limpet flesh, just off the bottom to avoid the crabs. And as they pulled it up, having waded back at dawn, what should greet them but eight feet of conger eel, thrashing about grotesquely in the depths. There it hung, at their mercy for almost a minute, before breaking free and leaving them with nothing but the straightened steel of the hook. So naturally now they’re fixing to return and sit all day like a couple of pint-sized Ahabs. But I’m not certain they should. Clouds have been massing for a while. Gates been swinging above the sand, their knotted clasps chattering ceaselessly back and forth through the bore-holes. It isn’t safe. I ought to tell father. That crimson moon just keeps on swelling.


I ought to tell father, but he is seldom inclined to listen these days. Dave and Jean? they barely know who I am, and besides, to my mind they are both quite ridiculous. Perhaps, just perhaps, I should approach the wicker chair Sebastian always curls himself into - like a bejumpered turd - and whisper the entire plot. He took an interest in this sort of thing. Well, he took an interest before 9pm; before he began decanting gin to his mug, before he began surreptitiously fondling Jean whenever Dave was bested by his bladder and had to leave the room to grunt over the porcelain. Yes in summary I fear I am quite alone in the matter of the island and the eel.

The boys, Si and Chris, talk incessantly about the island - their island.  It’s not much of an island anyway. Just a rocky straggler. Part of the coastline. Flicked paint on a brooding canvas. Them taking it as their own is pretty stupid. Might as well claim Caernarfon bay, all Anglesey even. They’re upstairs at the moment. Snoring away those brothers of mine.  I tried to get some sleep earlier, but that Jennifer thing has a penetrating laugh and the floorboards aren’t up to the challenge. Which incidentally, isn’t the only problem with this house. The location for starters. Right on the cusp. Teetering over the shingle. I told father, told him the decision was foolish. “One black lick and we’re a gonna”, I said, “and if we aren’t carried clean away, then all the windows will be caved in. Do you want that?” I glared right at him, “starfish clinging to your fireplace hoods?” He didn’t say much as I recall. Smiled some and went back to teasing Jennifer.



In the months that followed us moving in I had concluded that the house was actually absurd; a big sweep of brick, coiffured from the prow of the land, its innards an amalgam of faux-Edwardian tat. Mum would have laughed I reckon. Laughed and called him “highfalutin” or some such anachronism.   They liked it though, father’s periodic guests. They gushed over the embossed wallpaper like flies at a ham unwrapping. And, lit by an innocuous coal fire, they could drink absinthe and forget the trials of city life; the school runs, the weekend clamour for babysitters. Check Chekhov, yeah - father’s misguided attempt to divert youth attention towards the dead Russian – had been published a decade ago, yet it’s pulped pages still garnered a certain cache at these monthly gatherings. This was - I deduced later – the catalyst for Jennifer’s unlikely seduction (she was only twelve years older than me after all). Of all his decisions - and there had been some preposterous jewels over the years – she was the absolute worst. This notion however, had not properly cemented in my brain until last January, when I accidently walked in on them at a most inopportune moment. They had commenced, I think, behind some fake Japanese panelling; though by the end their limbs had fully slid free and resembled spilled blancmange. Urgent it was. Inauthentic. Sort of mutually desperate.

I was always stumbling into situations like that. Last year, out on the dunes in a sandstorm, I took refuge in one of the craters. The wind was really something that day, kicking at the flanks of the land, winnowing dandruff from the coarse hair. I was glad to clamber beneath an overhang, let the rushing particles do their thing and lid me up. Then who should I see invading my shelter but Dave and that itinerant little slut DeeAnne. Well, she was clearly not having the best of times, struggling away beneath his clodding hands. They stopped their tussle and stared at me, their eyes accustomed to a trichromatic world of yellow sand, green grass, and grey sky. I was perplexing. Too real after peering into empty vessels. And it seemed for a moment as though my incongruence rendered me invisible. That feeling has festered over the years, but at the time I paid it no heed and merely melted to the storm. And Dave got back on it. Porcine this time; semi-consensual squeals, trotters to the sand.  



Chris, the older brother, has a real thing for that DeeAnne now. Doesn’t understand why he likes her of course, but he’ll follow them brown eyes till he’s dead. She slopes up, black hair coiling on a translucent camisole, having spent the afternoon sinking Bacardi with the lads of Rhosneigr high-street. Teases him till it’s dark sometimes. Si can’t grasp his brother’s affliction. Doesn’t know why Chris doesn’t tell her to piss off when she steals from him, or cruelly pretends to meet them somewhere and doesn’t show for hours. Still, I’m sure he can tell he’s losing him. Losing him to that other world. The island is the only thing that gets them both excited these days. The island and the memory of that thrashing conger. Perhaps I shouldn’t ruin their plans. Tomorrow is their last chance to get back there and snare the beast. After that the tides will come and cut them off. Rush in and bisect understanding. 


Paintings by Matthew Snowden.
http://www.artroom.nepc.co.uk/pics/album/matthewsnowden/matthewsnowden.htm


Monday 18 April 2011

Undressing Existence

When we are crashed on hillsides drinking clouds
As wind turns pebbles from the ancient trees
Often my mind has cause to enshroud
The moment in bliss, till all memories cease

For we are the keepers of Time my dear!
Scorn death to a dream - and growing old?
Tis no more than chairs by the brink of a broken pier
As crowds blend to gulls, and horizons to gold

Yet even as binds release our form
Clouds unfurl and truth winks from afar
I remember the reason that we each were born
And clumsily fumble your bra.





Friday 1 April 2011

The Anti-Götterdämmerung of an Academic


Artlessly untitled [or something similar]  

Yosef Igneous Garrety (PhD) is consumed by his deliberately modest office. In front of him lies a stack of unmarked essays, the top most of which is titled: “Leaving the darkness: a psychosexual history of coal mining in the north of England”. The stack is bitten and coffee stained and rises from the general clutter of the desk like a pulpy stalagmite. Yosef peers distrustfully at the stalagmite. He has recently undergone a crisis of faith – he can no longer see value in Deep Freudian Historical Topography (DFHT). This is not the first crisis of faith in Yosef’s 35 years of plodding academia, but it will be the last. Yosef in fact had declared that very morning that he intended to “stop looking for sexual symbolism in the mundane and well, just ruddy live”. Nevertheless, on days such as these Yosef spends much time observing the walls of his office. Sometimes he thinks he can see them breathing; riddled with bronchitis and geologically slow. Other times he recalls how the walls looked before his pipe was confiscated on medical grounds (jaundiced, frankly) and how, sometime in 95, all that lovely character was destroyed as they were maculated with cheap cream from B&Q.

It is 5pm. The central heating has automatically shut off. Yosef’s screensaver of a fake office fire burbles pathetically away. He wonders if the current obsession with regulated, impotent heating might be some sort of reverse Promethean deification of the domineering modern Woman. He soon checks himself and instead examines the choppy grey sea of portacabins outside. He wants to go home, but it would be irregular to leave so early.

It is now 5:27pm. Yosef is unwrapping a toffee and wondering how the latest administration of radiotherapy will affect his wife’s tumour. A not insignificant part of him hopes it is hopeless. Beatrice has experienced terrible skin reactions.     

5:38pm and a homebound Yosef is disturbed by the weather. Stockton high street is remade. The cobblestones run with distilled exhaust fumes and buildings sport caps of filthy slush. Yosef considers the hallucinogenic grip of Snow. He tries to shake the idea. I am a conduit for experience, nothing more, he tells himself as he tramples a neon sign in a black puddle that reads: “Last Ever Golf Sale, Hurry”. Later, a homeless man mews painfully and Yosef hands him twenty pounds. A homeless man doesn’t know how to be grateful he thinks, before concluding out loud “the power structure in that moment is simply untenable”.

When Yosef gets home his shoes are both sodden. He crisps them on the radiator. As he is doing this he experiences an erection, which is mildly troubling because he cannot locate an appropriate instance of radiator masturbation from his early childhood. He sits in his armchair and relives the words of a student from earlier that day - “If willed memory was as visceral as the spontaneous variety we should never leave our armchairs”. Yosef gets out of his armchair with a start. He is again jealous of the young man. Not, incidentally, because of what he said. He had stopped bothering to interpret his student’s fetid attempts at insight a long time ago. No, it was the way Jill Mantle (PhD) - strip-lit by an unintentionally cracked door - had bucked beneath the student last Tuesday. Her mouth, or lipstick to be more precise (the image was seared in Josef’s brain), cavorted forever like kelp in a red tide. 

It is 6pm. Yosef peers through the wastes of his semi-detached garden. Beyond the fence (last plied with creosote – 23rd of May, 1992) lies the quarry. The recurrent freeze and thaw has sent tumbles of limestone onto the stiffened brambles, leaving them crushed and awkward in each other’s company. Yosef considers, as he extracts a fibrous blackhead from the side of his nose, whether the garden started decaying before or after Beatrice’s little romantic transgression. He wanders through to the living room, auto-piloted by the wear of the carpet. Here his attention is marshalled by his wife’s embroidery. It hangs above the plastic fireside, gold on navy blue: “Carpe Diem”. Yosef is disgusted. If it was a real fire he would unquestionably send the stitching to the flames. Instead he imagines seizing a pillow and pinning it to his wife’s face. The clatter of stainless steel amidst spilled IV fluid sends a pulse of pleasure from his back to his groin. Yosef suspects that he will be punished for this.

After tossing a couple of fried eggs between toast slices and washing it down with strong coffee, Yosef is ready to drive to the hospital. It is Friday and he reasons that if he spends two or three hours with Beatrice, he can safely keep the rest of the weekend for himself without condemnation from the children. The car follows its own black tracks out of the driveway. Manchester United vs Bayern Munich: European cup, quarter final kicked off at 7:45pm. The roads are silent. At 7:55pm it begins to snow. Yosef has ingested too much caffeine. As he hurtles through the night he imagines that he is parting the legs of a vast woman made entirely of his wife’s flaking skin. So strong is the melding with reality that five minutes later he mistakes the rear end of a lorry for the woman’s pudenda. As the Volkswagen enters a fatal skid, Yosef sees not his entire life, but merely strands of stinking egg yolk. And Symbolism oozes unhatched.