7: A Script Of Nature

Edit dated 06/04/06

Marcus Tullius Cicero: This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Leo Tolstoy: Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Jacob Bronowski: You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The decaying processes of nature reclaim material possessions and return them to their elemental forms; the raw materials of life recycled from inevitable death. In unavoidable truth, everything joined by human hands will divide and return to the all welcoming soil. Through the brief speck of time that our tiny lives inhabit, we witness nothing but the minor changes; when the bread becomes fur and when the pets become plant-feed. Invisible to us, even the concrete on which we stand will blow as sand into the futures eyes. In my brothers bathroom I witness the transitional state; the advancing wall of nature repossessing its pilfered resources.


A spray of dead flies fuse to the fibres of holed blue curtains, cast like peppercorns on a woven cotton sky. They lay dead from old age or physical exhaustion; through attempted escapes from the incarcerating filth. Fungus grows in moist ignored corners. A mat of greasy hair turns spirals in the bath plug hole; flicking in a stream of fresh eroding water. There are no dripping taps, but a constant run of transparent wash; like a sink taking pains to cleanse itself of shame.


I touch something solid, something metallic in my pocket, something with adhesive sinewy attachments. Fingerprint whorls and loops flap in fragments of skin like missing pieces from a scattered forgotten puzzle. A greasy metal relic carries the ‘jigsaw’ crumbs of man or woman; a trodden silvery fold, clipping together the remains of what was once probably a finger.


I throw the object in the shameful sink and let it sit for a while in the gushing flow. Soft fleshy pieces detach themselves from the solid mass and fall like snow into the depths of the earth. Stubborn traces linger behind and wait enclosed in the dull metal grip. I fiddle the bristles of my brothers toothbrush into the sheltering gaps... and pull out any remaining human. Gristly bits of something drop to the sink and circle down the rusting plug hole.


The object is finally free of sour organic mash but the smell of something dead still taints its shining surface. I find a bottle of mouthwash and swill the metal round in its cobalt blue liquid, making it rattle on the sides of the clear enclosing plastic. Odorous bacteria are exchanged for a sterile minty alcoholic freshness; a more suitable property to hold in the hand.


I return the mouthwash to the safety of a shelf and watch a particle sediment drift to rest at the bottom of the bottle. I will have to remember to avoid my brothers mouthwash in future. Bad breath is always preferable to a corpse in the mouth.


The mangled shine and flattened glister reveals its form, now free from the molesting human touch of finger traces. In an earlier guise this item of naked glint was a ring on a previous life; now reshaped from my shoe into common trash. Argentic and silvern in shade, this finger trinket shines like platinum, white gold or simple and worthless market-stall metal.


I run the object round my hand and feel the caressing friction of surface scratches; gouged and street scarred from its shoe-born transport. Filtered through the pavement scuffing, a string of symbols make themselves known; an exposure of order and design revealed through contrasting chaotic line. The symbols cluster into unintelligible groups, into ‘words’, into a sentence inscribed from an unknown language. This tarnished object of forgotten meanings, of wasted sentimental riches now exists but a few steps away from its elemental end; its transformation and return to ore.


The head that once cherished the thing, that once cried for joy at the gift of metal, now dehydrates in frozen air; a glittering rock of meat and bone. The metal will regress to a seam of oxide, the head will re-enter the carbon cycle; becoming soil – plant – animal – soil, until the earth burns from an exploding sun. I resist an urge to return the ring to its circular shape, its wearable form – in fear of any temptation to wear it. Jewellery torn from the hand of a cadaver would make a particularly useless lucky charm.


I wrap the ring in a blanket of tissue and put it to rest in a dry empty pocket. I lay myself down on my old stinking duvet and turn things over for a while. I think about distractions, about families of spiders, about religious iconography, about cheap second hand paperbacks, about going back to Prozac, about consumer electronics, about bodies dumped in a fucking freezer.


I close both eyes and stare at a memory of the crematorium chimney. A stream of ripped and twisting plastic bags ascend into the ozone, replacing absent fumes with fluttering black polyethylene polymers. Naked corpses strain at flapping plastic tails and sky-ride them into the charcoal atmosphere. Disposable bags and discarded people unify in the toxic airspace as dark and choking clouds of DNA/PVC.


The ‘Garden of Remembrance’ butt joins to the horizon as a complex carpet of serpentine ornament. Printed representations of lawns and pathways writhe through the distance like knotted veins. A singing child dances circles round a rose bush design, chanting ‘little girl’ skipping rhymes:

“Heaven is in the clouds, Heaven is in the clouds, Mary, Joseph, Luke and John. Donkey, Donkey, Donkey Kong. Where has baby Jesus gone?”

I walk the carpet lines and feel the pained avoiding movements of something shattered underneath. Fabric ripples ride over shifting hands and mouthing facial undulations. I step between the stillness and placidity of uninhabited spaces, sensing the adjacent motions of populated dirt. I tread carelessly down on a spinal curve and watch gravity warp and stiffen its resistance. Calcium gives way to persuasive kilograms. A dominated crack resonates on the airwaves.


The chapel interior spasms into vision with a lumbering switch of temporal existence. Time waits suspended in an irrelevant disposable nanosecond. I shamble forward on an underfoot stripe of smooth relenting textures; a spongiform fabric of warm and secretious donations. Perspective lines push triangular knives at a propaganda priest; solidified in shaping an infinite vowel. Black arachnid legs kick from his throat like quick broken springs; flicker walking limbs through a gossamer infected saliva.


I drag-heel over the lubricated floor and feel the cellular fabric baulk at my essence. In the priest’s open mouth an insect advances like a burning cancer, spreading crackle charred limbs over the god-giver’s tongue. I slip past the man and draw back the curtains from a once hidden door. The way ahead unfolds like a dead severed rose.


I glance to the rear and watch a brittle shadow; the sputtering shape from the mouth of a liar. Like hair, like carbon, like black razor wire; the sulphurous smash circumnavigates a cheek and invades the glaze of the preachers eye.


A taste of crystal sharpness sullies a once delicious oxygen; frozen vapour hangs thick in the air like nebulous cotton sheets. Clouds of claustrophobia invade the freezer’s vacuous spaces and grow in a broth of blown contributions. Shivers of tension thrash through my musculature in an involuntary stuttering body quake; taut exposed skin withers into dry cold rigidity.


I view the scene and witness it all just like before: the tarpaulin, the carpets, the balding head and the outstretched hand; everything as it was, and everything as it shouldn’t be. An impossible wind agitates the air; blowing gored plastic sheets into flailing banners. Brown frozen fluids cake to their surface like slogans drawn of rusting ice.


I hang my head low and see a baby in bucket; flushed and warm but so clearly out of place. A round living face ‘goo-goo’s and dribbles like a live baby should, with pink chubby hands mauling the rim of its old orange bucket. Somewhere inside its darling soft head an infantile thought transforms into a need, a want and an all consuming wish list. Primeval sounds evolve from its lungs; from a bubble to a blubber to a sophisticated squall. A gagging cry swells and multiplies in a plague of viral reverberations and infecting resonances. Hearing senses overload into alternative territories; from hearing to hurting, hurting to hunting.


I shout at the baby to make it all stop, but the omnipresent pain grinds in a surge. “Shut UP” again I shout, and nothing changes but cumulative pain. “SHUT UP”, again, “SHUT UP”, again. “SHUT THE FUCK UP” I scream, and the words rip at my throat like articulated knives. I stamp a foot down and shout in time to block out the noise. I stamp a foot down into the bucket. I stamp a foot down, down, down into the infant. The crying stops.


Far in the distance a familiar figure stoops over a bucket; it is me, viewed from the outside like an ape in a cage. I identify the filthy clothes, the clumsy stance and the stupid unshaven face; my own unvalued possessions, but I share no empathy with this bastard creature. I see what it has done; its mindless destructive acts and recognise a lack of any corresponding reason. Why did you do that? I ask. Nothing. Why did you do that? I ask again, more insistently. I refuse to answer.


I push the bucket aside and walk onto the mound of tarpaulin and carpet. Black plastic rivers course through bare ravaged valleys of Wilton and Axminster weave. I run imagined fingers through the contrasting textures; the rough itching touch of old natural wool and the soft cutting edge of polyethylene. Inside the coarse sarcophagi of material trash, I feel the stygian ripples of a bin-bag death mask.


I drag my nails through the coal-dark membrane and unveil the ashen bloom of marbled lividity. Dry leathered eyes glare from a waxen glaze; as distorted orbs, translucent and withdrawn to introspection. I cup her face in my grail of hands; a piteous rite of resurrection. Her sulphaemoglobin blush glows like sated chlorophyll. Nothing changes but incremental failure.


I hold the face of the cloud-eyed woman and welcome the weight of her head in my hands. My vaporous breath embraces her burden; envelops her affliction with cushions of warm dewy air. I stroke a line down her numb solid cheek and watch the epidermal film peel away in my fingers. A transparent slough of paper thin skin tears like ruptured cellophane.


In the cold sharp haze of exhalation, moisture folds into weaving cyclones of vitreous sleet. Strip refracted light stammers through a hanging suspension of crystalline lenses. Projecting through the prismatic broth, a revenant shade manifests into reality. A stone-faced woman motions dramatically from an open doorway.


Her mouth parts move in hushed parallel lines with synchronised words that resolve in unconsciousness. “Come home,” are the words she mouths. “Come home,” are the words for the deafened ‘cloud-eyes’. Through maternal tears the mother appeals: “Darling... darling, come home,” but the daughter is unmoved and remains. She doesn’t hear the emotive pull of distant crying. Her ears are dead and frozen into fragility.


I hold her body in a gesture of futility; forcing surplus living warmth into her frigid grey anatomy. Her tranquil head resides in the curve of my palm and sleeps inside a greater oblivion. Sparse twining grooves of jaundice yellow hair adhere to her scalp and weep with foul sebaceous meltwater. The soiled golden keratin strands unravel like sanity into dry broken threads and stale singularities.


I lean into her presence and brush at her mouth with the nerves of mine; a taboo touch precluded by the script of nature. I kiss in depths to her senseless lips and feel the gears of conventionalism grind an objection. Dark flaking pieces fall away into my mouth and I swallow the flavours of sour fermenting girl. A bitter culture dissolves and thaws into gagging new reality.

6: The Conjuring

Edited: 12-03-07


Through a sienna brown nicotine haze, the family converge for ritualised post-funeral alcoholism. In a pub called The Nelson I find myself conjoined with them, confined by a decor of reverence to the notorious old sailor. Paintings, prints and graven idols pepper the walls like war medals hung on a veterans chest. Electrified candles project through a backdrop of newly aged panelling; an illusion varnished with the integrity of a bland costume drama.


A warm pint of mild rests unconsumed on the flashing games machine; Mack’s drink of choice, and a replicated customary routine. The ceremony dictates: that a drink is bought for the person who died. A commendable tradition, except for the method of inevitable disposal. Beer is either drunk or thrown away; entering the drains in one of two ways. It will never evaporate into the spirit world. Its passage will be via an undistinguished send off; tipped down the sink at the evenings end, or swallowed by a drunk willing to take a kicking for his thirst.


I buy my own drink; the thought of something mild makes me want to slip into a coma. I drain a triple vodka and cover its tracks with the acceptable public face of cold generic lager. Something warm like love, burns a chemical contentment into my oesophagus lining.


A sip of Mack's ale was my first experience of the joys of alcohol. Mack and ‘Fat Jen’; his never loving wife, were baby-sitting the jibes of my brother and me. We had built up a wall of double 'pester power' until he relented; to let us taste from one of the holy cans he possessed. Adults forever raved about this spectacular nectar; this fluid of dreams and I anticipated the flavours of a beautiful cola. The flat bitter mouthful tasted of dead virtue and anticlimax. We pretended we liked it, and as numb adults the pretence is the closest thing we have to pleasure. I lounge at the bar, drowning in pretence and a consistent awareness of the filth adhering to the bottom of my shoe. I had stepped in a loathsome something while meddling around the freezer, though the moment never seemed quite right for probing at my sole. Any old bar-room charmer can scan his shoes for dog shit and pick it out with a swizzle stick, but digging out lumps of skin and the like can attract attention with handcuffs, in the wrong kind of way.


I head off to the lavatory; seeking the seclusion of an all enveloping cubicle. I stride a nervous, spastic and encumbering shuffle; keeping my soiled foot low and parallel to the ground. It’s a ludicrous and fabricated gait, but a falsified limp is common around here; like a counterfeit queue at the benefit office. I journey to the 'gents' and discover the traditional pub-standard feculence . Toddling old men list over porcelain glazed urinals; pissing at tab ends, pubic hairs and soap-like disinfectant cubes. Magnolia painted walls share nicotine stains and spattered waste; an artist's canvas for phone number scribbles and penis ‘Pictionary’. The sounds and smells of vomiting inform me of the already inhabited cubicle. I will have to think of something else.


I parallel shuffle back to the smoky lounge area where my family are gabbling over the sounds of a jukebox. ‘Hits’ from the sixties are playing out reminiscences; a triggering soundtrack for a past dated life. I take a seat somewhere out of the way, but my ass has barely kissed wood before a voice interrupts my solitude.


"When are YOU gunna have kids then eh? When are you gunna make your mam a grandma?"


She circumvents the traditional ‘hello’ and dives straight in with a dagger of a greeting. “When?”, she says... “when?”, as if shitting out children is an inevitable ambition. I imagine the collision of her mouth with a bar-room ashtray and the screaming commotion it would cause. I imagine her tongue lolling out between red and splintered teeth. I imagine that is no way to treat a cousin.


This cousin is one of two explicitly ugly sisters: Tina, a Jehovah’s Witness and Lisa, an illicit substance abuser. In true dramatic style, the sisters despise each other and never manifest in the same place together. They are a Ying and Yang, a plus and minus; two sides of hackneyed and metaphorical coin. The lottery has been drawn, the currency tossed and the Jehovah’s Witness has failed to appear. But joy upon joy, the addict is here and I feel like I have discovered a dog turd in the lucky dip.


Lisa spreads herself between her most recent man and her latest litter of slavering children. Two slugs of pink and stink sit lashed in pushchairs encumbered with the typical paraphernalia of baby consumerism. It has been four years since they took her first born slug away; when the law objected to the Afghan brown she was sticking in her arm. Somewhere in the world, a happy child is mercifully oblivious to the origin of its genes. This unashamed source of forgotten DNA appears twenty years older than her time given age, and thirty years older than her image in my memory. She is haggard and drawn with eyes like ragged exit wounds. The once pretty young girl has exchanged youth and vivacity for cheap fake love from a disposable needle. I watch her old body move as she loads a fresh plastic bottle into one of the kids faces. It grabs on tight and sucks it hard. I start to wonder if she ever breast fed and got her babies high.


She takes a drink from a long rum and black and opens her mouth to speak some more evil. In the depths of her face, her saliva and tongue bare the bloody red stains of her chosen liquor. I study my hands near the untouched ashtray, and look back to her mouth with its berry red teeth. Someone in the room stubs out a cigarette and coughs ash into the oxygen.


"You can't wait forever. The clock's ticking!"


She takes a cliché from a well stacked shelf and dusts it off like an ancient spell book. Her stale incantation projects an evil and awakens a thought that I try to kill off right away. I turn an eye to the clock on the wall and hear it tapping a rhythm to Herman's Hermits. Somewhere, elsewhere, an inappropriate joke spawns a brood of nervous laughter. I mute the sound with my fingers in my ears and hear the stifled punch of my wasted heartbeats. My breath rasps in and out, in and out like a saw on a yew tree.


Lisa exists as a walking convention; conforming to the principles of her small-town surroundings. I know her babies would never get high; those uncreative ‘witches tits’ expel nothing more than dry spider silk. She reminds me why I avoid talking to relatives; she reminds me of who I am and where I came from. I fantasise for moment about being adopted and never knowing the truth. Somewhere I smile inside and compose myself with a mindless comeback.


"Perhaps... I could buy the ones that you didn't want?"


I think the sentence through, but swallow it all back without speaking it out. Although I want to hurt her I refuse to provoke an argument or any kind of real conversation. I mumble a series of syllables hidden on a laboured breath, and glance at random naval items scattered on the wall. The words of Lisa slide out of existence as I concentrate my mind on an antiquated picture. On the deck of a ship, a monkey lies dead and tied by the 'hands' to a rough wooden board. Men in tall mercurous hats and stiff flaking collars point at their find with an ensemble of fingers. Below the image, a label presents a revealing inscription: "Beagle Re-enactment Society 1893".


Having children is surely an uncomplicated process; it’s animalistic nature of the earliest kind, from the division of amoeba to the dropping of a celebrity love-child. The mammalian recipe consists of just two distinct sexes, a few sweaty moments and the rest is a biology class. It requires no learned skills or higher brain functions; Socrates and Einstein where not noted for their masterful fucking technique. We flatter ourselves that we are different in kind to the council estate dogs, fucking for fun in the children's playground. I remember a dog ignoring its food and eating its faeces. I remember a dog at war with its own leg. I remember a dog licking sick off a pavement on a New Year's Day. These feeble-minded animals manage to reproduce themselves with virulent regularity - just like human, just like dog.


At the back of the lounge a swarm of hungry man-dogs savage a buffet of quiche and sausage rolls. In gatherings such as these, it is impressive to behave in the ways of the internal animal; to 'give in' to primal urges and simple unconscious reflexes. They eat sugar, drink desire, smoke, fuck and fight for pleasure; because with very little investment, chemical rewards can be gained from the brain. From beneath a fold of paper tablecloth a little black poodle emerges to wander a snack littered floor. It sniffs at the ground licking up fragments of crisps and peanuts freshly fallen from gibbering mouths. The arrival of the poodle causes me wonder if thinking about dogs has somehow conjured the animal into existence. Maybe if I hadn't been thinking about dogs then I just wouldn't have noticed it. Maybe I'm just thinking too much.


"What are ya upta these days?"


I believed my barrier method had snubbed her out but a slip of attention brings Lisa's interrogations back like a dose of the herpes. The gossip of family had spread an outbreak of answers but she asks her questions anyway just to pick at a sore. She wears a black stretch T-shirt that flattens her breasts into sagging flaps of skin; multiplying the side-effects of her 'alternative' lifestyle. Printed Celtic knots embellish her bony shoulders; mimicking the coiled and scabrous veins that are buried underneath. I think about her question and wonder, who the fuck wears a T-shirt to a funeral? I tell her I am doing 'nothing much'; giving her the feed line so she can get on with her real point.


"You avn't really done much since leaving school 'ave ya?"


She licks her tongue round the sharpened words and savours their bitter ugly flavour. A stifled smile puts a crack in her face that exposes the pleasure she now has in herself. She uses 'school' as a universal term for any educational establishment with no care for its level or status; when you are making a dig it all means the same. If I had spent my years pulling cabbages from the mud I wouldn't be a target for this insulting tone. Boston's people are bound by soil, destined to earn pocket change for their blood and reproduce like playground dogs. The only escape is the exit that death provides; when they pay out to burn you and eat cold pre-packaged quiche.


Behind the cobbled track of her spine, her generic 'man' whispers furtive reminders of my attempts to join the police. A moment passes... a silence disguised as the end of it all. The minute decays like ill-formed smoke rings, like cigarettes in a soured beer glass; as always, nothing is ever good enough to last.


"Your joining the 'enemy'? Fuckin' 'ell! What do ya wanna go and do that for?"


Her disappointment is true and down to the bone; to view me as anything other than useless subverts a growing and popular trend. I imagine her as a 50's sci-fi robot made of grey metal boxes with headlamps for eyes. A monotone voice of distortion and steel delivers a phrase in an infinite loop;


"does not compute, does not compute, does not compute..."


She overloads on confusion; unable to cope with the diversion away from the deprecation of me. Like the milk in her breasts and the mucus in her cunt; her speech has dried to a flaking crust of conversation. I relieve her disappointment and confess that I have failed, and my failure was at the medical stage. Somehow, the idea of me being physically, medically, genetically inept returns contentment to her ghost-like face. Once again I am the lowest in status; I am the weak and subordinate ape; I am the herbivore in the food chain.


"What ya fail the medical for?"


She digs deeper still, hoping to find the 'coup de grâce'; the last merciful blow to finish the quarry. With a casual turn she fakes disinterest, a veil of pretence; disguising her desire for scandalous dirt. A fresh new cigarette glows in her mouth as she inverts her cheeks into hollow black pits. The hiss of her breath dives into the darkness and swims in the void of her inflating chest. I don't bother with a reply; there is something so 'wrong place, wrong time' about the whole of this subject. A post-funeral piss-up is a bad choice of function to reveal how you once hated your life and wanted to die. For that I much prefer a christening.


This party is painful, like a naked flame under a blistering hand; it hurts yes, but the game continues until the smell makes you wretch. I pick at a plate of traditional party fare; of cholesterol rolls and artery blockages on sticks that all taste like sawdust to me. I dream of floating out of the window and surrounding myself with silent empty space. I shed my sight and taste the saccharin clouds, feel the disturbed and kissing air bend against my skin. But my progress is abrasive against the forces of gravity; acceleration and speed are hampered from impeding drag. I look south to the earth and see a charred feminine corpse hanging from my leg by a double ended noose. Engraved in its chest are two words of reminding: "The Forsaken".


I remember the matter attached to my shoe and scan the room for curious eyes. A shaved chimp in hire-suit is speaking out loud; a distraction for the family in awe of the novelty. The chimp consumes attention like celebratory champagne and gets drunk on the fruits of its muttering labour. The spectators binge on their own empathetic emotions; savouring the speech, licking up the words and snorting sentences like crudely cut lines of substandard coke. I ignore the show and seize the diversionary moment to prod at my shoe with a cocktail stick.


In the cleated sole of overlapping vales, a rubber stream is dammed near the crevice of the heel. I poke the stick into the grey-white mass and feel it hit something hard, something... something bone. With a twist of the stick I flick it down and out onto a waiting bed of serviette sheets. The item now disturbed brings a subtle aroma of ripe decomposition. The all pervading smog of cigarettes, spilt beer and once-a-year cologne conceal the crime; permeating the smells with a publicly acceptable incense.


I poke and stab at the tiny slug of flesh and make myself feel sick from my own debased actions. Knotted inside the torn rippled skin, a glint of white metal shines alien within the organic compound. I take another stick and tweeze the shine from the slithery mass. These 'remains', I discard and throw to the mouth of the little black poodle. The 'treasure', I keep and steal away in my suit jacket pocket.


The smell doesn't seem to bother the dog as it eats up the pieces like choice cuts of meat. Raised on the dead bodies of horses, slopped into cans and served up as 'doggy chum'; nothing compares to the original flavour of a real 'best friend'. This is the taste of canine betrayal, a taste of murder - and the little dog sits there; looking at me as if asking for more.


I abandon the dog with its secret desire and move towards the door with the intention of leaving. The outstretched hands of familiar strangers yearn to be shaken in contracts of symbolic nicety. I sign them off with prepared excuses and aim my steps at the nearing exit. A forgotten cousin attempts the beginnings of something close to conversation; she is getting married, divorced, pregnant, sterilised or something or other. I am far from interested and closer to leaving this ceremonial charade. I feign a smile, nod, sigh and hug the girl but I'm mentally out the door, trying to physically follow.


At the 'way out' I stop and feel something akin to the sweetness of success. I inhale freedom, walk without worry; untied from the restrictions of formal occasion. I return a glance through the open door and look back at the space where I used to be; the place, the people. There is meaning here, a symbolic and resonating allegory. For one last time I look behind, back inside... and walk away from the mess of it all. Now the dog is vomiting on the carpet. It seems it doesn't have a taste for the finger buffet.

4: Good Mourning Auschwitz

Edited 17/08/05


If the world was divided into the diametric bipolar stereotypes of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' then my uncle would have played for the team in white. In reality people are non-monochrome and in the uncut truth his shade of character was not the saintly pure white of symbolic doves or untrod snow. His was the beer wet and nicotine stained white of a man who knew how to enjoy life to excess.


When I was still at the age of eating insects for fun, Mack was working in a small family run bakery a couple of doors away from my home. He would start in the early forgotten hours of the morning to smash away the still silence. The locals excused the sounds of generators, delivery vans and assorted machinery when the scent of fresh baked bread in the air came as compensation. It was a predictable and welcome dawn chorus of birdsong, diesel engines and the yelling of men smelling of yeast and flour. The bakery frontage was a tiny shop; a display point for fragrant loaves, crusty rolls and sticky buns with a dead wasp garnish. It was a drop in rumour mill and chat room, a communication centre for the gossipy housewives. This was a time when everyone knew their neighbours business and dutifully told everyone else about it.


At night Mack would bring life to a series of pubs and clubs; drinking, smoking, playing darts and laughing till tears fell on his wiry black moustache. Snooker, dominoes, cards: all were a great accompaniment to a good joke and friendly company. I always remember him laughing, a cigarette hanging from a lip and a glass held in the air like the Statue of Liberty.


Mack eventually played the traditional game of marriage and procreation, a choice as inevitable as death. His wife Jen was an obese and inadequate slug of flesh in a dress. Her contribution to the family hive was misery and laziness. By night Mack cooked to feed his hungry kids, by day he baked to feed everyone else's. Jen wasted his wage on ill-fitting flowered dresses when the children needed shoes. She pushed her flabby feet into strappy stilettos when the children needed feeding. She took it away and spent it all trying to beautify herself, but you can't make dog shit attractive by painting it rouge.


The supermarkets swept into town and the bakery was bankrupted and closed; a story so common to the point of cliche. The people demanded croissants not crusty cobs, Danish pastry not iced buns - its what they all ate on TV, what they ate on "Miami Vice". Mack practiced a craft utilising methods and recipes perfected over history, but everything was worthless next to the shiny, cheap and surface frills. The community rumour mill was redundant and replaced by magazines of 'Celebrity Cellulite' and 'Stars In Their Cars'. No one knew their neighbour's business and kept their mouths shut about it. Mack got divorced when Jen was caught spreading her thighs for the local half-wit; the kind of guy that screamed in his sleep and stared lovingly at children. The end of the bakery forced Mack to work in a factory, packing machine made meat pies on a production line.


This series of events would cause most people to reach for the scissors, but Mack never let any of this stop him from enjoying a life. He was always the energy of a party and never needed much of an excuse for a drink and a laugh. In the end it was smoking that fuelled the cancer that ate through his body. His last weeks were spent in a hospital bed attached to feeding and breathing tubes. I feel guilty that I never visited him in hospital, but would always prefer to remember him, standing on the wooden bakery steps, cheering and laughing at us kids playing in the garden.


Having died of a smoking related illness Mack's impending cremation blew a wisp of inappropriate irony through the air. Cremation has always tended to be the financially preferred method for disposal of our relatives. It is a soulless 'bargain basement' process for those who want to keep a higher percentage of the inheritance. Relatives queue to cash in their genes when the 'Last Will and Testament' delivers the cheques. They pick a funeral off the peg and throw the cadaver to a burning hole in the wall.


Given the choice, the living would probably prefer to attend the 'worm buffet' than get the ashtray treatment. I imagine my own funeral: A one off inspirational experience to play on the senses. A marble headstone sits shaded under a blossoming tree, carved with verses direct from a mourning heart. A young blonde cries double streams of saline, internally consumed by doubts of life without the blood of her existence. Wailing crowds wave a sea of candles, flooding the surrounding hills of viridian and jade with illuminated faces. A coffin reclines on a polished gun carriage, carved from a single solid oak. Inside my body lies, anointed with scented oils and wrapped in silken bandages. Six grey horses draw the tomb though the parting crowds, painted with spirituous sweat and nervous whitened eyes. Dirge singing winds throw clouds across a blazing sun, shadows move and fade like unrested souls.


I watch the council crematorium building move closer from the car window, a purpose built processing plant barely hiding its function under a veil of aesthetic beauty. It is a small boxy construction with little architectural distinction apart from the tall square chimney that stands seemingly in conflict with the dominant horizontal plane. Concrete walls hide behind red brick cladding and white wooden crosses, a makeover attempt to render impressions of holy temples and faded ideas of spiritual transition. The facade fails to bury resemblances to incinerators used to efficiently burn the bodies of Jews at Auschwitz. A curved driveway sweeps our car past low neat hedges and uniform gravelled spaces. Benches and rose bushes parade name carved plaques of people I probably never met. Two ivy covered porches, symmetrically oppose each other on either side of the building. One entrance, one exit... the perfect verse for a minimalist epitaph.


Untidy groups linger aimlessly around, kicking gravel in the car park. I examine their wistful faces and strain to recognise features changed over time. There is nothing familiar here apart from the sensation of staring at strangers. These are mourners from a previous funeral, all tissues in handbags and unkeepable promises. At the exit, hired ushers offer sympathy and handshakes to the sniffling masses, looking like nightclub bouncers in leather gloves and long dark coats. A shook hand is the same as one thrust up between your shoulder blades; it means goodbye in any language.


Over at the entrance I spot family I forgot I had, but mostly just family I would rather forget. The haggard and lost looking faces seen at weddings and birthdays, with names I never bother to remember. The smells of smoke and death hang thick in the air, though not from conventionally expected sources. Almost every mouth sucks a cigarette and every back bares a charity shop coat. The chimney itself strangely blows no smoke or fumes and I try not to think about it. We wait for the hearse and the funeral drive-thru experience. The relatives shuffle awkwardly in shoes worn in by strangers unknown. They stand with looks of intense concentration, trying to think of interesting things or the right thing to say. Eyes reach contact with relative eyes, followed by facial displays of gravity and anguish. No real emotion exists here, just a cold and nervous social routine. Self-conscious hands hide in suit trouser pockets, coming up for air during frequent wristwatch glances. A bee flies past a brass plaque. A distant siren fades into nothing.


The hearse glides in on an easy silence, reaching stillness from motion in a blended transition. A limousine follows like a skinny sister; mimicking the grace of the heavier sibling but without the burden of responsibility. A shabby miscellaneous train of second hand cars pulls in behind with a cargo of handbags and beer bellies, stockings and suspended sentences. My DNA stands released on the kerb, fragmented and scattered like a metaphorical mirror. In it I see no pieces of myself, no meaning, no answers.


The long coats slide the casket out from the hearse and step a rehearsed, slow and purposeful walk with the polished box set on their shoulders. I visualize them in their night time jobs: punchy doormen for some dive of a bar, adept at muscling people out as well as carrying them in. Here the individual is predictably more compliant and - for a change - distinctively dead before they started work on him.


Voices chatter in streams of rasping syllables; an unrecognisable language to anyone unwilling to listen. Tongues smash against false teeth and chewing gum. I listen for a moment to confirm what I am willingly missing.


"...you're next, then you, no you wait there..."
"...it's Paul, then Sue, then... where's auntie Ag?"
"...it should be Jen first then Sue then Paul then..."
"...Steve, Steve? Where's Steve?"
"...You're next, then me, then Linda, where's Nettie? Nettie!?"


The relatives gripe among themselves negotiating an acceptable hierarchy to follow behind the box. An anxious line forms against the wall like a shoplifters ID parade. Insertions and switches constantly alter the sequence; a volatile string of bloodlines and varicose veins. I hang back and follow in behind once they decide on which spoon to use for the soup.


Inside, the 'chapel' looks as convincing as any fake church ever will. Double glazed UPVC windows hide behind a costume of adhesive stained-glass imagery. Faux vaulted ceilings conceal credibility in white polystyrene tiles and 'oak' MDF beams. Polished wood panelling and hard unrelenting pews strive in vain to furnish an air of authentic emotional warmth. A distant wall stands semi-clothed in post-box red; skirted in a swathe of sedentary velour curtains. Crosses punctuate the empty spaces as convention dictates; wooden symbols on clean white walls like tattoos on young naked skin. This is a blank generic place hung with faith specific symbols. It is a cinema, a theatre, a conference room or space number five with religious accoutrements. As the coffin is laid on a velour covered plinth I realise there is no soul in these walls, just glass-fibre cavity insulation. This is what churches would look like if they were made by Ikea.


The resident perfume of fresh paint and aerosol polish strains through the alien taint of market stall aftershave. Assortments of kin discuss seating protocol, while selected works of Bach are murdered on an organ.


"Pete you should be next to Sam"
"Friends on the left, family on the right...No, the right."
"Isn't that for weddings?
"No, Sue you can go on the right. Where's Ray? Ray, over here!"


I stay out of the debate as my directive is simple: don't sit near the crying, don't sit on the box; everywhere else is reasonably trouble free. I sit on wood and flick through a hymn book for no real reason. Like yesterdays newspaper on the tube train or the bimbo in a bar room; it's just something to do with the eyes and the fingers. In the margin of 'Amazing Grace' someone has drawn an ejaculating cock. A ballpoint trail of blue spatter semen highlights the line:


"Thro' many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come."


We follow the usual ritual; an unenthusiastic performance with an old pedestrian script. The man in the dress and crucifix ensemble delivers a speech recalling the virtues of someone he probably never met. He lays it thick with religious overtones; linking stories of Mack with the suffering of Jesus. It follows the standard formula: the priest says stuff, we repeat stuff, sing stuff, say stuff, sing stuff, say stuff - another day, another cadaver.


We sing ancient songs and repeat archaic verses. We mumble antiquated texts about gods, ghosts and creatures that live in the cupboard. I mouth the words in silence; refusing to vocalise irrelevant superstitions. The priest sings out in full lung tonality to shame the gathered passionless mass. Miming was a good idea, but unfortunately one shared by the surrounding crowd. A chorus of empty mouths collectively shape soundless air.


The priest rolls on like life itself and the seated bide time for his last breath. He talks up the 'trinity'; a shady '3 for 1' deal that the crowd refuse to buy. I let his voice fade out to a dull monotone babble like swimming pool screams and underwater conversations. His mouth moves and his eyes read but the syllables leave in unintelligible streams. I imagine being dead and the resulting ritual; my coffin lowered down by the trembling and grieving. I see handfuls of earth and taste the granular soil; rich and warm like geological chocolate. The air is free from religious discourse; no teaching, no moralising, no recounts of ancient magic tricks. The wind carries stories and memories of the past, told simultaneously in layered voices. There is freedom to contribute and freedom to abstain. Individuals visualise in the solitude that closed eyes provide. Some dance some cry, no forced agenda, no etiquette for the dead. It is over, and I am at one with time.


The priest closes his old book; place-marked and spliced by photocopied sheets. The sales pitch is over and the processing has begun. A red curtain draws an elliptical motorised path; surrounding the coffin in a shroud of velveteen. Organ music begins and cues in the sounds of grief from the gathering. Shrieks and tears emerge from the once sniffling and dry. A chorus of motors buzz into the mix; presumably powering the unseen coffin through a hatch in the wall. The organ music ends and there is no encore, no bow from the priest and no applause. Instead he just opens the exit door; a subtle hint to us that the show is over.


The crowds shuffle by, shaking the priest by the hand on the way out. I can't help but feel that this whole thing meant nothing. On a day that should be personal and emotional we go through this sterile ritual, packaged and ordered from the pages of a catalogue. We sing songs and pray to a god we don't believe in and go through the motions because that's the way it's done. I imagine myself in that coffin surrounded by the facade of spirituality. I feel the constriction of chipboard, the 'window dressing' of curtains, wooden crosses and a plastic Jesus. I see the sadness and boredom on rows of oblivious faces. Exactly who was this designed to benefit? Maybe this is why people are afraid to die.


Back outside I kick some gravel and try to avoid eye contact with people I don't want to talk to. Sobbing relatives swap stories of happier days while others race to light quivering cigarettes. The priest moves between the people, handing out sympathy like free samples of microwave pizza. I look around and notice the chimney again. It remains inactive, the only smoke here is being consumed by desperate yellow fingered addicts.


The stillness of the chimney spawns internal circles of repeating questions. I ask them and try to answer myself with limited success. Some kind of smokeless burning process must be involved, but without smoke... why the chimney? I notice the priest distracted in his duties and the still open door we used for an exit. I see the tears and scrunched up handkerchiefs of family and strangers. Searching inside now would be purely tasteless.

1: Two Tense

Edited 14/05/05, 24/06/05

I felt like smashing a spade into her face just to watch her cry, though this would go no way to convince her I was mentally stable. From that mouth of hers - uninjured by garden tools - she had uttered words that damaged me inside like cheap Latvian vodka. Multiple mental parts had become biological sludge through an application of her caustic sentences.

I was stiff with the rigour of suppressed violence and revenge; a statue seated with a mess of thick desperation inside. I scratched the head and the internal sludge for a 'get-out clause' or verbal gymnastic workout that could change her mind. The 'head custard' stirred and produced nothing of use for any speaking orifices. I said nothing. She had a motionless verdict and a self-assured voice; and I cared very little for either.

Her desk was a carefully organised clutter of clinical bureaucracy. Papers and forms lay in loose piles or caged in hi-rise plastic trays stacked on stilts. Her sponsored desk calendar showed the 28th of July and the name and logo of some surgical supply or drug company. In fact most items on the desk looked like they had arrived as offerings from sales representatives: a free stapler if you use our surgical gloves, a complimentary pencil caddy for buying our blood pressure gauge, pens, pencils, paperweights all with screaming logos and company names proudly announcing themselves just in case you are stuck for a place to buy, buy, buy. On this day I had walked into this doctors room with just myself to sell.. only she wasn't buying any of it.


The desk calendar was a reminder to me that it was the most of a year since I had submitted an application to the police. I was sick of working for money, sick of my purpose for someone else's profit, someone else's new sports car, so sick that I had a minor mental breakdown at the waste of all my time. Prescription drugs cleaned the sick out of my mind, and time supplied the glue to stick back the pieces. Into a shiny cleaned out head I resurrected an old and battered dream. I needed to open spaces between the blindness and pull the burnt shadows away from the breaks. I could no longer be the victim of a global situation and moved with the intention of playing a part in the state of the world. 'The world is what you make it', echoed as a cliche spoken in conversational drunk. Few people genuinely get to make a world but we all have to live in the consequences. I needed to make this a place in which to live not hide and to return respect to the ones that didn't walk on the backs of others. This day was the day of my police medical examination and the words of a product-whore doctor had murdered my dream in its newborn cot.


"I am afraid that with the information that you have given me on this form and in our subsequent conversation that I cannot recommend your application to proceed any further"


She spoke the words as if they meant nothing, or more accurately, like she had made herself believe she was doing me some kind of favour. I guess that's the way you sleep at night when you take other peoples dreams away for a wage.


"You have suffered a period of depression, and the work involved in the police force could set that off again. I couldn't put you into a position that could make your health suffer"


Well, I'm sorry spade-face but that is exactly what you have done and I can hate you so much in this moment. I was depressed, yes, but in a call-centre booth it's an occupational disease. A university provided me with nothing but expanded knowledge of what I was missing outside and the only work I could find was manipulating people to consume lists of things they never wanted. I was depressed because people that steal, intimidate, persecute and kill always get away with it. They thrive and spread like ants on a coke can and I can't do anything about it. I was depressed through a lack of a career, a lack of direction and a lack of control over the decay of western civilisation. Somehow after everything else, the sight of a face smashed on a dashboard seems like nothing more than an entertaining website.


"When you submitted your application surely you must have known?"


When you read my application surely you knew that you would fail me? Instead we had to go through this whole pointless charade. Why did I have to lie naked on that cold sterile couch with your hand on my scrotum? I didn't think to question it at the time. Sure, the moment was sweet as I imagined having sex with you over the instrument trolley - that flouncy flowered summer skirt just demanding to be lifted as you try to avoid being impaled by a 'free sample' scalpel. I admit in truth I was split by the fear of an involuntary erection faux pas and the possibility of a small penis preventing enrolment due to a lack of 'perceived power' in a naked gangster sauna situation. Surely I must have known what? That your point of view would be informed by hysterical tabloid doctrine instead of science? How I wish I'd asked that one. Depression is now so regular that if you look out of your window and don't want to jump out of it then you are probably sitting in a bungalow. Who is to say it is a disease anyway, and not a naturally occurring behavioural reaction to the conditions we find ourselves in? If I become cold I shiver, if I become pointless should I not look for a knife drawer? Prozac use is widespread like the birth control pill and recycled traces of both are now found in the water supply. Drug-laced piss swills around in the sewers beneath us, beneath you, swimming with infertile humping rats plagued by unreasonable happiness.


Desperation can do strange things to a man, like leading him into nightclubs or masturbating in the supermarket. Desperate ideas are generally defective. I considered breaking into the doctor's quarters and scribbling altered results on the papers. I thought of threatening her with violence, it all seemed logical at the time. Nothing I said seemed to make any difference so surely a sharp pencil in the throat could only open the dialogue. This whole depression thing was so much in the past it was starting to smell but written on paper it still looked bad. The doctor's untouched face continued to talk and bury me with dogma.


"For this condition we really need evidence of one or two years without relapse"


The decision had already begun to set in like the crust on a weeping sore. Nothing from my mouth would ever help a situation that's already tagged, bagged and driven to the morgue. I somehow had to accept it and move on. Dead ambitions are always difficult to mourn; with the death of a future only views of the past remain. I look at my past and see everything I want to escape from: things I shouldn't have said, people I shouldn't have done. If I had only lied on that form then none of this soul-searching land-fill would be necessary. I was so naive to presume honesty was a valued trait of modern law enforcement. One or two years without relapse? That was going to be tough after today.


Outside the sounds of a distant lawnmower drift aimlessly on a lazy wind. Somewhere back inside another application form is stamped, forgotten and filed in the loser drawer. Another naked nut-sack sits pensively on sterility. A door closes loudly as if for effect.


The path away from the Police Headquarters felt much longer and harder underfoot than I had previously remembered it; arcing into the horizon like a concrete claw. The HQ was an incoherent spatter of disparate buildings and departments forming a small purpose built town outside the major city. The burn of summer punched life through the scene; fuelling trees to beautify themselves with buds and flowers. All around was the cut and paste of edited nature landscaped for the senses and practical maintenance. Birds flew straight lines and sang for attention. Precision trimmed lawns carpeted the expanses between accommodation, gymnasiums, offices and conference rooms. Any benefit to the law was hidden or lost in a wisp of cumulus cloud. I breathed in the idyll and savoured the share my taxes had paid for; booze for the water feature, cigarettes for the flowers. In reality none of this was mine and so physically, atmospherically distant from the crime and grime of the city.


Those fights and tears, that sweat and smegma; the sounds and smells of life can be an annoying distraction from the filing and paperwork. This 'satellite' administrative centre is a spider unwilling to sit in its own web, yet still expecting to catch flies.


My shoes scraped along thick gravel driveways and I hung along for the ride. The security gates passed effortlessly by, no sign-outs or security checks; it was a slow train in, but a fast track out for the average Joe Schmoe. The grey haired old cunt in the guard room attempted a look away from the latest celebrity sleaze rag he was reading, though thought better of the effort and continued to suck in the junk with his eyes.


The sun pushed out the kind of rays that could give a coal miner a cancer. The faint smell of tarmac melting in the haze threatened to smother what nature does naturally. I rode my shoes in a daze, passing 'nice' little country houses for those with enough liquid capital to drown in. Oversized cars and supersized gardens were being washed and pruned respectively by scuttling little women in gloves and pastel tennis shorts. These were not natives or local people, they had been priced out long ago. These were the second houses of those with second cars on driveways, used only for the second 'wife' on scuzzy weekends. Tradesmen, farmers and craftsmen now work as packers and shifters and live like ants in the city because of someone's 'desperate' need for a country retreat. If you have the cash you can always escape the filth, but the rest just have to learn to love it.


The road was hot, the walk was long and the suffering was better than a bad tempered taxi ride. Nature was withdrawing from civilisation like the gums of a corpse. The gardens, the 'fish tank' cages of botanical elitism, the imprisoned and disciplined plant life; reduced on a scale in parallel to my journey. 'Nice' little houses turned into nice little clusters; clinging together in groups for security or support. The tarmac streak burned onward as groups turned into petulant gangs, into villages and villages into suburbs. Post offices and rustic pubs turned into off-licences and convenience stores. Lush gardens turned microcosm in a window box, window boxes to decorative plastic pot plants. The fragrant pleasure of tarmac and grass cuttings was now replaced by the sour tang of burnt fuel and sun-bleached dog shit.


I had stepped between two worlds; from a fantasy to reality, from ambition to rejection. My head offers a dart of pain, a reminder for the times I banged it into the wall for every relived second of the day. The sounds from outside buzz with people going places and vendor places doing people. I read the toilet wall graffiti until it stops moving like a broken kaleidoscope. 'Be here 7pm Tuesday for a blow' fades and dissolves into the wall like piss in the snow. An old man once told me that a train station was an almost eternal symbol for the convergence of souls, for lives at a crossroads, for options and choices. The shifting boards of electronic letters spelling out the corners of the world, multiple destinies, links and changes. The old tramps words spin like graffiti on a toilet wall and vibrate through a crunching tannoy. I feel the crumpled return ticket in my otherwise empty pocket; a token of pure rigid guided fate. I smell the sick on the train and somehow feel closer to home.