Cooked through and hot off the irons the stream of buttery travellers slewed forth into and out of Euston, collecting and eddying in frothy little bubbles before swilling off again as the crumpled metal veins of the station tipped in and out of their favour. I was steaming hot, giddy on the cloudy grey liqueur of a pipe hot London summer. The sky was a magic, intensifying gas belched from the hot coals that pebbled either side of the street. The big smoke mirrored. The fire contained, not out.
Busily I set about recombobulating myself upon the scorched airstrip landscaping the concourse to the ticket hall. An accordian’d cartoon character I pulled faces at the house of fun I had just wobbled out of and I tried to stretch myself back into shape. Much of this was of course internalised struggle, apart from the blasé attempt to slingshot slippery and ticklish balls around my pocket and back into their un-twisted hammock.
Gazing around me it seemed the last thing I needed commingling with my boiling claret was a sprinkling of gold leafed semaphore enticing any of the hot air pirates humming within eyeshot. I thousand yarded a fag and considered my next move. The ‘A ‘ can of 5% Wifebeater pressed solid, heavy and cylindrical through the synthetic hessian of my bag, numbing the sweat filling in the wife-beater on my back. The asinine parallel contorted my lips and I made a small snort in self-derision. My eyes grew wilder and my mouth perhaps more buck as the representation constellated in my firmament. Fleetingly I witnessed sanguine, gelid founts spray from a fat and frigid beer metal cock. Under the circumstances, both long and short, my behaviour was hugely self-indulgent psycho theatre. I mulled. However as my eyes synchronised with the mildly sickening whirl around I realised my making simultaneous disgust and self-absorption facially visible had at least persuaded a temeritous yet tentative creep that, for this once, his gay-dar might be out of whack. He was right I was sure. Immature perhaps but I wasn’t such an easy touch. I felt the reassuring cost of cold aluminium by my side and eyeballed the mud-skipping, shell-suited clown a benighted fuck off. But it was me who needed to jog on.
She would likely be at the gallery herself by now, applying a final touch of maquillage to some immaculate concept. With each nodding and rapturous defilement, the installation would be swelling insistently towards a watertight conceit, while tastefully resisting the desire to gorge upon itself and thus always affording room for yet more manicured cuticles to etch flourishes upon its bejewelled and hard lit inner sanctum. As the eve drew closer I could sense the locust flattering her crop and she, amidst the barrage, would fan humility in the face of their pestilent dead heat. The pose of an isolated and unexpected flower in confident yet agonised genuflection, on a vulcanised hillock, at the edge of a mega slum dock side land fill. Symbolically perfect yet this rough horticulture she practised wasn’t all verse. The bedding down of herself between brutal sources wasn’t simply to make her seem surreal and exotic, another specimen for the press. Like all watery male dreams of female meat in art, it was too in essence the bitter well of her wild and rotting perfume. The flies didn’t know this but they could slurp its cud, deep in the proboscis. I was an outsider and mute witness. Inadmissible. They kept court in a hysterical daze, hypnotised as I had been, but otherwise feigning delirium. The critics and customers saw the shimmer as they articulated their corpus’ at her feet on savage rocks. They imagined critical bodies building another dolls phallus for a disposable Queen of Hearts. Consequently they inscribed her icon lifelike on a shiny papered Byzantium. But she knew this and kept her history close. Sub-palace dogs typeset lustlorn howls. So what? I had no desire to share with them her mineral heavy waters. All I wanted, I had I told myself, was to have her admit, in not so many words of course, but at least to me in mine and, in subtle action hers, that the river coursed through us before still flooded her. And, for a second, to see her shut down the reservoir she had constructed. To resist the constant pumping of hands and eyes that pulsed mechanically through her walls and flow naturally once more. But I couldn’t see her like this. ‘I stink’. I needed to change.
‘Simon!’
My sweat-damp and tingling crack had barely risen from the weeds when a familiar voice, only vaguely so at first, pinged me from a recess somewhere, shadowed, near the station’s sliding doors perhaps?
‘Simon!’
A second, and this time without the sharpened pitch of shock. The voice carried more length now, bouncing through in ripples across the layers of freshly dried mud.
The shout of my name came a third time followed by more words that peppered the air around and disorientated me in lieu of apprehending their source. My skin prickledas the excitable barrage tumbled forth, I was being run out but from where? And soon the interrupter of my mission, the someone whomever they were who recognised me but me not them, would be upon me, leaving me still further on the back foot.
I took a few awkward steps forward. The uncertain coupling of sun and rain had creased up the bedding of this waster’s stomping ground and I caught my feet in the earth’s spongiform crust.
My eyes groped the throng, and between the flotsam and jetsam that always gathers around grids, gateways and terminals of any kind, I spotted the thing of value, buffeted by the flow of shit but steadfastly refusing to be eaten up. And out from the crowd, into open ground, I saw her appear.
‘Simon, how the devil are you?’
I leapt from my foot high battlement and met her face on.
‘Angela!’ I wrapped my arms around her and wrestled her lightly to the shallow, clear water we had found adjunct the crowd. We rallied and pillowed over uneven slabs awhile, not wanting to find the purchase that would ultimately overpower the other.
The hazing lasted but a few seconds but lingered anachronistically, absolute and frozen. Her on elbows, I sitting bowed, we both caught our breath. Panting eyes through my fringe expectant and her mouth corners arrowed in hope:
‘How are you?’
‘Since when you in London?’
I looked at my non-existent watch.
‘Since when were you?!’
AT :: 01 :: Leap of Faith
I was travelling backwards. A hole had been punched in the land-gripped tin can of a spaceship in which I had sat waiting and now time had begun to rush out of my beach-ball daydreams into the black vacuum of reality. This was to be no Roman holiday. I was falling down a glass well with no bottom, while my intestines receded up out of me, rope-trick straining for the edge of the station platform from which I had dived backwards. I was still trying to fathom why at an ever-increasing rate as my emotional bubble plummeted horizontally toward the centre of the earth.
Outside the test tube of my ongoing experiment was to be seen the emphatic results of my internal chemical reaction. Greens, yellows and blues rushed past in the opposite direction of my atoms, aiming for the safety of the familiar, of home towns, of mother and sanguine 80’s pop videos. Bell, Biv and hopelessly Devoe. The world was dancing blacker than the Southern clouds through which we would soon wildly decant. New Jackity, jack rabbit, jack swung corn-rows un-concertinaed. I stared at the scorched fields of England outside and still, heard a slave song dragged across them. My thoughts were bouncing backward and forward, up and down. I anxiously tried to hold onto them. And back in the big house an ever-moving landscape on a roller with make-up and moustache all over place. Sawed-up and spit-greased the train was railing the earth. Where were we going with this? A big fish out of the little pond on the end of a rod, being reeled in.
To pull myself together I was trying to pop the country’s ecstatic defilement with the badge-pin intensities that decorated my journey thus far. The endless back of fields and buildings that bobbed and bathed under the crumpling sky dogged my mind. There you were on top of roofs, your dead grandfather’s shed. Our limbs entangled, hands down pants, barely concealed from the tut-tutting terraces and the back-entry below. Bared skin so smooth and simple yet so difficult.
I couldn’t ride a train without thinking about your uncle. Engorged and enthralled. There he had stepped out eyes closed moments prior into the hi-speed swell. To cool off I took you, inside into the hall, you didn’t believe I could pick you up, you never did, but I did and I fucked you hard, so fucking hard… He must have exploded into shark meat, in my version lines of colour filled the area where the figure had stood muttering…as hard and as much as my skinny frame could purchase , flat backed and deeper…disguising the parallel tonal blurring of everything marked ‘family’. I’m not sure why I saw his body fragment before the train as ticking stop motion blur. My cock hurt as we pulped against your hard, grandmother’s wall…I suppose because it was like one of your paintings. It had always seemed good and right to me that you gave death this frigid grace but know i doubted it, bruising your daughter skin, split to give the soft, sweet youth inside. The incongruity of my phantom memory compared with the flashing finality made him an interruptus to the recursive bounding of the quantum hordes led from both ends by the crashing food cart. Letting me trap you like this was how you imprisoned me. With each plunge I fell on your sword. You were a woman, Venus; your giving was your snare…Lulling me into the jangling roar of the congregation’s indecipherable chorus-line.
‘Tickets?!’
Back to London. Always back never forward. This was no giant step for me, I had been here before. This was a retraction. I was redacting myself. I knew this but my songbird, chastened, swung amongst the lost smokers in the dining carriage and smelled sweetly of mislaid carrion. Shuffling and squeezing through, leaning to and from the loos, I slowly started to find my sea-legs. Readying myself perhaps for the soon to be timeless world where there was nothing to hold onto. In a few hours, a bit over half a day, I would be dead.
As yet I wasn’t, although I was beginning to sense it. I think I knew then that to see death as a sudden binary event was a misapprehension, propaganda whispered by the living, prone as they are to obsess about the importance of their own existence. Not for a moment had they stepped outside of themselves to actually try and grasp that death was part of the furniture. Maybe I’m being unfair. At that moment I was also instinctively aware that even when you know your clock is about to be punched off the wall it never happens at the exact time you think it might.
AT :: 03 :: ‘Allo,Allo, Allo’ or 'Broader than Broadwater'
and now for some historical drama...
October 1985. 2 bobbies on their rounds meet under a street lamp to swap shifts in a rough old part of north ‘Lahndahn Tawhn’
PC Keith - Hello PC John
PC John - Hello PC Keith
PC Keith – Quiet Night innit? warm though.
rasta walks past
PC John – Tell you what PC Keith not sure how warm it is when you can be wearing one of them fuckin tea cosy’s on yah fahckin ‘ead eh?
rasta looks back dolefully, kisses teeth
PC Keith (embarrassed) – Oh right, yeah.
PC John (unashamedly looking back after rasta as walks away) – Yeah yeah I had one of thos jungle bunny cunts this afternoon you know PC Keithy, over by the Broadwater ?
Canned laughter – actors pause for this without acknowledging studio-non-audience directly
Yeah this poor old dear was screamin blue, bloody fackin murder
The word 'murder' is an overdub from reggae song actor approximates with ridiculous parodic minstrel-esque mouth movements
FLASHBACK
‘he nicked me purse, he nicked me purse!!!...’
Flashback segues back into PC John’s speak
PC John - … and out the corner of my eye I see one of ‘em leggin it off down the street
PC Keith – Bloody hell
PC John – So I legs it after the cunt done i? and, just as he’s about to hope on the 37 bus I mange to grab the greasy cunt by his dirty doormat he calls hair and pull ‘im to the ground.
PC Keith - then what did you do?
PC John – Well I sit on top of the cunt face down, his big black arse between me legs and I says to ‘im ‘that wasn’t too clever was it? Should got a bloody hair cut shouldn’t ya?’ I mean? Who’d want hair like that? And he mutters some fuckin insult in coconut like ‘highly selessese’ or sum’thing…’highly selasse? Hail selasse? Highly fuckin suspicious more like sunshine (canned laughter)…. You’re nicked!’
PC Keith – So you got a result then?
PC John – No I bloody well didn't. Turns out stupid old bag had dropped it out her trolley and banana boy was just rahnnin' for the bus
PC Keith – Probably rushing for an appointment at the Job Centre...
PC John - Hey those Jammies don't half like a lie in don’t they 'eh? ‘Yeah mon’ hehe
PC John goes for a high-five but PC Keith lives him hanging...
PC Keith – ...and find gainful employment throwing off the shackles of poverty clasped upon him by the neo-colonialist white state that invited his forbears here then abandoned him.
PC John – you what Keithy? You havin one of your funny turns or what son? Either way watch yourself tonight 'ere my son. They're swarming all over the estate like a big black swathe of cockroaches they are, think someone had moved the fridge when they carried that daft black cow out her flat. Anyway I’m back off to the station for a nice cup of Rosie Lee. Night Keith!
PC Keith – Night John
Exeunt PC John stage left PC Keith left standing as the darkness with silhouettes at its periphery encroach and the street lamp fades to black.
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