TWO
He enters his office and sits down at his desk. The room is small and bare; its walls a glossy flesh colour. Like sitting inside a vagina. He is amused by the Freudian connotations.
He smiles wanly. His teeth are crooked. They appear sharp.
He scrutinises a single small scrap of paper that lies on his desk. He scrutinises it with a cold eye. (His hot one would burn the room. And then where would he be? In a burning room, of course.)
He cannot decipher the words on its surface. Even though he had written them himself, only the day before.
He yawns. Then sucks thoughtfully on the gold plated cap of his pen. Phallus or nipple?
FOUR
He enters the living room with a white rose clutched in his hand. A banal gesture. One of its thorns has scratched his ring finger. A fact of which he is unaware.
The room smells faintly of stale sweat.
Three dead rose petals fall to the floor: A snowflake… A settling butterfly… A stray piece of confetti… He watches their spiralling descent impassively. He sighs. Then allows the remaining scraps of moribund flora to slip through his fingers. He notices a few specks of dry blood, in stark contrast to his unnaturally pale skin.
He sits down in an armchair. He gazes up at the ceiling. At the shadows. The primal dark.
The ceiling resembles a blank tombstone.
FIVE
His bedroom window is divided into twenty-four rectangles. Each of them possesses the same dimensions: Twenty-one centimetres by twenty-seven centimetres.
Eight of them contain gardens.
Eight of them contain houses.
Eight of them contain the sky.
He concentrates on one specific pane. The lines and angles it encloses form a complex hieroglyph. He tries, almost desperately, to divine its meaning. But there is none forthcoming.
EIGHT
He sits in his favourite chair: A rocking chair. Cold saliva runs down his chin. He clutches at himself with claws that are fingers. He stares down at the floorboards. Down into the cracks between them. The infinitely wide… infinitely deep cracks… Each one of them a microcosm of the Void. A womb from which a new universe might, at any moment, be born. He is enraptured by the prospect.
Darkness. Darkness. He sees only darkness
The rocking chair creaks like a metronome in 2/4 time… Time… TIME…
/Sadness/His other eyes/Twinkling/Stillborn tears/The eclipsing floor/Stars/Cold flame/He hunches his shoulders/His tortured shoulders/A resurrection/Memories of a past tragedy/He hunches his shoulders in anticipation/An enormous disaster/Future disaster/
He laughs. He rocks his chair even faster until it topples over backwards. He laughs louder and kicks his heels at the suddenly inverted air.
He cannot understand why he is laughing. Laughing with tears in his eyes. It is all so ridiculous. The back of his head throbs where he has banged it against the floor. But still he laughs and kicks and dribbles and clutches at himself.
What the hell. What the hell. When all are dead, who will toll the bell?
NINE
He is alone in his bedroom. He gazes at his reflection in the dressing table mirror. His face appears to be a total blank. Without expression. Without character. Without features. The long strands of his black hair hang down lifelessly onto rounded shoulders. They frame a pallid circle of cold flesh: His face.
He stares at it. He peers intently into its milky depths and is barely able to discern a pair of eyes. A nose Lips.
The eyes are lost in deep shadow. Ebony set in black onyx. He closes them to the awful darkness. There is no reason for him to keep them open any longer. It makes no difference. Darkness still prevails.
He leans forward. The mirror presses cool against his forehead.
THIRTEEN
He lays sprawled across the living room floor, flicking through a dog-eared volume of his own poems. The gentle glow of a coal fire warms his sallow flesh and provides a soft illumination. But his eyes remain blind. They are too grey. Too deep set.
He snatches up a glass of Bacardi & Orange and takes a large, debauched swig. It tastes like candy floss. The glass is hot and sticky to his touch. He has left it standing too close to the fire. The orange juice seems to have somehow curdled.
Resolutely, he finishes off the remainder.
Although he can no longer see to actually read his own poems, he still remembers them only too well. He experiences a sharp pang of emotion as he turns the pages of the slim book. Something akin to sadness. Bitter. Fierce. Formless.
He… sobs...?
The sob undergoes a strange metamorphosis and becomes a yawn. An overlarge, affected yawn. The wells of his eyes have dried up (The drought seems perpetual.) He can no longer hope to understand his poems. The heavy symbolism is far too confusing.
Ambiguity. Obscurity. The old literary devices do not seem so clever any more.
Impenetrable.
He tosses his empty glass onto the fire. He hears it shatter. He hears the hiss and pop as it starts to melt.
The flames turn a ghastly blue/green. Like corpse lights.
His mind is empty. He feels sick.
SEVENTEEN
The chair is extremely uncomfortable. It is an amorphous lump of mass produced plastic. Its seat is hard and has the unfortunate effect of making his thighs perspire.
Before him spreads the off-white expanse of a much abused desk. Paint peeling away from those surfaces from which it has not already been scratched. It is stained by: Rings of congealed coffee. Sundry particles of food. Scribbled messages on various levels of obscurity and/or obscenity. A creeping, sticky trail of unidentifiable brown liquid.
The blemishes combine to form an intricate pattern. A mystical device. A scattered, incomplete pack of grubby playing cards serves to reinforce the cipher. Like a tarot. But he makes no attempt to analyse it. He is barely thinking at all.
Inside: Two people play a game of chess. Three people watch them, making occasional murmured comments on the relative intelligence of certain moves. They also hold a vapid discussion about the previous night’s football match. (A pastiche of a million other conversations… a million other games…) Someone plays acoustic guitar in an uninspired and desultory fashion. Two people listen; faces masked with what appears to be admiration. Four people huddle together round another desk. They giggle as they share their brave new world of emergent sexuality and sublimate their embarrassment with unlike innuendoes.
Outside: A grey sky enshrouds a grey world. Even the grass in the park seems grey. Like the houses surrounding it. Like the windowless factory in the distance. He shifts his gaze in order to trace the length of a grey road. It is filled with grey traffic. Beside it, there walk grey figures.
NINETEEN
He is afraid. He can feel the soft dirt under his fingernails. The bristles on his cheeks. The yellow film on his teeth. The sticky sweat in his armpits. The pimples on his back.
An oppressive taint of humanity drags at the room’s atmosphere. It warns him of impending migraine. His hair collapses into lank strands that all seem to desire his life. They penetrate between his dry lips and attempt to force their way down his powerless throat.
He chokes. He falls back onto an armchair. It engulfs his neck. His back. His buttocks. His thighs. (The digestive process has begun.) Sweat forms like condensation on the white marble curve of his forehead. It then trickles down maliciously into his eyes.
He is blind. He looks into darkness where there had always been at least a gentle twilight.
TWENTY-TWO
He selects a couple of reasonably clean tumblers from the draining board in the kitchen and carries them up two flights of stairs to his bedroom. He sets them down on the dressing table, next to a small bottle of whisky.
She smiles up at him from the rumpled double bed. Her smile is mocking. Her eyes are two ruthless snipers.
He feels nervous as her pours out a generous measure of the dark golden rotgut for each of them. He gives an unconvincing smirk as he hands her a glass. His hand trembles. He is well out of his depth. He much prefers to be the seduced rather than the seducer.
He raises his own glass to his dry lips with a half hearted flourish. He takes a small nip of the fiery brew. He holds it in his mouth for a few sickening moments, allowing the heat to bleed off onto his tongue. He then catapults the vile liquor down his unsuspecting throat. His stomach is caught by surprise and lurches in violent response.
He suppresses the urge to shudder and sits down on the very edge of the bed. He crosses his legs primly. An acid tear forms in his eye. He gazes gloomily through its rainbow haze and tries to calculate how many more sips it will take before his glass is drained.
The girl knocks back a good few mouthfuls of moonshine. She sets her glass down on the floor. She then reclines gracefully on pink nylon sheets that coincidentally match the colour of her long, fuzzy hair. She licks her soft blue lips.
He turns around slowly. He gazes at her – into her – with dark, disturbing eyes. The pupils are small and withdrawn. Hard. Like pebbles. His face twists strangely as he attempts to smile. He blushes faintly.
She caresses her nipples, which are clearly visible through the flimsy fabric of her T-shirt. She is obviously not wearing a bra. Her breasts are small, but firm and well shaped.
He sighs drearily. His mind feels leaden. Dark. Dense. Heavy. He lays back on the lumpy, uncomfortable bed. Weak with self pity. His thoughts explode into jagged fragments of shrapnel. They ricochet against the inside of his delicate skull and threaten to burst it wide open.
She props herself up on one elbow. Gently strokes the hairy expanse of his stomach. Croons to him softly, as if he was a baby. Hurriedly unzips her tight white jeans to reveal that her pubic hair is also pink and fuzzy.
TWENTY-FIVE
He is alone in the aching emptiness of his small, seedy bedroom. His naked body shines with perspiration. It is a terrible night. So hot. His head aches. His body aches. All over. He aches… He aches…
He moans and groans pathetically. He cradles his head in the complex network of his entwined fingers. A single tear falls and splashes on his thigh. It tickles. It seems so wrong. Nothing should be this frivolous. Not now.
He tilts his head back and gives a hoarse, whispered scream. The muscles in his neck and throat become tense. Horribly emphatic. The artery drums harshly. A pulsing, echoing skull…
He wonders whether the night will ever end.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The cold morgue. Black and grey. Full of darkness. Full of death. Still. Silent. A feral hush. Nothing moves. Nothing can move. The shadows are solid. Static. Frozen. As tangible as the rows of marble slabs that form a precise pattern of rigid straight lines. Like cuts from a surgeon’s knife.
But the symmetry is not absolute. An intrusive object lies in the room. It is cold and still, but imprecise. It does not belong. It is a cancerous growth. It has to be removed. Ruthlessly.
One of the shadows stirs. It is a man. A man dressed entirely in black. He glides across the room. Across to one of the slabs. Across to the shrouded form it supports. He waves his hand like a magician. He draws the shroud aside with a single deft movement.
A skeleton is revealed. A yellowish grey skeleton that stinks of disinfectant. The man smiles. The smell evokes a vague but pleasant memory.
He reaches down and shakes one of the thin shoulders. Its bones are brittle. A few pieces flake off and stick to his fingers. The skeleton moves. It creaks. It sits up slowly. It is obviously very weak. Its arms hang loose. Its skull rocks about precariously.
He steadies the emaciated figure with both hands and helps it to stand up. A difficult task. It takes quite a while for it to gain its balance. It stumbles and clatters across the hard concrete floor. But eventually it stands upright. All by itself.
The man points to the door. The zombie inclines its skull. It pivots round stiffly and stalks out of the morgue.
The man is alone. He lays down on the vacated slab and composes his limbs in the traditional attitude. His breathing slows. His heartbeat fades. His body cools. The shadows absorb him.
There is symmetry.
THIRTY-EIGHT
She strips off her clothes with a rather cold and efficient haste. She stands naked before the wardrobe mirror. She is blushing faintly all over. Or is she merely another aspect of the regal sunset? Adrift in a reflection of the purple sky… The purple satin bedclothes…
She gazes dispassionately at the image of her smooth, roseate body. So smooth. Inhumanly smooth. She has no breasts. Her torso is sleek and featureless. She lowers her eyes. No navel. No pubic hair. No labia. She is sexless. She is a living doll.
She turns to face him. The movement causes the long tendrils of her eyelashes to wave and to flutter gently. A coy smile flashes across her lips, like light across the facets of a ruby. The soft whisper of her breath resembles the rustle of ten pound notes.
She kneels down and cups his amazed penis in both hands. He does not respond. He is nonplussed. She quirks her lips in derision, then takes a firm hold on the flaccid organ and massages it roughly.
He groans. He flushes a brilliant crimson.
She glances sardonically at the pitiful, half erect stump of flesh. It appears to have a tear in its eye. She wrinkles her nose up in contempt. She then tightly clutches his trembling buttocks and pulls him towards her open, voracious mouth…
THIRTY-NINE
Why is he writing this? How can she – her words – have made him wish to compose a poem of his own?
And the room is like a prison cell. Its walls are preternaturally hard. He can barely hear the distant, tinkling sounds of birds and children. Miles and miles below. But all he can see is a colourless patch of sky; too dismal and drear to even be considered as being grey.
He is caught in a cube. The edges as sharp as razor blades. The shadows crush him. Like slabs of lead. And the sky suddenly attacks him, too. It pierces the window with stabs of sunlight.
He flays at the piece of paper on the desk before him. He tries desperately to impose his own views upon it. Intelligent views, or so he thinks. But why – when put into words – do they make a travesty of life? Why so distorted? Why incoherent?
He can remember being told that, as a child, his face was extremely pretty. Like a little girl’s. Oh! But how many gallons of pus have conspired to create yet another liar. He can remember being told, only recently, that his face was like blancmange. Milky and cratered.
He screams inwardly. He wields his pen like a stiletto. A misericorde. Each word is a wound. A mercy killing. But the poem is still pathetic. Miserably inadequate. So he tears it up.
FORTY-FOUR
He stands on the steps outside a large terraced house, which had probably once been quite picturesque. He presses the front door bell. Nothing happens. The heavy iron knocker is apparently missing. He does not relish the idea of knocking at the oak panels with his bare knuckles. And he is certainly not prepared to stoop to shout through the letter box.
He stands unmoving. He wonders what to do. Nothing comes to mind. Just then, the door swings open. She smiles out at him and motions for him to come in.
He smiles back at her. A genuine smile. He enters the dark hallway with a definite spring in his step.
Junk clutters the stairs and is littered all over the floor: A white marble head on a wooden pedestal. A small, baroque table stacked with fading magazines. A number of battered old cardboard boxes.
She points towards an even darker part of the house. The paintwork is chocolate and cream. Or, at least, it had been at one time. Several more dilapidated boxes are piled carelessly throughout the room. More boxes still are balanced perilously atop a tall, imposing cupboard.
He negotiates this curious, fragile maze with due caution. It is somehow reminiscent of the art forms of the late nineteen sixties. He discovers that he is in what apparently serves as a kitchen cum dining room.
He looks up towards the unusually high ceiling. The vibrations are all wrong. Not good. Not bad. Wrong. Weird. His initial sense of elation is dispersing rapidly.
She wriggles past him. Her slim body… The waves of her long auburn hair are tangled and in a mess… And her green eyes…
She offers him a cup of coffee.
He laughs – a sharp, nervous bark – and refuses.
She quirks her lips. Her expression is unreadable. She sits down rather abruptly. A strangely violent action, which he finds disconcerting.
He clears a space for himself on the edge of the kitchen table and also sits down. Simultaneously, he notices something scribbled on the side of one of the cardboard boxes. He recognises the handwriting as being hers:
Neurotic / New erotic.
FORTY-EIGHT
The sun, in its obesity, dominates the sky. The sky. The sky is such a pallid grey that it renders the clouds invisible. Clouds and sky merge and become one.
He feels ill at ease.
She places her convivial glass of Southern Comfort and Lemonade on the table and looks at him quizzically.
He sighs. He gazes out of the window.
She reminds him that he has not even touched his drink.
Silence. He does not respond. Birds fly by on creaking wings. The sun disappears. Grey. Grey. Grey on grey. Goodbye sun. Goodbye.
She stands up and says goodbye to him. As she does so, she accidentally jars the table and knocks her glass over. A thin stream of alcohol spills over the table’s edge. It soaks his knee. The resultant stain spreads in eight directions: A spider’s legs. A Union Jack. An exploding star.
She apologises.
He looks up at her. His eyes are full of midnight. He gives a chilling semblance of a smile.
She makes an embarrassed exit. Closes the door with excruciating care.
The pain in his knee makes him cry.
The star! How it burns!
FIFTY
He is alone with his pain. Alone in the bleak white emptiness of his cold bedroom. Kamikaze sunlight streams screaming through the dirty window and crashes against six intersecting planes: The walls. The floor. The ceiling.
Anguish. He does not know how to express his extreme anguish.
FIFTY-ONE
A small room full of darkness… shrouded forms… and the stink of long abandoned paint… This is where all the images come from… one way or another…
Thick black curtains of coarse cloth… of memory… hang before grimy windows… One of them is torn… It admits a thin spear of insipid light… a feebly glowing yellow trail… a segment of nothing sunshine and baleful…
Grey the canvas… cobweb bedecked and mildew edges… Glisten all forlorn… streaky paint with dirt in water… gravitic splash and moribund flies…
The beauty is final… beautiful dark…
Cusp bedevilled sheen suspended in a depicted air… centred among temporal drifts… Future mirrors… or past… Identity confuses anything real… It lays and green moulders with a sadness that irony can giggle over… Yes, it is sad… No-one perceives…
Perhaps the artist is dead.
FIFTY-TWO
He presses his face hard against the window. His neck is bent at a grotesque angle. The cold pane of glass numbs his cheek. He can see nothing. Nothing alive. The penthouse in which he now lives is too far from the ground. All he can see is the blank grey roof of the towerblock proper. It is so expansive that it blocks all view of the ground. The sky is merely a reflection of this. It is equally blank and grey. Like a dome of iron.
He tears himself away from the miserably empty sight. His mind feels like a clenched fist. He sighs dismally. Never before has he felt such total despair. Such utter loneliness.
The future promises nothing but a continuation of his unbearable ennui.
FIFTY-SEVEN
He bends back his wrist and gazes in morbid fascination at the blue/grey latticework of veins. He then regards the bright new razor blade held firmly between the thumb and first two fingers of his right hand. He believes – just for a moment – that he can see her face frozen in the cold steel.
He makes a small, experimental cut in his exposed flesh. It hurts even more than he expected. He holds his hand beneath the tap and turns on the water. His blood becomes pink and diluted. He feels sick.
A couple of tiny, bright jewels of blood twinkle on the mirror above the basin. He regards his face. It is no more than a pale, abstract blur. A shadow conceals his eyes.
He observes his blood swirling round and round and round in the sink, before disappearing forever down the gurgling plughole.
He grits his teeth. He makes a few brisk strokes with the blade. His face contorts in agony. His hand jerks.
(He remembers how she jumped from the bedroom window. How her hands had also jerked in the same futile rhythm: Clutching at the air.)
His hand continues to jerk convulsively. Blood fountains from the severed artery. He kneels down in an unintentionally reverent attitude on the bathroom floor.
SIXTY-NINE
He wrenches a couple of rotting planks away from what remains of the front door of the terraced house and cautiously squeezes into the dank, dingy hallway beyond. He hesitates there for a moment. He smells the muskiness of the stale air. The strange sweetness of what he knows to be dried blood. The very dolefulness of the bleak atmosphere. He then looks up the stairs – up at the waiting darkness – and immediately realises he will never be able to climb them. Instead, he enters the doorway on his left. Broken glass and shards of crockery crunch ominously beneath his feet. The sound shatters the oppressive, funereal silence.
The kitchen is a wreck. A chaotic ruin. Everything has been thoroughly and maliciously smashed. Probably with an axe. The same axe which…
He slips a couple of fingers inside his shirt and feels the soft ridges of scar tissue across his stomach. He remembers…
He kneels down abruptly and starts to pick through the domestic rubble. Anything to keep his mind safely dispassionate. His madly scrabbling hands discover two hard, cold objects. He clenches hold of them fitfully and lifts them to his empty gaze.
His left hand contains a chess piece: A black queen.
His right hand contains an empty pack of Gauloise Disque Bleu. One face of the pack is stained a dull crimson. Blood. He remembers…
He opens his hands. The objects fall. Clatter. Become once more obscure. He trembles. He straightens up and pulls his jacket tighter across his stooped shoulders. An autumn breeze flickers through the house. A disconcerting whisper. He can hear music being played next door. A tinny jazz/blues number with which he is not familiar.
He starts to shiver quite violently. He strides into the adjoining living room. It appears relatively untouched by violence. Except for the eviscerated armchair. Its black leather flesh has been cruelly hacked and slashed to tatters. Its fluffy entrails lay scattered over the carpet.
He remembers…
He moves deeper into the vacuous room. The white paintwork – once so bright and cheerful – is now stark and menacing. The silence – once merely calm and peaceful – is now the calm before a storm. The peace preceding an ambush.
He turns on the television set, in the hope that it will serve to drown the feral stillness in a tawdry flood of light and noise. The screen whines miserably. It emits a chill blue radiance. Shadows. Shapes appear. Words:
WARNING
H.M. Government
WATCHING TELEVISION
CAN DAMAGE
YOUR MENTAL HEALTH
He screeches incoherently. He topples the TV from its stand. A dull implosion. He flees the room. He flees the house. He flees down the grey, deserted street.
But he cannot escape. He remembers…
SEVENTY-THREE
(Faceless, we are dying. In death, we are faceless.)
He opens his eyes and sits up.
The room is as devoid of character as he is himself.
He stares at the featureless green wall.
He smiles.
He smiles.
He stares and smiles for the whole of the morning.
Eventually, he comes to believe that he is blind.
But that is not true.
He can see as clearly as anyone.
Nevertheless, he believes that he is blind.
He is blind because there is nothing to see.
He cups his hands and covers his face.
SEVENTY-SIX
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Sitting here in the cold – in this alien room, in this unhaunted house – he can find no sources of inspiration beyond his own body. A dismal predicament. He is trapped within the clichéd, obsessive landscapes of his own psyche. He can resort only to ambiguity and obscurity and sheer propaganda.
(Sincerity is the lowest form of wit.)
He looks from his window. The sky – the sky that intrudes between silver edged mountains of ebon cloud – is the colour of weathered bone.
He turns away from the sight. It saddens him and yet it is also unimportant. He does not understand. He does not pretend to understand.
EIGHTY
The wind laughs outside his lonely room. It threatens to suddenly smash through the walls and to fling him out into the unloving street. Into the eyes of the blind. Into another screaming paradox.
Oh, yes. And everyone he knows will be there. They will see him naked. A blotch of lesser grey on the grey pavement. They will see him. They will watch and wait. Unmoved. Patient. Objective.
A sheet of virginal white paper lays composed on the altar of his thighs. It awaits the sacrificial cut from a phallus of plastic and tin: A bloody ball point pen.
He stares. He thinks. Images collapse into a black hole of impotence. The words are tired and overworked. Pain lurks behind his right eye. Behind the tears that he is too depressed to shed. Migraine bores him. He sighs. Frustrating patterns begin to form. The paper falls to the floor. It is kicked and trampled by his restless feet. The pen breaks. It scratches his hand. Blood trickles thin across his palm. Crimson and shiny and warm and real.
He screams.
He screams.
Blood oozes thick across his palm. Red and dull and cool and illusory.
EIGHTY-FIVE
The living room is empty of all objects, apart from himself. His long, artistic fingers are blue with cold. The paint on the walls – a neutral shade of green – is still wet. The French windows are wide open. Spring sunlight coats the bare floorboards like a pool of golden syrup.
A sylvan gust of wind tiptoes into the room and presses its icy, ethereal lips to his cheek. Like the kiss of death.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and produces his slim volume of poems. Every word on every page has been emphatically crossed out and rendered illegible. He throws the book away with all the strength he can muster. Its pages flutter like the wings of a startled bird. It flies out of the room. Out into the garden.
The concrete garden.
