Fiction In A Place Like This

At the far end of the beach, an old man sits at a chair behind a table. And it’s been… I can’t remember the last time I saw a table or a chair or any piece of furniture that’s retained its purpose.

Behind me, the road and everything that’s happened on it – all the trudging, scuffling, foraging – melts away. They’re just things that happened, those things are gone and done. Before me is the sea and that is formless and colourless like my clothes which are makeshift and beaten into submission with wear, tear, mud, blood.

But the old man is wearing a suit. It’s seen better days, but I cannot comprehend how he has kept it from becoming rags like everything else.

On his table are arranged various pebbles. This, on a beach covered in pebbles.

“These are for sale,” he tells me.

“For… sale? I… I don’t have any money.” Nobody does.

“No, not money.” He gestures to the beach.

“With stones?” I ask. I realise I am whispering, as if what I have found here is a dream I don’t want to break. I haven’t dreamt in months.

“Pebbles pay for pebbles,” he smiles. I wonder if this is his joke or his fantasy. His way of dealing.

I look at the pebbles on the table again and realise they are the most beautiful pebbles on the beach – the most entrancing colours, the most pleasing shapes. He has collected them, as if they have value.

“Ok,” I say. I find myself walking back across the beach, scanning the beach for any pebbles of an unusual colour or shape or… any with a particular eye-catching quality, something I cannot quite explain. All these months on the road, scavenging for scraps of food and things I could use, and now… I’m searching for pretty rocks?

Eventually, I have a handful of stones – one is vaguely heart shaped, one has a pleasing seam of blue, one feels smoother than the rest. I return to the old man to go through with the charade of buying one of his most beautiful pebbles and he examines my haul before deciding which of his pebbles I can afford.

It is a fragile moment.

I am cold and tired and damp; flattened out, worn down, made inhuman. I haven’t yet decided whether I will take this from him, whether I can let him get away with maintaining fiction in a place like this.

Opaquelessness

There was a man who was arrested for impersonating a phone box.

The prison warden released him early on the condition that he delivered a cup of tea to an old man who lived on the other side of the mountains.  The journey was long and he had to walk very slowly and carefully to ensure the hot tea would not slop out over the sides of the mug.

With uncertain footsteps he crossed marshland, waded across a small stream, scrambled up slopes covered in scree and back down again, lost his mind and seemed to pop briefly into another medium – stop-motion animation perhaps – and back out again, came to his senses, climbed through the forest and strolled into the village to find the old man’s house.

The old man was grateful for his cup of tea and offered to make him one in return before he started his long walk home. Inside the old man’s house, all the furniture was crumpled against one another as if there had been a traffic collision between the bed and the chest of drawers and everything else had piled up behind them. It was impossible to see through the windows, which were just slabs of coloured plastic. One window was blue, the other green. One yellow, one red.

When he finally got home, his wife asked what he’d been up to.

“Oh… nothing much.”  He was taking his shoes off.

She stared at him for a moment, shaking her head. Then she busied herself, muttering under her breath, “don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect… some sensible answer… an explanation of where you’ve been.”

He was busy thinking about his expedition to take the cup of tea to the other side of the mountain, about the difficulties he had faced, each step a balancing act. He had a feeling that completing the task had proved he had repented the error of his ways – and that he was worthy of ongoing existence.

In The Perfect Light Of The Universe

he asked what I’d like to do for my birthday & I said well the weather looks alright so we could maybe go out & have a long walk & take our cameras & shoot & chat & he said sounds good, I’ll swing round after lunch & we can head out & I said good fine cool & he said see you then then

he turned up just about when he said he would & we set off into the day, which was nice & open with a good big wide open sky & perfect light for shooting all things though our favourite was to shoot the old & broken down greenhouses that were full of plants & trees & ferns & brambles all desperate to get out, all overgrown & pushing to be back in the outside world, like a soft slow green explosion which we found endlessly fascinating

we usually shot from the outside, taking photographs of the creaking greenhouse timbers & the flaking paint & the overgrowth pushing out & through the broken of the glass, but sometimes he persuaded me to join him in breaking (it was never difficult – the greenhouses had already fallen apart) & entering so that we could shoot from the inside & then it was like being in a different little world, quiet & forgotten

we would shoot & shoot & fill up our cameras, or at least the film within – my camera was a clunky old SLR that I had owned for twenty years & bought second hand, it having had a previous life with the police (& I liked to imagine the stake-outs it had been on & the evidence it had shot) & was tough as old boots, as evidenced by the fact I had once dropped it on the floor of a car ferry & it had barely put a dent in it, & I loved its weight & its mechanical processes & actually the results I got out of it were immaterial, the pleasure was in the act of carrying it around & using it & I didn’t really care what we achieved that afternoon

all I wanted was to spend a pleasant day out & about with my friend, exploring greenhouses & the time in which we lived, which was unique, the present being the only time in which we could possibly exist, & what I found interesting was the fact that these greenhouses were in this exact state now & only now & never again – there had been the boom time & the bust & they might come back again or they might fall further into ruin, crumpling & sinking into the ground like fossils, but they would never be exactly this again & I was thinking this as we both focussed our lenses on the broken glass & the dense thickets

& I thought about the fact that I might say all this when we stopped at a pub for a drink, maybe sitting outside on a bench in the slightly chilly sunshine on my birthday, the only day like it, the only moment at that exact point in time as we continued on and on, crumpling & falling through time & tumbling down again, vibrating in the light, the perfect light of the universe

Invisible Animals

They had been sitting at the table for half a goddamn hour and no one had come to take their order. He was getting hungrier and angrier, looking around at the other tables where diners were laughing, joking and eating, and was incensed by the implication that these people were somehow more deserving. This was a classy place – had they been deemed not good enough?

“It’s like we don’t exist,” said his wife of twenty years. Twenty years today in fact.

“What are we, invisible?!” he said loudly as a waitress passed, not appearing to be tending to anything in particular. Then, to his wife: “Maybe we should just go in there and get our own food.”

He had not meant for the remark to be taken seriously, but her eyes widened, and it made him think it might impress her. Surprise her. Twenty years it had been – he liked the idea that he might still be able to surprise her.

He pushed his chair back and stood. “Right then.”

She followed him across the restaurant. He was already rehearsing his explosion, the exact words he would use when the staff questioned his sudden presence in their kitchen. He imagined them trying to calm him down, how he would storm out. How they would pick up a takeaway on the way home and have vigorous sex on the sofa, fuelled by the sheer righteousness of it all.

But when he pushed through the double doors and into the kitchen, neither the chefs nor the kitchen porters looked up from what they were doing, and as he collected an empty plate no one batted an eyelid. Growing bolder, he started to load the plate, helping himself to handfuls of food, burning his fingers as he picked up sizzling steaks and fistfuls of chips.

After completing a circuit of the kitchen, he had collected an obscene amount of food, a heap piled high on the plate. The two of them tucked in, shovelling it with their hands, devouring with an appetite they hadn’t shared in years.

When they were finished, he said: “Watch this.”

Then held the plate in one hand and casually let go. It fell and smashed on the floor. They both laughed. No one else seemed to notice.

“Maybe we should have dessert right here,” she told him, grabbing the front of his shirt in her greasy grasp, pulling him towards her.

Day #14180: The Very Best Things I Read In 2022

I mean, you’re right, it does seem foolishly late to be going on about 2022, as we find ourselves here, already 6.5% of the way through 2023.  But I didn’t get this done before now, so here we are and there we go.  I’ll keep it brief anyway, and let the pretty pictures do most of the work.  Below are some of my favourite things I read last year + my favourite records released in 2023 (I don’t know why, it seems kind of wrongheaded when you think about it, that I do this every year and my books are books published any year and the record are only those released in that year).

My two favourite novels of the year, Hotel Splendid by Marie Redonnet (published in 1986) and Children Of Paradise by Camilla Grudova (published this year) had much in common – both are tales of havens deteriorating, falling to rack and ruin. 

Hotel Splendid is about a hotel built on the edge of a swamp, somewhere, somewhen. It is run by three sisters who argue amongst themselves and try to accommodate the series of workmen who are extending the train track through the swamp. 110 pages of damp, sinking, faulty wiring, blocked pipes, bills, illness and various other types of turmoil. Brief moments of respite shine through the gloom to make all the work seem worthwhile, but the hotel’s trajectory seems inevitable.

The setting for Children Of Paradise is an ailing old cinema, at which the narrator, known only by the pseudonym Holly, is employed.  Taking on a job at the Paradise, she descends into the strange permanent-night of cinema work and finds herself sucked into a dark, dingy and surreal underworld.

I read loads from Fitzcarraldo Editions and they pretty much all hit the spot.  Paradais, the new Fernanda Melchor, dialled back the magical realism of her debut Hurricane Season (my favourite novel of the year a few years back) to become a flat, brutal, desperate tale.  Box Hill by Adam Mars Jones was a beautifully-written eulogy to a time and place.  Best of all was Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra, a slight but perfectly formed novella which I read in one afternoon, sitting in the sun. 

Hand in hand with my year’s favourite works of fiction, I was fascinated by Cal Flynn’s Islands Of Abandonment, and her reports from places in the world that have been abandoned by humans and taken back by nature. 

Now-traditional Extra Music-Bloggery Content: My Favourite Albums Of 2021

BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD – Ants From Up There

CAROLINE – Caroline

JEREMIAH CHIU & MARTA SOFIA HONER – Recordings from the Åland Islands

MITSKI – Laurel Hell

AOIFE NESSA FRANCES – Protector

MOUNDABOUT – Flowers Rot, Bring Me Stones

DRY CLEANING – Stumpwork

CLARICE JENSEN – Esthesis

THE SOFT PINK TRUTH – Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?

 

 

 

 

Get Serious

He phoned in sick, having woken up vibrating.  They had to pull him out from under a big pile of sweat. 

On the news, reports of a national reality shortage.  Also they read out a list of recently deceased dogs (they don’t normally do that).  He had been reading a book that convinced him it might be possible for him, a human, to fly – that wasn’t what the book was about, but reading between the lines, he understood how it might be possible. 

All day he suffered from moments in which perspective seemed to zoom out and he became aware of his nonsensical position in the world, in the universe, in time – and not just his, but that of everyone and everything else.  In those frequent moments, he felt like he was going to fall and never stop falling, so he carefully made his way down to the ground and hugged it.  He came to believe he could feel the earth’s bones moving, shifting to respond to his touch. 

Late afternoon, they sent out an engineer to try and set him right. 

“Get serious,” the engineer told him. 

He wrote this on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall so he might remember how serious he ought to be.

‘Toothbrushing Dude’ / The Magician’s Rabbit

I woke from a dream and found a big wasp and a big spider duking it out on the ceiling above my bed. Then I woke from that dream and found I had overslept, the sky outside looked mad, storms thrashing around and heavenly sunshine all at once. I was late for rehearsals.

This was the first play I had been in – it was about a magician who set out to perform a long trick in which she gave birth to a rabbit. I played her flatmate, a character who didn’t really have anything to do with anything. The gimmick was that each time I appeared I was brushing my teeth, which meant all my lines were pretty much incomprehensible – the joke was that I would stumble in, gesticulate wildly and storm off again, frustrated at not being understood. The toothbrush was an electric one and I struggled to hear the other actors over its buzz, meaning I often delivered my ‘lines’ at the wrong time, which the director thought was great anyway. It added to the chaos. I was drunk for most of the performances, most of the rehearsals, dribbling toothpaste all over the place. I had a variety of costumes so that each time I appeared I was dressed differently – once in a tux, then in a wetsuit, at one point dressed as a vicar. As if my character were actually lots of characters. I never worked out what the play was about – I didn’t read the full script or see the other scenes performed. All I knew was that at the end, the magician gave birth to a small child wearing a bunny costume. Later, trying to explain the play and my role in it, I came up with a theory there was a secret plot twist that ‘Toothbrushing Dude’ was actually the father of the magician’s rabbit child.

By then, I was more settled – at nights I went to sleep, dreamt lightly, got up on time, got the children ready for school, dressed sensibly, went to work, produced. Yes, I’ve got the hang of this now, I’ve got this thing tamed.

Cupboard

One morning I decided to have a scratch around right at the back of my cupboard.  Usually I opened the door a crack and shoved things in.  After all these years it was pretty full, so anything new had to be really crammed in there.  The pressure of my pushing new things in at the front of the cupboard squashed the old things at the back of the cupboard and they became broken down and smushed together, compacted into one indistinguishable mass.  Until this morning when, feeling – maybe lost, maybe a little unhinged, certainly uncertain, certainly scared – a little bored, I decided to start excavating. 

I was a big fan of cupboards.  A cupboard was life.  A cupboard was independence.  A cupboard was a status symbol.  A cupboard was somewhere to put things.  In a land of inanimate objects, I was a living breathing animal thing and every day I wandered around, picking things up, putting things down, thinking.

Right at the back of the cupboard, in amongst some old letters that had been broken down by time and weight until they became indecipherable, a pulpy mess of paper and ink… I found a basketball, shrunken like an old tangerine.  It was the size of a thumbnail.

But I remembered playing with that basketball, eras ago when it was all different. 

On a Saturday afternoon, a friend and I would shoot hoops in his back yard.  Neither of us were good at basketball, nor did we want to be, and we threw the ball listlessly – it was something to do as we talked about the tv we were watching, the books we wanted to read, pop music.

For about 20 minutes that tiny desiccated basketball transported me back in time, but I needed more so I put on my shoes and coat and left the building, mooching through town until I got to my friend’s old house – actually it had been his parents’ house because back then we were only kids.  The house was still there, but in the back yard a block of flats had been built. 

Huh.

That back yard had only been, what, maybe ten foot by ten foot?  Can’t have been much more than that.  There was enough room for us to stand at the back door of the house and throw the ball at the hoop attached to the wall.  I’m not saying there’s anything unusual about building a block of flats in such a small space but it threw me when I saw it.  I just never expect the world to make changes, even after all these years.

I closed my eyes, brought my hands to my head and squeezed gently – the pressure on my skull felt good, comforting.

I opened my eyes again and looked up at the block of flats.  It was quite tall.  Wow, I thought.  I wonder how many cupboards are in that thing.

This Gun Shoots Horses

This was life. Cups of coffee. Taking things out of cupboards. Putting things in drawers. Groceries. Poignant glances. Terse dialogue. Whimsical events. Cats entering rooms, turning tail and walking out again. Anonymous clothes. More dialogue. A little magical realism.

Then one day one of my characters brought a gun into one of my stories.

He pulled it out mid-sentence and waved it vaguely; vaguely threatening.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “Put it away.” I didn’t want him spooking the other characters. They all regarded him, warily.

“It’s death man!” he said. “Stop fucking around.”

Obviously, there was death. I had not been keeping death out of my fiction. But this was not it. A quiet death at a convenient point in life, that’s what I was in favour of.

“Sit down,” I told him. “Do what you’re told to do.”

Instead, he held the gun up and pointed it to his own temple. The rest of the imaginaries stood and watched. Gawped. There was maybe a little nervous laughter. I had a whole narrative I wanted to explore with this group, but my plans had been railroaded and the other characters were starting to drift away, scared off by this kerfuffle.

He lowered the gun and stuffed it in his back pocket. “Lets get on with this bullshit.”

But ‘this bullshit’ was ruined now. The rhythm of the piece had been demolished. We called time on the day’s work early.

He hung around after everyone else had gone. One of this character’s defining traits was that he always spoke out of one side of his mouth, something people have told me I do as well. I worried that in giving him this I had created too much commonality between us – now he thought he was superior to the other characters, some kind of proxy for the author.

I made my way home, but he followed, right on my shoulder. We wrestled, physically and mentally. The presence of the gun was making me uneasy.

“Where did you get a gun from anyway?” I asked.

“Here and there.”

“I didn’t give you a gun. That wasn’t part of the story. I don’t write about people with guns. I don’t write about people shooting other people.”

“Well, this gun shoots horses!” Everything he said sounded like a joke only he got. I wondered where in my imagination he had crawled out of, brandishing his guns and doing everything he could to disrupt my story. But what if I didn’t let the gun be a weapon for disrupting the story? I could do that. I could repurpose his intentions.

“Ok,” I told him. “Lets go and fire this gun of yours. Try it out. See what it can do.”

“Yeah?” A look of surprise came sideways out of his face. “Yeah! Lets do it!”

The way he walked was a funny lurching scamper, always at my shoulder and at my heels. I don’t know what he represented.

“Where are we going anyway?” he chirruped after a while. He was getting fidgety.

“Somewhere.” I was terse and inscrutable. I thought he would like that.

We left the town behind us and got out into the country. I was looking for somewhere horses might live. Eventually, I found a nice empty field where our gun-shooting wouldn’t cause any fuss or commotion. We vaulted the gate and stood, surveying the empty space.

Though there was nothing for him to shoot he seemed happy. He took the gun from his pocket and started waving it about, shooting his mouth off about how he was going to cause so much death. I was starting to get the hang of this character now – essentially, he wanted to come across like a tough guy, but he didn’t know anything about anything.

“Go on then,” I said. “Fire it.”

He aimed the gun into the middle distance, his hands shaking as he held it out straight in front of him. Something had rocked his confidence. Somehow he knew that I had succeeded in wrestling back control of the narrative.

Finally, he pulled trigger.

There was, of course, the loud crack of the gun firing. Then there was a moment in which it was not clear – to him, at least – what had happened. That the bullet his gun fired had four legs, hair, hooves. It hurtled through the air, its legs gallop-treading the air before it landed and started running round and round the field.

“What the hell?”

“Your words,” I laughed. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. “Your words. This gun shoots horses.”

In his confusion, I took the gun from him and fired it again and again. A horse the size of a dog came out, then a small inflatable horse, then a cardboard cut-out of a horse and then a small plastic toy horse. That gun was no danger to anyone now.

I handed it back to him and he fired it a few more times – a horse made of fluff and finally a horse made of smoke. He tossed it in to the long grass.

“You’re an arsehole,” he said. “You think you’re so fucking clever. Well, screw you. You’ll find out, sooner or later. One day this is all going to catch up with you.”

I had been smiling, but somewhere along the way I had stopped. I knew he was right.

One day all this was going to catch up with me.

Day #13923: Sitcom / Density at Fugitives & Futurists

I am pleased to point you towards the Fugitives & Futurists website where my short story ‘Sitcom / Density’ is published today.

Fugitives & Futurists publish a piece of short fiction every week and  say:  “We want to recognize your melancholy in the occult features of the data stream. We want to flatten the hierarchy of meaning and upset the cobbles in the road.”

I really like the pictures they have used to illustrate Sitcom / Density and the way it looks on the page / screen – they’ve done a great job.  And I was really pleased to find a home for this piece.

The whole thing came together quite slowly, but parts of it were very immediate – particularly the setting for the first half was an image that came to me very clearly all at once.  I could see the factory, the brambles, the smoke, the noise of it.  Then it was just a case of bashing out the details of how the character traverses that world.  I’ve done a few stories in the last few years where I have mashed together two parts – two separate pieces of story that might seem unrelated but put together enhance each other.  That’s what happened with this one.

Thanks to Fugitives and Futurists for publishing it, and thanks also to my writing workshop group at Guille-Alles library for feedback on this one during the writing process.