Stern's Medlar

A little bit of something new...

2010-02-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

A little taster of something I'm working on at the moment - nothing too exciting, but a first draft attempt at a very early scene from a much much longer piece. The context: Claudia has just returned home after a typically awful dinner date with her difficult father. She's a little drunk, and fulminating in that wine-fuelled frustration we all know far too well...

When she was seven years old, and a precocious seven at that, full of the unceasing questions and the ineffably true curiosity that is the very stuff of intelligent children, Claudia Lambert had asked what her Dad did for a job.

When she was seven years old Claudia Lambert played the trumpet. She had special lessons twice a week, in the drawing room of a tall house a car ride away. A man with a red beard patiently and laboriously talked, cajoled and persevered in the way the best teachers always seem to. She could rarely hit the right note, regardless of how hard she blew, no matter how intently she concentrated. Eventually, after two years and little progress, Claudia simply stopped taking the car ride across town. Mum never spoke of it and Claudia did not see the trumpet teacher ever again.

When she was seven years old Claudia Lambert made believe she was a warrior in a fantasy world, slaying unspeakable beasts of every stripe with an enchanted sword.

When she was seven years old Claudia Lambert wore woollen slippers and a red knitted hat to bed every night.

Tonight Claudia Lambert slammed her front door behind her, slammed it behind with venom. A moment’s regret, she listened for wakened sounds. She noiselessly removed her shoes. She wrestled frustratedly with the heel clasp. These bloody shoes, too fiddly and too posh by far for dinner with dear old Dad. Guiltily, she tiptoed down the hall, sneaking past the carpeted stairs, steadying herself in the dark against the wall. In the kitchen she raided the cupboard and found a half-empty bottle of Scotch, the remains of the last dinner party she’d thrown. It had been fun, but too long ago to remember with any real clarity.

With no ice, and little thought, she poured herself a healthy jolt and sank half of it with her coat still on.

That arsehole. That stupid, stupid man.

A sleepy, exhausted voice behind her: “Are you okay? You’re back early.”

She turned, deftly hiding the tumbler of Scotch by her thigh. Billy stood in front of her, wearing only a pair of tattered old pyjama bottoms. He bare feet looked cold on the plain tiled kitchen floor.

“You’ve been asleep,” she said, “Go back to bed. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Billy grinned and rubbed his eyes. “The rock and roll lifestyle,” he offered.

Claudia shrugged and raised the whiskey glass. “I know what you mean.”

“Christ, what’s he said this time?”

She took a swig and shook her head. The burn of the whiskey nearly made her eyes water, but something about it seemed to settle her nerves. She would wait until Billy was back in bed before refilling.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Same old, y’know.”

“You sure, babe?”

“Sure. Go back to bed. I’ve got some work to do before tomorrow anyway. Long day. How did Judd sleep?”

“Like a baby.”

She smiled at Billy, a real smile this time. “Appropriate,” she said.

“You sure you’re okay?”

This good man she’d ended up with. This good, good man.

“I’m fine. Really. I’ll be along to bed in an hour or so.”

She turned back to the counter and heard the soft whisper of his feet padding back along the hall. The kitchen clock read ten o’clock. She took her tumbler to the dining table, set it down. Second thoughts, and then she headed back and grabbed the bottle.

A slug went back, and this time she barely noticed its burn. She grabbed a remote control, turned on the radio. Soft slow soul tunes began to waft easily and with low volume through the living room. She considered smoking, decided against it. Billy would notice, the result simply a disappointed shake of his head when he woke in the morning, or when her kissed her in bed tonight. She hated disappointing him, hated the idea that she wasn’t who he thought she was, or wasn’t all the he believed that she could be.

She hated the idea of disappointing Billy more than anything in the world. Otis Redding’s salty voice tremelloed in her ear as she poured another whiskey. She’d already disappointed Billy today. She reflected a moment. Was he passive-aggressive? Or was he just passive? The reflexive tilt of the head had been present this morning, when she had told him about her dinner plans.

“I’m just going to meet Dad for dinner,” she whispered to herself now, repeating the words that had brought on the tilt. She sank the whiskey.

She threw one leg up over the other, and rubbed her sole, trying to squeeze out a dull, fatigued ache.

In high school, when Claudia was fourteen years old, give or take, she had kissed a boy in a deserted science class. The smell of piped natural gas filled the room, its undertone an acrid reminder of exploded potassium. The boy was two years older than Claudia had been, sixteen and nearly in sixth form. Much more experienced. He’d attempted to slip his grimy wandering hand beneath her school shirt, and she remembered now that with Louis Renshaw’s tongue robbing insistently in her mouth, she’d acquiesced to this cheap fumble in the hope that they would be caught. No, not they, but she. That she’d be caught and Dad would be called he’d lose his rag and ground her or hit her or shout at her or something. And as Louis’ hand had failed at his third feeble attempt to unclasp her training bra (churlish, even now, Claudia remembered how late a physical developer she had been), Claudia had given up on the encounter, recalling that Dad was out of the country, and would be for another two weeks.

A failed rebellion, not so much in content as in form.

And now, nearly two decades later, still rebelling. Still failing.

The whiskey bottle was practically empty now, and Claudia splashed what little remained into the tumbler with drunken grace. She listened out in the m

idnight silence between songs for any indicator that Billy was still awake, waiting for her to retire to bed. Cheekily, feeling naughty, naughty as a fourteen year old public schoolgirl, she rooted in her handbag and came up trumps with a battered pack of lights and a box of matches. It was wrong to light cigarettes with anything other.

She felt prescient, imagining Billy’s morning displeasure, as she took a long, satisfying drag, sending grey wraiths of smoke to mingle with the floating saxophones.

Five Rules For Living

2010-01-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

One

Zoe screamed in pain and squeezed my hand. Her forehead was damp, her palms clammy; her eyes were on the verge of issuing agonised tears. That it had happened was shocking enough; it was the blasé attitude of the others I found so grim. Her pain, my terror dealt with by these people as though the situation were as everyday as receiving the mail.

The high pitched whirr of the servo motors erupted again, and the immense strength of those clumsy fingers was once more brought into play, the oily pneumatic claw making short tearing work of the stanchion, at its new base, the point at which had the narrow beam had speared the windscreen and Zoe’s leg.

The fireman tried to say soothing words, encouraging words, but they were as meaningless as the tired smoke that issued, mingled with steam, from the crumpled car bonnet. Zoe squeezed my hand harder. She was sitting to my left. I was pinned, by the dashboard crushing my knees. It was odd, I could feel the pain, but not as an immediate sensation; like a storm on the horizon, I could see its progress and marked it with interest.

Zoe had stopped screaming; shock, I knew, was setting in. She began to mewl drunkenly as the fireman and his colleague removed the top end of the beam and gently took her by the shoulders. A pair of anxious paramedics stood by a lurid orange stretcher waiting to receive her limp, barely-conscious form. She disappeared into a miasma of smoke and steam, the smell of oil and smoke, the crunch of rubber soles on chunks of shattered glass and the intolerable flash of blue lights. Another silence wailed in the middle distance. I wasn’t as scared now as I had been the first time. The pain in my legs, both obviously broken, began to roll in. The storm had broken.

I could hardly make out the chatter amongst the emergency workers, as the firemen began to tear the dashboard out of the eviscerated remains of the hire car in order to free me. But I could see the looks on their faces, their earlier stolid professionalism momentarily giving way to a bleak humanist pity; the pity of those who work with the dead.

I was three weeks in the hospital, the tibia and fibia of both legs shattered, my left femur fractured, and the x-ray of my right resembling nothing so much as a tiled kitchen floor awash with fragments of crockery in the aftermath of a red argument.

The nurses were nervously cheered by my mood, which was irrationally upbeat, though I now suspect this was more to do with the excellent painkillers I was being given four times a day. This said, there was an element of my cheerfulness that was informed too by the fact that I was here in hospital rather than at home; that home, the flat in Didsbury that Zoe and I had shared for three years was waiting for me. I dreaded returning, feared the inevitable audit of her belongings and the long hard slog of grieving that I knew was now my inheritance. Better to be here, cared for with television and Reader’s Digest condensed books and meals that involved lime jelly. The slow torpid greyness of hospital life, I found, suited me. The dullness of routine and the relentlessness of illness, and the slow progress of recovery were rhythms with which I felt at ease. Radiating from my berth, in every bed in my aisle, across the ward, across the breadth of the facility were human bodies, dying and getting better, each fleshwork one of a thousand simple ticking biological clocks chiming the hour, on the hour, in sympathy for the long slow decay of the human form.

I slept fitfully. When I slept I dreamed of the crash, over and over again, of the sudden crystallising of the moment of impact. I relived in dreadful slow motion the fragility of our flesh, and of the conveyance whose hard certainty had failed as surely as its brakes.

So I avoided sleep. I would read. I would do, or attempt to do, the Telegraph cryptic crossword. I imagined perverse sexual scenarios, the anonymity of a convalescence ward removing my shame, and Zoe’s death weighing each fantasy with a formidable ballast of guilt.

At the beginning of the second week, my plastered legs were taken out of traction and a wheelchair was deposited at my bedside. The attitude of the nurse was such that I understood I was to take some satisfaction in my recovery, and that the wheelchair represented, on some level, a step forward.

I took to sailing smoothly along the corridors late at night. I had been rendered so cumbersome by the crash that it took me some time to place myself comfortably into the chair. Once there I would stay until the first nursing staff of the morning shift arrived to help me back into bed. In those intervening hours the corridors were mine. I silently wheeled down from my ward past the cancer ward, the children’s ward. The smell of disinfectant was soothing to me now.

The cleaners became tacit friends, fellow night travellers. As I strobed beneath half-lit flickering fluorescent tubes I would swerve to avoid buckets, my expert handling earning an appreciative nod from the man who mopped the vinyl floor on the ground level. I became a steering virtuoso, managing to reverse into lifts at the last moment, with the sliding doors barely missing my rigid plastered legs.

I felt free in the confinement of these dim corridors. Outside the hospital grounds I could hear the distant whisper of traffic, but here I was safely sequestered. The iron fence that ran the perimeter of the lawns and gardens that skirted the hospital buildings kept them out as it kept me in.

I would urinate into reusable plastic bottles designed for the purpose. Before setting out on one of my journeys I would wedge two or three against the arm of the chair and my rough plasters. I would piss as it suited me, not worrying about being seen because aside from the cleaners there was no one to watch me. It became as much mischief as I could manage to leave these half-full piss receptacles hidden the large potted plants that punctuated each corridor junction.

I was in the awkward process of leaving one of these piss pots behind a monstera delicosa, when I met Daniel for the first time. I had three more days and two more nights before I was due to be discharged.

I looked up from the cheese plant, and was startled. I began to concoct excuses for my hiding piss behind a plant, and then abandoned the idea. I would simply roll past him saying nothing.

He was tall, over six feet, and thin. He stood a few metres away from me and wore an amused smile with ease. It was his demeanour that spoke of his occupation more than his white coat and stethoscope. He held a brown folder open: he had been holding x-ray films up to one of the few working light fixtures in the East Wing.

He began walking towards me. My instinctive reaction was to wheel myself around and flee, but there was something in his bouncing gait that forestalled my intention. He said nothing at first and merely looked me up and down. Then he tapped the white plaster on my left legs with the end of his pencil and emitted a contented snort.

“Good evening,” he said, “I’m Doctor Watterson.” He extended his hand.

“It’s the morning,” I replied.

I took his hand anyway.

Two

There was the moment at the party when I saw Zoe. I was working on my fourth cola of the evening, and hyped on sugar I was fizzing and restless. I wandered towards the trestle table where the bottles of booze lay. And there she was. Small, pale skinned. She had dark hair, cropped at one side, and dropping into long plaits on the other. She wore and waistcoat and slacks and a pair of little black pumps. Her watch was a man’s and far too large and weighty for her narrow, delicate wrist. She was in the middle of telling a long, involved and ultimately unfunny joke. She was overconfident and aggressive. Women did not like her. She emphasized her words with expansive waves of her cigarette, and made frequent random darts for the peanut bowl. I attempted to inveigle myself in the conversation with an ironic, deadpan witticism. She smiled dismissively.

I was hooked.

Her things were now sitting in bin liners and various piles. Her sister, Naomi, had driven from Dorset. She was pragmatically helping me sort things out, though to be honest I felt her presence as an intrusion and was thankful that after the funeral I wouldn’t have to see her again. That is not to say I disliked her. Far from it. She looked so similar to Zoe that I would find myself looking over a pile of dresses and jackets destined for the Salvation Army, and would be transfixed, watching the same darting, birdlike movements I had seen Zoe perform a million times. It was interesting that they were so similar in demeanour and movement; I imagined Zoe there, pretended for a second that this we were together and that this was some kind of spring clean-out.

Outside the flat, the rumble of buses and cars had been keeping me awake.

Naomi stayed for only three days. On the third evening she cooked us a meal. I was still wheelchair bound and found the kitchen’s cramped spaces difficult to negotiate. I had, however, grown adept at balancing trays on my casts. We ate in silence, and after ten or fifteen minutes I could feel the stilted air as surely as I could see my spaghetti cooling on my plate. I breathed in deeply, about to make some facile attempt at conversation, but Naomi spoke first.

“I miss her. That’s why it’s been so...” she trailed off. I found a surface, the top of a stereo speaker, and dumped my tray on it. Naomi took a sip from her glass of red wine.

“I understand,” I said. “I’ve really appreciated you being here.” I looked around the room. “I know I’m not very good company.”

Naomi glanced at me. “No-one is expecting you to be good company, Jim.”

In truth I didn’t know what to say. My grief was strange to me, like the pain in my legs at the moment of the crash. It felt distant, as though it were happening over a black horizon miles away. Naomi’s awkwardness, the awkwardness of all of the people to whom I had spoken since my discharge, all of the expectations of sorrow, felt more theirs than mine.

That night Naomi decided I smelled. Since departing the warm routine of the hospital I hadn’t washed my body properly. My inability to move myself with any ease and the necessity of keeping my casts dry were only part of the reason for my state, though. I also couldn’t be bothered; I would wash for the funeral, and after that I made no plans save the intention to wash should the situation merit it.

Naomi prepared a bowl of warm water, as one might do for an infant, and placed it on the table next to me. She lifted my shirt over my head. I could feel her fight against her own body recoiling, in that imperceptible way one does when experiencing a closer physical proximity than one is used to. My torso was still heavily bruised, shocking contusions of violet and black, fading to a bile-yellow near my stomach.

She rubbed the sponge against my chest with an insistent tenderness, squeezed the dirty waters into the bowl and began to mop at my shoulders, my armpits. She scrubbed the back of my neck, behind my ears and finally my face.

At the top of my left plaster, and inch below my hip were the stitches. The incision, barely two inches across and where the long steel pin had been introduced in order to rejoin errant fragments of bone, was a dirty red. The thread of the stitch itself was like a coarse bristle, twisted and defiant.

Naomi took the bowl of water and sponge away into the kitchen. I continued to stare at my stitch and the puckered angry skin it pulled together. I touched it, gingerly, expecting pain. There was none. I rubbed it for a second, the hardness of the thread strange against my fingertip.

The next morning, after filling her hatchback with bags filled with Zoe’s clothes for goodwill, Naomi stood over me in my chair as we waited in the white corridor for the lift to take her two floors to the carpark. She leant over and kissed me on the lips. It was a long kiss, and when she broke away there was a steeliness to her, a resolve. “I’ll see you in a week,” she said. “For the service.”

The next two days were grim and empty, and my mood was not lifted by a phonecall from my Stepmother on the third afternoon. She demanded an update on my physical status. In order to placate her I described to her something I had noticed whilst scratching myself at the top of my left thigh with a pencil that morning.

The lack of pain around the incision had led to my absently fingering it – it was oddly calming, but that morning, it had issued a little pus against the lead of the pencil. The skin around the stitch was darker than usual and I thought I could almost smell something bad, like the beginnings of a soft putrefaction.

My intention in describing this event to my Stepmother had been to disgust her and end the conversation. She suggested I call a doctor and have it looked at. I implied that I would, but declined to make any concrete promises.

The next morning it appeared the infection had worsened slightly; a definite rotten odour and more pus. Again, there was little pain. It felt like more of an itch, and I took a perverse pleasure in squeezing the ruptured patch of skin until the wound had yielded the last of its curious discharge.

I called Doctor Watterson after breakfast.

Three

“Do you remember much of the crash? Do you remember what led up to it? How much do you remember before you reached the hospital? Do you remember how you felt?”

The sore continued to issue pus. Drink was a kind friend to me in the weeks that followed the funeral. I found that gin especially helped dull my senses. So I drank and I watched television and did crosswords.

But the sore continued to issue pus.

It was my third call to Daniel Watterson that had brought him over to the flat today. Though the infection in my leg troubled him, he insisted on talking about the crash.

His specialty was psychopharmacology – he was, he explained, interested in the effects of trauma, my trauma specifically.

He prescribed antibiotics for the leg, applied a thick gauze dressing to the suppurating sore, and then stayed for four hours, drinking my gin and listening to me talk about Zoe.

Three weeks later I awoke after an afternoon nap in my chair with a case of the sweats. Rivulets of perspiration made their way down my hot skin. My hands shook as I called Daniel.

Twenty minutes later I was admitted to hospital. I was immediately sedated, put on fluids. The frantic professionalism of the nurses told me I was in trouble. A nurse lifted the dressing, and her face wrinkled at the smell.

I spilled rapidly out of consciousness.

There was a thick fug, half fever dream and half soporific haze. I saw a figure standing in the shadows of an enveloping blackness. At first I thought it was Zoe, and then I believed it was Naomi, and finally I realised it was neither. I could hear shouting, but it was a babble and made no sense. Though surrounded by black on all sides, I felt myself rising, higher and higher, and my mind began to splinter. I could hear Zoe’s breathing, as though she were asleep. And then that faded too.

When I awoke, I knew immediately that I had been operated on. My body was sore and I was partially restrained, my wrists attached to the frame at the sides of the bed. I tried to look around me, but my vision was blurred and I frowned and squinted as I tried to focus without success.

It was Daniel they sent to my bedside to explain to me that I had suffered an acute case of septicaemia, that my leg had become irretrievably gangrenous, and that it had, to curtail the spread of infection, been removed.

Four

“Jim.”

It was a hard word. Pushy and almost declamatory. “Jim.”

My eyelids flickered. I was engulfed in the tar of my dream and resisted this pull from outside of it.

In my dream I saw Zoe again. Today she held hands with Naomi. They walked together, hand in hand, away from my and toward a shimmering electric blue. They were enveloped in light.

“Jim.”

In my dream I wasn’t missing my leg. It was there, both of my legs were there, trousered. I could stand without pain. In my dream I wasn’t drugged. I didn’t ache. In my dream I was whole and unharmed.

Months before the crash, Zoe and I had taken a brief holiday, staying in a cottage on the Dorset coast. We had gone for a walk amongst the craggy rockpools. I had slipped and scraped my back on the shale. The graze was about six inches across, raised up and livid red. Back at the cottage Zoe had dressed the wound.

In my dream I was still grazed from that fall.

Zoe was enveloped in light.

“Jim.”

We arrived in the cottage on a Friday afternoon. The car had made the journey without any of the breakdowns with which it was customarily afflicted during long journeys. It was warm as the sun set. A light breeze came in over the grey steel of the sea.

We played board games. I lost.

“Jim.”

And after I lost we drank wine. In the fullness of dusk we walked barefoot along the beach. She drank red wine from the bottle and once it was empty, heaved it into the water.

Zoe paddled in the sea. Sand stuck to her feet. Darkness came slowly and then with a brisk finality.

We made love on an uncomfortable bed whose springs creaked. We giggled at the noise like teenagers might.

“Jim.”

We stayed at the cottage for three days before returning to our lives in the North. On the way back, the car gave up the ghost. We stood eating ice creams on the forecourt of a petrol station near Birmingham for an hour before the recovery vehicle arrived.

Zoe flirted with the driver and I smiled at her flirting.

One we were back home, we unpacked slowly.

“Jim.”

Five

The months rushed past me like flowing water, events overtaking me as I withdrew and applied myself to the only task that seemed to matter any longer; learning to walk.

Several months after the amputation, I was deemed well enough to be given a prosthestic limb. Though it was patently not a leg, it was a precision engineered device, aluminium, toughened steel and vulcanized rubber.

As I was learning to trust it to hold my weight and the swinging momentum of my unsure gait, I began to love it a little. Nights would be spent oiling its moving joint, cleaning the day’s accumulated dirt and grime from its recesses.

Daniel and I had become friends, almost to the complete expense of any friends I had before the accident. We began to spend evenings in the local pub. He found amusing my angry need to flaunt my prosthesis, unstrapping it from my hip, and brazenly scratching my ugly, bald stump. We would play cards talk for an entire evening, though we would speak, really, of nothing. His smooth and detached manner soothed my jangled nerves.

As I was being weaned from the array of painkillers to which I was beholden, my moods worsened; I became angry at the slightest thing, a bill, a song on the radio. I couldn’t sleep. And when I did I was still troubled by uncertain, restless dreams. Zoe often featured, but now, as the months passed, Naomi featured more.

I had seen her several times since my surgeries.

On the evening of the third of her visits, we ate dinner, once more in silence. As I let her clear the dishes, I poured myself a whiskey. Naomi still had a glass of wine; I knew she would drink no more tonight.

“Jim,” she said, her back to me as she faced the sink.

“Yes?”

“Do you remember the crash?”

“A little.” I sipped at my whiskey, thinking carefully about what I should say. This was my trauma, I knew. My injuries. But the same trauma, had, in the way that traumas do, bled into her life, claiming Zoe from both of us. “It was raining. It was dark.”

“It was raining,” she whispered softly.

She turned to me. Her eyes were full of unbroken tears. She held herself awkwardly, bent by her feelings, as though they and their tremendous gravity were oddly out of place in a tiny suburban flat.

“We had been to a party, Zoe and I.”

I took another sip.

“It was raining, and the windscreen was awash.”

She took a step toward me, leaning her weight on the back of a chair. “It was a hire car. I remember from the insurance papers.”

“Our cars were in the habit of being pieces of shit. One after the next broke down. We bought an old Fiesta. The clutch went three days before. Zoe wouldn’t let me buy us a decent car. The hire car was cover until we could find the time to buy a new one.

“It was bigger than the Fiesta. It felt clumsier somehow. The rain kept coming down.”

I finished my drink. I poured another. I prayed for the phone to ring, or for someone to knock at the door. I prayed for the explosion of a gas main, or for the sky to split with the flames of a burning aircraft.

“We were arguing as we drove.” I took another sip.

“About what?” The beginnings of tears were slowly rolling down her cheeks.

I could feel the shallowness of my breathing. I rubbed my stump, glanced at my leg.

The rain falls. The windscreen wipers drag their feeble way through an unending deluge. The pour rattles against the roof of the car. The lights of the car in front are blinding. The radio blares. I can smell the wine on her breath as she retorts. My insult blindsides her. We change gear. The car increases in speed. A bus pulls out. We brake. The names begin to fly, the coiled invective of months of resentment. Bitch, bastard, slut, cunt, prick, their meanings caught up in rage and confusion and the endless rain. The engine’s thrum more pronounced. Words aren’t enough now. Tears fall. Wheels spin. Puddles splash. Each droplet in arrested motion. Now I can see each one hit the glass. This angry childless pair circling eachother like snarling dogs thrust into such close proximity. I can smell the wine on my breath as I throw one last bitter insult into the already overflowing pot. She blinks. I can smell the wine on my breath. The name hits home. She slaps my face. She misses my face. She catches my ear. A rain of punches now. I hit her with my free hand.

I take my hand off the wheel, and I turn and I hit her.

The wheel spins loose in my hand, a deep pothole cracking the axle. The hire car turns a complete thirty degrees and slides, aquaplanes along the tarmac. We come to a stop.

“Jim?”

Naomi stands, waiting for her answer.

I finish my drink.

Sketches of Mary

2010-01-07T04:11:00.000-08:00

This piece is unfinished, as are most of the prose and poetry pieces I post here. This is mainly a series of tonal sketches about a girl I imagined, and with whom I imagine I would like to have a long train journey.

Second Draft – 11th September, 2009

It is Nineteen Ninety-Six. I can hear the ice cracking in my glass. A fan blows hot air through the room. I am sitting at my upright piano. I am resting my forehead on the music stand. My hands wait above the keys. They seem very far away. I am nineteen years old. I smell the burning of my cigarette. It sits in an ashtray on a battered coffee table behind me. I have only taken one drag. The glass perspires. I am crying, or at least I think I am. I will find in a few moments that my eyes are dry. I can hear the electric thrum of the fan, slicing the air into digestible chunks. In the bathroom the tub is full. It has been cooling for half an hour. I am naked. My long red hair hangs limply and greasily from my head. It points the way to the keys. I cannot bring myself to touch the keys. I cannot bring myself to play a note. I try to smile. It doesn’t come easily. I raise my head and take the glass. The gin is cold and refreshing. I drink it too quickly. I wipe a sliver of fluid away from my chin. I stand. I can feel the rough bristles of the cheap carpet on the soles of my feet as I pad to the bathroom. I go to the bathroom. I dip my fingers into the bathwater. It is stone cold now. I am naked but for my watch. I pull the plug from the bath and lie on the floor and listen to the water slowly drain from the tub.
It is Nineteen Ninety-Three. I am sixteen years old. I drink milk and eye the cookie in front of me ruefully. I can hear the chatter of my friends around me, though I have no idea what they are saying. I break the chocolate chip cookie in half and dip it in my glass of milk. There are six of us sitting around this table. The other customers in the coffee shop circle us warily. I chew my mouthful of cookie carefully. I hate crumbs. My friends are talking, laughing. They ask me questions. I stare on blankly, trying to process their words.
It is Nineteen Ninety-Seven. I am twenty years old. The blue line on the pen-shaped device has filled me with a dread I don’t know how to feel. I am pregnant. The walls fall away and I feel like I am heading back to my piano. I don’t know what keys to push. I drop the test. It hits the bathroom’s tiled floor with a plastic bounce. I push my hands to my belly and push hard. Everything is beginning to freeze, time itself slowly stopping like a train arriving at a terminal station. I can feel the cold of the toilet seat against my thighs.
It is Nineteen Ninety-Nine. It is the last night of the millennium. Fireworks split the sky, geometric patterns emerge, and I know I can understand them. I lie on the wet grass, watching the fireworks.
It is the year Two Thousand.
I am sitting in a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and I don’t know how I got here. I think I have a twin on the other side of the world. Maybe yesterday I was in Montreal. Maybe I was in New Jersey. I can’t remember. I order a cup of coffee. The barman pours it and takes a long, long look at me, drinking me in, eyeing me to see if I am the stuff of payment. I peel a five dollar bill out of a grimy roll of notes and lay it on the bar top next to my steaming cup.
I must have been travelling abroad. Because when I look up from the five dollar bill, I am in my mother’s lounge, holding a hot cup of sweet tea, a ginger biscuit resting on the saucer. Mother is shouting at me and is pacing the thick carpet. Her thick Northern accent gives lie to the expensive crockery. On the arm of the settee, the cat yawns lazily.
It is four-thirty three a.m.
I am curled up beneath the coarse fabric of a hospital blanket. It is four-thirty four a.m. I cannot sleep. And I can hear the creak of the springs and the laboured sound of my own breathing. And I can feel the slow dribble from my mouth down my numbed cheek. I can hear the breathing and early morning chatter from other mouths in this large room. The air smells of disinfectant, but for all that, it’s airy. The squeek of rubber soles on the lino floor alerts me to the entrance of the nurse. I can feel all the bodies on the ward tense in unison.
I am avoiding the smiles and imprecations of a boy, slyly hiding behind the shelf in the bookstore. It is Nineteen-Ninety Seven. I toy with him and sense his grin widening behind the heavy black bookcase. He buys me lunch and later fucks me on a futon in a musty room, whilst his housemates listen on. He is a student, reading English Literature at the university here. He tells me in all seriousness, without a hint of irony, that he prefers girls who read. He tries to fuck me again as I am scouring the floor for my clothes. I push him back to the futon, whose wooden beams crack beneath him. He shouts at me, and I find myself in the street moments later, trying to thread my belt back into my slacks. I feel hot, sweaty and embarrassed. My vest is sticking to my back. A breeze doesn’t so much cool me down as give me a clammy shiver.
It is four-forty-nine a.m. I am lifted from the foetal position I have adopted as my safest bet, and stretched out. A doctor and two nurses give me the once-over. I hear mumblings about my physical condition. When they ask me questions I take a new tack. I answer, honestly, politely, succinctly. And when the examination is over and they tell me I will be here another night, rather than explode, I nod sagely, wisely suggest that maybe a few more days will do it, and wait patiently for them to leave. I have already decided to escape.
It is the year Two Thousand. I am standing in Times Square. It is the intersection of the whole world, the very centre of things. I can smell exhaust fumes and cooking Chinese food and steam, the electric ozone smell of a coming rain shower. There is the rumble of traffic, shouts, laughs. A police officer stands in front of me. He asks if I am okay. I nod, and mumble something about how amazing it is. He notes my accent. Tells me to have a nice evening. Maybe I should put a sweater on, he suggests. The night’s getting cold.
In the hotel bar I have a long conversation, the longest I have had in weeks. I am travelling abroad. I waitressed for months. Yes, in the UK. Britain. No-one there calls it England. At least, I don’t.
It is Two Thousand and Eight. It is two forty-seven. The digital clockface shines red. A tealight candle burns at the side of the bed. A record player, an old 1970’s record player, spins an album of plaintive solo piano. I think it is a record from my collection. I know I have collected a lot of records in the last few years. A warm, dry palm strokes my face. Daniel stands at the side of the bed. He looks at me, sanguine. He tells me he’s concerned, mildly, that I’m not sleeping. His voice is calm and even. He puts the finishing touches to the Windsor knot in his powder blue tie. I notice how very tall he is. I know that his height first attracted me to him, his height and then his voice. His kindness is clear, his love manifest in every tiny gesture. It seems all of his molecules are vibrating, and sometimes when I lie with him I can almost feel them. He is leaving because his friend Jim has called him. Jim is broken. In a car wreck, he lost his wife and his leg and I think some of his mind. Jim often calls, and often this late. I don’t mind. I lie in the candlelight, bathing in it. I hear the front door slam as Daniel leaves, and I wait the few delicious moments between the door slamming and the revving of his car’s engine. It is two fifty-one. I am padding barefoot down the carpeted stairs. In the lounge I lift the lid of the piano. I hit a ‘g’. I start to play. A year from now I will barely register as the piano is wheeled from the house and pushed into the back of an articulated lorry with many wheels. I will watch this through the living room window. I will hear Daniel talking in a muted whisper on his mobile phone in the other room. I will feel his sheepish stare on my back as he says goodbye. I play Chopin’s Sonata Number Two. I do so from memory. The music lives there and it’s now a relief when I play. I am not afraid of the keys here and now.
The dark light is coming. It is Nineteen Ninety-Eight. It is as black on this hillside as anywhere I have ever seen. A thick, insistent wind is pushing me down into this coarse grass. The wail of the wind is loud and shrill and I clap my cold, numb hands to my ears. I don’t know if my eyes are open or closed. This thick night is as much home as anywhere I have ever been. The grass is a little damp, and I can feel the knees of my jeans absorbing the water. It begins to rain. I raise my arms in the dark, high above my head and feel the stripping force of the wind on my stinging skin, and the ice of the cleansing rain.
A man stands in the rain on the prow of a boat. I am standing a few feet away from him. The waves are grey and topped with bright white scurf. The same wind is howling. It is calling my name. He is calling my name. The man is smiling as he throws over the rail one leg and then the other. I call his name, and he turns back to me. His smile fades for a moment, a moment so brief and incandescently sad that it barely registers with me. “Look away now,” he says. The brightness of his lost hope is like a field I can reach out and touch. I can feel it with my numb fingertips. The sun is a ball of dulled light behind a grey hospital gauze. The wind is howling both our names. I hear the squeek of his rubber soles against the wet rail. I can see his knuckles turn white where he tightly grips it.
On the hillside I am comforted by the night, and the night can tell; the wind lessens, a soft breeze now. The night relinquishes its hold on the grass, peels back like a retreating fog, evaporating. I see a raven, and a post van rolling through the winding country road. A series of eight telegraph poles carrying thick black wire slices the landscape into irregular segments. It is morning. I am wet through but it is morning.
It is Nineteen Eighty-Nine. I am twelve years old. The boat is ploughing into the grey ocean with an exhilarating violence; spray and noise and over it all I keep my stinging eyes fixed on Dad, who sits as carefree as a relaxing cat on the taffrail. We roll and pitch, undulating with a brutal majesty. I can hear the words he spoke barest seconds ago, still echoing impossibly in the wind’s howl as he lets go of the rail. He is gone. I run towards his vanishing point, slipping on the slick wetness of the deck. I fall hard. Everything is black.
I am lost in time now. I will not put what I am experiencing into any order. I exist within time. All of this is happening. It is all happening. It is all happening now. Right now. I can’t change any of it.

You & Me

2010-01-05T13:50:00.001-08:00

I have a talent for disruption, I think.

Ineffable, rough and unexpected.

I don’t mean to ruin your day,

Or cause you to hold that caustic

Chardonnay on your tongue

Longer than you ought.

But keeping my mouth shut,

Holding in the words,

Is not in my nature. And listening with calm

Unruffled consideration is not in yours.

These thoughts creep through the sluice gate, you see:

Cocks and cunts and shames and envies

And when they find the fuel of their own words

They propel themselves,

Spastic idiom birthed into the world,

Where they newborn-scream and

Command aghast attention.

Tightened smiles, and glances directed floorward,

And the abrupt change of subject meant to

Forestall

And preclude.

And if I am you and I am inside you

Then it is you who speaks when you should

Remain silent.

You have only myself to blame.

Aberystwyth Twilight

2010-01-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

I have taken the chances

And I have lost more often than

I have won;

I have spoken promises

And broken them

And made oaths I have cracked

But not shattered.

In this half-light now

The sun unrisen

I hear wind on the water

The water on the shale

And the distant sounds of raucous laughter.

I have taken you to the beach

And we have drunk wine

And held hands, cold fingers entwined

Sinuous. There we made each made our

Fulsome empty overtures

To the other. And we

Failed ourselves with relish.

There is sand on my wooden floor,

And seawater,

crescents the soles of your feet.

Motes

2009-11-17T09:22:00.000-08:00

Faith fails him. Dust on the hem of his trouser
Steppe garb fluttering loudly
The flat slap of light cloth.
The pickup engine turns over.
The wire twitches with news and
The excitement of expectation.
Then the dull rattle of
Soviet gunfire jarring a hundred
Ancient dreams.
A beard’s itch and weary
Callused hands return him
To the outcrop.
The repeating cry of choppers’ blades.
The desert is old.
Old wars become new wars
In insistent grating rhyme.
The desert is old.

Damn.

2009-10-12T06:07:00.001-07:00

Today I turned thirty. The sun is shining. My girlfriend is beautiful and I am totally in love. We drank coffee and held hands and planned a huge future. The sky seems endless and the concrete that makes this city sing is gleaming in the afternoon glare. The coffee thrums with nervous grinning excitement in the cup and I am truly, truly happy.

On Monday I fly to Afghanistan.

Damn.

Sweet Caroline

2009-09-28T08:18:00.000-07:00

Karaoke is the one true outlet of pure emotional expression a preternaturally drunk white Irish Catholic, slipstreaming without effort or intent into his third decade, can find on a night where his tie is lost or worse, where he can no longer decipher the spoken words of his companions, and on nights where even his own thoughts have become muddied and ... unsound. On those nights, on those desperate, torrid, harsh nights where the heat is unbearable and the Indonesian barman tells him he's had enough; on those wicked queer suit-creasing, shoe-scuffing, knuckle-dragging nights when even the lounge hooker wouldn't take the last twenty out of his wallet; on those nights when the twilight melted into a full velvet blackness of shame and the streetlights' amber haze rises into a dark miasma of blooded resentment; only on those nights can that guy depend on belting out tunes out of tune, into the dull bright echo of apathy and embarrassment in the vague and sullen hope of winning the twenty quid prize for giving out a top notch performance of Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond.

God I love karaoke.

It’s never planned, never a ridiculous plan. Always a glorious accident, a precipitous Jericho waiting to topple clumsily and with great expansive joy. The giggles and jeers are combated by the cheers and applause of critically damaged critical faculties, the lager bluntly slicing through such parochial conceits as talent, ability, or tone. On a good night it can feel like the only night, and a warm room like the only room.

Fraktacular

2009-09-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched for the second time the final episode of Battlestar Galactica, concluding my two month entire series rewatch project. Geeky, yes, but necessary. Necessary because when first the finale was broadcast the forum threads were alive with people hating on the hour and a half special ep, and I, having watched it and loved it, couldn't for the life of me figure out why.

Even critics whose opinions I generally agreed with were out in force against the finale, invoking such weighty critical denunciations as 'cop-out', 'hurried'and of course, the dreaded 'deus ex machina' response.

This latter is interesting because, in a sense, it's what BSG is all about - the recurring interaction of fate and destiny versus free will and self-determination. Yes, the finale posits an explanation for much that goes on in the series as a whole as being determined by a god figure, and the whilst unexpected the manner in which the humans find this Earth is certainly deus ex, it's been brought about only after much personal wrangling, and at great personal cost. I am intrigued by critics who seem to say that a deus ex resolution is some kind of easy way out; it looks to me as though Moore et al have been working intuitively towards this kind of climax from the beginning.

Still, I was genuinely moved by the final episode - the flashbacks were well-conceived and added a grace note of depth to characters we thought we already knew everything of. The sequence of goodbyes was beautifully written and tightly edited and I think everyone got their just payoff. I didn't feel cheated.

And even the 'take care of your robots' coda seemed to me not hokey, as has been much written, but another instance of the circularity of this most eschatological of modern narratives. I thought it possibly a little heavy-handed, but the intent was sound and the execution all it needed to be.

In its four years on the air, BSG has consistently pushed boundaries - narratologically, in terms of gender, its exploration of race, religion and the extremes of politics; it has explored themes of genocide, holocaust, reconcilliation, and manifest destiny. It's not good enough to say that this was good science fiction, or that this was great television. In the final analysis, Battlestar Galactica was good art.

Between the Polychrest and the deep blue sea...

2009-08-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss. I've been terrible. I am an awful human being. I have been shouting, arguing and not writing anything. I am awful.

Worst of all, I have been rereading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels.

How do I expect to get anything done?

Prevarication aside, they're bloody wonderful. I'm on the second now, and like a junkie, I know I won't be able to stop at the end of this one. Because they're not really novels, as any fellow Joneser for O'Brian will tell you. They're the chronicle of a friendship, a friendship that equals any of the major relationships of literature - Aubrey, the master seaman, the warrior with one eye to the weather gauge, and Maturin, naturalist, Irish Catalan, spy.

I crack a smile when they play music together (and what's more, I bang Corelli on the old iPod). I am filled with consternation when they argue; I fear for them in danger; and I cheer for them in victory.

Wishing them the joy of their victory, of course.

The language is polished, perfectly calibrated and absolutely incomprehensible to the newcomer. There is talk of knots and knotts, masts and sail, hulls copper-bottomed and true and ungainly seabirds who lie low in the water and whose rudders seldom answer with efficacy. Newbies! Bear with it, because before too long what seems incomprehensible becomes tone poetry! You are a midhshipman thrust into a world you barely understand, and your growing understanding of this perfect recreation of a period adds to your enjoyment. Before too long you'll be annoying landlubbers of your acquaintance with your insistence on speaking only in seaworthy vernacular.

Now, I gotta go. Jack and Stephen are about to duel.

Excentrifugal Forz, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Frank Zappa

2009-05-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

It was 1993. I had made the move from Ducie High School’s Lower forms to the larger, harder school on Lloyd Street. I was sitting in a chemistry class taught by my favourite teacher, Mr Dudley.

Mr Ben Dudley. Ben Dudley, with long blond hair, tatty jogging pants or a long pale blue sarong, round, pink-lensed glasses, and a broad black country accent. Ben Dudley, who would punctuate lectures on valence by throwing blackboard erasers across the classroom. Ben Dudley who routinely called pupils “fuckin’ clowns”, and whose pupils loved it. Ben Dudley who exploded plumes of flammable hydrogen to blow off steam on long hot Moss Side aftermoons. Ben Dudley, the Ducie High pingpong champion (in our school a much sought after accolade).

Ben Dudley, who on a rainy afternoon harangued me as I was walking out of the classroom. Told me that whatever I was listening to on my Walkman was shit (I think it was Nirvana’s In Utero, though I may be being retrospectively cool in my remembrance). Thrust at me a stack of C90’s, with track listings written in tiny red pen letters.

What he had given me was the latest in a long line of musical shoves on to what he considered thr true path. Pushed me from Screaming Trees to Tyrannosaurus Rex, from Springsteen to Dylan, and so on. Through Dudley I had already been transwarping through the spacey and into the bizarre. Tapes I’d already devoured from the Ben Dudley music font: Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain. Mile Davis’ Get Up With It & Bitche’s Brew. Al DiMeola. Santana. Tangerine Dream. One tape had Captain Beefheart’s Soft As Milk on side A and Trout Mask Replica on B.

“How did you like the Captain?” Dudley asked.
I remember I curled my kip and then grinned. I had loved Beefheart’s rasp, loved the loose, free chunkiness of the Magic Band.
“Then you’re ready for this,” he said.

And that was that. I didn’t know it, but these tapes were to be the beginning of a real fandom that has lasted me every day ever since.

I was about to enter the weird, wonderful and sometimes downright unfathomable world of Frank Zappa.

The tapes I got in 1993 contained the complete Joe’s Garage album, Apostrophe and, the key title, Roxy And Elswhere.

Joe’s and Apostrophe are terrific albums, and I’ll talk a little more about them a little later, but Roxy & Elswhere is a very special album indeed. This is because it provides one of the few entry points into the Zappa canon that doesn’t completely overwhelm the listener whilst at the same time really showing what Zappa the Bandleader could do.

Frank Zappa? Well, avant composer, musical provocateur, expert jazz-fusion bandleader. Bad comedian, pioneer of ‘conceptual continuity, misogynist, feminist. Best not to pigeon-hole. Classification is useless. Be like putting a penguin in bondage.

Using jazz polyrhythms and rock instrumentation was nothing new when Roxy & Elsewhere was realeased in 1973, but what struck me when I heard it for the first time 23 years later was not the complexity of it –though that became apparent to me over the course of many hundreds of listens over the years- but the tightness of the band. Changing tempo and timbre at the drop of a hat, turning on a dime and blasting the music propulsively and humourously in the least logical directions, the Mothers on R&E as just about as tight, rehearsed and in-sync with their leader as a band could be.

And that’s before you even begin to listen to the lyrics, which are by turns absurdist rants about sexual acts involving flightless Arctic fowl, an homage to 1950’s B horror movies, the social polemic of More Trouble Every Day, an album-capper in the fifteen minute Be-Bop Tango Of The Old Jazzmen’s Church, a discursive improvisation around a theme that’s complex enough to begin with, yet somehow manages to transmute into an audience-participation riff resembling nothing so much as avant-garde performance art.

R&E showcases all of this with possibly the perfect Mothers line-up. Much of the same material can be heard later on in the tour on You Can’t Do That On Stage Any More Volume 2 – the same repertoire learned by rote and played at tempos that defy belief. But there’s also a warmth to the R&E album, despite the plain admission of overdubbing in the liner notes. If this is a band so well-rehearsed they make complicated music sound easier than it is, this is also the sound of a band so in control of its material that it can afford to enjoy itself, and enjoys antagonising the audience as much as entertaining them.

Joe’s Garage was my next C90, or rather double C90. Again, this was an album to get stuck into. Six sides of vinyl when I eventually bought my own copy, with liner notes including diagrams of sex robots, gasmasks and lyrics complete with stage directions, this was some kind of opus and it covered every genre of music, but revelled most in the gentle back and forth of reggae rhythyms. It also contained Zappa’s masterpiece virtuoso guitar solo, Watermelon In Easter Hay. The thing here is, Zappa’s lyrics are so deliberately humorous, and often so deliberately offensive that they serve to subvert his own musical intent. And his musical intent is deliberately subversive in itself. The man was a contradiction.

The album itself is terrific fun, one of several high-points of the manifesto made plain in Zappa’s live collection, Does Humor Belong In Music? Tracks like the jazz-fusion of Wet T-Shirt Nite are as much about cheap thrills as they are about knowing irony; and Zappa’s love of dumb (check his numerous covers of Louie Louie for more proof) reaches its apogee on Why Does It Hurt When I Pee? A rock chugger that segues effortlessly into mock-Wagnerian operetta around its midpoint.

Next week, we will be igniting a sulphur preparation and illuminating the joys of Hot Rats, Apostrophe and finishing off with a look at Zoot Allures.

The First Time

2009-05-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd type this phrase. Never thought I would. Many a drunken row with my good friend Zak has ended with my declaring that I would never say these words; that I would never type them. Never even think them. But here I am, for the second time today, about to put them down.

The new Manic Street Preachers album is awesome.

My problems with the Manics go way back. As a teenager I always found their peculiar Welsh agitprop a turn-off, their music kinda sucky in a juvenile way and there was something in their disaffection that seemed appropriate and at-home on the front cover of the NME or Melody Maker.

As close as I ever came to a public statement of encouragement for the Manics was this: "I suppose the Holy Bible's alright."

But this new album came along. This new album came along.

Apparently, there's been much play in the press about the genesis of this album, Journal For Plague Lovers; about how the lyrics have been bequeathed to the remaining members of the band by their errant and much-missed lyricist Richey Edwards; about how the band struggled to overcome their initial reticence at working with his lyrics in the aftermath of Edwards being declared dead after years of being merely missing; about the recruitment of Steve Albini into the fold, to provide a rawer sound closer to Nirvana's In Utero. I've been only vaguely aware of this ephemera, and frankly none of it matters.

None of it matters because this is the first album of 2009 that reminds me of why I love music. I would go further, and say that Plague Lovers is one of only a handful of albums I've encountered in my twenties that I would say is really vital, that I have really connected with.

This album is dynamic, urgent and taut. Not one of the songs outstays its welcome. In fact, none of the tracks here exceeds five minutes. A few days in and I'm finding little moments, pieces of lyric, guitar phrases, chunks of drumming that are making me excited to still be listening to new music.

There is anger here, shortfuse rage expressed in pithy, snotty lyrics that make me feel sixteen again. There is tenderness and beauty too, but with none of the self-lacerating self-obsession of juvenilia (my first weapon of choice when attacking the Manics). In putting flesh on the skeleton of Richey's bequest, the Manics have produced the first essential record of the year.

I am not a fan of the Manic Street Preachers, but I'm incredibly grateful they've reaffirmed my faith in rock 'n' roll.