Shopping in British Home Stores today, I saw a balding man in skin tight pink chinos take a photo of a sobbing, fat woman as she posed for him at the exit to the changing rooms.  The woman was wearing a purple dress that could have been a bridesmaids dress but which I like to think was her wedding dress.

I like to think they were going to marry each other.  For some reason he was forcing her to marry him.  He was going to make her marry her wearing the most awful dress he could find.

Well I don’t like to think that, I don’t like it at all, but you know

Unfortunately, when I tried to take a photo of the man, the woman screamed ‘Craig’ and ‘Craig’ charged at me screaming he was going to stab me

I wish I had taken a photo

I used to love the hank dogs.  The hank dogs, in case you haven’t heard of them, are the best ever group.  I can sense you are boled over by Hyperfact.  I loved them so much that I went a bit mental.

I used to have this blog and I had it for one reason:  to get the hank dogs to notice me.  Through out the postings, I’d pepper phrases from the hankdogs lyrics.  Or, to put it another, better way;

across the backs of these houses, wigmaker’s hand draws faces.

The plan was they’d alta vista their name, my blog would come top, they’d see how much I loved them and somehow we’d all be friends.

Whether or not you are aware, you are being judged somewhere.

 Exactly.  Anyway, it got so this blog got quite big for those times and I used to get comments saying ‘Why did you insert the words “the cows scare us half to death / firing our adrenaline” into that bit about wanting to kill yourself, again, but this time in the last of the cleaning aisles before the dog food in Tesco?

I never heard anything from them, though.

So I sent them emails to their record company, to them and to everyone with the same name as either Andy or Piano or Lilly.  Cringingly, I accidentally sent one of these emails to the director of the place I was working in the time.  Have you ever emailed the head of your business an email the first line of which is

“So, I suppose you could say this is a fan letter”.

Awful.  But I heard nothing back

So I wrote a novel and a half about Lilly Ramona, the singer out of the hank dogs, and I sent it to their agent, their record company and to the place which holds their regular easycome accoustic music night.

Still I heard nothing.  I was a bit pissed off about that, to be honest.  It was a good book, honest.  It would have got published except the agent wanted to change the end, and I refused. Now I look back I might have been misguided. I had this plan to win the booker prize with it and turn up and collect the cheque with a t-shirt which said on it:  I fucking love the hank dogs.  I bet they still wouldn’t have noticed me though

I was younger then.

Why am I telling you this?

“Poor little house in the country” 

I dunno

I still fucking love the hank dogs

There used to be a nightclub in Wolverhampton called the Dorchesters.  I hope its not there.  When I leave a town, I hope that everything I associate with it is destroyed forever.  For instance: when I left my home town for what I’d planned forever, it was summer.  I had cause to return a few years ago in winter for some work and was so upset by the christmas decorations that I had to leave.  I had to ring them and fake illness.  For some stupid reason, I faked a broken leg.  Luckily I worked for them remotely so they never saw me but on skype I had to pretend, sometimes, to be struggling with the weight of the plaster on my leg.  It was so over elaborate.  

 Anyway, my hometown:  They’d changed stuff! Without telling me! no, no I am not happy with that.  Better everything is ground to dust.

  Anyway, in the nightclub they used to sell poppers.  I remember the company that made them was called ‘Quiet Lynne’

I know for a fact that you have never heard of such a great name for a company.

Now the sun’s stopped sulking I have to draw the curtains as I watch TV.  The curtains are at odds with the rest of the house and are expensive and well made.

I have often thought about trying to contact the previous owner and ask why, in the midst of all the flimsyness; the broken showers, the lacksadasical cookers, the whimsical drainage, abstract cabling and the rotting window frames, the one substantial thing she bought was curtains.

For a while when I thought about it, I thought she had something to hide.

Something to keep out.

But that was an unpleasant thought, so for a while I thought she might have won them in a competition. But then I thought: when was the last time you saw a competition where the prize had been to curtain the downstairs of your cheap terraced house?

Exactly.

For another while I thought she’d been bequeathed them, but that would have meant whoever it was who had done the bequeathing, the bequeathor, had had exactly the same dimensions of windows as the bequeathee (given that the curtains do not look like they had been altered).  I wondered if the bequeathor had bequeathed them, not because of some deep seated friendship stretching back to the days of pottted crab sandwiches and air raid sirens, but merely because the dimensions of their respective windows had matched.  We know that the woman who lived here previously was old, probably.  Probably, or else had an overdeveloped sense of impractical humour, and faked old persons taste.

I draw the curtains to watch TV, mainly.  I mainly watch ‘manly’ ITV4  (dying every fucking time I head those shitty tetley adverts.  Have you noticed how they have escalated them so you see the talkers now?  Much as I despised the earlier ones, at least there was a semblance of mystique).  I watch ‘the professionals’, ‘minder’ and ‘the sweeney’ (is it ‘the sweeney’ or just ‘sweeney’. ‘Sweeny’ would have made a great name for a shoegazing band)

Why I mainly watch this shows is only for absolutely one reason: to imagine time travel.  I look at the light which bounced of late 70s, early 80s London, and I fall in love with my delight again.  I love the streets and the shabby emptiness which premates them.  I love the way the spring light makes the shabbiness look and I love, too, the way the light makes the emptiness looks spacious.  These are streets stripped of cars and singage, and, well, nearly everything except the streets themselves and the occasional speeding van.

If I could go back in time anywhere to anytime, It would be to around 1983 in London.  I would slavishly copy Bodie’s dress sense as I roamed the empty streets lit with pale sunlight.

I day dream while I watch TV, while outside, behind the curtains, hopefully, the stage is being set for a day dream from the future.  Maybe someone is filming where I live for their youtube channel, and maybe in the future someone then will fall in love with this second now.

The new light is beautiful,  but the old light more beautiful still

Bequeathor is a beautiful word.  I think I like it more than breather and I love breather. I love breather because of

Breather, sleeper, make me happy

which is the fist line of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YtB4kxfQPs.  In fact, without wishing to disparage chapterhouse, I think bequeathor would have sounded better than breather.  Whenever I sing the song in my head, I shall sing bequeathor and feel nought but joy.

In the bin is the smell of used nappies and used cigarettes.  But its not that which is making my flat smell.  The smell is from the fridge.  Every time I open it, I am confronted by failure.  My fridge has milk branded with a design featuring a green cow.  My yogurt has words about biology on it and my cheese has the italian flag on its packaging.  If everything is designed to be perfect, where is the smell coming from?

One by one, I take the  items out, sniff them then put them neatly on the fake walnut work surface.  Its the basil.  Produce of Turkey, it says, and it fucking hums.  I try to think of when I bought the basil.  I try to recal what would have caused me so much optimisim to have decided to buy it.  Seasonal Supermarket advert design, probably, I can’t recall anything else.  But, then I can’t recall the advert either.

I think, as I put the other items back, how perfect the advert was - it appeared, persuaded me, then disappeared, leaving my mind open for its successor.  I think about how the virus I read about on theregister.co.uk are quite similar to adverts.  For a second I have an intense image of the cracked and worn hands of the woman who must have picked the basil.  Then I realised the woman I am picturing is actually the woman on the front of the pg tips advert

I google pg tips box, and I see they have changed it from the picture of a lithe woman tea picker to just a photoshoped design of a tea leaf.

I put the basil in the bin, with the legitimate smells of the fags and the baby

The cigarettes aren’t mine, and the nappies.  The nappies are nothing to do with me, no matter what chemistry has to say.

Icee

As the rain fell on Oxford Road, and the taxi pulled up outside the university, I checked the thought gun was still in my pocket as I reached for the money.  Paying off the taxi, I turned up the collar of my Burberry Macintosh and squashed my trilby further down on my head.  The students gave me odd looks as they passed by; a mixture of pity and scorn.  I stood out and, some centuries ago now, I had learnt from the angels that the first rule was to never stand out.  Standing out got you noticed and once you were noticed, you were dead.   No matter now, nothing mattered, least alone my death.  The only thing that mattered was the death of Dr Helen Burton.  I was going to find her and I was going to stop her.  I had eradicated all trace of her thesis on her computer and email account.  Now all that remained was to finish her and the secret of the ice box would be safe.

I only hoped she had not yet reached the archive underneath the museum.

My thought gun throbbed in my coat.  The virus in it longed to leap and destroy.  On sensing the sneers of the students, it had started to vibrate, longing to fire the virus into their heads, to wipe out the wiring in their brain.  I forced myself to control and the gun calmed itself.  I would make it fire into Dr Burton and no one else.

Quickly, I entered the museum.  The family friendly notices irritated me briefly.  I climbed the stairs, passed the mummies (those pathetic fools with their desperate appeasements to death.  Ha!) and continued to the discreet door in the next corridor.  Inside the archive, I saw her by the antique box.  She was opening it.

She [i]had[/i] deciphered the manuscript then, the warning had been correct.  The thought gun hummed but I told myself I needed to find how much she knew and it calmed.

I walked to her and, on hearing my approach, she looked up from the box briefly.  “Hello” she said, dazed.  I could see the way the light gleamed from the inside of the box and it drew my breath.

“The box” she said sleepily “I worked it out this morning.  It’s a portal.  It opens, look”

I dared not look deeply yet.

She continued: “It looked so out of place in the archives and the transcription was so unlike anything I’d ever seen.   The translations confused me until… I understand now” She sighed

“Yes” I said.  “Every world has them hidden in them.  We use them to travel.  A small ice box.  Out of fashion for now, but I think you’ll find that in 50 years or so, with the great warming, they’ll be widely used again.  What can be more common, more unnoticeable? Only you need a way to open it specially.  This one was found and handed in here.  We managed to deactivate it for a while.  But there’s been sort of a war in a lot of the worlds and they opened them all again.”  I didn’t tell her what that meant, that the demons would already be here, breeding in this world, hidden from us for too long.

“And, and you read the manuscript, didn’t you?”  My gun hummed.  It longed to power into her brain, to turn her into a vegetable, or to kill depending on what thoughts and memories it found stored in there.  I hushed it.

She looked at me dreamily.  She had been staring into the way the light was pouring out of the small box.  She was already forgetting

“Another world.”

“Thousands that we know about.  No one knows how many.  You’d go mad finding out.  I know that alright.  Of course, some are just wastelands but there’s still enough.  A thousand worlds and a hundred thousand times.”

She shook her head “How do you know all this?  How did you read the manuscript?”

“I wrote it” I said

“But it’s a thousand years old!”

I did not need the gun; I forced her head into the light streaming from the box and the light expanded us into the new world.  The sun beat hot.  I had not been here for a few thousand years or so but I was confident I still knew my way around.  We lay on the ground in a cave.  The other box glistened and I shut it.

Outside, I started walking down the hill into the city a long way below.  This was a parallel world where the version of Manchester was hot and mountainous and dry.  We were in a cave high in the mountain.  I heard the doctor follow me.  Her footsteps sounded firm.

“Where are we?” she asked.  I took off my trilby and coat, folded them under my arms and unfurled my wings.  The breeze felt warm and good.

My wings beat.  Tired and old though I was, my ascent was graceful.

“You can’t just leave me here” she shouted.  There was another gateway at the end of the island, in a house by the sea.  It would take a few hours to fly and I was tired but I had to keep going.  The demons had opened up all the gateways and people were finding them all the time.  Poor Dr Burton didn’t need to work out how to decipher the one she’d found; she only needed to know how to look.  There were hundreds around.

“I’ll just open the box again and go back” she said, unaware that each box needed a new way to open it properly.

I flew away from Dr Burton.  Maybe she’d find the others who had found the gateway, although almost certainly they were dead.  Most of the missing people in that world found ways into this world.  It was only a minor world so we just left them.

Back in her world, the tearful, televised appeals for information would start.

Late that evening she says: “All the things we are, right, is just chemicals, so what does ‘I’m sober now’ even mean? It means f**k all, so drink the f**k up, f**ker”.

She often said things like that in the evenings. In the evenings, we’d talk free, almost easily filling the space between us. Before bed, we’d be talking about the good old days, years ago. That time when we got so f**ked up and that other time - before I stopped drinking again- when we got so f**ked up as well.

Mostly in the mornings, she’d say the same thing over and over; weak sounding cocktails of ‘never’ and ‘again’. I’d stroke her brittle hair as she retched, and I’d tell her it didn’t matter- though of course it did - and then I’d go to work.

So the days were nearly fine. But in the nights she’d say nothing to me, in the nights there was nothing there at all.

That evening, when I got home from work to our over tidied house she’d said:

“She can have you cos I’ve had enough of you, you cheating, boring b*stard.”

She was aggressive, though I’d thought there was no whisky in the house.

“I know what you’re up to, you know.” she’d said “Don’t you think I don’t. That girl who gave you a lift home; She the latest one is she?”

She only had the energy for one thing these days, and it wasn’t anger. I stayed calm; it would pass.

“Drink up!” she’d said “Please” she pleaded. I didn’t like the ‘please’. I didn’t like it at all.

“It’s you I love” I said. I remembered how, years ago, the sun would sprinkle her hair with light that made her look like a stained glass angel. I remembered. I remembered.

I moved to kiss her but she moved, with some deliberation, to the coffee table. They were all out ready as they’d always been; the gin and the wine already more than half empty, and the ashtray, already full. The ashtray looked like a dead explosion. The gin crackled on ice.

She couldn’t be that bad if she was still putting ice in her glass.

She drinks and then she really drinks.

I think of work; of Mary at work, and what we agreed in the car tonight before we kissed goodbye. I think of how my life could be so different if only I wanted. We’d talked about how I could transfer out of London. We’d talked about how she’d come with me. She’d talked about how much this house must still be worth. We’d talked about telling and agreed that she’d tell her husband tonight and I’d tell my wife.

“I think I made some dinner.” my wife says.

I walk through to the kitchen and eat some biscuits. I normally eat before I come home. Through the serving hatch into the tiny front room, I can see the way my wife’s hand trembles out to the glass and the tight tenderness with which she holds it. I try to recall when she last held me like that, but it’s just a memory of a memory.

I remember the flavour of gin exactly; of course I do.

I will myself to think of Mary, and her clean skin. When we were still just colleagues, we’d go to the gym and I’d revel in the pride she took in her body. When I got dry I’d pound the treadmills, sweating. Mary gave me encouragement; she said I could do it.

But I spent thirty years putting sh*t in my body.

Later on, we stopped going to the gym. Mary’s skin tastes like warm butter and her eyes are as clear as hope. Her mouth is a warm promise. Our romance is something physical.

“Have a drink. Come on. You would if you loved me. You used to be a right laugh. I’m so lonely darling.” My wife says.

Time hadn’t passed her by; it had failed her. If I wanted to look, I could see tiny depressions, proof of a thousand banal failures over her cheeks and nose. I could see the way the booze had stained her face. I could see her face was like she was already drowned; soaked and bruised by the jetsams of sodden wreckages, if I wanted to look.

“Remember that time in Capri?” she asks “Something reminded me of it today, I forget what.”

“Probably it was a holiday advert, there’s a lot of them on around now.” I make myself say.

We talk holidays a while.

“Go on, have a drink, just one. Prove you love me. Live a little. I dare you.” she pleads. It’ll pass. It always does.

My fingernails hurt my palms.

Mary’s husband will be in tears now. The anger and shame will come later, I know. I’m supposed to be handing in the transfer request tomorrow. All of this has happened so fast. Romance is a promise. But a promise makes too much possible.

I smile at my wife.

“I love you.” I say. We used to have pet names for each other; we were so close once.

“I know I’m not perfect” she says “But nor are you, you lightweight f**ker. I love you too.” she says. It must be to me. It surely must. It must.

“There. Does that make it better?” she asks.

“All the things we are, right, is just chemicals, so what does ‘I’m sober now’ever mean? It means f**k all, so drink the f**k up, f**ker”.

Romance is the promise of physics; but tonight I’ve shown I love her, tonight I’ve given in to love. Because love is chemistry.

In the night she’ll say nothing to me, in the night there’ll be nothing there at all. The silence will rest on ashes of broken promises.

Then I felt his tongue on my toes and then I felt it move up my leg. I looked at how I had folded my clothes neatly by the side of his single bed. My mother would have been proud, to a certain extent at least.
[background]

After *** left and said she really wasn’t coming back this time, I went a bit mental. There were several consequences of this; an STD, a criminal record, a lingeringly tedious addition to sulphate sprinkled amphetamines (alchohism having predated this particular trough by a bad half decade or so), and homelessness. At the time, I waltzed through life with a jaunty smile and a spring laden step. (now, with my own set of screwdrivers, plates and properly catalogued pornography, I have black fear of anything; odd huh?)
So I found myself living in hotels for a while. I tried sleeping in a park, really I did. But there was just something so, so, unamusing about it. I’d stay in a hotel, pay for a week or so, win some cheap trust then extend my stay saying my cheque book had to come over from England; could I stay a week or so and then pay when it arrived? You can only do this so long and I felt the whole time a sort of edgyness which made me paranoid everytime I thought of how many drugs I had in my backpack, and the tales of brutality I had heard about the local police force.

[the end of the background]

Anyway

One spring day, the sun as tentative and as enticing as the first kiss of a new love, I walked down the cobbled streets of the old town. The plane trees were still in the gentle breeze. The people of the town milled and scurried past me warm hearted and their gossip curled around the floors of the streets, curled up my legs and sidled, warm, into my ears. An oldish man (50, maybe, if you were in a good mood) stopped me.

He asked me whether I was looking for somewhere to live

I said I was

He said that was lucky, as he was a landlord.

He showed me a sordid, lonely looking bedsit. I asked about the price. I said I couldn’t afford it (probably without listening to the price first). He asked me for lunch and said we’d talk about it over lunch. So I found myself in a large, parquet floored appartment over looking some tidy gardens.

I noticed he closed the windows carefully as we went in,and unfurled the bunched lace curtains from the oak shutters till they hung loose over the windows.

And I noticed that he locked the door and I told myself to be careful. But half a bottle of hock later, my hand trembled only slightly as I lit my post prandial cigarette. I had not eaten for two days and put it down to hunger.

We talked about him. He talked about Japanese condoms (the best you can get, apparently. strong but thin). He talked about his love of MMF thresomes which he had with his cousin (typical bloody foreigners eh?). They had to go to her place out in the hills as she made too much noise in his flat, and he had to be careful.

Then he told me I was very thin, and very pale (er, drugs, duh!). He said he knew the rent was a lot, but we could come to some agreement. I remember I was sitting at the big oak table on a stool. I put my hands gently on the lace of the table. I remember how the lace felt. I was young, tired and hungry. He said he liked my feet and would like to see them.

I knew exactly what I was doing as we each undressed. Then he suggested we go to his room. I carried my clothes, making sure I rembered where my rucksack with my meagre posessions was, and, more crucially, where he had hidden the key to the door (in the cutlery drawer; people always put their keys in there).

I felt extremely stupid as I follwed him to his room. I am really ugly, and skinny and shy. He told me to lay down on the bed. I did so, face up. I wondered why the bed was single, but did not think more about it.

“There’s no way I am sucking his cock” I thought to myself. “There’s just no way”.


I wondered if I would bum him. I thought, probably not.

He said in rather formal language that he wondered whether he could kiss my feet.

I did not know the local phrase for ‘fire away’ but said “sure”.

He started to kiss the soles of my feet. I was a bit embarrassed on account of how I must surely stink, but figured it was up to him to complain. I felt his tongue on the sole of my foot, then I felt his tongue on my toes and then I felt it move up my leg. I looked at how I had folded my clothes neatly by the side of his single bed. My mother would have been proud, to a certain extent at least. Thinking of my mother triggered an involuntary laugh, but I managed to stifle it by pretending it was a groan of pleasure. I was cold, tense and, obviously, unaroused.

When he got to my knees, I put my hands on his thinning hair. He stopped and looked at me. His tired eyes, hung in deep bags, were sad.

“At least you know you’re alive” a little voice in my head said to me. I haven’t heard that voice for years.

He told me he wanted me to bum him. Then he rolled off, and so I stood up so that the least part as possible of our skin was touching. He lay on the bed, I imagine in what he imagined to be coquettish manner. You can’t really be coquettish when you’re trying to have sex with someone over twenty five years younger than you though. His back was to me and he scrunched up his legs so that he was holding his knees against his gut. I didn’t mind the flab or the age or any of that, though his grey haired back was offputting.

As were his balls.

They looked like the skin you get on cheap chicken breasts from a bad supermarket; grey and pimply. I wondered how I was going to get out of bumming him. I didn’t mind how he looked at all; I am just not gay.

” I need some more wine” I said. When he went to get it, I dressed speedily. When he came back, he saw me clothed. I said I was sorry and he cried. I tried to hug him but he tried to turn the hug into a kiss so I left. That was that.

That was about 12 years ago. It’s odd how time passes.

When I was in the city, I used to read all I could about the sea.  I read about how it looked, and smelt and how something called phosphoresce meant it shimmered in the moonlight, like a shiver down a naked back.  I walked along the other side of the field by the dunes.  I looked down at my feet.  Despite the cold, they were warm and I liked the way they moved across the divots and dimples in the field, expertly.  Up until a day ago, I had never left the city and up until an hour ago, I had been in the car which I had stolen.  Then I looked up at the stars.  I had read in a book that stars could die and their light would keep shining afterwards.  Something to do with speed, and time, and distance and I didn’t like looking at the stars so I looked ahead.  The house, I had read, was just around the corner.  It was so late it was early, or so early it was late; I didn’t want to work it out.  The sea was loudly sushing the dunes but I don’t know why - the land wasn’t saying anything back.  It was just sitting there.  The air seemed full of electricity, and I was a bit worried about this because I had read about what to do with electricity and water, before I had decided not to.  The air was full of static and it was buzzing.  The whole world was dreaming and the whole world was alive and when I got to the house, I would walk through the rooms.  I’d walk through the kitchen and run my hands over the old oak kitchen table.  I bet the wood would feel warm.  I’d walk down the corridor and look at the blue ceilings and the faded plaster.  I’d stand in the drawing room and look at how the pale yellow carpet had been pulled back so the dancers could dance on the old floorboards.  I’d look at how it would look in the half light.  Then I’d go up the stairs.  she would be in one of the bedrooms.  She would have her hair in hands, stretched out to show me how long it was, and she would have wide eyes and from the room she had told me about, I would see, finally, the sea which I had read about.