“Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head?”

William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)

Raining. Fuck, its always pouring. God’s own curdling and I feel just as vulnerable as the pounded glass. The windshield a surface constantly being wiped clean by mechanised arms, sanitised so as to appear transparent. Once she told me that I looked as beautiful as one of those bubbles in front of me, but all the same, I popped.

    Footloose. Every time I close my eyes, I see the gun. I wonder how many people out there dream of it too. You’re changed by the first moment you hold and touch a gun’s cold metal; it’s almost as if your very physiology dares you to match its system of intricacies against your own. The weight is a ghost still evident on my hands, my palms buckled up and imprinted by a mass slightly heavier than a human heart.   

    “I told you, I never felt anything for you. I don’t want you and I never will.”

    I keep on getting these flashbacks, shadowed edges captured by psychic photoflashes. Analogue or digital, the larger result from my brain is always the same, an image of this woman shaking in her bedroom’s corner. A quivering mess of reflexes that makes me think that she could well have been acting out a range of different physical situations. A mime using the contours of their body to represent themselves anew. Performances like these echo in my mind, which without the constraints of time have now acuminated, forcing me to accept them as behavioural differences between humans and animals. The dimensions of her room refuse profusely to leave my blind-sight, sanguine walls repaired by a concealer of Johnny Depp magazine cutouts and hand-written poems. Fixtures flittering by in movie style fades: screen split, dissolve, vertical separation. Always in a different fashion but still a perpetual constant of content.

    “My mother she er… Tried to commit suicide when I was fourteen.”

    Revenge.

    Passion killed the radio star. Interiors shift only to reassemble, I am no longer in the car but I’m not in the room either, instead I now survey the gothic hues of the bar. Tables and wood furnished shelves all coated in black masking tape wrapped in several inches of varnish. There are holes in the toilet walls that spill out liver disease, jaundice, addictions to weed and cocaine. Purchased prisoners breeding in their rightful place. The sensibilities of their inmates still pervade, penetrating downwards in the way sunlight filters through canopies of a forest. This is the curse that is transmitted virally to every society that hates its own parents.

    She woke up at midnight and took early morning walks inside herself; comforted by the dark, she was camouflaged by a central notion of feeling. Wide netting, this boy was caught-on by another story. It’s the type of private failure so tantalising that it casts shades to be shut up deep inside.

    The sky above me is tinted turquoise and I’m starting the ignition of the inoffensively coloured vehicle, trying to make open roads fall forward once more.

    “He tore off my clothes and then… He hit me.”

    Tears, they’re just parallel lines running down my matrix of crushed bones and torn sinew; driving blame that cuts swathes across the pale curvatures of glass. Internal and exterior, the sorrow-filled rain is reduced to a surface symmetry. What a word, elation; her stolen muttered speech, so sharp but unclear, almost felt dirty in its ambiguities. The sniper’s sight, her letters shot through me with a speed much slower than conventional bullets so as not to pass through the body but rather to linger and encourage infection. Today’s storming sky is elation personified.

    The soap sud star and confident contender, lover, friend and self-taught fighter (bras and high-heels lying scattered across her floor). Why did she tell me those stories, I have to wonder to myself at least once a day, silently enveloped by this hidden glee. Her speech was peppered with the cysts of matter-of-fact nuances and I was fictionalised by my complicity in her confessions. I would only feel truly alive by trawling through the tragedies of her life.

    “Where is fancy bred, is it in the heart or in the dead.”

    It is only now, whilst grey landscapes pass by this spaceship I pilot, that I start to doubt her. Were they fabrications? Twisted concoctions of calculation designed to draw me closer. Sexual games played out with the espionage of teenagers, it was a marriage sown with the threads of social camouflage and lethal tribal politics.

    Every word was recorded by the mirrors of close circuit television. I can hear them now, replaying and re-transmitting all the data to an undisclosed location in brain. This is the age of control. It’s an obsession that is as deepening as the cracks of the Statue of Liberty.

    “I’ll be the East (George) and you’ll be the West (Paul).”

    Watching Beatles films, neither of us could ever find the help we needed.

    I’m at a red light now; the damp of its blood seeps through the car’s air-conditioning system and forces a reaction, turning my back to shivers.

    “I talk to him; he’s a living animal in the shadows. My grandfather speaks from out of paintings, rotting wallpapers and through the chiming of clocks.”

    Even if she made those revelations up, each situation being more tellingly implausible than the last, it would have been impossible to tell, her reality was one that was marred completely by self-indulgence. As I study my features in the rear-view mirror I can see that I’m peeling from the Californian sun, it was an eight-hour flight but I suppose I have always been a star searcher. The indicator lights tick and suck me to ground, the symphony of their dashboard music sounds like the thundering of distant bombs.  

    “You’re a strange one, aren’t you.”

    It’s a curiosity that two people so alike could never get it right.

Our lips are met in this different memory, blood against blood here in the club. She’s stone drunk but then again, so am I. The final surprise, this uncomfortable lie. As I fix her simple frame, the glacier decay and she plays with teeth. I just want to take her inside and as I do nothing, the inevitable happens. A polite policewoman kisser, we nip and tuck in the bedcover corners. Handshakes break as we walk away into our separate days.

    Turning right I drive through the entrance following a small procession of cars. The weather is unrelenting. No love of culture could ever have changed our choices. There were other men in her life, inflicting and dangerous and never showing respect or patience with her. I regurgitate all this as I walk half-wandering from the parking lot to the grassy hills beyond. Sheltered under an umbrella bearing the name of the company I work for, my dreams become bronzed and oxidised.

    “I guess I could write a children’s book. Do you still write then?”

    Despite the cover, I can still feel the wet gather and collect as if in a final show of misdirected anger.

    ‘Did you know the deceased?’ The woman beside me in the churchyard says. I’m absolutely transfixed at the black marble tombstone of a freshly dug grave. The engraving on its finely lettered gold plating reads:

    RACHEL DUCKEND (1980-2004)

    MUCH LOVED DAUGHTER AND FRIEND

    SHE WILL ALWAYS BE MISSED

  

    ‘Folie à deux,’ I say as I turn to face the inquisitive apparition.

    ‘Sorry?!’ Her voice tightens, simultaneously bewildered and uninterested.

    ‘Did you know that Rachel once told me, back when I used to know her in school, that she had found a grave with my name on it. I’ll never forget that. She would often disappear and I simply knew that she would be ambling off somewhere. I wondered if she was an insomniac because she would get up in the middle of nights and drift along the streets like an unseen ghost. On her own in the cemetery, she would always study the names of the dead and buried. I would find her there pacing around until long after the sun had set. I’m sure that she wrote them down somewhere, made a record for all those voices of the lost people that she had spoken to. After that conversation we had, I started looking for my grave, but I never could find it. She had forgotten where it was.’ My eyelids are closed.

    The woman’s expression is long and thinly spread; she takes my cigarette off me with a comforting grasp and blows its smoke across the whole gallery of mourners. ‘Folie à deux,’ she says. ‘What does it mean, its French isn’t it?’

    ‘It was my favourite phrase to indoctrinate her with, “a madness shared by two.”’   

The Train to Sichuan

Yuan Yang

I lay on my belly, sunk against starched sheets, gazing down from the third bunk up. A single hand reached out from a bed below to open the window shutters. They sent sunlight scuttling along stacked bunk beds; vertical slats of light tapping across the ladder bars, pausing then flickering off like a fast cinemascope.

There were people draped about the entire compartment, hung from bunks stacked up to the ceiling; the heat of the summer air sat down upon their chests, and brushed against their dangling limbs.

We travelled three days and two nights on the train to Sichuan province, and we were new to this. We had got on at Beijing, but there were people already on the train, who had been travelling for nights already. Or – who knows? - they might have been living on trains all their lives, hanging around the corridors easily at home - their chests browning ever deeper in the sun, and smoking continuously, talking to the other travellers in flavoursome, accented dialects. One day a woman showed me where a flask filled with boiling water was kept. She out from her bag a series of packets of inexplicable, dried tendrils, and when the hot water soaked them, they unfurled into whole meals of vegetables and meats. This is how they lived on the long train.

We spent these three days in florid sunlight, as scenery fell away behind us. Sometimes mountains would rise in front, and sink behind; our train would wind slowly into mountain villages guarded by the extremity of the peaks. I was astounded by the remoteness of these lives; their distance from mine. Village women walked paths by the tracks I would never pace, sallow hands on hips. The train slowed right down while climbing, down to the speed of the women, so that I could watch them almost as if I walked with them. Only, their goats fled from the train.

When we stopped at broad, dust-tiled stations, the platforms might be empty except for fruit sellers, who passed you strings of lychees through the window. Lychees were soft, sharp and delectable; their tough maroon-pink skin, their translucent, white flesh. You bit through the husk and the scent drenched your mouth. I loved them in the summer, and I sat at the window greedily eating lychees.

The nights grew long, because we were essentially captives in the compartments; I climbed monkey-like into my bunk, where you slept with your tickets under your pillow; but the depth of the slumber in those tight spaces was given by the sedating weight of the air. Scores of people in a carriage slept close together, their heads lolling in unison with the pitching of the train. The chuck-chuck, chuck-chuck sound of the movement carried through everyone’s dreams; it lulled people into rhythmic sleep, a rise and fall, rise and fall of chests. When night came and the spicy chatter stopped, the breathing and the thick silence of sleep sat in the chamber.

We travelled three days and two nights, and we came off when we entered the pleasant coolness of the Sichuan basin; weeks later we were back in the misty dullness of Yorkshire, an English autumn. Yet still when I lean against the wall of a train compartment; a seven-minute journey to school, the last train home – and I hear the fainter chuck-chuck, chuck-chuck of the train, I hear the metrical parade, the ongoing thrust and pull of the universal engine, the movement inside every journey, and think of the rhythmic sleep of the train to Sichuan.

When I grow up I want to be a Prophet

Nicola Hulks

In the back of her mind she always knew he would leave. The question that had always tormented her was when. That afternoon she watched Yeshua in his workshop from her kitchen window as she prepared his food. He was running his fingers over the table top that he had been sanding. She could see that his thoughts were far off. Her own mind played out where his might be. She saw him standing among the great arches of the temple. Not in the garb of a priest but in his own clothes, dusty and brown from the workshop. He would be looking down on the mass of people below. From where he was they would look like tiny dust mites swarming together in the sand. In his hands was a scroll, engraved with the book of the Torah that he was about to read aloud. The weight of the scroll pulled his arms down. It fell to the ground with a thud as he unrolled it. And then she heard his voice: vivid and clear. It cracked slightly on his first word but then rung out like a siren. She was startled by the pot bubbling over and scolding her hand. Quickly she served up his meal and walked down the path from the house to the workshop.

    Whatever he may have been daydreaming about, he was startled out of his reverie by his mother dropping his lunch on the table in front of him.

    ‘Here, your lunch,’ she said, pointing to it.

    ‘Thank you, Mother,’ he replied and swept a handful into his mouth. 

    She stood next to the table he had just been working on and watched him eat. Even though there were seats around the table he ate his meal standing. She took a seat for herself to rest her feet for a while. It had been a long day. Now that the family was growing, with new wives and grandchildren, she seemed to spend all day sweeping the dust from the house. It seemed to accumulate in layers everywhere no matter how hard she worked to keep it swept and clean.

    Yeshua was far off in thought again and staring into space. His head was tilted to one side as it so often did when he was daydreaming; the rice in his hand dripping sauce in a large, brown drop which was slowly collecting on his plate. Catching her looking at him, he lowered his hand back down on to the plate. Placing her elbow on the table, Maryam rested her head in the palm of her hands.

    ‘Have you been busy today, Mother? You look tired,’ he said.

    As she smiled across at him the concern was etched on his face, ‘I’m fine, son,’ she replied. She sat for a while, watching him enjoy the food she had prepared. With a cube of bread he mopped up the last of his meal and moved to take his plate through to the main house. His mother jumped up quickly and took the plate from his hands.

    ‘I’ll go,’ she said.   

    He patted her arm. She didn’t know why but she was suddenly holding back tears.

That evening he came up the path from the workshop to the main house as he always did. At the door way to the house he shook the sawdust from his hair and clothes. She mused that perhaps it was him bringing the dust in. Through the doorway she could see her daughter-in-law stirring a pot so ferociously that Maryam wondered what was in there that she was trying to subdue. Over dinner that night there was little conversation. Maryam watched her three sons, and the wives of the youngest two, and wondered that they had nothing to say to one another. The only noise came from plates being moved back and forth and the occasional squeak of a chair moving across the floor.

    At last someone interrupted the silence. ‘How was work today?’ Yochanan said to Yeshua, leaning back in his chair.

    ‘It went well, I think. I finished a few pieces.’ He replied. Yochanan nodded; his father would have made thirty tables in the time Yeshua had made three.

    ‘We had a hard day,’ Yochanan said matter-of-factly.

    Yeshua looked down at his plate.

    The silence encroached again. Maryam stifled her frustration.

    After the meal Yeshua was nowhere to be found. Maryam knew where he would be. Her other sons and their sullen wives rolled their eyes at one another as she opened the front door. Immediately she saw his silhouette, he was standing on the peak of the hill that towered over the village. He had his back to her. She’d seen him there so many times with his long tan coat billowing around him. She knew what he would be doing: just staring over the land. The land led to nothing and contained nothing; just sheep and herd boys. He would stand and stare for hours and hours on end at all that nothingness. When she saw him there all she could feel was the weight of him in her arms as a baby. So vividly it came back: the feel of him kicking in her belly and his high pitched cry as he entered the world. The smell of his baby skin, it was as if it were under her nose right then. The feel of his dark hair tickling her nose as she kissed him on the crown of his head. His eyes that were so blue when he was born but had turned to a dark, deep pool of brown as he grew up. She remembered how he began to walk, following her from room to room always hanging from her skirts. And she remembered the first day she took him to the temple. She had to present him to the priest and offer a sacrifice. They took two pigeons as they couldn’t afford the usual offering of a lamb as well as a pigeon or dove. Everyone had been in love with Yeshua, they always where. The old man priest took Yeshua in his arms and blessed him. He said words that Maryam never forgot, that gave her all her understanding of him and that fuelled all her fear:

    ‘This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.’   

    Her fears were only added to as he grew up. Everything he did, he had his own way. He was so different from the others. Everything he made as a carpenter was so intricate he could never match it. No two table legs ever looked totally the same. That was how everyone knew the table had come from his workshop. It drove his father mad. She feared everything that lived and breathed in Yeshua’s head; those ideas that grew legs and walked him away from her.

Maryam had always imagined that one day his walks might take him away and he wouldn’t come back. She practised the moment in her head. Tried to train herself out of the pain she knew she would feel. The day it happened for real she waited for him in the kitchen for hours, though she knew he was gone. When he had gone to bed the night before, he had held her in his arms for just a fraction too long. Those extra seconds told her what he was about to do. She swatted him away and laughed, calling him soft, trying to retract the moment. He smiled back at her and kissed her on her forehead. Then she really knew.

    She sat in the kitchen for five hours, her other sons came and went. Then a sudden burst of hope gripped her and she ran down to his workshop. It was empty. She thumbed the tools he used and sat in his chair. On the floor she made patterns in the sawdust with her toes.

    Eventually the wind came in and swept away the sawdust. It formed into tiny mountains around the legs of the unfinished furniture dotted about the room. She sat in there often and let the dust build up in the house. All the time she thought of him, of how he was her own and yet it was as if he had arrived to her with his own unmoveable heart.

She heard from relatives that they’d seen him in the city. She didn’t follow him there and ignored the tug of her heart because she knew she couldn’t change him. She couldn’t imagine him there, among the tall buildings that radiated heat through the narrow streets. She could only see him in her mind as he’d always been: coming through her back door with dust on his feet and a smile on his face. She wanted to pluck him from those hot streets and bring him back here to keep.

    On the thirty-first day that he was away she swept out his workshop. She couldn’t stand the dust anymore. Her daughter-in-law Ruth stood in the doorway and watched her. She hoped her mother might sweep Yeshua out with all the sawdust and badly made tables. Then she watched as Maryam put down her broom and stared through the open window. She looked past the neighbours houses to the bottom of the street. There the houses ended and you could see travellers on the crest of the hill as they entered the village. Maryam waited a moment as if giving him one last chance to appear on the horizon. He didn’t come. She wiped her hands on her apron and picked up her broom walking briskly past Ruth out of the workshop.    

    They went on as normal for thirty more days. The house was swept again, perhaps even more so than when Yeshua was there. The door of the workshop was pulled firmly closed until one day the second eldest of Maryam’s sons asked her if he might open it and re-start the family trade. Maryam stared into the pot of food she was making, stirring it slowly round and round. After a long pause she looked up at her son and nodded. The tables he made were square and functional.

   

She told herself she had to go. They went to Jerusalem every year for the Passover and she probably wouldn’t see him anyway. But of course, she did. He was among the crowds in the same coat he always wore but it was more ragged now around the edges. His hair was longer and his eyes looked browner. Perhaps it was his skin; it had darkened with the sun. She supposed he had never seen much sun when he was in the workshop.  

    People were bumping into her in the crowd. She stood rooted to the spot. Suddenly she was sure he had seen her so she quickly backed away. She told herself that he didn’t want her and she didn’t want him. Her heart thumped in her chest, her throat was parched, dry. She lost herself in the crowd and pulled her hood over her head as she walked rapidly away.

    As she made the journey home the rains came. Great bullets of rain fell from the sky. Each one creating mini eruptions as it hit the dry earth. Maryam let her hood fall back. The rain pummelled her face and hair.  She walked on not wanting to stop for even a minute’s rest. As she neared home the rain began to slow and it was then that a dark shadow passed over her. He was there, his old coat held above them. It smelt heavy and of camel hair. How long he had been following her she had no idea. They walked together, neither one of them speaking. Their feet slid on the leather soles of their open sandals.  Mud formed between the gaps of their toes. Yeshua walked her back to her home until they were standing there at the front door of the house. She pushed it open, the house was black inside. Still neither one of them spoke. Yeshua leaned back against the door frame. He looked so tall and again she was struck that he looked different somehow. She could see the whites of his eyes clearly though there was little light around. He was looking at her, as if waiting for something.

    ‘Will you come in?’ she asked. ‘Will you stay?’

    ‘I’ll come in,’ he replied.

    Her second question hung heavy in the air.

The next morning she woke up early and as soon as she opened her eyes she knew he was gone. She leapt out of bed, grabbing her dress that she had laid out to dry the night before. She had left it on the chair Yeshua had carved for her. The first chair he had carved as his father’s apprentice. She ran to the front steps of the house where they had stood the night before. Her hair hung long and wild, in great ringlets around her shoulders, not a hint of her age about it. From the front step she saw it: the smoke rising from the temple on the hill and she knew. That was where he was. Forgetting herself she ran, her feet bare and her shoulders uncovered, until she reached the steep flight of stairs that led up to the temple. She took two at a time, leaping up them like an ungainly beggar. As she reached the top she slowed, suddenly feeling like a lamb being led to the slaughter. She knew what she was about to see and as she reached the top, she saw it. He stood there between the two great pillars at the foot of the altar with a great scroll in his hands. The temple was beginning to crowd with people. His voice rang out, as clear as a bell. Her mouth dropped. She ran.

Sunday

Jane Verity

‘I’d rather it that way, than to feel you’d gained on me again.’

Early April, feeling the first of the sun hot on the back of my jeans, and the fronts, where the fibres are pressed up against still dewy grass, wet. I am trying to read: V S Naipaul, Magic Seeds, a tale of political corruption, revolution, greatness and ignorance - and feeling in my own way, ignorant.

I do feel that you’ve gained on me, by the way. I always feel that. For it to be another way, just for once, would be great.

I wouldn’t say you were distracting exactly. Just laying there, basking in the occasional burst of sun, not noticing when it goes behind a cloud and I have to hunch myself up to roll down my jeans. It’s just that things always seem to work out for you, in your happy go lucky kind of way, and whenever I sneak a quick look in your direction I feel a strange pang of guilt, because I know what I’m feeling is something close to resentment.  Things shouldn’t be that easy, not for you, not for anyone.

And yet, here we are again, lying side by side but a million miles apart. I’m not bitter about our situation, not exactly, I know I’ve made my choices and I have to stick by them, but take now, right this very second, as an example. I’m sitting here trying to read something of substance, really struggling my way through it (I don’t think it helps that it’s the sequel to something else, I didn’t know that when I picked it up) and you just continue to lay there, completely oblivious to what I might be thinking, soaking up the rays, totally absorbed in your own book. It upsets me that you haven’t noticed that I’m sad, but I’m desperately trying to ignore the feeling. I stop a moment to feel the gorgeous spring breeze blowing across the park, and watch it making waves in the blades of grass beneath us, as well as in your hair. I love to watch your hair when we’re outside, it takes on a life completely of its own, but today there is something sad inside me, and my fingers don’t want to cooperate. 

I’ve always felt that April is a slightly remedial month.  A month of one step forwards and two steps back, but this April smacks of stagnation more than any I can remember. I’ve just started a new job doing PR for Nothing, based at their head offices in town - I say just started, I have my three month review meeting next week and I am terrified that I have made no progress at all and will probably have nothing to say. Of course what I really want to say is, ‘I quit’, ‘screw you’ ‘fuck off’, but that will never happen because I’ve given up too much already to get here, and I probably couldn’t bring myself to mess it all up even if I wanted to. I have to say, right now, (and this surprises me) I’m missing being a student quite a lot. This is my first job out of university and it has hit me pretty hard. At least you know where you are with academia. Constant appraisal, regularly assessed tasks, and a re-assuringly mathematical marking system.  As it is I’m struggling to make a picture of myself out of the inscrutable darkness of my bosses’ minds, upon which variations on the tones of their silences seem to be the only points of light.

I’m well aware that I am not what they hoped I would be. I feel cruel for deceiving them and for deceiving myself. I know that this is a very cushy job and one that people keep telling me I’ve been lucky to fall straight into. But is it really lucky to be a faker? A horrible, nasty little faker? I feel like an ugly little changeling child, one that has deceived its parents into conception and each day tangles itself up further into a web of scissors and glue – cutting, sticking, franking and copying my way into a daily widening oblivion.

When I look at this position I’ve found myself in and I look at you, no matter how hard I try, I cannot reconcile these two elements in my life.

Like the uneducated Willie Chandran, I am overawed by the new world that I’ve found and by the evils I have fled, yet also feel cowardly for not confronting what I thought would be the inevitabilities of my life. (Who am I kidding? I don’t understand this book at all, let’s try this again). Finding out now, mid-twenties, that the things I thought would happen to me in life haven’t, I secretly feel a bit disappointed.

I had a cousin who died aged 19. He was strong and brave and beautiful and wasn’t afraid to face the realities of life, or those of death. Flying along the motorway at 90, flying and rolling, tipping and tilting, onwards, upwards, out of life and away to pastures new – he took life in his hand like an orange and he squeezed.

I am 26. I live alone with my boyfriend. He is a waiter. Sometimes on a Sunday we go to the park to read and to watch kids playing with Frisbees and shouting at each other. We have a nice, tidy flat, with carpets from Laura Ashley and a cleaner who comes once a week. I have my own car, a small, tidy Renault Clio which takes me to work and back, and sometimes into town.

Here are the things I thought would be the inevitabilities of my life: 1. Having to struggle, because I’m a girl. 2. Falling pregnant too early and disgracing the family. 3. Disappointing my father. 4. Failing my degree. 5. Failing to find a job or a house or a lover or a life or a pet or a plumber for when the washing machine breaks down. And I have never failed in a single one of these things. Because although the washing machine breaks down from time to time, that is in its nature, I never do. Not because it is not in my nature, but because the achievements of my life have been based solely around a hysterical fear that the opposite would happen.

Now I feel that if I had done even one of those things mentioned above, it might have rescued my spirit from the fake wonder of my comfortable, stagnant simpering life.

I’d rather it that way.

The way where happiness, not expectation is the motivation for one’s actions. The way where I am not the primary bread winner, not the chief washer up, not the head maker of the bed, not the one responsible for the bills, the council tax, the TV Licence, I’d rather not be bothered, thank you very much. I’d rather work in a supermarket, stacking shelves in ASDA, leaving the building at 5pm each night with a click of my heels and a whistle into the wind. I’d rather rush into your arms each night impatient for a rapturous evening of love-making and watching re-runs of something cheesy on TV. Instead I return exhausted, not physically but spiritually, from the immense daily effort of trying to be what I now supposedly am. In PR. ‘In PR’ – I hate it. It is ridiculous. Such a non-job – a real noughties career. As useless as it is well paid and so sickeningly valued by the company.

In order to do the job at all competently I am having to ‘become’ the public face of Nothing Bank PLC. I keep on telling you that this is why I am so tired, because I have to ‘become’ on a daily basis – I am like a werewolf living through a month of alternate night full moons. You laugh at this analogy. You laugh that full rich hearty laugh, the laugh of the care-free, and it makes me feel better. ‘Blissfully free are those lucky enough to find work which does not encroach upon personality’, you say. I ask you if this is a quote and you say you don’t know, but I think it must be because I’ve heard it somewhere before. Oscar Wilde? Winston Churchill? Or older, Shakespeare perhaps? I start wondering about the etymology of the word ‘encroach’ and realise it makes me feel better to think that my plight might be as old as the hills. You say you’re pretty sure you made it up, actually, just now, and now it’s my turn to laugh, except that my laugh is sounding a bit dead these days. 

Each morning I leave the house with messy hair, busy fringe flying free in the wind, head full of midnight fuzz, imaginings and ideas. I find myself in this state perpetually surrounded by inspiration, finding it in every tiny thing – I am a creative being and an active participant in the fabric of the world. By the time I have arrived (maybe 10 minutes or so after) I feel the shock and I change. I am the public face of Nothing, and even though I see and I know and I take all the bull shit on a daily basis, I know that these are not things suitable for the face of Nothing, upon which is never anything except a gleaming, perfectly lipsticked smile.

I applied for the job mostly out of curiosity. The name caught my attention in a newspaper advert – it’s big steel N, cutting downwards and upwards at its two tips like a doubled–edged knife. What kind of a financial corporation calls itself Nothing? I was amused. I shouldn’t have been. The company was one of the first to grow out of the banking crisis of the late Noughties. Early in 2010 they launched themselves, out of the rubble of Northern Rock. There were mergers happening all over the place, and it was looking like the Spanish bank Santander would be the biggest player going forwards, and Northern Rock was in state ownership with all take over bids so far having been declined. And then, all of a sudden, Nothing appeared. Tarjei Solberg, the Cheif Exec of HillCrest, a Swedish investment management firm, had put in an offer the Government couldn’t refuse and within a few months of ownership the company were already boasting about the buoyancy of their new brand – their name was suddenly everywhere and their popularity soared, it seemed the people couldn’t get enough.   

The big metallic ‘N’ is always accompanied by a caption – ‘What do we have to hide?’ ‘What can you expect to pay?’ You get the idea. Nothing. Nada. Nowt. It is a funny marketing tool, shock tactics that which lend the business a kind of cool, a social leverage in areas in which other banks struggle. I.e. students, and young professionals, the under 26s. And the wishing they were under 26s. You can just imagine the conversation in the bar, can’t you?

‘Who do you bank with?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Noting?’
‘No. Noth- thing’
‘Oh yes, Nothing, yes, I’ve heard about them....’
By this point older person is either lying or furrowing around inside his head for some dim memory of something he read in the FT a couple of months back. Younger person obviously realises this, and leaves to find somebody younger.

When I got the job, I was overwhelmed. Excited. Couldn’t believe my luck. It was like I was proving that all the hours of hard study, staying in instead of going out, head stuck inside a book, had been worth it after all. I was going to be on a real salary, in a real job, I would be able to afford driving lessons, a car, expensive clothes, nice things for the house.  Shame it didn’t last, that feeling. I wake up every morning hoping it might return, thinking it must be right, but it isn’t. And it won’t.

These days I often fantasise about going in work wearing something entirely inappropriate. A clown costume perhaps. Or a tiny denim mini skirt with ripped tights and a top, held together with well placed safety pins. To see the faces of all the old crones, as I sashay past casually, giving them an occasional glimpse of buttock as my skirt flaps up and down.  Maybe I would even bend over in front of some of them, give them a proper shock.

I’m getting bored of this book now. I get bored so easily these days, can’t stick to any one thing. I think it’s because I’m so desperate to get away from what I’ve become that I will try to do anything that I don’t think is very ‘me’ and then as soon as I do it, it is ‘me.’ Damn. I’ll have to put it down for a while, I haven’t taken in any of this section anyway, Willie has accidently joined some kind of communist uprising I think, or maybe I just imagined that.

I glance over to your patch. I can see more clearly now and notice you are reading Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef. I chuckle. I hadn’t realised you’d been sitting here all this time, quite this still, over a recipe book. I wonder what can possibly be holding your attention so. Eggs Benedict? Some kind of flan? Maybe a desert, a mousse or a tart tattin? You love a good dessert, this is one of the things I adore about you, your fondness for fondue, your profligacy with profiteroles.  I move in and tickle the bottom of your legs, the hairy exposed bit of ankle. You roll over and look at me and smile. You really are very beautiful.

You have these amazing green eyes with tiny flecks of orange in. Sectoral Heterochromia is the correct term, apparently. I always think that they’re like a cats eyes, with such defined sections of colour, and they seem to be set on a slight slant, so that the outer edges always appear to be turning up. This has the effect of making it look like you’re smiling even when you’re not. Which is probably why you get on so well in life, coming to think of it. People often tell me I have a bit of a miserable face – not that I am a miserable person necessarily, just that the default position of my face, when I’m not using it, tends towards despondency. I’ve always had quite pouty lips and big, pregnant eyes and I do tend to err on the side of seriousness. You reach over to tuck a piece of my hair behind my ear, stroking my head on the way down, gently, and I forget all of this. You really are very beautiful.

A little while later a girl comes over to us and asks very politely if we would mind looking after her dog for a moment whilst she uses the public toilet. This seems like a bit of a strange request to me, and the girl looks a little suspect, like she might have a knife tucked in her sleeve, but you are always extremely good about helping other people and say that it won’t be a problem at all. After the girl has disappeared around the corner I ask you what on earth you think you’re doing and what we’re going to do if she doesn’t come back. It’s a real brute of a dog, and it looks pretty unfriendly, but I can already tell that you like it.

I decide to leave you to it, and go back to reading for a bit. I’ve got a lot on at work next week and don’t especially want to waste my Sunday afternoon dog sitting for potentially violent strangers, so I pointedly turn over and look in the other direction.

         ***

It is cold now, and almost dark. The realisation of this shocks me and I feel around behind me for my jacket, wrapping it over my shoulders as I sit up. I look around the park. It’s nearly empty, there are a couple of kids sitting on the swings are a lonely dog walker in the shadows. But no you. No dog, no girl and no you. Fuck. 

And then I see you all together in the distance, three shady silhouettes at the edge of my vision. I wonder what you could possibly be doing, whether she’s trying to sell you something, or asking you for money. And then I realise suddenly (and this hits me like a smack in the mouth) that actually you look happy together, strangely and easily happy. When you see that I’ve sat up you rush back over. All in a flurry you tell me that her name is Tasha, she lives just around the corner from us, that she’s really nice, and has invited us over for dinner. You look at me for a second. Am I ok?

I look at you closely now and I see myself in the reflection of your eyes. I see myself as you must see me and I look rough as hell. Pale, sallow cheeks, and a furrowed brow, a worried expression that is worried not about anything, but worried all the same. I am a vision of hollowness. I am an expression of things undone, of a life unlived.

Fucking hell, I say. What? You say. Nothing, I say. Nothing at all. You are probably thinking that I’m thinking what a prick you are for leaving me when I fell asleep and sneaking off with some girl, but what I’m actually thinking, what has just struck me is that I have, in fact, done it. There is Nothing written all over me – I’m like a stick of Nothing rock, cut me open I would read Nothing all the way through.

Watson falls asleep, then wakes up

Chris Arksey

Opening my eyes a little now, I can see this:

I’m a man, I know that much. A fat man, I know a little more. A short, fat man, a little more. A short, fat, ginger man, every second a little more. I have a lazy eye, a little more and more every second. I’m a man and I’m married to a woman, who looks like a man. I’m a tight sphere of five letters. I can describe the moon as well as any poet. It is easy to describe something that you haven’t touched. I’m forty-three years old and counting, one two three, up.

Nothing is more satisfying than to wake up to a hot drink, though not coffee or tea, but a large, steaming cup of beef stock. J. knows this, that is precisely why she carries it up to me each morning, and why there is always a supply of Oxo cubes in the kitchen, not for cooking, but for drinking. This morning was no different. Every morning is no different, is the same. First I wake up, then I drink, and then I open my eyes. Then there’s the trouble of brushing my teeth – with a yellow toothbrush or blue? Or red? Or perhaps I will not brush them at all. Mints, mints will do the job. Although, they will have to be peppermint, I wouldn’t dream of sucking spearmint, good lord. This isn’t my decision, but J.’s, as she can’t stand the latter. I can’t stand kissing women who have moustaches, but J. refuses to do anything about hers. Every time we kiss it’s awkward. It’s like watching two buck-toothed Cavaliers kiss. I’m not one to exaggerate, so let’s just leave it there.
J. was waiting in the rain when I opened the door. I paused for a while, trying to work out how much more she weighed, what with the rain soaking into her clothes.
–I thought you were at work this morning? I said
–I rang in sick, I thought I would surprise you.
All this thinking is utter nonsense. Thinking should be reserved for solitude.
–Ah, I said.
We spent the day in a park in the centre of town, finally ending up at the train station, where J. waited for the train home. We decided early on that we would never live together. My decision, not hers.
With a twitch, I gave her a good-bye kiss: the kind that either last for too long, usually dry, or the kind that don’t last long enough, usually wet. To be honest, neither one is agreeable. And if we’re going along this route, I can honestly say that my life is a turd, is several turds. It never used to be like this. I used to be happy, I think. Now I’m unhappy and tired. It’s not the weather that takes it out of me, but the fact that during a typical day with J., I exert a considerable amount of energy on fake smiles, fake laughs, fake pouts and an emotion containing all these three attributes combined. Then there’s the annual anal fissure to contend with. Anyway, the train was delayed, so we had another hour together. It was hell.
It had been a hot afternoon, so I took the pleasure of lying on the floor when I got back home. Total silence, uninterrupted. I miss being alone. There’s nothing like it, nothing like it in the world, to be alone, with only yourself to worry about. I’m selfish, I know this, and I’m ignorant, but at least I’m consistent. Everyone is unhappy, and it’s too late to save them all now, so I’ll just give up. Well, I’ve said my piece. J. called me as soon as she got off the train, as she always does. The conversation lasted twenty-six minutes, I timed her, timed us, let’s not forget that I was also involved, though if I had my way, there would never have been a phone call in the first place. The interesting thing about talking to J. on the phone, bear with me, is that she never greets the caller or respondent with a Hello, first she coughs, then dives straight into the middle of a conversation. This time was no different:
–I took those painkillers.
–Yeah?
–It’s the piles, I think.
–I see.
It was never my decision to get married. I can’t imagine a worse position to be in than marriage, and I’m in it. I proposed over the tannoy at the train station, again, not what I wanted, but what J. wanted. She had it all planned out, first the train station, then the ring, which she bought and placed in my hand the day before, then a year of wearing the ring, then the registry office. No honeymoon, J. didn’t like holidays. No one else was involved, just the two of us, that’s not to say that we didn’t want to tell anyone, but that we didn’t have anyone to tell. Well, apart from my parents and J.’s parents, but they’re old and I thought they would die before we got married. Unfortunately, it was not to be. I’ve thought about killing myself, everyone has, and that’s why I’ve never managed it, everyone’s doing it these days, it’s too popular. Then there’s the matter of choice. There’s too much choice, I can never decide, and they’ve all been done before anyway. I think I’m back where I started, in the dark. Don’t ever trust anyone, especially women. Don’t trust–. I have no trust, no trust for them at all. I have written letter after letter after letter and have had no reply. Just when you think you’re happy, you realise it’s a lot worse, you’re in love. The trick is to always be on your guard. When the sun is shining, prepare to be shat on. When it isn’t, still come prepared. Get as low as you can and wait. There’s nothing else you can do, ever. Divorce, must file for divorce. Good morning J., good morning.

Cadaverine Magazine 2009