Space without words

The profits have spoken

2006-02-21T20:08:00.000+07:00

Mr G. Dastard
Chief Executive
Global Brand Corporation

Cc. Human Resources

Dearest Dastard,

I read your letter several times. It raised many puzzling questions for me. The problem of how you can send a letter to me while you’re not even aware that I exist (and in fact while you’re jacking off in your leather chair) has started me wondering what I am - if indeed I am. If I only exist in the mind of your lackey in his cubicle, and if the lackey doesn’t care who I am, can it be said that I even exist? You know the old problem about whether a tree makes any sound if it falls down and nobody’s there to hear it? I’ve come to think that, if a person falls down and a chief executive doesn’t hear it, they don’t make any sound. Perhaps they don’t exist.

Perhaps the whole world is an idea in the mind of a marketing executive, and if he closes his eyes or turns away, everything will cease to be. Perhaps notions of God in the ancient monotheistic religions were dreamed up by people in an attempt to explain the great marketing executive in the sky, whose terrible presence they sometimes felt when storms lashed the earth with their indifferent fury. If this is so, our current age, with its obsession with celebrities, wealth and fame, could be said to be more in touch with the true spirit of things than that of our ancestors. I have come to realise that you are a prophet of this age. I have ploughed through all the annual reports and financial statements on your website, so much so that the figures and tables are still flashing through my mind like strange, partially revealed signs of a higher reality. Through my feverish reading, I have divined your holy message to be this:

Let all suffer except the profits.

Profits, prophets – what’s the difference? Your theology is one of apparent paradox, common with many of the great religions. There is a wrenching, sometimes counter-intuitive quality to adhering to your doctrine, but that is its genius. This is what distinguishes true faith from mere belief. I remember being a child and failing to grasp the idea of a powerful God “saving” us from our sins by sending his son to die on the cross. In a similar way, you save us from our own greed by taking all the money for yourselves and hoarding it in offshore bank accounts. Of course, despite all the accounting tricks and tax dodges that only rich and powerful people like you can use, the taxman sometimes catches up with you, and this is when you find yourself suffering for our greed. And we continue scratching away at our own miserable little lives, unaware of what you are doing for us, and sometimes even cursing you for our own failings! Forgive us, O profits – we know not what we do.

I will follow you, my Dastard, until the last judgement, when the icecaps melt and the earth is covered by a deluge of boiling water. I have been at the landfill site, where all the waste of the city flows, vomiting and gagging as I find any materials I can to make my vessel, which will carry me, you and all the other pure believers into the promised land. It is outwardly a very ugly vessel, lashed together with twine and tattered remains of rubbish bags, but I have faith that it will float. You will have pride of place at the front of the vessel, where I have lashed together two stakes of rotten wood. You will be attached to them when the day comes with the rusty nails I found at the landfill site, and you will be our figurehead, and your petrified rictus grinning face will stare forwards, guiding us to the land of the profits, still suffering for our greed, as we glide through the boiling waters and the skies burn above us.

Yours forever,

Juan

The Dastard replies

2006-02-11T10:02:00.000+07:00

Dear Mr Kerr,

Thank you for your application for the position of Brand Coordination Officer. Thank you for your letters. I read both of them with great interest. I regret to inform you that your application for the position has been unsuccessful on this occasion. But this is not because you are somehow not good enough for this job. In fact, after reading your words, I feel that the opposite may be true. I read your letters over and over again and thought about your words even when I didn’t have the letters to hand. I sat in boardroom meetings, looking out at the sea of drained, middle-aged faces as they spoke about profits and strategies, and all I could think of was how wise and true your letters were.

I walked out of that meeting without saying anything and left that poky, artificial, air-conditioned room. I could feel their eyes on me as I left, but none of them said anything because they can’t and I have all the power. I realised this as I walked out and glanced at their uncertain, desperate faces. I don’t have their respect, just their fear and their jealousy. They suddenly disgusted me, with their gold watches and their loud, sardonic voices and their horrible, acquisitive wives and their big houses just outside town and their SUVs for the school run for their spoilt little kids who would grow up to be just like them. And I realised that I disgusted myself, too. As I walked down the corridor, away from the boardroom, I reflected on what a sham my life had become. All I do is sit there and make decisions, and more often than not they go wrong, and then all the minions below me have to work extra hard to make everything right again!

I walked out of the building and took the beamer into the countryside. As I got further away from the city, I looked out of the window and watched the trees slide by as if seeing them for the first time. After the greyness and artificial colours of the boardroom, the green of the foliage looked vibrant, real, alive. I opened the window and the wind whipped in from outside and took my breath away as I began to sing, suddenly, blissfully aware of the world that had been passing me by for so long. My phone started ringing and without even thinking I picked it up and threw it out of the window.

I stopped by a little stream and parked the beamer under some trees. There was a light breeze in the air, ruffling my hair, and I could hear the innocent, sweet song of the birds in the trees. I took off my shoes and threw them into the babbling stream. Then I took off my socks, hitched up my trousers and paddled in the stream. It was icy cold, but the feel of the rushing water against my skin was the most amazing feeling I have ever had, as if I was being born all over again and all the sensations of the corporeal world were rushing to cradle me in a sense of wholeness with the universe. The pebbles were round and smooth under my feet; I leant down, plunged my hand into the icy water and took one of the pebbles out. I looked at it as the lazy afternoon sun glinted warmly on the clear water underneath me. The pebble seemed to represent the perfection of nature, as well as its simplicity. I reflected on how long it had been since I had silently gazed at a pebble and experienced the beauty of this simplicity. I realised that the pebble in my hand had more of a right to be in the world than me. The pebble was part of the beautiful simplicity of creation, while I was nothing but a kind of parasite, sucking money out of the natural resources of the world for the sake of a soulless corporation that does more harm than good, and only exists to make already rich, greedy men richer and greedier. I looked up and stared into the deep blueness of the sky.

And if you believe all this, you’re an even bigger tool than you seem. How dare you bother me with your idiotic ramblings, when there is money to be made and time is running low. I’ll tell you all about pebbles. Pebbles are shit.

Trees are shit. Streams are shit. The deep blueness of the sky? It’s fucking shit. It doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. There may as well be no trees in the world for all I care. Do you know who I negotiate my bonus with? Myself! I answer to no one, while you have to answer to every prick who crawls your way. I’m not even writing this letter. A lackey from the lower reaches of my corporation is sitting at a rabbit hutch of a cubicle and writing this on my behalf, while I continue to jack off on my leather chair in my office on floor 35, blissfully unaware that you even exist.

Go and walk to a stream somewhere and immerse yourself in the purity of existence. Go and contemplate your pebbles, and see where it gets you. You can’t make money from trees, and you can’t eat pebbles. You probably studied philosophy, didn’t you? And you’re religious, right? Or maybe you want to be but you “can’t reconcile religious belief with the presence of pain and suffering”, or whatever it is tools like you bang on about in a desperate attempt to give your poverty-stricken, empty lives some semblance of dignity. Well, whatever you think, whatever you believe, and whatever dreams you have in your floaty, airy-fairy little mind – it’s all shit. There’s only people like me, people like you, and a big stack of money in the middle of the room. I get the money and the bitches, and you get your pebbles. Now go fuck yourself.

Yours sincerely,

G. Dastard

Brand Coordination Officer

2006-02-07T00:17:00.000+07:00

Mr G. Dastard
Chief Executive
Global Brand Corporation

Cc. Human Resources

Dear Mr Dastard,

Re: Brand Coordination Officer

I am writing to apply for the post of Brand Coordination Officer because I believe I have the necessary drive, ambition and dynamism for the post. I also have extensive experience of coordinating things and being an officer, and I have extensive knowledge of brands and how they work in the kitchen, office and bathroom. I am very sympathetic to Global Brand Corporation’s vision of “Branding the world for the 21st century” and believe that I would be able to play a key part in helping you realise this admirable vision.

As you may have guessed, I was a little hasty in assuming that I had won a fortune of £125 million. However, I feel that the aggressive tone of my previous letter and the imagination and creativity I displayed in it demonstrate that I have just the qualities you are looking for in your Brand Coordination Officer. As you will have seen, I am a dynamic self-starter with the necessary dynamism to take the position forward in accordance with Global Brand Corporation’s Strategy. The fact that I managed to send slightly different versions of the same letter to over fifty companies demonstrates my multi-tasking abilities as well as my drive and determination. Did I also mention dynamism?

Mr Dastard, I am offering you the unique opportunity to employ a unique individual who has extensive experience of “creating dynamic marketing material to tight deadlines” and who was once features editor of the student newspaper at the University of Gitting, as you will see from the attached CV. This is your chance to employ a serious but fun-loving individual who is interested in current affairs but regularly “watches and plays football”. Maybe we could play football together. I’ll let you win. I will do anything, absolutely anything, for Global Brand Corporation, including selling the tattered remains of my soul.

Now, let’s get branding.

Yours forever and ever,

Juan Kerr

My millions

2006-02-03T00:31:00.000+07:00

Mr G. Dastard
Chief Executive
Global Brand Corporation

Cc. Human Resources

Dear Mr Dastard,

Re: My millions

As you may be aware, I have recently become richer to the tune of £125 million through a stroke of outrageously good fortune. When looking at the pictures of my beaming face in all of the main newspapers or watching my television interviews, you may have noticed that my personal fortune now surpasses your own by a very large margin.

I have been following the fortunes of Global Brand Corporation recently and have been surprised to see all the bad news. Share prices are down, your shareholders are demanding answers, and you have suffered severe downturns in profits in all of your major markets. I have been interested in Global Brand Corporation for quite a while now. I applied to your graduate recruitment scheme a number of years ago, but unfortunately my application was unsuccessful. More recently, I applied for a low-level managerial post in the London office of your corporation, only to receive a brief letter of rejection a few days later.

With my newfound millions, I am now in a position to help Global Brand Corporation in this desperate time of financial scandal, declining revenues and plunging profits.

However, I regret to inform you that there were a number of outstanding candidates for my money and competition was very severe, and on this occasion your corporation has been unsuccessful. If you would like, I could keep your corporation’s name on file and pretend to keep it in mind, while in reality wiping my arse on the file and flushing it down my toilet (which is now made of solid gold, incidentally).

Thank you for your interest in my obscene wealth, and I wish you every success in the future.

Yours sincerely,

U. P. Yours

Superstar DJ

2006-01-24T19:09:00.000+07:00

When I was a teenager I would have regular fantasies about hiring out a hall or a club and spending the whole night playing only the songs I liked, by the bands I loved. The hall or club would be full of people and they would all dance and have a great time until the early hours of the morning as I gyrated and pirouetted at the turntables like a superstar DJ. People would come up to me and congratulate me on my taste in music and say that they wished they had my record collection. Women would approach me, flutter their eyelashes and invite me back to their houses, their passions clearly inflamed by the mixture of Sonic Youth, Rollins Band and Manic Street Preachers I played.

Now I am in my late twenties, my music taste has changed. My fantasies have also changed. I’m sitting in my living room in the early hours of Sunday morning, drinking a glass of wine and listening to music on a small portable stereo with headphones. I am my own DJ, crouched in the corner of a dark room, invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world. I briefly imagine hiring out my own hall or club and playing all the music I enjoy. I wouldn’t invite anyone to come, though. It would just be me, playing records on my own in a massive hall filled with music, flashing lights, a glitterball throwing flashing shapes on the black walls, and a bar. Maybe there would be a silent barman to fix me drinks, but there would be no one else.

I turn off the music, drink the rest of the wine and go to bed, shutting the door firmly on the dark world outside.

Zoo

2006-01-12T01:07:00.000+07:00

For children, a trip to the zoo is an invitation to a magical world populated by the real-life counterparts of the colourful creatures they remember from their nursery walls. Friendly blue elephants with smiling faces, Aslan-like lions with fluffy manes, cheeky monkeys hanging from branches... For adults, a visit to the zoo is a more complex experience. They look forward to seeing the tigers and bears, but at the same time they’re secretly worried that the zoo and its animals will tell them something about themselves that they’d forgotten...

It is a cold January morning. There is a light misty rain hanging in the air as we get on the bus from Camden towards London Zoo. Old women holding shopping bags and teenagers in hoodies sit silently together on the bus, staring blankly into the greyness of the road ahead. Pubs with large dirty windows lumber past in the growing drizzle. Somewhere in all this, beyond the brown and grey buildings, under the same impenetrable sky, endangered species are pacing up and down in their cages. I take hold of my girlfriend’s hand and stare out of the window.

It was a sunny day towards the end of summer and the start of autumn. The sky was blue but there was a bite to the wind and my hands were cold. I was due to attend a conference at Lords’ cricket ground, but I had arrived early, so I decided to have a look around the area, then sit in a cafe and read my paper. I thrust my hands in my pockets and walked into the heart of St John’s Wood. Content, well-fed people wearing comfortable clothes strode along the clean streets as giant SUVs glided past. Instead of fast-food chains and supermarkets, the streets were lined with stylish boutiques and tastefully decorated shops selling luxury goods. I saw a cafe on the other side of the street and waited at the traffic lights with a woman and her two children. The three of them were dressed in well-fitting designer clothes and they seemed to glow with some kind of inner wellbeing that was unfamiliar to me. With a flick of her beautifully groomed blond hair, the woman glanced at me for a moment and then looked away without seeming to have seen anything. The light changed and they floated across the road, leaving me standing, my mouth gaping like that of a village peasant watching noblemen gallop past on sleek horses. Two SUVs towered above me as they waited at the lights, their drivers looking down with haughty disdain at the ground far beneath their wheels. I scuttled across the road, my head bowed.

As we walk through the main entrance, our first reaction to the zoo is one of awe and admiration. We see elegant Victorian buildings housing reptiles and birds next to large, modern enclosures containing unseen creatures that howl and chatter into the dampness of the morning. We cross the bridge across the canal and in front of us is a large, high enclosure covered with nets. I see a dark figure moving about in one of the trees, shaking the branches. “Look! A monkey!” I say, and my girlfriend peers into the distance to get a better look. The dark figure moves again and I realise that it’s not a monkey; it’s a workman doing some work up in the trees. My girlfriend laughs at my mistake. “Well, men are similar to monkeys,” I say. We walk into a kind of giant stable for giraffes. Usually they would probably be outside, but it’s so cold today that they’re huddled up together inside. We stand and watch the two giraffes as they stand together in the cold, tracing their patterned hides with our eyes and looking up at their expressionless faces. It seems strangely obscene after a while, as if we’re watching our neighbours getting undressed through their windows. Back towards the canal, the meercats stand shivering in their little toytown enclosure, perilously perched on rocks, huddled together under tiny heaters set on the wall.

The cafe was a spotlessly clean, air-conditioned recreation of something you might find in one of the warmer countries on the continent. The coffee sizes were in Italian and there were sophisticated pasta dishes advertised on a board behind the counter, but the prices were, of course, very British. I paid for my coffee and sat down at the counter by the window. I opened my paper and carried on reading the article I’d started in the tube train on the way to St John’s Wood. The writer’s contention was that the energy crisis facing the world is much worse than we think and no one is doing enough about it. Climate change, humanity’s massive greed for energy and our own complacency are hastening us towards the end of the era in which we can take so much for granted. Perhaps the new era will take us closer to the end of the world. I looked up from my paper, took a drink of my coffee and stared out of the window. Across the road, beautifully manicured hedges swayed gently in the breeze. A fat man with the rosy red cheeks of someone who has enjoyed a lifetime of gorging himself on good food walked past my window. He was wearing a well-tailored suit and he had a copy of the Financial Times tucked jovially under his left arm. As he walked, his chubby face suddenly creased up into a smile, as if he was remembering some past hilarity. Then his smile faded and he looked guiltily around him before disappearing around the corner. The huge bulk of an SUV glided into view and stopped at the lights outside the window, blotting out the sun. The driver was a healthy looking middle-aged man in a suit. He sat there from his vantage point high up from the street, blankly looking at the road ahead. Then, just as suddenly as the fat man, his face broke into a satisfied grin as if he was remembering some pleasurable fact or a joke from long ago. Perhaps he was smiling about his comfortable life, the warmth and safety of his car, the money in his bank. The light changed and the SUV smugly eased forwards. I looked down and carried on reading my article.

I remember the article I read about the end of the world as I watch two camels standing in sand sodden from the January drizzle. In the cold, their breath steams up in front of them, and somehow this seems wrong. I wonder what will happen to all these animals when everything starts burning or all the energy goes. As I watch the camels, a loud roar echoes through the zoo. More roars follow, again and again, and I have a sense of urgency to go and see where they are coming from, as if some momentous event is happening. Parents and children run with me, anxious to see the animals perform. We arrive at the lion enclosure and see a male lion, his underside encrusted in mud from where he has been lying on the wet ground, roaring into the misty air. I jostle with the other people to get a closer look at him. Underneath his gaping mouth, I can see white feathers on the ground; it looks like he has just killed a bird and he’s now roaring some kind of war song. The roars get shorter and shorter until they sound like retches, as if the lion has made himself sick. I suddenly feel uncomfortable, as if I am witnessing a sorry show of lost dignity and I walk away. Behind me, the lion continues to roar and retch into his feathers. I walk towards a large glass panel and find myself face to face with a massive, powerful looking tiger. The tiger is lying down, resting his powerful limbs, and he stares at me with a strange, lost, puzzled look, as if he is unsure why he is here and why I am here staring at him. We stare into each other’s eyes and he doesn’t look away, the fearful symmetry of his coat odd against the dreary setting. “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,” I say.

“What?” my girlfriend asks.

“Nothing.”

That night I sit cradling a glass of whisky, half drunk, watching late-night live coverage of the latest ‘Celebrity Big Brother’. A faded pop star from the 1980s with hugely inflated, collagen-enhanced lips is talking to a similarly surgically enhanced glamour model about being famous. She doesn’t seem to notice the sneer on his horrific lips as he looks at her and says: “if you get a bit more famous, you’ll realise that you need to keep something for yourself, a little private thing that no one else can see.”

“Well, yeah,” the glamour model ventures, adjusting her bulging breasts.

The faded pop star regards her with distaste. His distaste seems odd because they look so much alike. “You must have something private – what about your Polaroids? You wouldn’t let anyone see them for anything, would you?”

“Well, yeah, I wouldn’t let anyone see that for anyfing,” the glamour model says with conviction.

“What – not even for twenty million?”

There’s a short pause.

“Yeah, of course I’d let ‘em see it for twenty million, course I would.”

A sneer of a smile distorts the faded pop star’s obscenely swollen lips. I turn off the TV and the room is plunged into darkness.

Office boy

2005-10-13T23:15:00.000+07:00

A desk-bound office life has the advantage that you don’t have to walk around or do any exercise and everything is within your reach, but at the same time it can get quite dull, and your muscles can atrophy to the point at which opening a new jar of coffee becomes an impossible task. If your office job involves the wearing of smart clothes, it also has the added disadvantage of meaning that you feel idiotic when you venture, with your suit and your awkward shiny shoes, among the ranks of the grunting, overall-clad honest workers that haul the bog rolls around in the basement of your office building. The lack of exercise can be addressed occasionally, when there are desks to be moved for forthcoming seminars, when you emerge, blinking, into the light of the seminar room and try to swagger manfully as your tie swings awkwardly above the chair you’re carrying and the sweat sticks your freshly ironed shirt to your back. Another good opportunity for exercise (and a change of scenery) is volunteering to collect the post from downstairs.

There is post that needs collecting and I volunteer. I swagger to the goods lift, enjoying the manly feel of walking purposefully through corridors outside the office on a journey that will not just end in a toilet trip or a quick visit to Sainsbury’s. There are things to be carried, trolleys to be pushed, and I’m the only man for the job. It’s a similar feeling to the times the water cooler needs changing and none of the women can carry it and they ask me to do it because I’m a big strong manly man. Like a big bear. And sometimes if there’s a cup on the top shelf and the women are too short to reach up and get it and I casually reach up with my big long arms like a big muscular giraffe or something.

The goods lift takes a long time to arrive. When the door opens, I see that there is a man in blue overalls standing by a cage trolley filled with cardboard boxes. I can hear tinny music coming from somewhere. I reflect that manual workers always have tinny music playing somewhere when they work, whereas office workers just sit there in silence. The cage is big and manly and the boxes look chunky and heavy. I roll my dainty trolley into the elevator, my tie swinging awkwardly in front of me, suddenly ridiculous, as if I’m a grown man wearing a bib. The man looks at me and grunts a greeting; I nod to him and press the button to close the door behind me. As the elevator makes its way downstairs, I realise that the music I can hear is being played on the man’s mobile phone. The music is ‘Sheena is a Punk Rocker’ by the Ramones, and it brings me back to my teenage days, when I loved punk music and pogoed in my room. I didn’t wear ties then. I look over at the man, but he is just staring down at his mobile, listening to the music. I want to say something about how I know the song, but I’m not sure what would be the best way to say it. For a moment I sway slightly to the beat, like a drunken old man at his granddaughter’s wedding, and then I stop when I realise what I’m doing. The man carries on looking down intently at his phone.

Down in the post room, there’s a bundle of letters and newspapers for my company, and I pick it up and put it in the trolley, careful not to get any marks on my shirt. “Is this all there is?” I ask the post room man. “Yeah,” he says. I push the trolley towards the door, but the door opens and a man in overalls appears. He stands aside and holds the door open for me. “Cheers mate,” I grunt, and push the trolley out of the room, enjoying the satisfying, manly noise the wheels make on the concrete.

When I get back to the goods lift, there’s already someone in it. He’s a black man I sometimes see changing the toilet rolls in the bathroom. He’s holding a cage full of giant packets of toilet roll. He holds the door open for me and I grunt “cheers” and wheel my trolley in. I press the number of my floor and he says something in a thick accent that I don’t understand. I nod. “You shore?” he says. I nod again.

The elevator moves to the next floor and he presses a special button, and the elevator stops at that floor. He grabs a packet of toilet rolls and aggressively throws them out into the corridor. “I stop every one so you trap,” he says. “You go all mine. You shore?” He seems angry that I’m there, and I start thinking I want to get out and try to find another elevator, but I just nod. I wouldn’t be able to explain why I’d suddenly decided to get out. The man sucks air through his teeth as the door shuts. “You trap, mon,” he says disapprovingly. The cage full of toilet rolls towers above me. The lift gets to the next floor and the man presses the button again, opens the door and throws more toilet rolls out. The door shuts and traps us in again.

There is a moment of silence as the elevator glides upwards.

The man turns to me. “You trap, mon. You got time, you okay in here?” I nod. He presses the button again and the elevator stops, but the doors don’t open. A drop of sweat rolls down one of my shirtsleeves.

“You’re mine,” he seems to say.

“What?” I say. The oppressive air in the elevator is full of silence. My legs start to feel weak.

“You don’ mine? Thass good. A job easier if you don’ mine so much.” He turns back the control panel, realises that the door hasn’t opened, and sucks air through his teeth again. He presses the button again and the doors open. He throws more toilet rolls out into the corridor.

People are strange...

2005-10-12T19:48:00.000+07:00

It’s strange that I live in such a big city, because the fact is that people tend to piss me off. If you think about it, most day-to-day problems involve the presence of other people. You try to get on the rush-hour train but can’t because it’s too full. The reason? People. You go to your bank in your lunch hour to discuss something with the bank advisor but end up having to wait half an hour because all the advisors are busy, thus wasting your whole lunch break. The reason? People. You get punched in the face late at night, and when you regain consciousness you realise that all your money has been taken. The reason? PEOPLE! They’re everywhere!

I’m thinking about this as I’m standing in the aisle of a little bus on the way to my friend’s house. I’m crammed in between two giant men with body odour problems and the handle of a pushchair is digging into my left leg. The driver is going too fast along the winding streets, and every time the bus jerks, my arse is pushed into the face of the woman sitting behind me. I try to position myself away from her by adjusting my position, but after I do this I find that I’m shoving my crotch towards another woman’s face, and every bump in the road makes my hips rock back and forth in an unintentionally obscene gesture. I turn away again and find myself facing one of the giant men, my arm resting on his shoulder in a pose that might strike an observer outside the bus as looking rather romantic. But I don’t feel romantic; I feel angry and claustrophobic.

I get out of the bus when it reaches the main road near to my friend’s street. As I walk away from the bus, a police car, its siren screaming, races past me. This is not such an unusual sight, especially recently. I have become deaf to the urgent electronic wails that assail the night and day with their sudden, scary songs. Behind me, further up the street, a series of strangled electronic screams pierce the air. It’s not just one but two or three sirens, starting and stopping over and over again, loud and harsh, as if they’re arguing with each other. Instinctively, I turn round to check what kind of sirens they are, and feel relieved when I catch a glimpse of two fire engines. Police cars mean robbery, murder and bombs on the street; fire engines mean problems in warehouses on the outskirts of town, far away from me.

As I cross the road, I realise that the fire engines haven’t moved very far, and their sirens are still wailing to each other despite the lack of movement. I look over and see that each fire engine is been pulled along by a group of men with a rope. The men, who are dressed in firemen’s uniforms, are straining like carthorses, and as I watch, another man wearing ordinary clothes runs up to some of them and throws water over them in what looks to me like a vicious, petulant gesture. The traffic is backed up behind them and I hear car horns being sounded impatiently. A lone police car in front of the engines, its siren silent but its lights flashing, completes the picture of anarchy and disorder. I hear harsh voices shouting above the noise of the sirens and horns, and someone else emerges from the side of the road to throw something at the men pulling the fire engines. It looks like a riot. People, I think. They ruin everything with their violence and selfishness.

The engines move forward and come towards me, and I turn and start walking away, glancing back every so often. A huge jet of water spurts out from the side of the road, looking like the water cannons the police use in riots on TV. The water soaks one of the fire engines, but the sight of this excites loud cheers instead of expressions of fear. Suddenly, the cheers make the whole thing look celebratory rather than intimidating. A man in the uniform comes up the street in front of the fire engines, shaking a bucket full of money. “Cancer research!” he shouts.

I try not to meet his eye and walk away as fast as I can.

Sensible people

2005-10-05T18:46:00.000+07:00

As I’ve grown older, I’ve developed a real hatred of excessively sensible people. I have a particular hatred for people who refuse to play the lottery or gamble in any way because they feel it’s “a mug’s game”. Bores with mathematics A-levels under their belt will probably go on to mutter darkly about how they “understand the probability” or something like that, implying that, with their grounded, scientific education they have been blessed with wisdom that is beyond the feeble reasoning powers of the common laymen and the dreamy arts graduates. Whenever people say this to me, I always have to resist the urge to shout at them: “Do you think I don’t KNOW how unlikely it is? I’m not stupid!”

I know the probability! It’s somewhere between the probability of me fathering Britney Spears’ next child and that of my 56-year-old mother becoming the new face of Chanel. What more is there to understand?

My response to the self-appointed financial advisers and sages is to say that there’s always enough “bad” probability in people’s lives and never enough “good” probability, so it makes sense to try and redress the balance. If I walk down a street in London, the chances of me being run over or mugged for my mobile phone are alarmingly high, but the chance of someone walking up to me and giving me a million pounds are, conversely, annoyingly low. The odds of winning the lottery are astronomically remote, but if you buy your ticket, you’re in with a chance, and no matter how slight that chance is, that’s enough for me. This still doesn’t even out the balance between “bad” and “good” probability nearly enough, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Of course, gambling to excess is not a good thing, and many people’s lives have been ruined by addiction and unrealistic dreams, but why should I be made to feel guilty (and stupid) about having a bit of a flutter every so often?

I try to be sensible quite a lot, and I often succeed: I save money, I eat as healthily as I can, and I’m even sorting myself out a pension soon – the absolute pinnacle of being sensible for anyone under thirty. But people can get addicted to being sensible, and it can ruin their lives and destroy their dreams. You see the sensible addicts in town sometimes, with their bloodshot eyes and their drained faces. Sensible can really screw you up.

The trouble with sensible people is that they’re suspicious of people who still have dreams, people who still believe that there might actually be a shred of magic somewhere in this world. Admittedly, buying a lottery ticket in the vain hope of becoming obscenely rich without having to do any work might be a bad example of looking for magic in the world, but I can think of others. I write short stories. The chances of it happening are extremely small, but I would be very happy to earn a living out of writing, or just to have the satisfaction of publishing a nice, shiny book with my name on it. If nothing like this happens, I’ll still have the satisfaction of regularly doing something I enjoy, and I might even have some small victories along the way that, no matter how insignificant they may seem to others, are very important to me. For example, I was recently placed in a short story competition and my story will be published along with the other winners. It’s not the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I only came eighth, but it certainly feels good. Sensible people are suspicious of this kind of thing because they’re worried that the dreamers might actually have a point. They don’t want people to have dreams, because there’s always the danger that these people’s dreams might actually come true and they’ll be left plodding away in the background, being sensible.

And if I do ever win big or get a book published, I’ll go round to all of those sensible people’s houses, wave my money or my book in their faces, do a little jig, lift up my leg, fart like a trumpet, and skip off into the sunshine.

Fear

2005-09-13T05:49:00.000+07:00

It's been a long time since I've actually been scared. In big cities, you usually have a couple of moments a year when you get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach and, if you're a man, your testicles get that rising feeling, as they rapidly retreat, sumo wrestler-style, up into the warm shelter of your body. This is because they (I'm talking both leftie and rightie here) instinctively know that the risk of them - and you - being attacked and damaged in some frightening way, has suddenly become dangerously high.

I go to a football match. I'm not a fan of the team that's playing, but I have a free ticket and they're one of the strongest teams in the league, so I think that I may as well go. When I emerge from the tube station, the grey skies open up like a pair of old man's Y-fronts and cold rain slashes into my face and down my neck. I bunch up my shoulders and skip along with thousands of hulking, fist-faced skinheads through slick streets towards the stadium. During the match, the people around me sing hateful songs in angrily euphoric voices as the footballers battle in the rain, sliding into punishing tackles on the wet grass and smashing the ball up the pitch. At half time I queue for fifteen minutes to buy a pint of beer and then force it down my gullet in two minutes as I listen to the thunderous cheers rise up again in the stadium.

After the match, very far away from the football and all the shouting voices, I'm on a rickety local train and I'm on the home strait. Dark stations flash by. One or two people are standing on their own on the platforms, glumly looking down at their feet, wanting to be home. I look down and try to concentrate on my book. My carriage is empty and the only noise is the weary whirring of the train's engine.

The train stops at one station and the doors open. I hear raised voices on the platform. Someone walks into the carriage, banging into the doors as they pass. A bulky form goes past me and sits in the seat opposite me. The person has a big plastic bag that seems to be full of newspapers. I concentrate hard on the book in front of me. I hear loud voices shouting out on the platform again and then the doors hiss shut. I can tell the man in front of me is staring at me.

"There goes another one," he says. I nod and carry on reading my book. Much too slowly, the train groans into life, the sound of the engine failing to drown out the tense silence between me and the man in front of me, who I can tell is still staring right at me. There is a moment of silence as we head into the darkness away from the station.

"Cunts," the man says. I stare harder at my book. I glance up and see that he's a big, bulky skinhead with wild eyes. Those wild eyes are staring at me, expectant and outraged. I give a weak nod and look back at my book, the dread rising in my stomach.

"Cunts," he says again, still staring at me. He says it matter-of-factly, as if I'll know exactly what he's talking about and if I don't agree, well, then he'll find some way of forcing me to agree. There is a palpable air of latent aggression throbbing in the air between us. He leans forward, his wild eyes still angrily searching my eyes for a glimmer of recognition. I simply nod again, afraid that even one word will tip the balance between a manageable situation and having my head pushed through the train window. I pray for him to stop talking to me. The train is crawling through the darkness. As soon as it gets to the next station I plan to get out and nonchalantly move to another carriage, but the train seems to be moving slower than walking pace. Please don't say anything more, I think. Please.

"Cunts."

The words on the page in front of me have already blurred into one grey mass, but I keep staring at them, as if they will save me in some way, as if Paul Auster, the writer of the book, will suddenly materialise and help me get away. I nod again, almost imperceptibly, and this angers the man. He leans forward again.

"Don't just nod," he says, sounding outraged, imitating my nodding with a sudden jerk of his head, his wild eyes cold and clear. My stomach is light and full of scary butterflies, as if it's about to float out of my mouth. I try to think what I could have done or said to avoid angering him. Maybe I should have nodded with more conviction and said "cunts" back to him, agreeing with him as if we were swapping platitudes about the weather or something. "Terrible weather we're having. It would be nice to have some sun for a change. And by the way - cunts!"

The train starts slowing down and I see a station emerge out of the gloom in front. The man is still staring at me as I work out how to subtly manouvre myself out of his reach.

Suddenly, the door adjoining the other carriage is slammed open and a young black man wearing a hood swaggers in. The man in front of me looks up at him, and he seems to recognise the young man. "I might just decide to kill you! I might just decide to kill you!" the young man shouts. He ignores me and swaggers towards the man sitting in front of me, who sits there passively, staring up at him. "I might just decide to kill you!" the young man says again, and punches the chair just next to the man's head as he passes. The skinhead doesn't flinch. The young man walks on, laughing manically, and then spins round, like a warplane going in for another attack. The train finally shudders to a halt and I get up and walk out, thankful that both of them are too preoccupied to notice me.

I get out and walk along the platform to a place two carriages down, my breath quick and shallow, my heart beating fast. There are some other people in the carriage, and I wonder if they would help me if someone tried to kill me. The train starts up again and inches me a little further towards freedom and home. Just before the next station, the door swings open and the young black man walks in, alone. He ignores me again and walks past me, seemingly satisfied with what he has done. When I get off at my station, my fear only just beginning to die down, I look into the carriage but I don't see the wild-eyed skinhead.

Wish you were here

2005-07-04T18:55:00.000+07:00

Sometimes life arranges a little visual poetry for the passer-by, to make that person think for a moment and reflect on the random beauty of this world. By chance and coincidence, certain sights and sounds come together at the same time to create a whole, seeming like a portent of a mysterious, strangely ordered world that is just beyond our grasp.

I’m walking with my girlfriend through the theatre district of London. The streets are almost deserted and there aren’t many cars. There is a slight breeze. I look over at an open window, and see three people dressed in seventeenth century period dress, complete with wigs and make-up, sitting on the windowsill with their backs to the street. The breeze ruffles their flowing robes as they sit there talking, taking a rest, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world for them to be sitting there on a Saturday afternoon, looking the way they do. And for them, it is normal: I look at the front of the building they are in and see that it’s a theatre, showing The Phantom of the Opera. They’re just actors having a break. My girlfriend comments on the sight and I nod.

We cross the street and notice some similarly unusually dressed people. There are two women dressed in flowing, colourful robes, and an old man standing a little away from them, looking at a parking meter, also wearing colourful, exotic clothes. “There’s more people with amazing clothes!” my girlfriend says, excited. “Are they actors, too?” We walk towards the three people, still enraptured by the sense of wonderment an unusual sight can give you on an almost-empty city street. The people are south Asian in appearance, and as we get nearer to them I realise that they are just ordinary people, wearing their ordinary clothes. Maybe they’re tourists, over here from the Asian subcontinent. “They’re not actors,” I say, and my girlfriend nods in agreement, realising our mistake.

As ｗe pass the old man studying the parking meter, he lets out a long, loud, wet fart. At first I don’t realise what the noise is, but as it grows in volume, moistly rasping its way out of the man’s colourful trousers, I find myself laughing uncontrollably. When we pass the two women they don’t seem to have noticed, and just stand there impassively. It takes a long time for me to calm down, and I almost hyperventilate as we walk into the main street, my face red, my girlfriend at my side, slightly annoyed.

That evening, I sit down with a beer and watch the coverage of the Live8 concert in Hyde Park. I don’t like a lot of the acts, but I watch everything anyway, caught up in the emotion and meaning of the event, sitting there on my sofa. Pink Floyd come on towards the end, and I feel tears pricking at my eyes as they perform Wish You Were Here. “How I wish, how I wish you were here,” Dave Gilmour sings. “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year.” It reminds me of someone close who died. The night after he died there was a storm outside the house, and I lay there not knowing what to do, shuddering with guilt and grief. I remember, as I watch Pink Floyd’s performance, that that night I put on an old, scratchy record of Wish You Were Here and crouched on the floor listening to it as the lightning flashed outside. The tears prick at my eyes but they don’t come out. Then I think about the man farting outside the theatre and I find myself smiling, but the smile is still a little sad.

Six songs (in response to SunToad)

2005-06-24T20:50:00.000+07:00

Sonic Youth – Schizophrenia
It’s Friday night and I’m 13 or 14, and I’m listening to the radio in my little box room at the back of the house. My light is off and I’m drinking coke in the darkness, alone except for John Peel’s voice and the strange and wonderful records he plays, seemingly just for me. It’s late, and the rest of the house is silent. If I turn the radio off I can hear the soft hiss of late night cars on the parkway, or sometimes the squeal of trains braking on the nearby train tracks. Outside, orange halogen lights silently observe the gentle unfolding of the summer night.

“This is Sonic Youth,” John Peel says, and my hand moves to the record button on my tape player with practised swiftness. I’ve heard of this band; I’ve heard that they’re good, and I’ve looked at their CDs and records countless times in the record shop, flicking through the sleeves, feeling the inviting weight of the plastic covers and admiring the mysterious cover artwork. The song starts with a melancholy, slow drumbeat, which is then joined by chiming guitars, and together it all evokes a mysterious kind of urban melancholia, of streetlamps reflected on empty windows, deserted train tracks, silent machines standing still in the darkness, and the soft murmur of car tyres on empty roads, and then the singer’s voice comes in, singing mysterious words that don’t really mean anything to me but still fit perfectly with the feel of the music: “I went away to see an old friend of mine / his sister came over, she was out of her mind.” As the song progresses, the guitars begin to sound like parts of machines, chiming and clinking against each other through the night, and then they gather momentum, and the drums speed up into the crescendo of the song, and it all sounds deep and emotional but I don’t know why. The guitars and drums slow down again as though they’ve been exhausted, and they repeat the same mournful refrain a few times until the song ends in a low squall of feedback. I stop the tape, rewind it, and listen to the same song again and again until I’m so tired I can’t stay awake. The next day, I get out the canvass bag I use for school, find a space, and write “Sonic Youth” on it in big letters.

Manic Street Preachers – This is Yesterday
I’m walking across a stretch of grass towards a motorway. Cars speed through the night in front of me, and over in the distance on my left, the vast cathedral towers into the sky, lit up with warm light. Somewhere to my left lies the river, with its dark waters and silently gliding swans. I’m 17 and I’m a little drunk. I’ve just come out of a pub, where I drank a few beers and tried to enjoy myself, but after a while I just felt like walking somewhere. I have my walkman on, and the song I’m listening to fits my mood and the landscape around me. The song is about a longing to return to the past, when everything was simple and there was always someone to take care of you. The songwriter seems to have attempted to return, but all he’s found is “houses as ruins and gardens as weeds.” I carry on walking, the grass feeling wet under my shoes. “Why do anything when you can forget everything,” he sings.

I bought the album when I went back to my old hometown, and saw my old friends changed almost beyond recognition. Houses were ruins and gardens were weeds. How did they know about me when they wrote the song? How did they read my mind and get that shivering, yearning guitar sound that perfectly sound-tracked my confused thoughts? “I stare at the sky, and it leaves me blind,” he sings, sounding like he’s longing for something but he’s not sure what that thing is. “I stare at the sky, and this is yesterday.” The music pauses before exploding into life, with crashing drums and a wrenching guitar solo, and I run up to the top of the hill until I’m looking down at the motorway and the cars passing. With the music pumping into my ears, I turn round and look at the cathedral, which rises above all the other buildings, spearing the darkness with the lightness of its spires, and I stand there, with the cars, speeding capsules of light through the night, behind me, and I’m thinking that there’s a strange beauty to the world that is sometimes hard to see.

The Cure – High
It’s May 1992 and I’m hanging around near the cash desk at the HMV in town, watching the cashiers get CDs and tapes out of a big cardboard box. The cashiers in music shops always look too cool: they have long hair and sometimes dreadlocks, and some of them are in bands, so I find it hard to talk to them, and I sometimes feel embarrassed when I buy records from them, as if they are supreme arbiters of what is good and they are always judging my music taste and finding it wanting. After a while, a Goth girl who looks a year or two older than me comes in. She has long dyed-black hair, making her spotty face look even paler than it is, and she’s wearing a ragged black t-shirt, a black skirt and stripy black and purple tights with Doc Marten boots. She walks up to the cashier with dreadlocks and I move closer to hear what she’s going to say. “Do you have the new Cure album?” she says.

The cashier nods and says, “would you like CD or tape?”

“CD please,” the Goth girl says, and the dreadlocked cashier shouts over to his colleague to throw over a CD. The other cashier throws it over, and the dreadlocked man catches it effortlessly, even managing to make catching a CD look cool. I look on admiringly, wanting to be like him. If a rock star like Kurt Cobain caught a CD, it would probably look like that, I think. The girl buys her CD and I approach the cashier after she’s gone and ask for a tape. I put the tape in my Walkman and walk out of the shop into the fresh morning light of the early summer.

As the summer progresses I listen to the tape over and over again. One of my favourite songs is High, a magical love song that seems to revel in the happiness of the present while acknowledging the sad fact that it could have all been different if another path had been taken. “When I see you happy as a girl / that lives in a world of make believe / it makes me pull my hair all out / to think I could have let you leave,” Robert Smith sings, and the gently chiming guitars sound full of happy melancholia, as if they’re living creatures singing along with him, not just musical instruments.

That summer I get my first girlfriend, and she likes the Cure too, and we walk around the rowing lake talking about our favourite songs, our friends at school and our hopes and dreams. At the end of the walk, we hug by a post box at the end of a road, and after that, through my teenage years, that place is special to me, and whenever I go past it I try to sense if the happiness I felt there somehow floated out of me and became a part of the fabric of that place, but whenever I go there, it just seems like a post box with cars going by, and I realise that the only special thing about it is the memory associated with it. In the month or so we are together, I always think of her when I listen to High, and I sit in my bedroom, looking forward to the next time I’ll get to see my girlfriend, and then after a while I finish with her and go out with someone else.

I begin to regret my actions, not least because by new girlfriend dumps me after just eight days, and the song taunts me with its words, because I let her go.

Future Sound of London – Papua New Guinea
I rediscover the power of music to soothe the mind after returning home from a stressful, hot day in London, lying down, and listening to this joyful track.

Aphex Twin – Boy/Girl Song
It’s midnight and I’m walking through a park in north London, near to the studio where Hitchcock directed his first British movies. In the tennis court, a scary looking man is standing on his own, looking down at the floor, swaying slightly, and I see him by the light of the moon. I quicken my pace. I’m listening to this majestic, weird and wonderful track by Aphex Twin and in my mind I start directing the movie of the novel that is in my mind. Like a classical score, the music reaches a crescendo, and the swirling strings bring a picture of a cliffside, with someone walking towards the bottom after winning a struggle.

DJ Shadow – Midnight in a Perfect World
I'm travelling down to Tokyo on the Shinkansen, drinking beer and looking out of the window as the rice fields, pachinko parlours and love hotels flash by. This song is playing on my walkman.

Reserve songs:

Led Zeppelin – the Rain Song
A warm-hearted song. “This is the springtime of my loving / so little warmth I felt before.”

Neil Young – Sugar Mountain
Alain-Fournier’s “Le Grand Meaulnes” encapsulated in one song.

Scary movies on a Monday morning

2005-06-09T22:48:00.000+07:00

There’s a track by a Canadian rapper called Buck 65 that makes me want to watch scary movies on a Monday morning every time I listen to it. Buck 65 is pretty unclassifiable, so it’s kind of misleading to call him a rapper, even though he uses scratching and hip hop beats in his music. If you listen to his music you can’t help but imagine being regaled by a grizzled old tramp, his brain pickled on alcohol but still lucid and crazy, with a poetic way with words. The track in question is called 50 Gallon Drum, and it’s a series of strange poetic images growled by Buck 65 over a beat and a slow, sinister sounding piano. “Sometimes I drive all night and listen to my tapes,” he says, making it sound like the coolest thing anyone could ever do. Later in the track, he growls, “scary movies on a Monday morning,” and every time I hear this line it makes me swear to myself that, next time I have a Monday morning free, I’ll sit myself down and watch scary movies. I haven’t done it yet. One day...

Somehow, the whole idea seems romantic in an uncaring loser, grizzled tramp, Bukowski kind of a way. Sitting there watching scary movies on a Monday morning, while everyone else is at work. Swilling whiskey like water while watching screaming people on the screen being cut down by a maniac with a chainsaw.

Cool.

But my friend beat me to it, if only partially. He recently watched the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on DVD one Sunday morning when he woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Of course, Sunday’s not quite Monday, but it’s still pretty cool. “What was it like?” I asked him, overawed.

“It was okay,” he said. I wondered what the rest of his Sunday was like, after watching a massacre in the morning.

I never watch scary movies on a Monday morning and, as far as I recall, I haven’t watched one on a Sunday morning – at least not in the past few years. Every Monday morning I rise out of bed, bleary eyed and cursing, probably looking like something from a horror movie myself. Then I shamble off to the train station, blinking in the morning light, a light that seems to make me uncomfortable rather than making me feel warm. I stand in the train’s corridor, packed tight with other drones in suits, swaying and blank-faced, hurtling past grey buildings and graffiti-stained walls towards the centre of the city. The wasted, grimy landscapes around city train tracks used to seem romantic and mysterious to me, with their run-down buildings and indecipherable graffiti codes that look like intimations of a different world that exists in parallel with the real world. I used to imagine living there somewhere in an underground bunker, or at least exploring the strangely beautiful and mysterious landscape of steel and concrete. In a similar way, when on car journeys in the countryside I would look out of the window and imagine that I had a long scythe that would cut all the trees and walls in half. Or I would yearn to be out there myself, running in the fields by the side of the car, jumping over hedges and walls like a show-jumping horse...

I think it’s that same impulse, that strange yearning for a mysterious world of secrets and twilight existences just beyond normality, that makes me like the idea of scary movies on a Monday morning. I’m thinking about this as I stroll on the polished lobby floor of the building where my office is, towards the immaculate glass revolving doors, venturing outside for some breakfast. The sun is shining outside, harshly glinting on passing cars and the bald heads of middle aged men in suits. Two men in pin-striped suits, taller than me, richer than me and in more of a hurry, push past me and swing through the doors.

“It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker,” one of them says in a posh voice. “But you should get Charlie to action this one.”

They are propelled out of the double doors and into the strong sun as if driven by the power of money, fast, purposeful and efficient. I walk out behind them, a little slower, a little more contemplative. Outside in the heat, people hurtle two ways like homing missiles, driven along on their tiring legs by the unstoppable momentum of years of doing this same thing every day, unreflecting, unable to stop and not understanding why, not even trying to understand.

Scary banality on a Monday morning.

The Wraith

2005-06-07T22:50:00.000+07:00

I’ve never figured out the complex, sometimes illogical process by which humans enjoy and appreciate art and entertainment. You could say that good art makes you feel aesthetic pleasure. It could be a picture, beautifully painted, which somehow manages to provoke an emotional reaction from deep within you, making you recognise that the painter has somehow captured the essence of a certain aspect of the world. It could be a book or a movie that either challenges you or holds a mirror up to something you understood deep within yourself but could never express as eloquently as the writer or movie-maker. This could all be communicated through extremely beautiful pictures or words that weave linguistic or visual magic around you, stunning your senses.

But none of this explains why we enjoy certain things that are not beautiful. In fact, they could be quite trashy, but in the trashiness there is to be enjoyed, paradoxically, a kind of rubbish beauty and cheesy sense of satisfaction. I’m thinking right now of a movie called The Wraith.

I’m not sure whether to love this film or to laugh hysterically at the thought of it. One thing I am sure of is that I feel a lot of affection towards it and I’m glad it exists. I feel the same way towards the Wraith as I feel towards the movie Dollman, a movie which follows the adventures of a hard-boiled cop from another planet who crash-lands on earth, finds that he is now thirteen inches tall (‘thirteen inches of attitude’) and battles stereotypical gang members while uttering sub-Robocop catchphrases. The Wraith follows a long and noble tradition of films that grab your attention with a strange mixture of morbid fascination and genuine enjoyment.

The basic premise here is that a teenager comes back to life as a murderous phantom after being killed by a psychotic drag-racer and his gang when he is discovered with the gang-leader’s girlfriend. This is simple enough, but the start of the film is confusing, as Charlie Sheen walks around as the wraith, bold as brass, without being recognised by the gang-leader, his girlfriend (a pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn), or his own brother. It becomes apparent later through a series of flashbacks that the teenager who was killed was played by a different actor, although it’s hard to gather this from the murkily lit, shakily filmed flashbacks. The inference we are meant to make is that, through his new magic powers, the ghost is essentially the same person but has managed to regenerate a new face for himself. Why he actually bothers to do this is anyone’s guess.

The characters are all gleefully constructed stereotypes taken from every teenage/horror/smalltown movie you can think of. Packard, the gang leader, is the best, with his blank stare, his inexplicable cruelty, and his endearing habit of pulling out a flick-knife and silently holding it to people’s necks whenever they say something he doesn’t want to hear. The comedy value of this leather-clad teenage character is enhanced by the fact that the actor appears to be about thirty years old. His gang is made up of all the usual jittery, manic, amoral punks. These characters are also given an interesting twist in this film by their excellent hairstyles, which make them look like the bastard children of Buddy Holly and Sid Vicious, and the fact that they wear make-up and swig what looks like petrol from a bottle as they drive along in their souped-up cars. This habit gives rise to one of the film’s best quotes, uttered by the local Sheriff (another great stereotype, played by Randy Quaid): “Get rid of that zombie-piss you're drinkin' before it turns you into a mushroom.”

Quite apart from the question of how drinking zombie-piss is supposed to turn someone into a mushroom, the film is riddled with puzzles, inconsistencies and irregularities. The apparent indifference with which the gang react to the horrific death of the first gang member to be killed by the wraith can be explained by bad acting, but the reason why the body is left in a burning wreck, completely intact apart from the eyes, which have been gouged out, is never explained. Maybe the make-up team had enough budget for a gouged-out eye effect but not enough money to show a badly burned body. Then there’s the question of why all the kids seem to be living in some kind of teen paradise, completely free of parents…

Ultimately, none of these questions matter. With a film like this, the important questions are: 1, are there lots of explosions? 2, do you get to see breasts? 3, is there a scene in which someone with a shotgun shoots lots of things? And 4, is there a laconic but kindly sheriff who always appears on the scene too late and says things like, “bad feelings don’t add up to resurrections, buddy”? For the Wraith, the answer to all these questions is “Yes”.

And I’ve just decided: I do, in fact, love this film.

More quotes:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092240/quotes

Old men drinking

2005-05-19T18:48:00.000+07:00

As far as I know, there isn’t a famous painting entitled Old men drinking on an afternoon, but if there were, I’m sure it would look like a scene from Eastenders painted by Edward Hopper: gritty, slightly depressing, and with a shaft of light shining into a dark room with a sense of still foreboding. If you can imagine this scene, you can imagine what it’s like being in my new local pub on an afternoon.

The day I moved in to my new apartment, I had a drink in my local pub and saw old men drinking on an afternoon. There were four of them, drinking in a shaft of dusty sunlight, their pints of beer staining the ash-strewn table, saying ‘fack’ to each other. They seemed to be discussing philosophy at one point, or at least the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, judging by the frequency with which they mentioned his name. I couldn’t work out if they were friends or not at first. One old man, a tattered brown leather jacket draped over his bony shoulders, tottered out of his chair and stood for a moment, his grizzled face illuminated by the foreboding light as he rolled up a cigarette. One of his friends, or perhaps an enemy, walked past him and punched him in the stomach, making a slappy leather sound, and carried on his way, cackling drunkenly. The man with the brown leather jacket didn’t seem to notice and just stood there, swaying, contemplating his half-completed roll-up.

I am outside the pub, waiting at a pelican crossing. There are three other people waiting to cross the road: a young man, a young woman, and a tall old man with white hair. There is a slight lull in the traffic and the young man and woman take their chance and cross the road. The crossing light isn’t green yet, so I stay and wait. The old man looks after the two young people and lets out an expression of surprise. He turns towards me and says something, and I look over at his wrinkled, drunken face, not really hearing what he’s saying. He has a big shaving cut on his chin. He sounds surprised, so I give out a surprised snort in response, hoping that this will be enough to show that I agree with what he said and therefore that no further conversation is needed.

He carries on, and this time I hear what he’s saying. “I’m not running out in front of a facking car! That’s no way to die. I’m waiting to get shot at the age of 90 by a jealous husband!” he says.

I laugh at this and say something weak and noncommittal, like “me, too”. The light turns green and we both cross the road, each going our different ways. The old man turns and says, “see you, mate”, as if we’re old friends who have been sharing a joke over a drink. I respond with another meaningless grunt, taken aback by his drunken show of friendliness.

So holy

2005-05-11T22:10:00.000+07:00

The sun beats down on the bus as it waits interminably, just before a bridge over the river Thames, with what seems like a thousand cars, bikes, buses and black cabs between it and the station. People walk past, overtaking us. Suddenly, the bus lurches forwards. The tension and indignation hovering around the passengers lightens a little, but returns as the bus halts again and stays there. There is a crackle of speakers and the bus driver’s disembodied voice addresses us. “I’m going to open the doors now, so if you’re in a hurry I’d advise you to get out now and walk over the bridge,” he says. “I’m not going to open the doors once we’re on the bridge, so if you want to get out, you need to get out now” he adds, pre-empting passenger exasperation with his own exasperation. The doors clumsily hiss open and I am borne out onto the street in a tumbling mass of grimly suited and booted determination. The sun hits me and I momentarily feel euphoric and free.

The bridge is a mass of people walking back home across the river. Some of them are emerging from stationary vehicles, blinking in the light. The sight is slightly apocalyptic, as if the earth has stopped functioning and is standing still, but it also has a vaguely celebratory feel to it in the sun, as though the people have emerged from their buses and taxis to organise an impromptu festival above the river.

At the station, a crowd of people stand motionless, their gaze fixed on the departure board, as if there has been a major, earth-shattering event and they are all watching the events unfurl live on a large screen. I take my place among them and look up. The platform from which my train will depart has not yet been decided. I stare at the empty place where the platform number should be, waiting and poised, edging slowly towards where the platforms are. After a long wait, the platform number appears, and the motionless crowd around me bursts into life. I follow the crowd to platform 14, driven by the urgent, throbbing fear of the commuter: the fear that something will fuck up unless you move fast. I gently elbow people out of my way as I surge towards the ticket gates, my ticket poised and ready.

By the time I get to the train, there are no seats left. I stand by the doors, my face to the wall. There is a man sitting on the seat behind me, talking into his mobile phone in a language I don’t understand. His voice sounds husky and breathless, as if he’s been running and he hasn’t caught his breath.

“Sah... sah...” he says. I can hear a tinny woman’s voice coming from his phone. The woman’s voice is talking more than the man, and he seems to be listening and agreeing. “Sah,” he says again, and then says something in his indecipherable language. “So holy,” he seems to say, with breathless conviction. “I hear you, so holy,” he seems to say.

I keep listening, entranced by the man’s voice. “So holy,” he seems to say again. “Sah, I hear you, so holy.” The woman’s voice carries on, tinny and high-pitched. “So holy. Sah. So holy. Sah. I hear you,” the man’s breathless voice replies. Suddenly, in my trance, the man’s voice starts to sound slightly vulgar, as if he is a porn star in action, giving encouraging words to his acting partner. There’s something porn-like about his panting, hoarse voice, and its tone of tender conviction. “So holy, I hear you. Sah. I hear you. So holy!” I try not to laugh as I look out of the window, down at the train tracks. The train’s engine starts up and drowns out the breathless porn star’s voice.

The train is now full and I’m penned into the corner. Two men in suits who just managed to jump onto the train before the doors closed are talking to each other in a language which sounds like Russian. “Welcome to London,” one of them suddenly says in English. His voice sounds sarcastic, as if he doesn’t feel welcome. They carry on their Russian conversation.

My stop is the second along the line. The train stops at its first destination, and there’s an impatient surge towards the doors. I hear a voice that I haven’t heard before. It’s not the holy porn star and it’s not the sarcastic Russian men: it’s a British voice, posh and exaggeratedly polite. “Please, be my guest and come through,” the voice says. I look round and see an old man, dressed in a tweed coat and a bulbous black cycling helmet. He has a strange, foldable pedal bike, a trapping of modernity that looks incongruous against the old man’s genteel appearance. He manoeuvres his bike to the right to allow the people on his left to get out. “First, the people on this side – allow me,” he says with a flourish. Despite his politeness, there’s a sarcastic edge to his voice. The people file past him and off the train. “And now, the people on this side,” he says, as though he’s a bus conductor, and manoeuvres his bike to the other side, allowing the other people to file past.

The doors shut and the train starts up again. The two Russian men are watching the old men with amused looks on their faces. “He’s a very nice man,” one of them says in English. “Yes, a very nice man,” the other man agrees sarcastically. I don’t understand where all the sarcasm has come from. Everyone is speaking in inverted commas, even the old man, with his exaggerated politeness. I feel like I must have missed something, probably while I was listening to the holy porn star’s conversation.

The train stops at my stop. The old man prepares to get off, but he appears to be struggling with his bike, blocking the way of the people waiting to get off. I walk up and help him, rolling his bike off the train. “Thank you so much, so kind of you,” the old man says, but he seems reluctant to let me touch the bike. Once we get the bike on the platform, he wrestles it away from me protectively. “Thank you so much, I’m alright now,” he says dismissively. There’s still sarcasm in his voice. I nod at him and walk away.

Clucking bankers

2005-04-29T19:10:00.000+07:00

An electronic voice speaks to me in calm, measured tones, listing a range of options as my telephone bill continues to rise.

“Welcome to Dickhead Bank,” the voice says. “To assure you of the best possible service, customers are reminded that calls may be monitored.” I have a brief mental image of the call centre, full of robots and computers. One of the robots is in a little room, aside from the rest, hunched over a phone, monitoring all the calls, warming up its strange robot torture apparatus.

“To report a card lost or stolen,” continues the inhuman voice, “press one.” That’s not what I want. “To enquire about your balance, press two” That’s not what I want either. “To enquire about any other products and services from Dickhead Bank, press three.” I certainly don’t want that.

After the voice has listed eight different options, none of which apply to me, it arrives at the one option I need. “To speak to one of our customer advisers, press star now.” I press the star button eagerly, almost breaking my phone. There is a silence. I sense my phone bill rising to unacceptable levels with every second.

The machine has been thinking, and it has decided it doesn’t like what I’ve done. “Sorry, we cannot process your request.” After a leisurely pause, it slowly and deliberately lists through all the options again, right from option one. I’m gripping my phone so hard I’m afraid I might crush it. “To speak to one of our customer advisers, press star now.” I press the star button hard, but not too hard. I press it clearly, and hold the button, but not for too long. My finger doesn’t press any of the other buttons around the star button. If I were a footballer, this would be a goal, top corner, sweet and true, beyond the clutches of the ‘keeper.

The machine considers this silently.

“Sorry, we cannot process your request,” it says. I can almost sense a note of irritation in the voice, as if it’s exasperated with my stupidity. “Please wait while we try to connect you,” it says, grudgingly.

After listening to some tinny, unidentifiable music, an aggressive, human voice cuts in and starts demanding information from me. It’s a man and he has a strong north-eastern accent. I think he says good afternoon to me but I’m not sure.

“I’d like to inform you of a change of address,” I say.

“Okay...” he says. “First, I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions. And I want them answered immediately.”

He demands to know my date of birth, my mother’s maiden name, who is my daddy and what does he do, my first cat’s name, and the first three letters of my porn name. I tell him quickly, trying to sound natural but getting flustered.

“Good porn name, that,” he says in a rare moment of human interaction. “ Now, what are the first, third and last letters of your telephone banking pass number?”

I remember hearing something about a pass number, but I can’t remember what it is. I decide to try and bluff it. “Um, seven?”

“Yes?”

“Eight, two,” I say. There might be a chance that I got it right by coincidence, or I can magically remember my pass number.

He pauses for a moment. “I’m afraid that isn’t the number we have on here.”

“So can I still change my address then?”

“No, I’m afraid not, sir. If you can’t remember your number you’ll have to go into a bank in person to authorise the change.”

Shit!

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” he says, as if I’ve forgotten all about the address change and there are a few other things I may as well do while I’m on the line.

I hang up and run out of the office. I have a little bit of my lunchtime left, but I have to hurry because I have to go off for a meeting straight after lunch at the other side of town. I run to the nearest branch of Dickhead Bank, which isn’t very near at all.

At the bank, people in suits wait in line with resigned expressions on their faces. Posters around the bank promise mortgages and percentages and APR, making me think of things I don’t understand and can’t afford anyway. There are two customer advisers. One is free, but there is a man sitting in the waiting area behind me. If I let him go first I will be late for the meeting. I talk to the customer adviser, deciding to see if she would understand my predicament.

“Hi, I need to change my address...”

She looks up at me disapprovingly. “There’s someone else waiting.” She gestures to the man in the seating area.

“I know, but this won’t take long...”

“You do have your passport, don’t you?” she says, as if speaking to an idiot child.

“No, but”-

“Well, you need your passport for an address change so I’m afraid we can’t do anything,” she says smugly.

“Okay,” I turn round and stamp out angrily. I exclaim, “Jesus!” as I go out of the door. As I walk back to the office, I regret my outburst. Taxis and buses glide by, slashing through puddles, full of people who are blissfully unaware of my mental torment. No one in the bank knew that I had tried to call before. They also won’t have known that I was in a hurry. I would just have seemed like a manic, irritable idiot. The customer adviser probably complained about me to her colleagues during her tea break. This horrible, weird customer came in, trying to push in, she’ll probably say. He was ugly too, she’ll probably say, and her colleagues will probably laugh and say they sympathise. I walk on, stamping through puddles, getting angry again as I imagine what she’ll say. Then I begin to worry that they have me on camera saying “Jesus” and storming out, and they’re going to hunt me down. Maybe my picture will be in the paper the next morning, with police appealing for information about the manic bank customer and his inappropriate behaviour.

I walk back, not noticing the sun above me or the people around me, worrying and feeling bad, until I find a new thing to worry and feel bad about.

Take it for the best

2005-04-26T18:50:00.000+07:00

It is early evening and I’m looking out of a dirty window at walls, windows and throngs of sour-faced people waiting for buses, a scene that passes by and all blurs into one unified vista of urban grime. The city survives hundreds of these days every year. It never sleeps as the acidic rain slashes into its dirty pavements, and the people throng at the road crossings, pounding the floor with thousands of pairs of feet and then eating and shitting and filling the spaces underground with tonnes of sewage. Sometimes the sewage overflows into the Thames and boats have to go around pumping oxygen into the river so the fish don’t die; as if all the fish need is a little bit of oxygen and then it will make it okay that they have to swim through tonnes of shit every day. The pigeons shit down the walls, melting the monuments, coating Nelson’s once proud coat with berries and digested bits of burgers, and the foxes come out at night, many of them limping, their coats covered with grime, whimpering their strange city song to each other as they rip into garbage bags looking for food. And then the grey light appears through the clouds and rain and the people come back, crowding into buildings, trains and buses, cold-eyed and shark-like, driven by a cold, merciless instinct to get to a place that is not the filthy floor under their feet, jostling each other and kicking the crisp packets and cigarette butts as they march on and on.

I am on the top deck as usual, watching all this and marvelling that something doesn’t happen one day, like the floors caving in, or the raw sewage exploding out of the ground like a hot, filthy geyser, or the buildings falling down or the pigeons going mad and pecking the commuters to death. How does the city manage to survive all this, all the trains screeching through dark tunnels underground, all the people and buildings and the machines digging into the ground, smashing stones and grinding down earth? I turn my eyes away from the scene outside. The bus lurches round the corner, out of the centre of London and along the slow, clogged path that takes me home.

There is a man in the seat next to me and he is talking into a mobile phone in a strong afro-Caribbean accent. I like the sound of his voice and I can’t help listening to what he’s saying. He has a deep, reassuring voice: the voice of someone who has taken the blows of life and come back stronger for it, ready to give advice and help others get through it too.

“But that’s life man, that’s life,” he’s saying, in a tone of laid-back compassion. “These tings, we just take it for the best, we just take it for the best.”

The bus gets to a relatively clear stretch of road and roars forward, as if exhilarated by a sudden sense of freedom, away from the darkening city. The throaty whine of its engine sounds almost as if it is singing. A traffic light changes in front of us and the bus lurches to a stop, its brief song of freedom cut short. There are only three people on the top deck: myself, the man on the phone, and another man who is sitting towards the back of the bus. The wise phone man continues his conversation.

“But we aall have our cross to bear, you know what I mean?” The bus lurches forward again as the light changes. The wise phone man’s head is jerked forward and he looks a little annoyed for a moment. But then he continues, his voice unchanged. “Me doing some tings you know. Some tings, but not much, but that’s life, you know what I mean. These tings, you just take it for the best.”

I reflect that the philosophy of taking it for the best is a good one. It sounds simple just to say it, but people find it hard to put into practice when they’re confronted by the complexities and pains of life. But the wise phone man sounds like he has it all worked out. His voice expresses his philosophy with a wise sense of calmness.

Suddenly, his voice is drowned out by a loud voice from outside, which is amplified by a megaphone, as though I am listening to an old AM radio and I’ve just turned the dial. I look out of the window but I can’t find the source of the voice. We are now in Elephant and Castle, a depressed area dominated by congestion-clogged roads and a sixties monstrosity of a shopping centre that rises up into the grey sky. There is a cartoon statue of an elephant with a castle on its back at the entrance of the rickety shopping centre, like a horrific, Salvador Dali version of a Disney character, and I always look at it, appalled but fascinated, as I go past. The voice outside is full of compassion, a little like the wise phone man’s voice, but there is an evangelical urgency to this voice.

The voice echoes around the polluted junction, surrounding the buses and cars with its tender urgency. “It doesn’t matter WHO you are, or how much money you have, or what car you have... JESUS will save you, Jesus will save you!”

The electronic doors downstairs bleep electronically and hiss shut, and some new arrivals climb up the stairs to join us on the top deck. The bus lurches forward, leaving Jesus to save the people behind us. The wise phone man carries on his conversation, sounding a little sad now. “But you know Hannah’s husband? ‘Im dead man, ‘im dead!” Incredulity mixes in with the sadness in his voice. “Just a terrible accident,” he says. His voice starts to get wise and philosophical again, but I can still hear the pained incredulity there. “Monday and dead. This week and dead. And he was a nice guy, you know?”

He is silent for a moment as the person on the other end of the line says something. The bus continues its journey into the growing darkness. The other people on the top deck sit there silently, contemplating their lives.

“But that’s life, you know what I mean?” the wise phone man says. “We just take it for the best.”

Toilet humour

2005-04-25T23:19:00.000+07:00

The elevator door slides open obligingly and I walk in with a crowd of other people dressed in suits. I press the button for level five. Someone presses four. Someone else presses six; I like this person. Someone else presses two, and I am not so fond of this person. Someone presses one, and then to get the amount of time that is wasted before I get to level five to a good level, someone presses three.

I have the urge to shout at the person who seems to need an elevator to get up one flight of stairs, but he’s bigger than me and anyway, I wouldn’t have had the courage even if it had been Kenny Baker. Come to think of it, someone as small as the man who played R2D2 in the ‘Star Wars’ films would probably be best taking the lift instead of the stairs anyway. The other reason I can’t shout is that my mouth is full of sausage and egg muffin. I stuffed it in my mouth before I got into the elevator. I take a few chews, but the elevator is so silent, my chewing sounds as loud as a cement mixer. I stop mid-chew and stand there, as quiet as I can be, my mouth full of food, as the elevator glides its way up to each level. The people around me silently contemplate the smooth steel walls of the elevator, their thoughts unknowable.

When I finally reach level five, I indulge in a festival of gleeful chewing. I press my entry card to the sensor and the door opens to admit me for another day of fun. We recently moved to a new office, in a better area than before and with better facilities. I like a lot about the new office except for the toilets.

It is well documented how awkward office toilets can be when you have to drop some friends off at the pool. One of the worst things is the “walk of shame”. This is the walk back from the toilet, through the whole office, past that girl you quite like in accounts, past your boss, after having incontrovertibly spent more than the time you might reasonably expect someone to be just having a wee. Whenever you have to make that walk, you can’t help imagining that your colleagues are looking at each other knowingly. Maybe sending each other emails.

In our last office, there were several floors that had no offices on them, so you could have a whole toilet to yourself, just by walking down a few floors. You could sit there at your leisure, contemplating life, savouring the time to yourself. You still had the walk of shame to negotiate, but you could get round this by dropping in on the post room on the way back and bringing some documents back to your desk. A couple of pieces of paper from the wastebasket would do the trick. But you had the whole toilet to yourself, and no one in the cubicle next to yours, and that counted for a lot.

In our new office, the toilets are nice and new and spick and span, but THERE ARE ONLY FOUR CUBICLES! This is for my office, and all the other offices that share the floor. That’s a lot of people. And they all poo a hell of a lot. So if you manage to find a cubicle that’s free, the chances are you will come face to face with the person who has just used the facilities before you. You might stand there at the cubicle door, awkwardly saying ‘cheers’ as he holds open the door for you. You have to avert each other’s eyes, because you both know what’s happened and what’s about to happen. The other person vacating the cubicle might be slightly more embarrassed than you. But he can go about his business, while you find yourself enclosed in the cubicle, surrounded by the fresh, warm aroma of someone else’s poo.

Even going for a wee at the office is a source of potential embarrassment. There’s nothing worse than standing there having a pee next to your boss. Actually, there is: if you’re standing there peeing and your boss starts enquiring about the progress you’ve made on that report you have to finish by the end day. Enough to make it go right back in.

Richard Slater and his Dog

2005-04-20T23:17:00.000+07:00

I am emptying the drawers in my room, getting ready to move house. I have found a place that is cheaper than where I live now and closer to the station. The only trouble is that it is half the size. I am looking for things to throw away, but it is difficult for me. Nostalgia has a stranglehold on me that I cannot break.

Since I was a teenager, I have been an obsessive maker of compilation tapes. I would make tapes for all seasons and all moods, sometimes replicating songs from one tape to another, but adjusting the order of the songs to reflect the mood. I also liked to include samples from my favourite movies. Somewhere, I have a tape that samples Mickey Rourke as the Motorcycle Boy in ‘Rumble Fish’. He says: “you know, if you’re gonna lead people, you have to have somewhere to go,” and this segues into ‘Dress Rehearsal Rags’ by the maestro of misery, Leonard Cohen. I would approach the making of tapes with extreme seriousness – almost scientifically. I can’t throw away the tapes because they are relics of a past life that I am reluctant to erase completely. They bring back the strength and pain of being young: the despair mixed with the thrilling sense of possibility that adolescence involves.

The care I took with making tapes was never replicated in my schoolwork. Also in my drawer, I find some old school reports, covered in Ds and Es. There is also a letter from my school to my parents, explaining that I would be put on report after a number of teachers expressed concern about my attitude and the standard of work at school. If they would like to discuss this further, the letter goes on, my parents would be welcome to make an appointment to meet my teachers. But my parents never saw the letter, because the teacher in question made the mistake of summoning me and telling me that she had sent it that day! So all it involved was a vigil every morning for the next few days at the letterbox. When the letter in question came, with its telltale postmark, I intercepted it, and my parents were never any the wiser. This was October 1992, not long after the first Gulf War, when there was still a Tory government in the UK. Recently, at the age of 27, I showed the letter to by mother and apologised for the lateness, but she didn’t seem to care much. Who’s laughing now, huh, Teech??? Huh?!?

I also find some examples of my schoolwork. One of the most interesting finds I make is a story I wrote in November 1991, at the age of 14. I wrote the story after we were asked to write a contemporary update of a traditional fairy tale. I chose the story of Dick Whittington, the tale of the boy who travels to London thinking that its streets are paved with gold. I’ll reproduce the story here, complete with spelling and grammar mistakes:

“Richard Slater and his dog – a contemporary update of the Dick Whittington story

Richard Slater lived with his poor family in a small farming community. His only future was to work on his family’s farm for the rest of his life, so he decided to run away from home to find a job. Richard decided that most jobs would be found in London, so he would hitchhike there. Richard unpacked his rucksack with money and other things he might need, and took his dog, his only friend, with him to the motorway.

It was almost dawn when Richard caught his first glimpse of London, the greatest city in England. The only person he had managed to hitchhike with was a man named Mark Gardener, who drove a small mini. Mark was travelling to Kent, and he would only drop Richard off on the outskirts of London to avoid the terrible traffic congestion. Richard took the Underground train to Charing Cross, where he watched the sun rise over Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Beholding such a marvellous spectacle, Richard was surprised to see around him great poverty. The walls of Trafalgar Square were filled with tramps, all stirring as the first rays of the sun and clutching at whatever possessions they had. Standing in Trafalgar Square among the tramps and pigeons, Richard’s illusions were painfully stripped away from him. He had just ran away from poverty to homelessness. And he was hungry.

Richard spent the rest of the morning in a steamy cafe, where he spent the rest of his meagre cash on an Old English Breakfast, occasionally feeding scraps to his faithful dog. When he was asked to leave, Richard asked if there was a job free in the cafe, and if he and his dog could help. Richard was forcibly ejected from the premises, and he wandered around London for any chance of some money or a place to stay, until nightfall came, and the only people left in the streets were drunks, tramps, nightclub goers and Richard Slater with his dog.

Over the next few days, Richard slept where he could. As he was technically homeless, Richard could not get a proper job. Richard and his dog were slowly starving, and no one cared. Where was the wealth that Richard had expected to encounter? Certainly not on the streets of London among the homeless.

One night Richard and his dog were sleeping in a back alley behind an inner city warehouse. Unknown to Richard, a burglary was taking place in the warehouse, and the thieves had the back alley planned as their escape route. Richard’s dog hadn’t eaten anything for two days, and he was seriously considering eating Richard. When he saw several big fat men climb out of the warehouse window, it was a godsend for him. He was wild, starving, and he went for the throat.

It turned out that the warehouse owner was a respectable businessman, willing to break the law if he had to. When he saw Richard and his dog crouched over the theives’ mutilated bodies, gorging themselves on the soft, bloody flesh, he saw a great security possibility. Richard would then on patrol the warehouse with his dog. The warehouse owner had security, and Richard Slater had somewhere to sleep, money for food, and a frightening taste for human flesh.”

This story earned me a B+, and the following comment from the teacher: “Rather a macabre twist to the original storyline. It is good though – until the end. I feel that the cannibalism is rather misplaced.”

But what do they know? Teachers, huh! No sense of humour! Always trying to suppress my creativity!

Stones and bones

2005-04-19T19:30:00.000+07:00

It is a cloudy April morning and Big Ben towers above the bustling red buses and black cabs behind me. I am walking with my girlfriend past the permanent demonstration that is camped out on the square in front of Westminster. Badly drawn signs shrilly accuse the MPs inside parliament of being baby killers. A large red sign depicts a stick man holding a petrol pump to his mouth and drinking greedily. We cross the road and join the crowds waiting to enter Westminster Abbey.

I pay eight pounds to get in after spending twenty minutes in the company of four American tourists. The main hall opens out above me, along with the musty smell of old stone and stained-glass windows. I have been to Westminster Abbey before. I like old buildings and I’m interested in history, but the Abbey always feels to me like it's one giant grave. The previous time I went, it was with a Japanese friend, and the whole time we were there, the Abbey reverberated with low, ominous organ notes, getting lower and lower and more sinister as we walked round looking at sculptures of skulls contorted into rictus grins and huge monuments containing bones of old kings. This time, there is no organ music, but I feel the same presence of thousands of years of death and bones hanging mustily in the cold air.

My girlfriend has become fascinated with the history of London and the famous people that walked its winding streets in the thousands of years it has existed. She looks up at the ceiling and the thick walls, and examines the giant sculptures of old, long dead statesmen and soldiers that all stare ahead blankly with their cold, blank eyes. Barely readable inscriptions, some apparently in Latin, proclaim the greatness of the dead warriors and leaders, trying to stave off the encroaching weight of history and the indifference that follows the long passage of years. We are their only witnesses now, and we must be alien to them, with our mobile phones and digital cameras.

We walk along the chosen path, passing the graves of old kings and queens, and walking over the bones and words of others. As a child, I didn’t like walking in churches over the large slabs of black stone that held the inscription that underneath lay the remains of people who had lived and died hundreds of years ago. I imagined that they wouldn’t like me walking over their graves. Elizabeth I is represented by a stone image, hands together and pointing upwards in a praying position, with an old woman’s face that was apparently made from the queen’s “death mask”.

In the museum of the Abbey, we see old, ragged funeral effigies of some of the kings and queens. The effigies were life size and the faces were made from the monarchs’ death masks. The effigies would be carried along with the coffin at the funeral in place of the actual body, which would have decayed too much in the time it took to prepare such a big state occasion. Henry VII looks out from behind the glass, his face pinched and sallow, his hairstyle simple and ascetic. I remember studying about this king: the Tudor who defeated Richard III, the hunchback of Shakespeare’s play, and who ran the country with ascetic efficiency, laying the groundwork for the future Tudor monarchs. I used to be fascinated with the connection between past and present you can participate in by visiting such old monuments and graves, but know I’m unable to feel this. When I look at the grave of Henry VIII, I’m unable to get the sense of this big man who hunted, irrevocably changed the church in England and had six wives. All I can see now are stones and bones. Too much time has passed, and we’re all now so far away from the past.

At the poets’ corner I offer up a silent request to Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll and John Masefield that I might also one day write something that is good. The stones lie there on the floor, unmoving and cold. Most of the poets are not even here: Shakespeare rests miles away in Stratford upon Avon. My girlfriend notices that the inscription for Lewis Carroll is the most interesting, with its italicised writing and the circular pattern of the inscription.

We have a look at Winston Churchill, the monument to Isaac Newton with its strange globe, and walk past the tomb of the unknown soldier. The cloudy grey light surrounds us as we emerge from the stone walls, and the cars and buses roar us back to the present.

Sugar Mountain

2005-04-15T15:30:00.000+07:00

I am 17 and I’m sitting in my little room at the back of the house. My posters are on the wall and the familiar faces look at me as I lie on the bed listening to my stereo, with the speakers arranged just as I like them. On sunny days when trains go by, the sun glints on their windows and the warm yellow light flickers across my wall. Sometimes I hear trains through the night, their engines sounding like mechanical horses, snorting and whining. It’s a comforting sound and I usually have no trouble getting to sleep. When it’s raining I get out my old Cure albums and put on one of my favourite tracks, ‘the Drowning Man’, and I listen to the strange, shivering guitar and Robert Smith’s cold, despairing voice while looking out at the water gathering in a puddle on the roof of the shed of the Italian man who lives next door. I actually like the sense of lonely melancholia that shivers through me as I watch the drops of rain running down the window while listening to the song. Towards the end of the song, he sings, “everything was true, it couldn’t be a story... I wish it was all true, I wish it couldn’t be a story,” and I don’t know what the words mean or what they refer to, but I feel like I ache with the same yearning melancholia that I hear in the song. Music to me is still magical, and I can’t imagine how it is made, how people play guitars and find these amazing, mysterious sounds.

But today it’s not raining and I’m listening to ‘Sugar Mountain’ by Neil Young. Again, I relate to the sense of yearning I sense in the singer’s shrill, shaky voice, and I like the warm, intimate sound of the acoustic guitar. I think I understand what the lyrics mean: “You can’t be 20, on Sugar Mountain, though you’re thinking that you’re leaving there too soon.” I think that Sugar Mountain is a state of childhood innocence, when everything is fresh and new, and the singer is lamenting the loss of this as he grows up. Already at 17, I have a strong sense of melancholic nostalgia for times past, and I have a constant awareness of time slipping away from me each time the sun rises and sets and people appear and disappear around me. A certain soap I haven’t used for a while can conjure up feelings and memories for me from just a few months or years before. One soap reminds me of a girl I used to like. I liked her so much that I used to go into town and wait for her where I thought she would be and watch her, afraid to talk to her. I even had a chance with her, but I was too shy to take it. Time seemed big then, but everything changed, subtly, almost unnoticeably, and suddenly I am 17 and the girl I liked is never in town any more, and I can’t do my romantic, yearning, hanging around town thing anyway because I’d look like a stalker. Anyway, my chance with the girl has gone, and she has disappeared somewhere in the crowds in town, leaving me with just the memory of that smile I noticed one day, possibly in 1991, when I was walking out of the Our Price record shop and she walked in with her friends, smiling that smile, wearing a denim jacket with ‘the Cure’ written on the back.

I am suddenly 27 and I’m walking through Holborn, and I don’t have my little room any more: it’s miles away now and it’s full of old comics, books and CDs that I can’t bring myself to throw away. I’m listening to ‘Sugar Mountain’ on a tape I have made of all my favourite ever songs and I’m battling my way through the crowd, not really noticing the people around me. I’m worrying about moving house and whether I’ll be able to afford the deposit and whether the new apartment will be big enough. I don’t listen to the music with the same intensity I used to, but it still stirs something deep within me, but this thing within me, this pure sense of things, of light from train windows flashing across my wall, of girls and their smiles and water gathering in puddles, gets deeper and deeper and more faint as the years go by, and, when I have the time to think about this, I sometimes worry that one day it will completely disappear.

Clown Boy and the Bastards

2005-04-14T19:39:00.000+07:00

I wake up too late, as usual. I make my sandwiches for the day but I don’t have time for breakfast. I look outside. The sky’s grey and it’s raining. I rush back in for an umbrella. I walk down my street, past the gym, the restaurant and the pub on the corner. The traffic on the main road is almost stationary. Through windows I see the sides of people’s heads, their faces resigned and impassive, staring ahead into the swirling droplets of rain.

At my bus stop, the usual people are standing there, some with umbrellas, some taking shelter under the overhanging entrance of a pub that used to be a cinema. Sodden posters outside the pub advertise forthcoming football matches and 2 for 1 food deals. There is a skinny man with blonde hair and glasses who I see every morning. He reads so many books on his bus journey that sometimes I see him with an extra, auxiliary book, ready for him to read in case he finishes his current one.

When my bus comes, I’m able to get a seat upstairs. My current book is ‘Dynamo’, the story of the German invasion of Ukraine in the Second World War, told through the story of the football team, Dynamo Kiev. I think about reading my book as a spray of raindrops dies on the steamed-up window next to me. I don’t feel like reading it. The bus shudders to a start and then stops again. All the people on the bus feel the sands of time, the seconds of their lives, slowly slipping away, counted out by the dirty shudder of the bus’s engine and the droplets of water on the windows. Time passes. It takes us 15 minutes to crawl up to the top of the hill. People have died, babies have been born, and we have all aged, sitting here, looking out of the window at the brown puddles patiently gathering water. I think about people from my high school and a wave of hatred slashes through me like a tyre through a puddle. Those bastards, I think, and look out at the grey buildings by the road.

A teenage boy walks up the stairs and stands there on the stairwell, looking out from beneath his hooded top at the people sitting on the top deck. He suddenly starts shouting. I tense in my seat, but the boy seems to be enjoying embarking on a surreal flight of fancy rather than preparing to act violently. He puts on a fake, camp American accent. “Oh my Gooood!” he shouts. “It’s like, so steamy in here, yes it is! Ooooooh! The windows are all steamed up!”

All the people on the bus shrink into their seats slightly and no one looks up. “She’s reading her book, oh yes! What’s that book you’re reading?” the boy shouts, probably at someone sitting near him. “Ooh, it might be the Bible! But then what version is it? You’re reading the Bible and you don’t know what version??? I like that author – he’s good! Oooh my God!” Nobody answers the boy’s surreal musings, and there’s a silence for a while as he just stands there, and the only noise is the bus’s engine. He starts again. “Oh my God, we’re not moving! We wanna move, yes we do! Cloak and daggers and bags and crags and all that! Yeah!”

The boy sits down on an empty seat, next to a man who’s staring straight ahead, trying not to look at the boy. I feel sorry for the man. The bus shudders and moves a little, before stopping in the rain-soaked gridlock. The boy is silent for a moment, but the man continues to stare straight ahead. The crazy clown boy starts talking again, this time to the man next to him. He’s turned round to his captive audience of one and he’s chatting to him like he’s an old friend and they’re sitting at a bar together nursing a couple of beers. I can’t hear most of what he says. The man just sits there, not acknowledging the clown boy, staring straight ahead. I hear a snatch of the one-sided conversation: “And you know that Keanu Reeves, I just really like him, he’s a great actor, and did you see him in that movie? That really good movie? He’s just so great man!”

The bus stops at the clown boy’s stop. He gets up, says goodbye to his new friend, and bounds down the stairs. The man just sits there, staring ahead, not acknowledging the friend he has just made. Maybe in another city, another universe, these two could have been friends, but today it is not possible.

Someone comes in and sits next to me and I look out of the window at the unsmiling people waiting on the street and rushing through the rain with their umbrellas. The thought of the people from school comes back and I feel the hate again. I think about their entries on the Friends Reunited website, and the way they try to make it look as though they’re being really successful. One guy, who was actually quite interesting at school, wrote that he was working for a “leading” firm. “Leading”! It’s like something out of the “about us” section of a company website! When I met him a couple of months ago, he was boasting about how many suits and properties he had. He mentioned how expensive his suit was and then added: “Well, actually, I shouldn’t be worried about that – not on MY wage, anyway.” Afterwards, he said to someone else that I hadn’t changed at all since we were at school. First of all, I think I must have changed, primarily because I don’t mope about wanking all the time (well, not all the time) and my face is not encrusted with zits. Secondly, the inference appears to be that it’s a bad thing not to change that much: as if I should be all mature now and should be thinking about buying properties instead of still being interested in books, music and films. I hate the idea that all these people assume that I want exactly all the same things as them, when I don’t. Dickheads. The hate courses through me. The traffic is better now, and the bus is racing purposefully through the rain towards the heart of the city, as if guided by my wrath.

I make plans about the revenge I will get when I’m a famous millionaire. When I’m collecting my Nobel Peace Prize, or my Oscar for best actor, or whatever greatness I’m destined for, I’ll stand there and have a message for all the bastards I went to school with. Standing there at the podium, with the crowds in front of me and the cameras trained on me, I will conclude my acceptance speech like this: “Oh yes, and I have something to say to the people from school. Hello everyone! Heheh! You know who you are. Kiss this!” Then I’ll pull down my trousers, turn round, and bare my arse to the world.

That’s what I’ll do.

The bus arrives at my stop. I get off and go to work, thinking that I just thought of a great new name for a band. Clown Boy and the Bastards.

Bee plants from 1985

2005-04-12T21:07:00.000+07:00

It is morning, and I am waiting for a bus, thinking about life and how it passes by so quickly without giving you the time to properly savour things. Sometimes, at times like this, I remember things from years ago and marvel at how many memories there are hidden away in my head and how much life I have lived. The bus crawls up the hill towards my stop, and the people around me tense up and edge subtly towards the front of the queue. I edge along with them and think about what place in my mind all these memories must be stored when they’re not being used or perused. That time in 1985 I walked along the pits, a grassy wasteland behind the motorway, with the cars sighing in the distance and a blue sky above, and my friend Chris said that we hadn’t met much recently. There were long grasses, buttercups and daisies and strange weeds that looked like bees on stalks. Some kids had made a tree-house. Where did that come from? Where is it usually stored?

The bus stops with a resigned hiss of bad chemical breath, and the door opens. A man jumps out excitedly, animated and eager, like a small child. But he looks like he’s in his late thirties or early forties, large and balding. Even so, there’s something different about him. “OI!” he shouts, and the people around me tense further, ready to fend off blows or utilise their ignoring mechanism that commuters use to blank out potential danger. The man bounds past us all, towards a man who is leaning against a wall behind the bus stop. He punches the man’s arm. “What are YOU doing here?” he shouts, in an excitable, childish voice. The man leaning against the wall calmly answers back and starts chatting to his assailant. It seems that they are friends.

I get on the bus and walk upstairs. I prefer to sit upstairs during the day, but on evenings I avoid it, because upstairs you’re more likely to get stabbed or beaten up for your mobile phone. Not that anyone would want my phone. I can’t find a double seat for myself and have to sit next to a young man who seems to take up a seat and a half with his bulk. He doesn’t shift at all to make me more comfortable as I sit down. Sunlight streams through the window and warms my face: summer will be here in a couple of months. I have a brief vision of a blue sky and weeds that look like bees.

I hear a loud voice shouting from downstairs. It’s the over-excited man from earlier. He is talking to someone: probably the man who had been leaning against the wall. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but I think that his voice sounds like Sloth, the character in ‘the Goonies’ who is locked away by his brothers. He speaks in bursts, loud and excitable, and when he pauses, his friend speaks a little, in short, quiet sentences. I can’t read my book, so I listen to the man’s voice and try to make out what he’s saying. Something about going to work, and how he usually walks everywhere.

I get off the bus at the hospital and sit at a bench by the bus stop. The bus pauses to let some new passengers on. I hear the man-child’s voice, booming through the bus and into the street. An empty crisp packet is stirred in the breeze. It lightly pitter-patters across the concrete path towards the door of the bus, as if it wants to get on. There is a series of electronic beeps, and the bus doors hiss shut, leaving the crisp packet to stir gently on the floor, alone. It will have to walk wherever it wants to go. The bus starts up and carries on in its journey, carrying the excitable balding man to wherever his life is set to take him next. It is clear that, wherever he goes, he will continue to commentate on all his experiences loudly in that thrilled, innocent voice of his. The image of the sky, the bee plants, the motorway and my old friend Chris fades away in the dusty, swirling city air.

Later, on my way home, two young men get on the bus, talking loudly about an ugly girl they know and what they’d do if they woke up in the morning next to her. I can’t concentrate on my book, so I listen to my Walkman. In the break between songs, I hear one of them saying, in a moment of seriousness: “It was the drinking, innit? That’s what brought on the facking epilepsy.” Another song starts and drowns out his voice.

Musical instruments

2005-04-05T18:48:00.000+07:00

I am standing at a bus stop talking to a girl from work. She’s a little younger than me, and she’s tall with long blond hair. I enjoy talking to her because she seems to have a good sense of humour. I often try to impress her and make her laugh. We are talking about the songs we would sing on school trips when we were kids.

“Do you remember that ‘wherever we go’ song?” I say. “I used to think it was a special song just for our school, because we’d mention our school in it. I didn’t realise that you could change the words depending on what your school was called!”

“Yeah, I remember we used to sing that!” she says. “But I never sang it on school trips. I was in the Girl Guides, so we used to sing it whenever we went to Guide Camp.”

“Hahah, you sound like that girl from ‘American Pie’!” I say.

My colleague starts doing an impression of the girl from ‘American Pie’. “At Band Camp, we had all these musical instruments, and we did this and that,” she says, sounding silly and overenthusiastic like the girl in the film.

I start geting carried away. “Hahah, but then there’s that really funny bit, when she goes, ‘in Band Camp, I stuck a flute up my....’” I stop the sentence there, but the girl’s face goes slightly red, and I realise that I might already have gone a little too far without saying the word.

“Well, it was only Guide Camp I went to, so you have to remember we didn’t have any musical instruments there” she says.

“Did you have to use something else instead, then?”

The words come out before I can stop them. She pauses, not sure of how to respond to this. I apologise to her and she goes off to look at the bus timetable. If I didn’t already have my coat on and we weren’t already outside, I’d get my coat and go outside.

Memory torture time

2005-03-31T22:24:00.000+07:00

I lie in bed, squirming with memories and fears, every so often looking at the clock as it inexorably works it way towards morning with no hint of saviour sleep. My memories are strange things that swim around in my head, invisible to me, until they inexplicably turn up to say hello and turn me into a writhing mess of guilt and embarrassment. When the memories pop in to say hello, I experience them all over again with an alarming intensity, even things that happened over ten years ago.

Today’s memory is a silly one. I am fourteen, and I arrange to meet my friends at the cinema. My father takes me in the car because the cinema is very far away. I climb out of the car and my father drives away. I walk in, resplendent in my Nirvana t-shirt: the one with the smiley face that says “corporate rock whores” on the back. My friends are not there. I look at the cinema and it occurs to me that I got the times wrong and I have come an hour too late, so my friends must be already watching the movie. I decide to wait for them. I don’t have any money to play on arcade games so I just sit there, getting glummer as each minute passes. After another hour, two girls come out into the foyer and notice me sitting there. I ask them where everybody else is, and they say that they went out of the other exit to a nearby McDonalds. I feel unbearably sad: I’m pissed off that I have spoiled my own night, and the sadness shows itself on my face. Later, my friend tells me that one of the girls said that I looked as though I was going to cry, and this adds to the unbearable weight of my teenage humiliation. I call my father and ask him to pick me up. I wait outside for him, and just before he arrives, my friends see me and come bounding up to ask where I’ve been. My father turns up in his little, cheap car that I’m sure is about half the price and size of everybody else’s cars. I can only say goodbye to my friends who look on, puzzled, as we drive away, me in my wretched Nirvana t-shirt, my father in his wretched car. My father, misinterpreting my sadness, looks back at my friends through the rear-view mirror and says, “typical – they’ve taken all’t birds for themselves!”

I experience this again as powerfully as the first time, lying there in bed. The wave of sadness and inexplicable humiliation washes over me again. If I had the number of the girl who thought I was about to cry I’d call her up right now and say: “listen, you know that time when we were at the cinema, well... I WASN’T about to cry! I just felt a bit pissed off that I missed the film!” For some reason I imagine that this incident is as fresh in her mind as it is in mind; in reality, she’s probably forgotten I ever existed. Then I’d call everyone else who figured in my life so far and apologise to some of them, maybe clarify some things to other people and take a bit of revenge on others, maybe dispense some witty put-downs I hadn’t thought of first time round.

I don’t know why these memories keep coming back on these dark nights. They even pop up at other times, when I’m sitting at my desk at work or walking through town. They affect me with such intensity that it’s not unusual for me to be seen to suddenly stop walking on a crowded street, look horrified and say “shit!” in a haunted, strangled voice. Maybe one day I’ll curl up into a foetal ball on the path and refuse to move until the bad stuff goes away. Maybe I’ll just lie down in the street like in that Radiohead video.

Quality of life

2005-03-30T22:14:00.000+07:00

I call a number I don’t know and wait, slightly nervous, until a voice I don’t know answers. “Er, I’m calling about the, you know, flat to rent in Drearton – the one for 190 a week.”

“Yes, yes, it’s still available,” the man on the line says. He sounds a bit too brisk, as though he’s clear about the relationship between the two speakers, and his is obviously the superior role.

“Well, I’d like to view it tonight, if that’s okay,” I say.

“Yeah, that should be okay. One thing – the place is actually an ex-council flat. You are okay with that, aren’t you?”

“That’s fine – I have no problem with that.” I’m playing along with his definition of the roles a little too much, like he is the master and I am the gimp. I need to be more of an alpha-male. But the truth is, I’ve seen ex-council properties before and most of them seemed alright.

“Good,” the man says briskly. “Right... you are in work, aren’t you?”

I hesitate, worrying for a moment that I sound like I’m not ‘in work’. “Yes,” I say.

“Okay...” the man says, as though he’s a policeman taking down the details of someone he’s arrested.

An unpleasant thought strikes me. “Are you an estate agent?” I say, and try not to spit out the last two words.

The man laughs a slightly unpleasant laugh, like Sid James crossed with Hannibal Lecter. “Hahahah, I am an estate agent, actually. But I’m renting out this property privately, so don’t worry – you won’t be going through an agency.”

“You did sound very... professional,” I say.

“Hahahah, some people say that, some people say that.” I begin to feel like I’m James Bond and he’s the Bond villain, and he has me hung upside down over a tank full of sharks.

With a sense of foreboding, I take the man’s name and the address of the property, and arrange to meet him there in the evening. The price is quite expensive for the location, but I have to look at as many places as possible before making a decision.

After work, I get the bus to the perpetually snarled, exhaust-fumed hell of Drearton junction, possibly the only place close to the centre of the city with rents that I can afford. An endless line of buses roars throatily, stopping and starting, lurching through a maelstrom of fumes and dirty noise. Mean looking kids wearing hoodies are hunched in huddles round the cash machines and outside McDonalds. Inside the windows of the burger bar, lit up by the harsh electric light, people I’ll never know, with stories I will never hear, absently eat fries and drink milkshakes.

I am early, so I decide to walk around the area. A whirling, sickened wind stirs candy packets and newspapers along the path and gently nudges empty cans that rock in the grime. Someone walking behind me belches loudly as they pass. I turn around and see a middle-aged woman walking away from me.

I get out my map and wait to cross the road to the side where the flat is. There is an explosion of noise behind me and I whirl around, ready to fight. A man staggers past the shop windows, holding a can of special brew up in the air like a trophy he is proud to have won.

“WHO’D FUCHIN GET THEIR FUCHIN HAIR CUT THERE!?!?!” He’s looking in through the window of a barbers’ shop, the sight of which has obviously caused much amusement for him. The hairdressers inside carry on, seemingly oblivious to the man’s drunken shouts.

The traffic crossing turns green and I cross the road, my heart still beating fast. I walk further up the road, looking at the map. I find the street I need. On the corner of the street, there is a seedy looking hotel. I can’t think of why anyone would want to have a holiday in this area. The hotel is called ‘Hotel Paradise’, which is spelled out above the door in dirty orange neon.

I walk past the garish sign and further up the street. The lane I am looking for is just off this street, according to my map. The street is quiet compared to the ragged roar of the road, but it’s not a pleasant quietness. There’s a menace to the quietness in the early-evening half-light. Grim blocks of council flats rise up from the street on either side of me. Inside they are warrens of wasted dreams, broken down stairs, and filthy corridors with lights on timed switches that plunge you into darkness before you get far enough.

An old woman is walking in front of me, hunched and slow. I approach her carefully, not wanting to scare her. In the distance, I hear children’s cries, echoing off big concrete walls. “Excuse me,” I say to the woman. She whirls around and looks at me suspiciously. “Do you know where Hope End is?”

The grabs my map and peers at it. “Well, that’s this street,” she says. “But I don’t know Hope End. Maybe up there,” she says, gesturing further up the street.

“Okay, that’s fine,” I say. “Thank you”.

I walk on and overtake the woman. The street opens up into a maze of dully coloured council blocks. Some of them have balconies that just look out onto seas of concrete. Washing hangs out to dry, giving forlorn accounts of people’s lives. I hear children calling to each other somewhere among the concrete walls. Above me, a window is open and music plays, echoing through the balconies and hallways. It sounds angry rather than celebratory.

It takes a long time to find Hope End. It’s a block of several flats among hundreds of blocks that all look the same. I ring the buzzer of the flat that is for rent, but there is no answer. Beyond the glass door, the corridor looks tawdry and uninviting. I call the man I spoke to earlier, but his phone goes straight to voice mail. I knock on the door and ring the buzzer. I stand there, at a loss, awkward and self-conscious in the suit I wear for work. The only life in this concrete mass seems to be hiding somewhere beyond my sight. I get the feeling that someone is watching me.

I sit down on a wall and call the man’s number again. There is no answer. I look up at the windows of the upstairs flats, but there are no lights on. I feel inexplicably frightened. I wait for another ten minutes. I call the man again, but there is no answer. I get up, walk to the door, and press the buzzer. Again, there is no answer.

I hear a shrill voice somewhere in the distance. “Fack off, Tyrone!” Another voice answers back, shouting something incomprehensible. Just some kids: playing football or something.

I walk away from the flat, through an alleyway that’s darkening as the night draws closer. The choking traffic greets me with its filthy embrace.

Singin' in the bus

2005-03-23T21:27:00.000+07:00

The bus chugs and stops its way into Victoria and I am standing by the closed door, expectant, crushed up against another commuter, so near to freedom yet still so far. After a seemingly interminable wait, the doors grudgingly hiss open, and I am pushed out on a wave of simmering commuter anger.

I walk across the front of Victoria station, weaving through vertical waves of striding, angrily purposeful people who are all starting their day with a scowl. A grotesque pigeon flutters past on filthy wings. Bleary-eyed people in suits stand poised at traffic lights as black cabs and red buses dustily roar past.

The number 38 is coughing its way out of the bus bay as I run up and hop on. I walk up the little narrow stairs and park myself on a filthy seat from the 1950s. The bus conductor is downstairs and it seems that he is singing as he works. He kind of raps in a reggae style, probably imaging a booming bass behind his improvised rhyming couplets.

“Don’t be shy, you ain’t gonna die,” I hear him sing as he comes up the stairs. He emerges at the top of the stairs, holding on to a rail as the bus clumsily rounds a tight corner into the street outside Victoria. He has dreadlocks and he’s wearing grey jogging trousers. His glasses give him a studious air.

“Tickets please, I don’t want no cheese,” he says. The people in front of me wearily glance up and get their tickets ready in a kind of Pavlovian reaction, unmoved by the fact that the bus conductor is singing to them. “It’s gonna be a good day, I ain’t being gay.” He stands by my seat and I hold out my ticket for him to check, not looking up for fear that he might start serenading me in front of everyone else. “I say thanks, I play no pranks,” he says, and walks on to the forward of the bus.

“You’re happy aren’t you?” one man in a suit says as the conductor checks his ticket.

“Got to be glad, no need to be sad.”

After five minutes, the bus is nearing my stop, and I walk down the stairs to get ready to jump off. There are a couple more people waiting, unsmilingly holding on to rails as the bus skitters along on its journey. The conductor is holding onto the main rail and leaning out of the bus, watching the grey buildings flash by and singing into the noise and exhaust fumes. I think of Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain”.

“I remember, it was December,” he sings. He continues, getting carried away by the muse: “Or was it deepest March...” he pauses, unable to think of a word that rhymes with March. He settles on something, unwilling to break the rhythm. “.... no March.”

The bus judders to a halt and I jump off, onto the grey path. “Have a nice day, hope you get lots of pay,” the conductor sings as the bus starts up again.

Dirt

2005-03-08T19:17:00.000+07:00

It feels as if there is a film of grease on my face. I haven’t felt like this since I was a teenager. I am a very clean man, and I feel uncomfortable even if I go to work without having shaved. Every time my neck grazes against my collar, it feels like my collar’s getting dirty. For various reasons, I have come to work today without even washing my face. At least I had time to brush my teeth.

Today was a good bus luck day, but this good bus luck was undermined slightly by my bad getting up luck. I tried to sound mysterious earlier by darkly alluding to ‘various reasons’, but the truth is, I couldn’t get up.

I spent the night reading ‘the Dirt’, the tale of the eighties hair-metal band Motley Crue, told by the band themselves. It’s my bedtime book at the moment. It’s quite a strange choice for a bedtime book, I know. It’s enjoyable but very depressing at the same time. The first depressing thing about it is that it confirms that the band got rich and famous without really having much in the way of talent. The second depressing thing is how they pissed it all away in a flurry of drugs, alcohol, women and, bizarrely, mud-wrestling. You can’t help getting the feeling that there must have been thousands more people plugging away in bands who deserved fame and riches more than these guys. The sections dealing with them actually recording albums are perfunctory and suggest that the band didn’t actually enjoy this part of the music business. But despite all this, the band’s honesty and humour make all this a surprisingly entertaining read. It’s also made me less sorry that I never made it as a famous rock star.

I sometimes worry that my choice of bedtime reading may have an effect on my dreams at night, or even on my general state of mind. I just remembered that last night, just after reading lurid tales of Motley Crue bass player Nikki Sixx overdosing on heroin and then running out of the hospital with just a pair of leather trousers on to go straight home for another hit, I turned off the light and proceeded to have the worst nightmare I’ve had in a long time. Something about taking a picture of myself and then developing it and seeing a frightening ghost in the chair next to me.

My friend used to take bedtime reading very seriously, and maybe I should too. He would prepare himself for sleep by reading wistful, gently humorous travelogues about Brits drinking wine in the south of France. But unfortunately, that just sounds boring to me.

Muleness the sleeping genius

2005-03-03T15:15:00.000+07:00

Every day when I come home from work I look forward to seeing what mail there’ll be waiting for me on the doormat. Usually there’s nothing for me. At regular intervals, there are bills that always surprise me with how expensive they are. Usually I’m a bit of a pessimist – what some people would call a “glass half full person”. But in some areas of life, I’m an incurable, irrational optimist. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I have a bizarre belief that somehow there is something special about me; that there is good news waiting for me just round the corner. When I do the lottery, I do it with the bizarre presumption that I somehow deserve the jackpot more than everyone else, because of this indefinable special magic I have.

I have a similar weakness when it comes to my assessment of my own limited talents. I get through each day with the casual assumption at the back of my mind that the potential greatness in me is only sleeping, and that it’s just a matter of time before the genius that is in me will be unleashed on the unsuspecting world. Maybe this delusion just serves the purpose of getting me through the boredom of being nothing more than an ordinary person.

Today I return home and find a plain white leaflet on the carpet by the door. The leaflet is an advertisement of the services of a certain “Mr Ayuba”, who describes himself as a “spiritual healer, world renowned.”

I’m reminded a little of “Ghostbusters” as I read on:

“Do you have a problem and don’t know what to do? Have you tried many solutions in vain? If so, contact me.

Mr Ayuba, medium, psychic, spiritualist world renowned for accurate revelations in past, present and future. Originally this power is from his grand parents. This is a hereditary gift from generation to generation. Some of his specialities will be mentioned: when you want to change your life for the better. Business, financial, stock market, relationship, when loved ones break your heart, health, success in life, exams, sexual impotency, black magic, and many other problems.

Also protect you and your family from all kinds of phenomenon and evil spirits.

PAY AFTER RESULTS.”

This is followed by two telephone numbers: a landline and a mobile. The last sentence about the evil spirits scares me a little, but I keep the leaflet. I get leaflets advertising pizza and fried chicken every day, but this is the first time I’ve got one from a spiritual healer. Maybe he could help me realise the genius that is apparently slumbering within my ordinary frame.

Radio nights

2005-03-02T22:23:00.000+07:00

At the moment the radio is tuned to BBC Radio Four, and I can’t bring myself to turn to a different station. Listening to Radio Four is like being transported back in time to a different Britain: a comfortable country full of suburbs and people drinking tea and playing cricket. In the morning they have a ‘Thought for the Day’ and in the evening they have a ‘Book at Bedtime’, which features a voice actor reading a serialised version of a popular novel, every evening at the same time: 10:45pm. At the end of the day they have the Shipping Forecast. I don’t know what it is but it sounds cool: a posh woman’s voice talking about the weather in places I’ve never heard of, making me imagine faraway seas and frozen landscapes, and pioneering BBC people wrapped in furs in wooden huts in the Antarctica sending their weather readings to the people back in London and saying things like: ‘smoke me a kipper – I’ll be back for breakfast!’

It may seem that, by listening to Radio Four, I’m getting old and losing the last vestiges of my rebellious youth. But the truth is that I’ve always liked Radio Four. In fact, I’ve always liked the radio. There’s something romantic about sitting inside on a stormy night and listening to calm voices broadcast from somewhere that may as well be a million miles away. Somehow, it’s better than TV. If you sit up late at night watching TV, you get a sense that you’re watching something impersonal and pre-programmed. But with radio, the announcers are out there in the night with you.

I don’t listen to music radio so much any more, mostly because the internet has allowed me to look things up myself and follow my existing tastes to find new things. Another reason is that the great John Peel died recently. He was a BBC radio DJ who probably did more than anyone else to shape the music scene in the UK in the last 30 or 40 years, mainly because he was so open-minded and he was always looking for new things. I used to listen to his show every week between the ages of 13 and 17. He would play weird techno, heavy metal and occasional emotive indie gems all through the night, talking between records like a friendly, self-effacing uncle. I first heard the Red House Painters through his show. They’re not really my favourite band, but I like a lot of the songs by them that I’ve heard. But I first heard their song, ‘Uncle Joe’, on John Peel’s show, sitting in my room late at night with the lights out, while everyone else was asleep. Somehow, listening to that song for the first ever time is my clearest memory of listening to John Peel.

The lyrics of the song are a bit too maudlin:

“where have all the people gone in my life
i'm looking at the ceiling with an awful feeling of loss and loneliness
the after late night television pain
i'm running out of strength
and it feels so wonderful to swim in our fear
and it's unacceptable, the awakening of life
oh, uncle joe could you tell me what you know?
i've been having mental problems
and the solution is unclear
i'll give anything a try once
i'll try anything three times
i don't care, i don't care
but there's no company that i can stand to be with me
so my dependency on you grows
and i am not very well read
and did you say that i will lose my house
and can you spare me of my pain
and can you spare me of my tears
oh, uncle joe
it was unintentional when i spit in your beer
i am overinfluenced by movies
let's all go to the pier tomorrow
the darkest pool
did you know lies below the sky”

Umbrella despair

2005-03-02T02:02:00.000+07:00

I come home from work at about 7:30, walking from the bus stop through swirling snow. The apartment is freezing, even though the heating is on, and I am hungry. I make some pasta with pesto sauce, tuna and salad. It doesn’t taste any good.

I open a beer and play Playstation for about an hour. The plan, initially, is to play until 9:30 and then write in my notebook. I’m trying to write short stories at the moment, at a rate of about one a month, to see if I have it in me to write stuff that’s any good. My allotted Playstation time runs way over schedule. When I finish, I open my notebook and get my pen ready. The pen is poised over the page, but as soon as I see the blank page a wave of tiredness washes over me and my head begins to hurt. It feels like it would be painful to write even one word; to try a paragraph would probably cause my head to explode like the guy in David Cronenburg’s ‘Scanners’.

There’s a rented DVD on the floor in the corner, by the TV. I haven’t watched it yet, and it’s due back on Friday. I close my notebook: my ‘tragicomic’ story about a man with ridiculous, unrealisable ambitions will have to wait. I sit back with my beer and watch ‘Jackass the movie’, putting my lofty intellectual aspirations on hold yet again. It’s pretty funny. My favourite bit is when the man craps himself in the car and the cameraman throws up.

The next day, the snow has turned to drizzling rain and there’s a soggy feeling in the air. I wait for the bus in the cold for about ten minutes. On some days my bus luck is good, and on other days my bus luck is bad. It seems that today is a bad bus luck day. The people standing near me in the rain are thinking the same thing, judging from their tired, weary faces. There’s anger boiling somewhere underneath those resigned facades. The bus clumsily coughs its way through the grey drizzle after what seems like a whole day of waiting. The people gently edge their way towards where they think the bus door will open. Elbows are poised, ready to push obstacles out of the way. As always, there’s a mild hysteria in the air, a slight threat of violence.

The bus stops and a crowd of people tries to force its way through the door, simmering with pre-emptive anger. As I force my own way onto the bus, I hear a shrill cry from somewhere to my side. It sounds like some kind of giant bird of prey, angrily defending its nest from intruders. It is a woman’s voice, loud and full of anger and frightening despair, echoing into the grey sky:

“Oooooooooooooh SHIT!”

Something terrible has happened. I spin round and see an ordinary middle-aged woman bending over to pick something off the floor. Her umbrella was knocked out of her hand in the crush to get in the bus. She is picking the umbrella up from the sodden pavement. That was the cause of the shrill shriek of despair.

I get on the bus and laugh to myself, thinking about the voice. Oooooh SHIT! I know what she means. I know what she means.

A hundred cartoons

2005-03-01T02:08:00.000+07:00

My girlfriend has gone home, halfway across the world, for a few weeks. At first I like the freedom of being alone in the apartment. I can drink whiskey without being warned about drinking too much. I can play Playstation for longer than the fifteen minutes she’s in the shower. I can watch crap on TV all night.

I sit down with my whiskey in front of the TV and watch ‘the Hundred Greatest Cartoons’ on Channel 4. I am opposed to these shows on principle, but whenever I watch them, they’re strangely compelling and addictive. It’s a countdown that lasts about four hours, punctuated by a clip of a sardonic guy telling bad jokes. There are also clips of second-rate celebrities you’ve never heard of reminiscing about the cartoons and ironically observing things that a thousand drunken people in pubs have probably pointed out with more humour. The cartoons have been voted for by the viewing public, probably with an enthusiasm much greater than that provoked by a general election. The countdowns have been around for a while now. Recently they have been getting desperate with the themes. I’m waiting for the ‘100 Greatest Canine Film Stars’. I’ll probably watch it, too.

I sit there waiting for the old cartoon of ‘the Moomins’ to turn up: the old, melancholy cartoon that had felt figures moving slowly across a gloomy background, with a hushed voice narrating the story like it’s the end of the world and everybody else is dead. I watch the whole damn four hours and it doesn’t come up. It’s all ‘Thunder Cats’ and ‘He-Man’, with the second-rate celebrities wryly observing the homoerotic undertones of He-Man’s wardrobe. I go to bed after having watched all this rubbish, slightly drunk and with less brain cells than I did at the start of the night. I have work the next day and it’s late, and I’ll probably wake up with a headache. I miss my girlfriend.

Space without words

2005-02-26T04:43:00.000+07:00

My mobile phone starts ringing while I am sitting at my desk. It’s an unfamiliar number. My colleagues carry on their work, unperturbed, as I answer the phone.

“Hello?” It’s my girlfriend. She sounds dazed, puzzled. “I’m just calling to tell you I can’t find my mobile. If you try to call, you won’t be able to get through.”

“What happened? Did you leave it at work?” I talk in a hushed voice as my colleagues tap away interminably on their keyboards.

“Maybe…” she says, doubtfully. “I don’t know – I can’t remember.”

“I’m sure you left it at work. You’re too careful to lose it,” I say. “I’ll see you later, then.”

A few minutes later I decide to call her phone. Maybe there’s still someone in the restaurant where she works. They could set it aside for her and she could get it in the morning. The phone rings for a few seconds and someone answers. It sounds like quite a young boy – maybe about 12 or 13 years old.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hello? Is that the restaurant? Do you know my girlfriend? This is her phone, so could you leave it aside for her until she comes in tomorrow?”

“No, no, no,” the kid says, dismissively. He pauses. “Where are you?” he demands, a little arrogantly.

“Well, where are you?” I say, my suspicion growing.

The kid says where he is: a place about half an hour away from where I live.

“Where did you get that phone?” I say, my heart sinking.

“I found it,” the kid says.

“Well, give it into the lost property office then,” I say.

“Where?”

“The lost property office. All bus stations and underground stations have a lost property office.”

The kid pauses, and then his rat-like brain realises something. I hear a smarmy smile begin to play in his voice. “How much money are you willing to give me for this phone, then?”

“Just give it into a lost property office!” This is the cleverest remark I can muster in reaction to this ridiculous situation.

“OK, bye,” the kid says. His tone is that of a harassed senior executive whose patience has been tried by a timewaster. He hangs up, and I throw my phone down onto the desk in a rage. Extorted by a kid for a mobile phone. I dial the number again, trembling with anger, but the kid has turned off the phone and it goes straight to voicemail. Then I call the mobile phone provider, cancel the phone and the Sim card, and make enquiries about how I can transfer the number and credit onto a new phone.

The next day, I walk to Oxford Street to buy a new phone. I walk past the American Embassy. Policemen patrol the perimeter, casually carrying assault rifles. A group of people are huddled in front of the building holding candles and carrying banners that say something like, ‘100,000 dead’. The American eagle sternly looks down at them. There is probably a similar demonstration outside the UK parliament. I rush on, full of manic, stressed purpose, wrapped up in my own miniscule worries. I should have hunted that rat-kid down. Why didn’t she put her mobile in a safe place, anyway? Why does all this shit happen to me? Blah blah blah. The people with the candles look sad and silent, conscious of a tragedy I can only begin to comprehend.

Moving onto Oxford Street, the exhaust fumes and toxic particles swirl through the cold air and into my eyes and mouth. Buses lurch from traffic light to traffic light, the blank-faced people on them nodding jerkily, involuntarily, giving their consent to a distasteful life they can’t avoid.

I can hear a loud, angry voice shouting and swearing. I turn the corner, and see a furious tramp with a big grey beard, shouting and kicking out at someone sitting on the path next to him. The other man is younger, and he doesn’t look homeless. He looks as though he’s been shopping, but he must have done something to provoke the fury of the shouting tramp.

As I pass, the tramp shouts something at the man sitting near him:

“Space without words is BEING DEAD! Which is what YOU are!”

The words seem eloquent and poetic, but somehow disturbing. I want to stay to hear more, but I’m afraid that the tramp will look up, see me and start cursing, so I walk on. The tramp’s furious poetry is swallowed up by the dirty dry roar of the traffic.

The words stay with me all night, and I write them down when I get home so that I don’t forget them. I try to imagine what happened between the two men and what the tramp meant, but I can’t imagine what meaning the words had. But perhaps that doesn’t matter because the words seem to have some kind of savage, dark meaning of their own.

Space without words is being dead. So true, so true.
Which is why I get straight to the shop to buy my girlfriend a new mobile phone.