She wakes up slowly. The fragments of the dream that she can recall with ease she tries to fit together, all the while knowing that the picture will never be complete.
The pain is in the small of her back and in the space around her liver.
One day, she thinks, it’s all going to come down in a shower of stiff rain, rock and roll and dreadful shimmer. She’ll walk out, be absorbed by the storm, screaming, and no-one will hear.
But in the meantime she just wraps his big coat around her and bends her back into the wind again.
Life and death: a sequence of repeats, a movie that she watches again and again.
How does it all begin?
I of fish? You of pork? They of lamb and we of beef? He of lungs and she of teeth? It of brains and heart and liver and spleen and blood and unrecognizable flesh?
“Offal,” he tells her, “that’s where it starts and ends.”
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Holland Park
And another dawn breaks with the pain of blood like a red mist through fearsome night streets, a new day with all of yesterday’s newly awakened traumas and hung-over tears, banging on the door, embracing him, screeching like murder at the edge of the forest, tearing pages out of the book of sleep, dragging him from his dreams like a detective.
There’s nothing else.
What else should there be?
A negro bass-player’s double bass just before the dawn?
A sense of twilight?
What about the amok-man?
Smashing up the room with a hammer, spitting and hissing like a demon with his face horribly twisted… a terrible grimace.
Eh?
What?
Tell me about that bastard.
God.
I can see him now: sweat dripping from his nose and chin, spit foaming up like whipped snot around the wry, distorted, criminal grin of his gibbering mouth.
Look, I’m telling you it never happened. There was just this woman. Someone called her sweetheart. She couldn’t remember his name.
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Comedy
It’s history now, a scenario lost in time. Fatboy in a smart restaurant. Black tie, tux, smoking a cigar, perusing the menu. His date, a huge winged insect in a ball gown and costume pearls, sips a cocktail through a plastic straw. A waiter waits.
I’m cold. The whole room is cold and everything I touch increases it. I pour myself a drink, knowing I shouldn’t. The glass is cold; the blood in my fingers freezes as I clasp it. I really shouldn’t. The warmth of alcohol is artificial, a dead heat. But I knock it back regardless and pour another. I need the inflammation.
How long will it take? How many glasses? If I can drink twenty lifetimes in one day, and if doing so produces enough heat to finish this, I’ll be happy. I’ll die a funny, laughing drunk.
My father calls it his inner ear. I stretch mine and try to listen but there’s nothing laughing in there. There’s just this vacant hum, an inactive drone like the buzz of a dead radio channel, an empty space waiting for the pop of time.
Time runs in grooves, little furrows with smooth, steeply sloping banks that you can’t climb. And it makes a faint popping sound on the hour like a soap bubble bursting in your ear as it runs out on you. It’s supposedly a man made construct but that can’t be true, since there’s never enough of it.
One day I’ll have time, time to do all the things I’ve never had time to do before. Such is belief. Then I realise that what I really mean by “having time” is “owning time”, controlling it. That’s the only way. To own time is to have the time to increase time and bend it, expand or shrink it to our own ends. It’s arrogant of me, I know — my wife leaves me for this very reason — but that’s the way I am and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Imagine, Fatboy, if time was dust. You could spend a whole year in a room just letting it collect and at the end of that year — on New Year’s Eve, say, the final second about to pop — you could gather up all that dust into a great pyramid and snort it up like cocaine through a rolled up banknote or a tube of typing paper. It’s like experiencing the whole of that year in one blinding, thirty second rush, a gargantuan high, three hundred and sixty five days in a shot glass. Or, if you choose, you can do it slowly, selectively, batch it up into daily doses each containing a minute of the year. Five hundred and twenty-five thousand and six hundred hits — enough for twenty lifetimes, twenty lives out of one year of heat, and the real thing too — nothing artificial there, that’s the real thing, dust heat.
If dust was time, if dust was life you could have it all, all the time in the world. You could live forever, you could be the king of time.
I get the terror. It drags me back to the lines at the top of my screen. All the coldness of the room, the streets, the world, concentrates in the pit of my stomach, a small, hard, freezing fist-sized ball of dread. I imagine flakes of ice forming across my eyes.
What if it isn’t time I lack? What if it isn’t heat I need? What if I have all the time in the world and the most efficient heating system in the universe and I sit in my room for eternity and nothing happens? No more sketches or skits. No more jokes. No more ironic elbow nudges. What if my screen remains for all time bereft of strange but amusingly contextualised and cunningly placed lexical choices?
Tens of millions of sheets of yellowing, rotting, horribly disintegrating typing paper flutter and flounce around behind my eyes in an invisible breeze, each one horribly blank. I hear the sound of hollow laughter.
Once terror gets its hooks into a writer working to a deadline well, he might as well shoot himself. Soon he is overtaken by a total disbelief in his abilities. He can tell himself he’s a professional, that there’s no such thing as a block but he’ll never convince himself. He will refill his glass. He has to. There are no choices any more, he has to generate heat any way he can before the cold takes over completely. Before the ice expands.
Janitors and bailiffs have broken into writers’ apartments to collect unpaid rent only to find blocks of solid, unmeltable ice hunched hopelessly over broken and frosted-over keyboards.
That’s what terror does, that’s the way he gets you. He creeps up the back of your throat and into your mouth, finds his way under your tongue where the soft membrane is and snatches it up with his talons, bites into it, paralyses you. You have to drown him — it’s the only way — or freeze to death. So you drink. And that’s when the guilt starts.
My father never drinks. In twenty years not a mouthful passes his lips while he’s working.
“You can’t write good stuff you can’t stay sober,” he tells his son. He speaks like that, omitting conjunctions; you can never quite pin down the true sense of what he’s saying; the resultant ambiguity is the source of his humour.
I take a large swallow from the bottle. I can’t write good stuff (and) I can’t stay sober. But I have to write something, anything, anything to obliterate that white obscenity, to cover that loathsome nakedness. With my eyes crunched shut I move my fingers across the keys. Soon I’m pressing and punching mindlessly, shivering with cold, fear and guilt and lack of time and onrush of alcoholic meltdown.
Take my father — please!
What does he know? He’s dead; an old dead, corn-ball one liner re-shuffler. The world is different now. Everything is different now. Comedy is different, I’m different. My chest is bursting, huge breaths increasing body heat. I’m writing. don’t know what I’m writing or what the words mean or if they mean anything at all or even if they are actual words or just bunches of random characters and I really don’t give a damn. My head’s full of the clatter of the keys, faster and faster, echoing, fading and increasing, letters tripping and tumbling onto the screen laughing and squealing and chattering like kids out of school.
Querty and the Black and White Miracle Show.
There’s a cigarette unlit between my lips; indentations of teeth on the filter. I go to the window. Through the glass I can see nothing at first but the dark. Then, briefly, as it passes beneath a street light, a figure. A girl late night walking. My eyes try to follow her but once she passes through the light she becomes just a shadow, elongating and flattening out, expanding and contracting in the glare of a passing headlight like a reflection in a deviant mirror. In seconds she’s gone and I wonder what her name is. Why is she out at this hour on such a cold night? And is it my imagination or does she look up for a split second? Does she smile at me? Is she cheating on some man? Is she a prostitute?
Late night people have defects. They’re all up to no good. That’s what I want to write about: faults, imperfections, stories told in shadow, in fairground mirror reflection, all the fear washed out, the ugliness of deformity draped in ridiculous washes of colour.
I read aloud the few lines at the top of the screen: “Fatboy in a smart restaurant…” The characters dance on the page as I slur the passage over and over again. Tommy “Fatboy” Devine, the comeback kid. No other comic in the business is more terrified of new material and yet his insistence on total originality from his writers is pathological.
For a comedian, telling a new joke or performing a virgin routine is like sky diving. You never know if the parachute is going to open. Fatboy, now, well he doesn’t simply want to jump out of a plane; he wants to dive off the moon, on television, in a “totally original” one man show after five years in the weeds.
I open a clean screen and sit there a while just staring at it. Nothing happens. The bottle on my desk is as empty as the screen and I wish I wasn’t drinking. Maybe I should get some more. A few glasses and a wrap I could work through til midday. I could call the local cab stand and get them to send a car over to the 24/7 in Kilburn.
But I don’t. I’m already falling asleep, picking up the phone in a dream, saying hello to a sleepy voice on the other end. Then the phone disappears and I fall deeper. The room becomes a smart restaurant and I’m Fatboy Devine in black tie and Tux.
The waiter waits. The insect has finished her cocktail.
“OK,” I say, “I’ll have the gazpacho, leeks vinaigrette with shrimp, marinated zucchini, the orange mousse, a bottle of Cotes du Rhone ’68…” the insect’s wings buzz and her pearls rattle “…and you’d better bring me a plate full of shit for my fly.”
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Daedalus
In half sleep I see the streetlamps on Constitution Hill glisten inside their frosted halos. I watch them swing softly in the crosswinds that waft the spirit of the sea up through the town and sweep the mysteries of heather and furze down from the low-lying hills.
I breathe the rimy evening air, moist with soft rain, and feel the purchase of my key in the old lock, the softness of the rugs beneath my feet as I enter the warm stillness of home.
It’s nearly two-thirty. I have dozed for maybe twenty minutes, my only sleep in almost twenty-four hours, and yet I feel wide awake.
I open the double doors to the balcony and a gentle ululation of cricket-song and soft jazz fills the room. I can see the fading shadows of the village and, just behind, the luminous blue of the pool and the the spot-lit piazza of the hotel.
I think of the drive from the airport, of Emile and my tetchiness. I’m tired and the youth’s zippy manner and easy familiarity irritates me, accentuates my consciousness of my own low spark.
“There are many Americans in Crete,” he tells me, “In the town you should feel at home, I think.”
After a deliberate and pronounced silence, I reply that I doubt it and, for his information, I didn’t come all this way to “feel at home”
“Anyway, I live in the UK and my father was Irish.”
“My mother is French,” he says.
“And?” I ask.
“I am Greek. First Cretan. But Greek.”
“Your father is Greek?”
“No,” he replies, “my father is dead. To fully be Greek a man must be alive.”
We continue the journey in silence until we reach the village. Just before turning off to begin the final ascent up the mountain road to the house, Emile points to some steps leading to the entrance of a walled courtyard:
“This is my family’s hotel, it’s called Daedalus. The bar opens late; we have some Irish guests just now. I hope you’ll visit us.”
On reaching the house I offer him some money but he refuses:
“Max is a friend. Come to the hotel anytime. You can buy me a drink.”
Then he reverses into the drive and turns the car around.
“By the way, you will like my sister. She hates Americans.”
I wake late, dress and make my way downstairs, where I find Max Thorwaldsen in the kitchen. He is seventy but looks much younger.
Crete has been home to Max and his wife Eva for nearly twenty years. She teaches English at the school in Old Hersonisos, painting landscapes and harbour scenes in her spare time. Max has Glaucoma and is going blind.
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An old praejudicium
There is a noticeable curvature of her spine. Curvature is a nice word but it’s really not quite there yet. Over a period of time it hits home that nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
Anyway, Ms Curvature-of-the-spine, let’s call her Julie, is getting down to it with Ted Silversteen in the back of his battered old Princess, her tongue slithering along the upper set of his old dentures and hands everywhere. He’s spent quite a bit of time imagining making love to her. What will it be like? Will he find other curvatures beneath her dress? Hidden bends and bevels in her pants?
She unzips the front of his trousers and takes it out, her tongue in his ear now. He can feel all the old wax begining to break down with the moisture. He carresses her curvature and soon there is a noticeable hardening and enlargement of his member.
This may be the kind of stream of consciousness perversion that worries some men but it doesn’t bother old Ted one bit. He hasn’t been able to get it up in years. Good old Julie. What does it matter if her curvature turns him on? Compared to the amputee nuts he has no problem.
There is one case he’s read about. A woman. Reckons she’s an amputee in a whole person’s body. She’s desperate to lose something, doesn’t care what. An arm, a leg, a hand, a foot… Contacts a sympathetic surgeon who tries to convince her that perhaps it will be sensible to adopt a gradual approach: a finger first, maybe, or a toe, then a hand or a foot. But she isn’t having any, tries to slice her whole bloody leg off with a chain saw and dies of shock.
Or perhaps it’s elation.
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